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Mein Kampf (Complete Text)

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Aryan Warrior
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« Reply #60 on: July 19, 2008, 01:33:18 am »

To sum up: The People's State must reconstruct our system of general
instruction in such a way that it will embrace only what is essential.
Beyond this it will have to make provision for a more advanced teaching
in the various subjects for those who want to specialize in them. It
will suffice for the average individual to be acquainted with the
fundamentals of the various subjects to serve as the basis of what may
be called an all-round education. He ought to study exhaustively and in
detail only that subject in which he intends to work during the rest of
his life. A general instruction in all subjects should be obligatory,
and specialization should be left to the choice of the individual.

In this way the scholastic programme would be shortened, and thus
several school hours would be gained which could be utilized for
physical training and character training, in will-power, the capacity
for making practical judgments, decisions, etc.

The little account taken by our school training to-day, especially in
the secondary schools, of the callings that have to be followed in after
life is demonstrated by the fact that men who are destined for the same
calling in life are educated in three different kinds of schools. What
is of decisive importance is general education only and not the special
teaching. When special knowledge is needed it cannot be given in the
curriculum of our secondary schools as they stand to-day.

Therefore the People's State will one day have to abolish such
half-measures.

The second modification in the curriculum which the People's State will
have to make is the following:

It is a characteristic of our materialistic epoch that our scientific
education shows a growing emphasis on what is real and practical: such
subjects, for instance, as applied mathematics, physics, chemistry, etc.
Of course they are necessary in an age that is dominated by industrial
technology and chemistry, and where everyday life shows at least the
external manifestations of these. But it is a perilous thing to base the
general culture of a nation on the knowledge of these subjects. On the
contrary, that general culture ought always to be directed towards
ideals. It ought to be founded on the humanist disciplines and should
aim at giving only the ground work of further specialized instruction in
the various practical sciences. Otherwise we should sacrifice those
forces that are more important for the preservation of the nation than
any technical knowledge. In the historical department the study of
ancient history should not be omitted. Roman history, along general
lines, is and will remain the best teacher, not only for our own time
but also for the future. And the ideal of Hellenic culture should be
preserved for us in all its marvellous beauty. The differences between
the various peoples should not prevent us from recognizing the community
of race which unites them on a higher plane. The conflict of our times
is one that is being waged around great objectives. A civilization is
fighting for its existence. It is a civilization that is the product of
thousands of years of historical development, and the Greek as well as
the German forms part of it.

A clear-cut division must be made between general culture and the
special branches. To-day the latter threaten more and more to devote
themselves exclusively to the service of Mammon. To counterbalance this
tendency, general culture should be preserved, at least in its ideal
forms. The principle should be repeatedly emphasized, that industrial
and technical progress, trade and commerce, can flourish only so long as
a folk community exists whose general system of thought is inspired by
ideals, since that is the preliminary condition for a flourishing
development of the enterprises I have spoken of. That condition is not
created by a spirit of materialist egotism but by a spirit of
self-denial and the joy of giving one's self in the service of others.

The system of education which prevails to-day sees its principal object
in pumping into young people that knowledge which will help them to make
their way in life. This principle is expressed in the following terms:
"The young man must one day become a useful member of human society." By
that phrase they mean the ability to gain an honest daily livelihood.
The superficial training in the duties of good citizenship, which he
acquires merely as an accidental thing, has very weak foundations. For
in itself the State represents only a form, and therefore it is
difficult to train people to look upon this form as the ideal which they
will have to serve and towards which they must feel responsible. A form
can be too easily broken. But, as we have seen, the idea which people
have of the State to-day does not represent anything clearly defined.
Therefore, there is nothing but the usual stereotyped 'patriotic'
training. In the old Germany the greatest emphasis was placed on the
divine right of the small and even the smallest potentates. The way in
which this divine right was formulated and presented was never very
clever and often very stupid. Because of the large numbers of those
small potentates, it was impossible to give adequate biographical
accounts of the really great personalities that shed their lustre on the
history of the German people. The result was that the broad masses
received a very inadequate knowledge of German history. Here, too, the
great lines of development were missing.

It is evident that in such a way no real national enthusiasm could be
aroused. Our educational system proved incapable of selecting from the
general mass of our historical personages the names of a few
personalities which the German people could be proud to look upon as
their own. Thus the whole nation might have been united by the ties of a
common knowledge of this common heritage. The really important figures
in German history were not presented to the present generation. The
attention of the whole nation was not concentrated on them for the
purpose of awakening a common national spirit. From the various subjects
that were taught, those who had charge of our training seemed incapable
of selecting what redounded most to the national honour and lifting that
above the common objective level, in order to inflame the national pride
in the light of such brilliant examples. At that time such a course
would have been looked upon as rank chauvinism, which did not then have
a very pleasant savour. Pettifogging dynastic patriotism was more
acceptable and more easily tolerated than the glowing fire of a supreme
national pride. The former could be always pressed into service, whereas
the latter might one day become a dominating force. Monarchist
patriotism terminated in Associations of Veterans, whereas passionate
national patriotism might have opened a road which would be difficult to
determine. This national passion is like a highly tempered thoroughbred
who is discriminate about the sort of rider he will tolerate in the
saddle. No wonder that most people preferred to shirk such a danger.
Nobody seemed to think it possible that one day a war might come which
would put the mettle of this kind of patriotism to the test, in
artillery bombardment and waves of attacks with poison gas. But when it
did come our lack of this patriotic passion was avenged in a terrible
way. None were very enthusiastic about dying for their imperial and
royal sovereigns; while on the other hand the 'Nation' was not
recognized by the greater number of the soldiers.

Since the revolution broke out in Germany and the monarchist patriotism
was therefore extinguished, the purpose of teaching history was nothing
more than to add to the stock of objective knowledge. The present State
has no use for patriotic enthusiasm; but it will never obtain what it
really desires. For if dynastic patriotism failed to produce a supreme
power of resistance at a time when the principle of nationalism
dominated, it will be still less possible to arouse republican
enthusiasm. There can be no doubt that the German people would not have
stood on the field of battle for four and a half years to fight under
the battle slogan 'For the Republic,' and least of all those who created
this grand institution.

In reality this Republic has been allowed to exist undisturbed only by
grace of its readiness and its promise to all and sundry, to pay tribute
and reparations to the stranger and to put its signature to any kind of
territorial renunciation. The rest of the world finds it sympathetic,
just as a weakling is always more pleasing to those who want to bend him
to their own uses than is a man who is made of harder metal. But the
fact that the enemy likes this form of government is the worst kind of
condemnation. They love the German Republic and tolerate its existence
because no better instrument could be found which would help them to
keep our people in slavery. It is to this fact alone that this
magnanimous institution owes its survival. And that is why it can
renounce any REAL system of national education and can feel satisfied
when the heroes of the REICH banner shout their hurrahs, but in reality
these same heroes would scamper away like rabbits if called upon to
defend that banner with their blood.

