“Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ sells 50,000 copies in Turkey in three months,” from AFP, with thanks to all who sent this in:
ANKARA: Cheap cover prices and a rise in nationalist sentiment have made an unlikely best-seller in Turkey of Adolf Hitler’s infamous autobiography, “Mein Kampf.”…
But since January, the book has sold more than 50,000 copies and is number four on the best-seller list drawn up by the D&R bookstore chain.
“‘Mein Kampf’ has always been a sleeper, a secret best-seller,” said Oguz Tektas of Mefisto editions, one of several publishing houses to re-release the book Hitler wrote while in jail in 1925. “We took it out of the closet for purely commercial reasons.” His company’s sole aim, he stressed, was “to make money,” which they did by slashing the cover price.
“Mein Kampf,” published by about a dozen companies over the years, always sold at a fairly steady annual rate of about 20,000 copies at some 20 New Turkish Lira ($15) a copy.
The Mefisto edition retails at YTL5.90 and sold 23,000 copies in two months….
“The times we live in have a definite impact on sales,” Kilic said. “It is an astonishing phenomenon.”
TigerHawk again has some dead-on observations (with links in the original):
Not surprisingly, The Jerusalem Post is more willing to see a trend than the Daily Star:
Filiba said the sales were part of a “worrying trend” with anti-Semitic publications – such as the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a 19th-century anti-Semitic tract – on sale even in bustling department stores.
Fifty thousand copies sold in less than three months is a huge sales figure for Turkey, equivalent to 250,000 copies in the United States. I could not find U.S. sales figures, but I found one source that said that American sales averaged 15,000 copies per year.
History does not progress in a straight line. Racist fascism has tremendous appeal to the world’s dark hearts, and it will emerge in some quarters whenever there is social distress and conflict, as there is today in Turkey. No such platitude should let us forget, though, that Islam and Nazism have close historical ties that could re-emerge at any time.