This shocked and frightened me the first time I read it, and I still feel the same way.
Courtesy of a transcript from MediaMatters:
April 30, 2007:
BECK: I go on vacation for three days, and I decide to take my family away. And I'm there at the beach, and we're reading. And I take -- my wife takes some magazines and stuff, and we take the books for the kids, and I take The Years of Extermination [HarperCollins, March 2007]. ... And I'm doing some research right now for some other thoughts that I have that are probably six months away from percolating.
And I'm reading this book trying to do some research. And what this book is, is how do you get people to kill people? How do you get -- not just Germany -- all of Europe to kill the Jews. To round them up and kill them. How do you do that? That's what this book is about. And it is a phenomenal -- it is scarier than Mein Kampf. I read Mein Kampf because -- that was my first foray into evil. And I read Mein Kampf, and I read it because I wanted to know -- did the Germans know?
...You got to have an enemy to fight. And when you have an enemy to fight, then you can unite the entire world behind you, and you seize power.
...
Now, how did you convince all of Europe to do it? You needed to have fear. You needed to have the fear of starvation. You needed to have the fear of the whole place going to hell in a handbasket.
...
On this day Beck was ranting that Al Gore was using the "same tactic" in fight against global warming as Hitler did against Jews.
But while he was trashing Gore with Nazi talk, Beck revealed the he himself was curious about, researched, and understood how the Nazis manipulated the public into believing and doing terrible things.
As you know, with all the "food storage" stuff, Beck is now trying to convince people that mass starvation is a real possibility for Americans.
And he has already ginned up the "enemy to fight" in the form of President Obama and those uber-evil progressives. Beck agrees with caller that people with liberal ideology are God's enemy, adds "they are enemies of Him".
This is the part that scared me. Whenever I hear Beck saying he's afraid the government is going to take his children for not getting a flu shot, or that President Obama is an angry radical fascist thug who hates white people and wants to destroy the economy, destroy the Constitution, destroy America, and "just start shooting people" - perhaps kill 10% of the population ("hell in a handbasket", in essence) - I always come back to thinking about whether or not Beck is shaping his narrative based on what he learned from this book.
I'm not saying Beck is trying to convince people to kill people. But I do think he is trying to convince them Obama is more evil than Satan and to the scare the hell out of them, as this helps further his own ambition for power, influence and self-enrichment. It suits Beck to have a large pack of barely-restrained wild dogs at his "beck" and call. It suits his ego, and merely the threat that they could be unleashed gives him a lot of power.