The People's State will have to fight for its existence. It will not
gain or secure this existence by signing documents like that of the
Dawes Plan. But for its existence and defence it will need precisely
those things which our present system believes can be repudiated. The
more worthy its form and its inner national being. the greater will be
the envy and opposition of its adversaries. The best defence will not be
in the arms it possesses but in its citizens. Bastions of fortresses
will not save it, but the living wall of its men and women, filled with
an ardent love for their country and a passionate spirit of national
patriotism.

Therefore the third point which will have to be considered in relation
to our educational system is the following:

The People's State must realize that the sciences may also be made a
means of promoting a spirit of pride in the nation. Not only the history
of the world but the history of civilization as a whole must be taught
in the light of this principle. An inventor must appear great not only
as an inventor but also, and even more so, as a member of the nation.
The admiration aroused by the contemplation of a great achievement must
be transformed into a feeling of pride and satisfaction that a man of
one's own race has been chosen to accomplish it. But out of the
abundance of great names in German history the greatest will have to be
selected and presented to our young generation in such a way as to
become solid pillars of strength to support the national spirit.

The subject matter ought to be systematically organized from the
standpoint of this principle. And the teaching should be so orientated
that the boy or girl, after leaving school, will not be a semi-pacifist,
a democrat or of something else of that kind, but a whole-hearted
German. So that this national feeling be sincere from the very
beginning, and not a mere pretence, the following fundamental and
inflexible principle should be impressed on the young brain while it is
yet malleable: The man who loves his nation can prove the sincerity of
this sentiment only by being ready to make sacrifices for the nation's
welfare. There is no such thing as a national sentiment which is
directed towards personal interests. And there is no such thing as a
nationalism that embraces only certain classes. Hurrahing proves nothing
and does not confer the right to call oneself national if behind that
shout there is no sincere preoccupation for the conservation of the
nation's well-being. One can be proud of one's people only if there is
no class left of which one need to be ashamed. When one half of a nation
is sunk in misery and worn out by hard distress, or even depraved or
degenerate, that nation presents such an unattractive picture that
nobody can feel proud to belong to it. It is only when a nation is sound
in all its members, physically and morally, that the joy of belonging to
it can properly be intensified to the supreme feeling which we call
national pride. But this pride, in its highest form, can be felt only by
those who know the greatness of their nation.

The spirit of nationalism and a feeling for social justice must be fused
into one sentiment in the hearts of the youth. Then a day will come when
a nation of citizens will arise which will be welded together through a
common love and a common pride that shall be invincible and
indestructible for ever.

The dread of chauvinism, which is a symptom of our time, is a sign of
its impotence. Since our epoch not only lacks everything in the nature
of exuberant energy but even finds such a manifestation disagreeable,
fate will never elect it for the accomplishment of any great deeds. For
the greatest changes that have taken place on this earth would have been
inconceivable if they had not been inspired by ardent and even
hysterical passions, but only by the bourgeois virtues of peacefulness
and order.

One thing is certain: our world is facing a great revolution. The only
question is whether the outcome will be propitious for the Aryan portion
of mankind or whether the everlasting Jew will profit by it.

By educating the young generation along the right lines, the People's
State will have to see to it that a generation of mankind is formed
which will be adequate to this supreme combat that will decide the
destinies of the world.

That nation will conquer which will be the first to take this road.

The whole organization of education and training which the People's
State is to build up must take as its crowning task the work of
instilling into the hearts and brains of the youth entrusted to it the
racial instinct and understanding of the racial idea. No boy or girl
must leave school without having attained a clear insight into the
meaning of racial purity and the importance of maintaining the racial
blood unadulterated. Thus the first indispensable condition for the
preservation of our race will have been established and thus the future
cultural progress of our people will be assured.

For in the last analysis all physical and mental training would be in
vain unless it served an entity which is ready and determined to carry
on its own existence and maintain its own characteristic qualities.

If it were otherwise, something would result which we Germans have cause
to regret already, without perhaps having hitherto recognized the extent
of the tragic calamity. We should be doomed to remain also in the future
only manure for civilization. And that not in the banal sense of the
contemporary bourgeois mind, which sees in a lost fellow member of our
people only a lost citizen, but in a sense which we should have
painfully to recognize: namely, that our racial blood would be destined
to disappear. By continually mixing with other races we might lift them
from their former lower level of civilization to a higher grade; but we
ourselves should descend for ever from the heights we had reached.

Finally, from the racial standpoint this training also must find its
culmination in the military service. The term of military service is to
be a final stage of the normal training which the average German
receives.

While the People's State attaches the greatest importance to physical
and mental training, it has also to consider, and no less importantly,
the task of selecting men for the service of the State itself. This
important matter is passed over lightly at the present time. Generally
the children of parents who are for the time being in higher situations
are in their turn considered worthy of a higher education. Here talent
plays a subordinate part. But talent can be estimated only relatively.
Though in general culture he may be inferior to the city child, a
peasant boy may be more talented than the son of a family that has
occupied high positions through many generations. But the superior
culture of the city child has in itself nothing to do with a greater or
lesser degree of talent; for this culture has its roots in the more
copious mass of impressions which arise from the more varied education
and the surroundings among which this child lives. If the intelligent
son of peasant parents were educated from childhood in similar
surroundings his intellectual accomplishments would be quite otherwise.
In our day there is only one sphere where the family in which a person
has been born means less than his innate gifts. That is the sphere of
art. Here, where a person cannot just 'learn,' but must have innate
gifts that later on may undergo a more or less happy development (in the
sense of a wise development of what is already there), money and
parental property are of no account. This is a good proof that genius is
not necessarily connected with the higher social strata or with wealth.
Not rarely the greatest artists come from poor families. And many a boy
from the country village has eventually become a celebrated master.

It does not say much for the mental acumen of our time that advantage is
not taken of this truth for the sake of our whole intellectual life. The
opinion is advanced that this principle, though undoubtedly valid in the
field of art, has not the same validity in regard to what are called the
applied sciences. It is true that a man can be trained to a certain
amount of mechanical dexterity, just as a poodle can be taught
incredible tricks by a clever master. But such training does not bring
the animal to use his intelligence in order to carry out those tricks.
And the same holds good in regard to man. It is possible to teach men,
irrespective of talent or no talent, to go through certain scientific
exercises, but in such cases the results are quite as inanimate and
mechanical as in the case of the animal. It would even be possible to
force a person of mediocre intelligence, by means of a severe course of
intellectual drilling, to acquire more than the average amount of
knowledge; but that knowledge would remain sterile. The result would be
a man who might be a walking dictionary of knowledge but who will fail
miserably on every critical occasion in life and at every juncture where
vital decisions have to be taken. Such people need to be drilled
specially for every new and even most insignificant task and will never
be capable of contributing in the least to the general progress of
mankind. Knowledge that is merely drilled into people can at best
qualify them to fill government positions under our present regime.

