Suddenly everybody’s reading Hitler. But who are those readers? And why are they reading him?

This is not your grandmother's
brand of conservative – but now
he's hot in e-bookstores

I wish this were merely a sendup, a la Mel Brooks’ Broadway and screen masterpiece, “The Producers.”

Alas, no such luck.

An online publishing trade journal called Book Business reports that “Mein Kampf Rises in E-book Rankings.”

Rises? It shoots through the roof, according to the information Book Business offers: 

For a year now, his magnum manifesto has loomed large over current best-sellers on iTunes, where at the time of this writing two different digital versions of Mein Kampf rank 12th and 15th on the Politics & Current Events chart alongside books by modern conservative powerhouses like Sarah Palin, Charles Krauthammer and Glenn Beck. 

Where are the market research people 

 now that we need them?

I wish we knew who’s suddenly in the market for the little racist psychopath’s horrid excuse for a nation building manifesto. Why are they buying it? What do they think of it? How does it fit into their views of politics?

But Book Business offers us no information beyond the titles of books in the political arena that are selling at similar levels (maybe market research people have better things to analyze than Hitler’s book sales.) And a longer article on a website called vocativ.com, from which the Book Business article was derived, also offers no clear explanation. So I’ll have to take my clues where I can find them.

Book Business notes that Sarah Palin, Charles Krauthammer and Glenn Beck are also top-of-chart sellers. Is there some significance to that? Are the right wing heavy readers congregating around Hitler as well as Krauthammer? Can we assume that the crazy Tea Party right is developing a new adoration for der Fuhrer? Is Sarah Palin about to go all Nazi on us – along with Kruathammer, Beck, and also, say, Paul Ryan and Ted Cruz?

Or is this even more ominous than that – say part of a behind-the-scenes push toward a Koch brothers putsch?

Stay tuned. Or, if a more cautious alternative seems to make more sense to you, flee the country and watch from afar.

P.S. On Friday,  January 10th, I ran across this. Could Google be off on a Hitler bender? And could they somehow be what's moving his hate lit? It's only a tongue-in-cheek question, of course. Or is it?