Russian authorities have just decided that Hitler’s anti-Semitic opus Mein Kampf is extremist, and have banned the book. The move comes as the country attempts to combat xenophobia in far-right circles, and prosecutors discovered that the book was freely available in a certain region. The government keeps a list of extremist materials whose distribution is illegal.
Mein Kampf espouses a “militaristic outlook and justifies discrimination and destruction of non-Aryan races,” the prosecutor general tells Reuters. For good measure, it also contains a raft of anti-Russian sentiment. Still, the prosecutor says, “up to now, Mein Kampf was not recognized as extremist.” That is doubly odd, RTE reports, since Russia has a standing law that deems all books written by Nazi leaders to be by definition extremist. (More Adolf Hitler stories.)