It goes without saying that, among the sum total of individuals who make
up a nation, gifted people are always to be found in every sphere of
life. It is also quite natural that the value of knowledge will be all
the greater the more vitally the dead mass of learning is animated by
the innate talent of the individual who possesses it. Creative work in
this field can be done only through the marriage of knowledge and
talent.
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Aryan Warrior
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« Reply #61 on: July 19, 2008, 01:33:34 am »

One example will suffice to show how much our contemporary world is at
fault in this matter. From time to time our illustrated papers publish,
for the edification of the German philistine, the news that in some
quarter or other of the globe, and for the first time in that locality,
a Negro has become a lawyer, a teacher, a pastor, even a grand opera
tenor or something else of that kind. While the bourgeois blockhead
stares with amazed admiration at the notice that tells him how
marvellous are the achievements of our modern educational technique, the
more cunning Jew sees in this fact a new proof to be utilized for the
theory with which he wants to infect the public, namely that all men are
equal. It does not dawn on the murky bourgeois mind that the fact which
is published for him is a sin against reason itself, that it is an act
of criminal insanity to train a being who is only an anthropoid by birth
until the pretence can be made that he has been turned into a lawyer;
while, on the other hand, millions who belong to the most civilized
races have to remain in positions which are unworthy of their cultural
level. The bourgeois mind does not realize that it is a sin against the
will of the eternal Creator to allow hundreds of thousands of highly
gifted people to remain floundering in the swamp of proletarian misery
while Hottentots and Zulus are drilled to fill positions in the
intellectual professions. For here we have the product only of a
drilling technique, just as in the case of the performing dog. If the
same amount of care and effort were applied among intelligent races each
individual would become a thousand times more capable in such matters.

This state of affairs would become intolerable if a day should arrive
when it no longer refers to exceptional cases. But the situation is
already intolerable where talent and natural gifts are not taken as
decisive factors in qualifying for the right to a higher education. It
is indeed intolerable to think that year after year hundreds of
thousands of young people without a single vestige of talent are deemed
worthy of a higher education, while other hundreds of thousands who
possess high natural gifts have to go without any sort of higher
schooling at all. The practical loss thus caused to the nation is
incalculable. If the number of important discoveries which have been
made in America has grown considerably in recent years one of the
reasons is that the number of gifted persons belonging to the lowest
social classes who were given a higher education in that country is
proportionately much larger than in Europe.

A stock of knowledge packed into the brain will not suffice for the
making of discoveries. What counts here is only that knowledge which is
illuminated by natural talent. But with us at the present time no value
is placed on such gifts. Only good school reports count.

Here is another educative work that is waiting for the People's State to
do. It will not be its task to assure a dominant influence to a certain
social class already existing, but it will be its duty to attract the
most competent brains in the total mass of the nation and promote them
to place and honour. It is not merely the duty of the State to give to
the average child a certain definite education in the primary school,
but it is also its duty to open the road to talent in the proper
direction. And above all, it must open the doors of the higher schools
under the State to talent of every sort, no matter in what social class
it may appear. This is an imperative necessity; for thus alone will it
be possible to develop a talented body of public leaders from the class
which represents learning that in itself is only a dead mass.

There is still another reason why the State should provide for this
situation. Our intellectual class, particularly in Germany, is so shut
up in itself and fossilized that it lacks living contact with the
classes beneath it. Two evil consequences result from this: First, the
intellectual class neither understands nor sympathizes with the broad
masses. It has been so long cut off from all connection with them that
it cannot now have the necessary psychological ties that would enable it
to understand them. It has become estranged from the people. Secondly,
the intellectual class lacks the necessary will-power; for this faculty
is always weaker in cultivated circles, which live in seclusion, than
among the primitive masses of the people. God knows we Germans have
never been lacking in abundant scientific culture, but we have always
had a considerable lack of will-power and the capacity for making
decisions. For example, the more 'intellectual' our statesmen have been
the more lacking they have been, for the most part, in practical
achievement. Our political preparation and our technical equipment for
the world war were defective, certainly not because the brains governing
the nation were too little educated, but because the men who directed
our public affairs were over-educated, filled to over-flowing with
knowledge and intelligence, yet without any sound instinct and simply
without energy, or any spirit of daring. It was our nation's tragedy to
have to fight for its existence under a Chancellor who was a
dillydallying philosopher. If instead of a Bethmann von Hollweg we had
had a rough man of the people as our leader the heroic blood of the
common grenadier would not have been shed in vain. The exaggeratedly
intellectual material out of which our leaders were made proved to be
the best ally of the scoundrels who carried out the November revolution.
These intellectuals safeguarded the national wealth in a miserly
fashion, instead of launching it forth and risking it, and thus they set
the conditions on which the others won success.

Here the Catholic Church presents an instructive example. Clerical
celibacy forces the Church to recruit its priests not from their own
ranks but progressively from the masses of the people. Yet there are not
many who recognize the significance of celibacy in this relation. But
therein lies the cause of the inexhaustible vigour which characterizes
that ancient institution. For by thus unceasingly recruiting the
ecclesiastical dignitaries from the lower classes of the people, the
Church is enabled not only to maintain the contact of instinctive
understanding with the masses of the population but also to assure
itself of always being able to draw upon that fund of energy which is
present in this form only among the popular masses. Hence the surprising
youthfulness of that gigantic organism, its mental flexibility and its
iron will-power.

It will be the task of the Peoples' State so to organize and administer
its educational system that the existing intellectual class will be
constantly furnished with a supply of fresh blood from beneath. From the
bulk of the nation the State must sift out with careful scrutiny those
persons who are endowed with natural talents and see that they are
employed in the service of the community. For neither the State itself
nor the various departments of State exist to furnish revenues for
members of a special class, but to fulfil the tasks allotted to them.
This will be possible, however, only if the State trains individuals
specially for these offices. Such individuals must have the necessary
fundamental capabilities and will-power. The principle does not hold
true only in regard to the civil service but also in regard to all those
who are to take part in the intellectual and moral leadership of the
people, no matter in what sphere they may be employed. The greatness of
a people is partly dependent on the condition that it must succeed in
training the best brains for those branches of the public service for
which they show a special natural aptitude and in placing them in the
offices where they can do their best work for the good of the community.
If two nations of equal strength and quality engage in a mutual conflict
that nation will come out victorious which has entrusted its
intellectual and moral leadership to its best talents and that nation
will go under whose government represents only a common food trough for
privileged groups or classes and where the inner talents of its
individual members are not availed of.

Of course such a reform seems impossible in the world as it is to-day.
The objection will at once be raised, that it is too much to expect from
the favourite son of a highly-placed civil servant, for instance, that
he shall work with his hands simply because somebody else whose parents
belong to the working-class seems more capable for a job in the civil
service. That argument may be valid as long as manual work is looked
upon in the same way as it is looked upon to-day. Hence the Peoples'
State will have to take up an attitude towards the appreciation of
manual labour which will be fundamentally different from that which now
exists. If necessary, it will have to organize a persistent system of
teaching which will aim at abolishing the present-day stupid habit of
looking down on physical labour as an occupation to be ashamed of.

