“The Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle’ ” is a 1939 essay by the American literary theorist Kenneth Burke. In it, Burke describes how Hitler, in Mein Kampf, repeatedly describes his struggle to embrace National Socialist ideals, such as the realization that life is a battle for power between groups in which reason and objectivity have no role, his realization that humans are beasts, and his rejection of the Enlightenment, as driven by reason. Burke writes, “those who attack Hitlerism as a cult of the irrational should emend their statements to this extent: irrational it is, but it is carried on
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