The individual will have to be valued, not by the class of work he does
but by the way in which he does it and by its usefulness to the
community. This statement may sound monstrous in an epoch when the most
brainless columnist on a newspaper staff is more esteemed than the most
expert mechanic, merely because the former pushes a pen. But, as I have
said, this false valuation does not correspond to the nature of things.
It has been artificially introduced, and there was a time when it did
not exist at all. The present unnatural state of affairs is one of those
general morbid phenomena that have arisen from our materialistic epoch.
Fundamentally every kind of work has a double value; the one material,
the other ideal. The material value depends on the practical importance
of the work to the life of the community. The greater the number of the
population who benefit from the work, directly or indirectly, the higher
will be its material value. This evaluation is expressed in the material
recompense which the individual receives for his labour. In
contradistinction to this purely material value there is the ideal
value. Here the work performed is not judged by its material importance
but by the degree to which it answers a necessity. Certainly the
material utility of an invention may be greater than that of the service
rendered by an everyday workman; but it is also certain that the
community needs each of those small daily services just as much as the
greater services. From the material point of view a distinction can be
made in the evaluation of different kinds of work according to their
utility to the community, and this distinction is expressed by the
differentiation in the scale of recompense; but on the ideal or abstract
plans all workmen become equal the moment each strives to do his best in
his own field, no matter what that field may be. It is on this that a
man's value must be estimated, and not on the amount of recompense
received.

In a reasonably directed State care must be taken that each individual
is given the kind of work which corresponds to his capabilities. In
other words, people will be trained for the positions indicated by their
natural endowments; but these endowments or faculties are innate and
cannot be acquired by any amount of training, being a gift from Nature
and not merited by men. Therefore, the way in which men are generally
esteemed by their fellow-citizens must not be according to the kind of
work they do, because that has been more or less assigned to the
individual. Seeing that the kind of work in which the individual is
employed is to be accounted to his inborn gifts and the resultant
training which he has received from the community, he will have to be
judged by the way in which he performs this work entrusted to him by the
community. For the work which the individual performs is not the purpose
of his existence, but only a means. His real purpose in life is to
better himself and raise himself to a higher level as a human being; but
this he can only do in and through the community whose cultural life he
shares. And this community must always exist on the foundations on which
the State is based. He ought to contribute to the conservation of those
foundations. Nature determines the form of this contribution. It is the
duty of the individual to return to the community, zealously and
honestly, what the community has given him. He who does this deserves
the highest respect and esteem. Material remuneration may be given to
him whose work has a corresponding utility for the community; but the
ideal recompense must lie in the esteem to which everybody has a claim
who serves his people with whatever powers Nature has bestowed upon him
and which have been developed by the training he has received from the
national community. Then it will no longer be dishonourable to be an
honest craftsman; but it will be a cause of disgrace to be an
inefficient State official, wasting God's day and filching daily bread
from an honest public. Then it will be looked upon as quite natural that
positions should not be given to persons who of their very nature are
incapable of filling them.

Furthermore, this personal efficiency will be the sole criterion of the
right to take part on an equal juridical footing in general civil
affairs.

The present epoch is working out its own ruin. It introduces universal
suffrage, chatters about equal rights but can find no foundation for
this equality. It considers the material wage as the expression of a
man's value and thus destroys the basis of the noblest kind of equality
that can exist. For equality cannot and does not depend on the work a
man does, but only on the manner in which each one does the particular
work allotted to him. Thus alone will mere natural chance be set aside
in determining the work of a man and thus only does the individual
become the artificer of his own social worth.

At the present time, when whole groups of people estimate each other's
value only by the size of the salaries which they respectively receive,
there will be no understanding of all this. But that is no reason why we
should cease to champion those ideas. Quite the opposite: in an epoch
which is inwardly diseased and decaying anyone who would heal it must
have the courage first to lay bare the real roots of the disease. And
the National Socialist Movement must take that duty on its shoulders. It
will have to lift its voice above the heads of the small bourgeoisie and
rally together and co-ordinate all those popular forces which are ready
to become the protagonists of a new WELTANSCHAUUNG.



Of course the objection will be made that in general it is difficult to
differentiate between the material and ideal values of work and that the
lower prestige which is attached to physical labour is due to the fact
that smaller wages are paid for that kind of work. It will be said that
the lower wage is in its turn the reason why the manual worker has less
chance to participate in the culture of the nation; so that the ideal
side of human culture is less open to him because it has nothing to do
with his daily activities. It may be added that the reluctance to do
physical work is justified by the fact that, on account of the small
income, the cultural level of manual labourers must naturally be low,
and that this in turn is a justification for the lower estimation in
which manual labour is generally held.

There is quite a good deal of truth in all this. But that is the very
reason why we ought to see that in the future there should not be such a
wide difference in the scale of remuneration. Don't say that under such
conditions poorer work would be done. It would be the saddest symptom of
decadence if finer intellectual work could be obtained only through the
stimulus of higher payment. If that point of view had ruled the world up
to now humanity would never have acquired its greatest scientific and
cultural heritage. For all the greatest inventions, the greatest
discoveries, the most profoundly revolutionary scientific work, and the
most magnificent monuments of human culture, were never given to the
world under the impulse or compulsion of money. Quite the contrary: not
rarely was their origin associated with a renunciation of the worldly
pleasures that wealth can purchase.

It may be that money has become the one power that governs life to-day.
Yet a time will come when men will again bow to higher gods. Much that
we have to-day owes its existence to the desire for money and property;
but there is very little among all this which would leave the world
poorer by its lack.

It is also one of the aims before our movement to hold out the prospect
of a time when the individual will be given what he needs for the
purposes of his life and it will be a time in which, on the other hand,
the principle will be upheld that man does not live for material
enjoyment alone. This principle will find expression in a wiser scale of
wages and salaries which will enable everyone, including the humblest
workman who fulfils his duties conscientiously, to live an honourable
and decent life both as a man and as a citizen. Let it not be said that
this is merely a visionary ideal, that this world would never tolerate
it in practice and that of itself it is impossible to attain.

Even we are not so simple as to believe that there will ever be an age
in which there will be no drawbacks. But that does not release us from
the obligation to fight for the removal of the defects which we have
recognized, to overcome the shortcomings and to strive towards the
ideal. In any case the hard reality of the facts to be faced will always
place only too many limits to our aspirations. But that is precisely why
man must strive again and again to serve the ultimate aim and no
failures must induce him to renounce his intentions, just as we cannot
spurn the sway of justice because mistakes creep into the administration
of the law, and just as we cannot despise medical science because, in
spite of it, there will always be diseases.

Man should take care not to have too low an estimate of the power of an
ideal. If there are some who may feel disheartened over the present
conditions, and if they happen to have served as soldiers, I would
remind them of the time when their heroism was the most convincing
example of the power inherent in ideal motives. It was not preoccupation
about their daily bread that led men to sacrifice their lives, but the
love of their country, the faith which they had in its greatness, and an
all round feeling for the honour of the nation. Only after the German
people had become estranged from these ideals, to follow the material
promises offered by the Revolution, only after they threw away their
arms to take up the rucksack, only then--instead of entering an earthly
paradise--did they sink into the purgatory of universal contempt and at
the same time universal want.

That is why we must face the calculators of the materialist Republic
with faith in an idealist REICH.



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« Reply #62 on: July 19, 2008, 01:34:17 am »

One example will suffice to show how much our contemporary world is at
fault in this matter. From time to time our illustrated papers publish,
for the edification of the German philistine, the news that in some
quarter or other of the globe, and for the first time in that locality,
a Negro has become a lawyer, a teacher, a pastor, even a grand opera
tenor or something else of that kind. While the bourgeois blockhead
stares with amazed admiration at the notice that tells him how
marvellous are the achievements of our modern educational technique, the
more cunning Jew sees in this fact a new proof to be utilized for the
theory with which he wants to infect the public, namely that all men are
equal. It does not dawn on the murky bourgeois mind that the fact which
is published for him is a sin against reason itself, that it is an act
of criminal insanity to train a being who is only an anthropoid by birth
until the pretence can be made that he has been turned into a lawyer;
while, on the other hand, millions who belong to the most civilized
races have to remain in positions which are unworthy of their cultural
level. The bourgeois mind does not realize that it is a sin against the
will of the eternal Creator to allow hundreds of thousands of highly
gifted people to remain floundering in the swamp of proletarian misery
while Hottentots and Zulus are drilled to fill positions in the
intellectual professions. For here we have the product only of a
drilling technique, just as in the case of the performing dog. If the
same amount of care and effort were applied among intelligent races each
individual would become a thousand times more capable in such matters.

This state of affairs would become intolerable if a day should arrive
when it no longer refers to exceptional cases. But the situation is
already intolerable where talent and natural gifts are not taken as
decisive factors in qualifying for the right to a higher education. It
is indeed intolerable to think that year after year hundreds of
thousands of young people without a single vestige of talent are deemed
worthy of a higher education, while other hundreds of thousands who
possess high natural gifts have to go without any sort of higher
schooling at all. The practical loss thus caused to the nation is
incalculable. If the number of important discoveries which have been
made in America has grown considerably in recent years one of the
reasons is that the number of gifted persons belonging to the lowest
social classes who were given a higher education in that country is
proportionately much larger than in Europe.

A stock of knowledge packed into the brain will not suffice for the
making of discoveries. What counts here is only that knowledge which is
illuminated by natural talent. But with us at the present time no value
is placed on such gifts. Only good school reports count.

Here is another educative work that is waiting for the People's State to
do. It will not be its task to assure a dominant influence to a certain
social class already existing, but it will be its duty to attract the
most competent brains in the total mass of the nation and promote them
to place and honour. It is not merely the duty of the State to give to
the average child a certain definite education in the primary school,
but it is also its duty to open the road to talent in the proper
direction. And above all, it must open the doors of the higher schools
under the State to talent of every sort, no matter in what social class
it may appear. This is an imperative necessity; for thus alone will it
be possible to develop a talented body of public leaders from the class
which represents learning that in itself is only a dead mass.

There is still another reason why the State should provide for this
situation. Our intellectual class, particularly in Germany, is so shut
up in itself and fossilized that it lacks living contact with the
classes beneath it. Two evil consequences result from this: First, the
intellectual class neither understands nor sympathizes with the broad
masses. It has been so long cut off from all connection with them that
it cannot now have the necessary psychological ties that would enable it
to understand them. It has become estranged from the people. Secondly,
the intellectual class lacks the necessary will-power; for this faculty
is always weaker in cultivated circles, which live in seclusion, than
among the primitive masses of the people. God knows we Germans have
never been lacking in abundant scientific culture, but we have always
had a considerable lack of will-power and the capacity for making
decisions. For example, the more 'intellectual' our statesmen have been
the more lacking they have been, for the most part, in practical
achievement. Our political preparation and our technical equipment for
the world war were defective, certainly not because the brains governing
the nation were too little educated, but because the men who directed
our public affairs were over-educated, filled to over-flowing with
knowledge and intelligence, yet without any sound instinct and simply
without energy, or any spirit of daring. It was our nation's tragedy to
have to fight for its existence under a Chancellor who was a
dillydallying philosopher. If instead of a Bethmann von Hollweg we had
had a rough man of the people as our leader the heroic blood of the
common grenadier would not have been shed in vain. The exaggeratedly
intellectual material out of which our leaders were made proved to be
the best ally of the scoundrels who carried out the November revolution.
These intellectuals safeguarded the national wealth in a miserly
fashion, instead of launching it forth and risking it, and thus they set
the conditions on which the others won success.

Here the Catholic Church presents an instructive example. Clerical
celibacy forces the Church to recruit its priests not from their own
ranks but progressively from the masses of the people. Yet there are not
many who recognize the significance of celibacy in this relation. But
therein lies the cause of the inexhaustible vigour which characterizes
that ancient institution. For by thus unceasingly recruiting the
ecclesiastical dignitaries from the lower classes of the people, the
Church is enabled not only to maintain the contact of instinctive
understanding with the masses of the population but also to assure
itself of always being able to draw upon that fund of energy which is
present in this form only among the popular masses. Hence the surprising
youthfulness of that gigantic organism, its mental flexibility and its
iron will-power.

It will be the task of the Peoples' State so to organize and administer
its educational system that the existing intellectual class will be
constantly furnished with a supply of fresh blood from beneath. From the
bulk of the nation the State must sift out with careful scrutiny those
persons who are endowed with natural talents and see that they are
employed in the service of the community. For neither the State itself
nor the various departments of State exist to furnish revenues for
members of a special class, but to fulfil the tasks allotted to them.
This will be possible, however, only if the State trains individuals
specially for these offices. Such individuals must have the necessary
fundamental capabilities and will-power. The principle does not hold
true only in regard to the civil service but also in regard to all those
who are to take part in the intellectual and moral leadership of the
people, no matter in what sphere they may be employed. The greatness of
a people is partly dependent on the condition that it must succeed in
training the best brains for those branches of the public service for
which they show a special natural aptitude and in placing them in the
offices where they can do their best work for the good of the community.
If two nations of equal strength and quality engage in a mutual conflict
that nation will come out victorious which has entrusted its
intellectual and moral leadership to its best talents and that nation
will go under whose government represents only a common food trough for
privileged groups or classes and where the inner talents of its
individual members are not availed of.

Of course such a reform seems impossible in the world as it is to-day.
The objection will at once be raised, that it is too much to expect from
the favourite son of a highly-placed civil servant, for instance, that
he shall work with his hands simply because somebody else whose parents
belong to the working-class seems more capable for a job in the civil
service. That argument may be valid as long as manual work is looked
upon in the same way as it is looked upon to-day. Hence the Peoples'
State will have to take up an attitude towards the appreciation of
manual labour which will be fundamentally different from that which now
exists. If necessary, it will have to organize a persistent system of
teaching which will aim at abolishing the present-day stupid habit of
looking down on physical labour as an occupation to be ashamed of.

The individual will have to be valued, not by the class of work he does
but by the way in which he does it and by its usefulness to the
community. This statement may sound monstrous in an epoch when the most
brainless columnist on a newspaper staff is more esteemed than the most
expert mechanic, merely because the former pushes a pen. But, as I have
said, this false valuation does not correspond to the nature of things.
It has been artificially introduced, and there was a time when it did
not exist at all. The present unnatural state of affairs is one of those
general morbid phenomena that have arisen from our materialistic epoch.
Fundamentally every kind of work has a double value; the one material,
the other ideal. The material value depends on the practical importance
of the work to the life of the community. The greater the number of the
population who benefit from the work, directly or indirectly, the higher
will be its material value. This evaluation is expressed in the material
recompense which the individual receives for his labour. In
contradistinction to this purely material value there is the ideal
value. Here the work performed is not judged by its material importance
but by the degree to which it answers a necessity. Certainly the
material utility of an invention may be greater than that of the service
rendered by an everyday workman; but it is also certain that the
community needs each of those small daily services just as much as the
greater services. From the material point of view a distinction can be
made in the evaluation of different kinds of work according to their
utility to the community, and this distinction is expressed by the
differentiation in the scale of recompense; but on the ideal or abstract
plans all workmen become equal the moment each strives to do his best in
his own field, no matter what that field may be. It is on this that a
man's value must be estimated, and not on the amount of recompense
received.

In a reasonably directed State care must be taken that each individual
is given the kind of work which corresponds to his capabilities. In
other words, people will be trained for the positions indicated by their
natural endowments; but these endowments or faculties are innate and
cannot be acquired by any amount of training, being a gift from Nature
and not merited by men. Therefore, the way in which men are generally
esteemed by their fellow-citizens must not be according to the kind of
work they do, because that has been more or less assigned to the
individual. Seeing that the kind of work in which the individual is
employed is to be accounted to his inborn gifts and the resultant
training which he has received from the community, he will have to be
judged by the way in which he performs this work entrusted to him by the
community. For the work which the individual performs is not the purpose
of his existence, but only a means. His real purpose in life is to
better himself and raise himself to a higher level as a human being; but
this he can only do in and through the community whose cultural life he
shares. And this community must always exist on the foundations on which
the State is based. He ought to contribute to the conservation of those
foundations. Nature determines the form of this contribution. It is the
duty of the individual to return to the community, zealously and
honestly, what the community has given him. He who does this deserves
the highest respect and esteem. Material remuneration may be given to
him whose work has a corresponding utility for the community; but the
ideal recompense must lie in the esteem to which everybody has a claim
who serves his people with whatever powers Nature has bestowed upon him
and which have been developed by the training he has received from the
national community. Then it will no longer be dishonourable to be an
honest craftsman; but it will be a cause of disgrace to be an
inefficient State official, wasting God's day and filching daily bread
from an honest public. Then it will be looked upon as quite natural that
positions should not be given to persons who of their very nature are
incapable of filling them.

Furthermore, this personal efficiency will be the sole criterion of the
right to take part on an equal juridical footing in general civil
affairs.

The present epoch is working out its own ruin. It introduces universal
suffrage, chatters about equal rights but can find no foundation for
this equality. It considers the material wage as the expression of a
man's value and thus destroys the basis of the noblest kind of equality
that can exist. For equality cannot and does not depend on the work a
man does, but only on the manner in which each one does the particular
work allotted to him. Thus alone will mere natural chance be set aside
in determining the work of a man and thus only does the individual
become the artificer of his own social worth.

At the present time, when whole groups of people estimate each other's
value only by the size of the salaries which they respectively receive,
there will be no understanding of all this. But that is no reason why we
should cease to champion those ideas. Quite the opposite: in an epoch
which is inwardly diseased and decaying anyone who would heal it must
have the courage first to lay bare the real roots of the disease. And
the National Socialist Movement must take that duty on its shoulders. It
will have to lift its voice above the heads of the small bourgeoisie and
rally together and co-ordinate all those popular forces which are ready
to become the protagonists of a new WELTANSCHAUUNG.



Of course the objection will be made that in general it is difficult to
differentiate between the material and ideal values of work and that the
lower prestige which is attached to physical labour is due to the fact
that smaller wages are paid for that kind of work. It will be said that
the lower wage is in its turn the reason why the manual worker has less
chance to participate in the culture of the nation; so that the ideal
side of human culture is less open to him because it has nothing to do
with his daily activities. It may be added that the reluctance to do
physical work is justified by the fact that, on account of the small
income, the cultural level of manual labourers must naturally be low,
and that this in turn is a justification for the lower estimation in
which manual labour is generally held.

There is quite a good deal of truth in all this. But that is the very
reason why we ought to see that in the future there should not be such a
wide difference in the scale of remuneration. Don't say that under such
conditions poorer work would be done. It would be the saddest symptom of
decadence if finer intellectual work could be obtained only through the
stimulus of higher payment. If that point of view had ruled the world up
to now humanity would never have acquired its greatest scientific and
cultural heritage. For all the greatest inventions, the greatest
discoveries, the most profoundly revolutionary scientific work, and the
most magnificent monuments of human culture, were never given to the
world under the impulse or compulsion of money. Quite the contrary: not
rarely was their origin associated with a renunciation of the worldly
pleasures that wealth can purchase.

It may be that money has become the one power that governs life to-day.
Yet a time will come when men will again bow to higher gods. Much that
we have to-day owes its existence to the desire for money and property;
but there is very little among all this which would leave the world
poorer by its lack.

It is also one of the aims before our movement to hold out the prospect
of a time when the individual will be given what he needs for the
purposes of his life and it will be a time in which, on the other hand,
the principle will be upheld that man does not live for material
enjoyment alone. This principle will find expression in a wiser scale of
wages and salaries which will enable everyone, including the humblest
workman who fulfils his duties conscientiously, to live an honourable
and decent life both as a man and as a citizen. Let it not be said that
this is merely a visionary ideal, that this world would never tolerate
it in practice and that of itself it is impossible to attain.

Even we are not so simple as to believe that there will ever be an age
in which there will be no drawbacks. But that does not release us from
the obligation to fight for the removal of the defects which we have
recognized, to overcome the shortcomings and to strive towards the
ideal. In any case the hard reality of the facts to be faced will always
place only too many limits to our aspirations. But that is precisely why
man must strive again and again to serve the ultimate aim and no
failures must induce him to renounce his intentions, just as we cannot
spurn the sway of justice because mistakes creep into the administration
of the law, and just as we cannot despise medical science because, in
spite of it, there will always be diseases.

Man should take care not to have too low an estimate of the power of an
ideal. If there are some who may feel disheartened over the present
conditions, and if they happen to have served as soldiers, I would
remind them of the time when their heroism was the most convincing
example of the power inherent in ideal motives. It was not preoccupation
about their daily bread that led men to sacrifice their lives, but the
love of their country, the faith which they had in its greatness, and an
all round feeling for the honour of the nation. Only after the German
people had become estranged from these ideals, to follow the material
promises offered by the Revolution, only after they threw away their
arms to take up the rucksack, only then--instead of entering an earthly
paradise--did they sink into the purgatory of universal contempt and at
the same time universal want.

That is why we must face the calculators of the materialist Republic
with faith in an idealist REICH.



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« Reply #63 on: July 19, 2008, 01:34:34 am »

CHAPTER III



CITIZENS AND SUBJECTS OF THE STATE


The institution that is now erroneously called the State generally
classifies people only into two groups: citizens and aliens. Citizens
are all those who possess full civic rights, either by reason of their
birth or by an act of naturalization. Aliens are those who enjoy the
same rights in some other State. Between these two categories there are
certain beings who resemble a sort of meteoric phenomena. They are
people who have no citizenship in any State and consequently no civic
rights anywhere.

In most cases nowadays a person acquires civic rights by being born
within the frontiers of a State. The race or nationality to which he may
belong plays no role whatsoever. The child of a Negro who once lived in
one of the German protectorates and now takes up his residence in
Germany automatically becomes a 'German Citizen' in the eyes of the
world. In the same way the child of any Jew, Pole, African or Asian may
automatically become a German Citizen.

Besides naturalization that is acquired through the fact of having been
born within the confines of a State there exists another kind of
naturalization which can be acquired later. This process is subject to
various preliminary requirements. For example one condition is that, if
possible, the applicant must not be a burglar or a common street thug.
It is required of him that his political attitude is not such as to give
cause for uneasiness; in other words he must be a harmless simpleton in
politics. It is required that he shall not be a burden to the State of
which he wishes to become a citizen. In this realistic epoch of ours
this last condition naturally only means that he must not be a financial
burden. If the affairs of the candidate are such that it appears likely
he will turn out to be a good taxpayer, that is a very important
consideration and will help him to obtain civic rights all the more
rapidly.

The question of race plays no part at all.

The whole process of acquiring civic rights is not very different from
that of being admitted to membership of an automobile club, for
instance. A person files his application. It is examined. It is
sanctioned. And one day the man receives a card which informs him that
he has become a citizen. The information is given in an amusing way. An
applicant who has hitherto been a Zulu or Kaffir is told: "By these
presents you are now become a German Citizen."

The President of the State can perform this piece of magic. What God
Himself could not do is achieved by some Theophrastus Paracelsus (Note 16)
of a civil servant through a mere twirl of the hand. Nothing but a stroke
of the pen, and a Mongolian slave is forthwith turned into a real
German. Not only is no question asked regarding the race to which the
new citizen belongs; even the matter of his physical health is not
inquired into. His flesh may be corrupted with syphilis; but he will
still be welcome in the State as it exists to-day so long as he may not
become a financial burden or a political danger.

[Note 16. The last and most famous of the medieval alchemists. He was born
at Basleabout the year 1490 and died at Salzburg in 1541. He taught that
all metals could be transmuted through the action of one primary element
common to them all. This element he called ALCAHEST. If it could be found
it would proveto be at once the philosopher's stone, the universal
medicine and their resistible solvent. There are many aspects of his
teaching which are now looked upon as by no means so fantastic as they
were considered in his own time.]

In this way, year after year, those organisms which we call States take
up poisonous matter which they can hardly ever overcome.

Another point of distinction between a citizen and an alien is that the
former is admitted to all public offices, that he may possibly have to
do military service and that in return he is permitted to take a passive
or active part at public elections. Those are his chief privileges. For
in regard to personal rights and personal liberty the alien enjoys the
same amount of protection as the citizen, and frequently even more.
Anyhow that is how it happens in our present German Republic.

I realize fully that nobody likes to hear these things. But it would be
difficult to find anything more illogical or more insane than our
contemporary laws in regard to State citizenship.

At present there exists one State which manifests at least some modest
attempts that show a better appreciation of how things ought to be done
in this matter. It is not, however, in our model German Republic but in
the U.S.A. that efforts are made to conform at least partly to the
counsels of commonsense. By refusing immigrants to enter there if they
are in a bad state of health, and by excluding certain races from the
right to become naturalized as citizens, they have begun to introduce
principles similar to those on which we wish to ground the People's
State.

The People's State will classify its population in three groups:
Citizens, subjects of the State, and aliens.

The principle is that birth within the confines of the State gives only
the status of a subject. It does not carry with it the right to fill any
position under the State or to participate in political life, such as
taking an active or passive part in elections. Another principle is that
the race and nationality of every subject of the State will have to be
proved. A subject is at any time free to cease being a subject and to
become a citizen of that country to which he belongs in virtue of his
nationality. The only difference between an alien and a subject of the
State is that the former is a citizen of another country.

The young boy or girl who is of German nationality and is a subject of
the German State is bound to complete the period of school education
which is obligatory for every German. Thereby he submits to the system
of training which will make him conscious of his race and a member of
the folk-community. Then he has to fulfil all those requirements laid
down by the State in regard to physical training after he has left
school; and finally he enters the army. The training in the army is of a
general kind. It must be given to each individual German and will render
him competent to fulfil the physical and mental requirements of military
service. The rights of citizenship shall be conferred on every young man
whose health and character have been certified as good, after having
completed his period of military service. This act of inauguration in
citizenship shall be a solemn ceremony. And the diploma conferring the
rights of citizenship will be preserved by the young man as the most
precious testimonial of his whole life. It entitles him to exercise all
the rights of a citizen and to enjoy all the privileges attached
thereto. For the State must draw a sharp line of distinction between
those who, as members of the nation, are the foundation and the support
of its existence and greatness, and those who are domiciled in the State
simply as earners of their livelihood there.

On the occasion of conferring a diploma of citizenship the new citizen
must take a solemn oath of loyalty to the national community and the
State. This diploma must be a bond which unites together all the various
classes and sections of the nation. It shall be a greater honour to be a
citizen of this REICH, even as a street-sweeper, than to be the King of
a foreign State.

The citizen has privileges which are not accorded to the alien. He is
the master in the REICH. But this high honour has also its obligations.
Those who show themselves without personal honour or character, or
common criminals, or traitors to the fatherland, can at any time be
deprived of the rights of citizenship. Therewith they become merely
subjects of the State.

The German girl is a subject of the State but will become a citizen when
she marries. At the same time those women who earn their livelihood
independently have the right to acquire citizenship if they are German
subjects.




CHAPTER IV



PERSONALITY AND THE IDEAL OF THE PEOPLE'S STATE


If the principal duty of the National Socialist People's State be to
educate and promote the existence of those who are the material out of
which the State is formed, it will not be sufficient to promote those
racial elements as such, educate them and finally train them for
practical life, but the State must also adapt its own organization to
meet the demands of this task.

It would be absurd to appraise a man's worth by the race to which he
belongs and at the same time to make war against the Marxist principle,
that all men are equal, without being determined to pursue our own
principle to its ultimate consequences. If we admit the significance of
blood, that is to say, if we recognize the race as the fundamental
element on which all life is based, we shall have to apply to the
individual the logical consequences of this principle. In general I must
estimate the worth of nations differently, on the basis of the different
races from which they spring, and I must also differentiate in
estimating the worth of the individual within his own race. The
principle, that one people is not the same as another, applies also to
the individual members of a national community. No one brain, for
instance, is equal to another; because the constituent elements
belonging to the same blood vary in a thousand subtle details, though
they are fundamentally of the same quality.

The first consequence of this fact is comparatively simple. It demands
that those elements within the folk-community which show the best racial
qualities ought to be encouraged more than the others and especially
they should be encouraged to increase and multiply.

This task is comparatively simple because it can be recognized and
carried out almost mechanically. It is much more difficult to select
from among a whole multitude of people all those who actually possess
the highest intellectual and spiritual characteristics and assign them
to that sphere of influence which not only corresponds to their
outstanding talents but in which their activities will above all things
be of benefit to the nation. This selection according to capacity and
efficiency cannot be effected in a mechanical way. It is a work which
can be accomplished only through the permanent struggle of everyday life
itself.

A WELTANSCHAUUNG which repudiates the democratic principle of the rule
of the masses and aims at giving this world to the best people--that
is, to the highest quality of mankind--must also apply that same
aristocratic postulate to the individuals within the folk-community. It
must take care that the positions of leadership and highest influence
are given to the best men. Hence it is not based on the idea of the
majority, but on that of personality.

Anyone who believes that the People's National Socialist State should
distinguish itself from the other States only mechanically, as it were,
through the better construction of its economic life--thanks to a
better equilibrium between poverty and riches, or to the extension to
broader masses of the power to determine the economic process, or to a
fairer wage, or to the elimination of vast differences in the scale of
salaries--anyone who thinks this understands only the superficial
features of our movement and has not the least idea of what we mean when
we speak of our WELTANSCHAUUNG. All these features just mentioned could
not in the least guarantee us a lasting existence and certainly would be
no warranty of greatness. A nation that could content itself with
external reforms would not have the slightest chance of success in the
general struggle for life among the nations of the world. A movement
that would confine its mission to such adjustments, which are certainly
right and equitable, would effect no far-reaching or profound reform in
the existing order. The whole effect of such measures would be limited
to externals. They would not furnish the nation with that moral armament
which alone will enable it effectively to overcome the weaknesses from
which we are suffering to-day.

In order to elucidate this point of view it may be worth while to glance
once again at the real origins and causes of the cultural evolution of
mankind.

The first step which visibly brought mankind away from the animal world
was that which led to the first invention. The invention itself owes its
origin to the ruses and stratagems which man employed to assist him in
the struggle with other creatures for his existence and often to provide
him with the only means he could adopt to achieve success in the
struggle. Those first very crude inventions cannot be attributed to the
individual; for the subsequent observer, that is to say the modern
observer, recognizes them only as collective phenomena. Certain tricks
and skilful tactics which can be observed in use among the animals
strike the eye of the observer as established facts which may be seen
everywhere; and man is no longer in a position to discover or explain
their primary cause and so he contents himself with calling such
phenomena 'instinctive.'

In our case this term has no meaning. Because everyone who believes in
the higher evolution of living organisms must admit that every
manifestation of the vital urge and struggle to live must have had a
definite beginning in time and that one subject alone must have
manifested it for the first time. It was then repeated again and again;
and the practice of it spread over a widening area, until finally it
passed into the subconscience of every member of the species, where it
manifested itself as 'instinct.'

This is more easily understood and more easy to believe in the case of
man. His first skilled tactics in the struggle with the rest of the
animals undoubtedly originated in his management of creatures which
possessed special capabilities.

There can be no doubt that personality was then the sole factor in all
decisions and achievements, which were afterwards taken over by the
whole of humanity as a matter of course. An exact exemplification of
this may be found in those fundamental military principles which have
now become the basis of all strategy in war. Originally they sprang from
the brain of a single individual and in the course of many years, maybe
even thousands of years, they were accepted all round as a matter of
course and this gained universal validity.

Man completed his first discovery by making a second. Among other things
he learned how to master other living beings and make them serve him in
his struggle for existence. And thus began the real inventive activity
of mankind, as it is now visible before our eyes. Those material
inventions, beginning with the use of stones as weapons, which led to
the domestication of animals, the production of fire by artificial
means, down to the marvellous inventions of our own days, show clearly
that an individual was the originator in each case. The nearer we come
to our own time and the more important and revolutionary the inventions
become, the more clearly do we recognize the truth of that statement.
All the material inventions which we see around us have been produced by
the creative powers and capabilities of individuals. And all these
inventions help man to raise himself higher and higher above the animal
world and to separate himself from that world in an absolutely definite
way. Hence they serve to elevate the human species and continually to
promote its progress. And what the most primitive artifice once did for
man in his struggle for existence, as he went hunting through the
primeval forest, that same sort of assistance is rendered him to-day in
the form of marvellous scientific inventions which help him in the
present day struggle for life and to forge weapons for future struggles.
In their final consequences all human thought and invention help man in
his life-struggle on this planet, even though the so-called practical
utility of an invention, a discovery or a profound scientific theory,
may not be evident at first sight. Everything contributes to raise man
higher and higher above the level of all the other creatures that
surround him, thereby strengthening and consolidating his position; so
that he develops more and more in every direction as the ruling being on
this earth.

Hence all inventions are the result of the creative faculty of the
individual. And all such individuals, whether they have willed it or
not, are the benefactors of mankind, both great and small. Through their
work millions and indeed billions of human beings have been provided
with means and resources which facilitate their struggle for existence.

Thus at the origin of the material civilization which flourishes to-day
we always see individual persons. They supplement one another and one of
them bases his work on that of the other. The same is true in regard to
the practical application of those inventions and discoveries. For all
the various methods of production are in their turn inventions also and
consequently dependent on the creative faculty of the individual. Even
the purely theoretical work, which cannot be measured by a definite rule
and is preliminary to all subsequent technical discoveries, is
exclusively the product of the individual brain. The broad masses do not
invent, nor does the majority organize or think; but always and in every
case the individual man, the person.
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« Reply #64 on: July 19, 2008, 01:34:51 am »

Accordingly a human community is well organized only when it facilitates
to the highest possible degree individual creative forces and utilizes
their work for the benefit of the community. The most valuable factor of
an invention, whether it be in the world of material realities or in the
world of abstract ideas, is the personality of the inventor himself. The
first and supreme duty of an organized folk community is to place the
inventor in a position where he can be of the greatest benefit to all.
Indeed the very purpose of the organization is to put this principle
into practice. Only by so doing can it ward off the curse of
mechanization and remain a living thing. In itself it must personify the
effort to place men of brains above the multitude and to make the latter
obey the former.

Therefore not only does the organization possess no right to prevent men
of brains from rising above the multitude but, on the contrary, it must
use its organizing powers to enable and promote that ascension as far as
it possibly can. It must start out from the principle that the blessings
of mankind never came from the masses but from the creative brains of
individuals, who are therefore the real benefactors of humanity. It is
in the interest of all to assure men of creative brains a decisive
influence and facilitate their work. This common interest is surely not
served by allowing the multitude to rule, for they are not capable of
thinking nor are they efficient and in no case whatsoever can they be
said to be gifted. Only those should rule who have the natural
temperament and gifts of leadership.

Such men of brains are selected mainly, as I have already said, through
the hard struggle for existence itself. In this struggle there are many
who break down and collapse and thereby show that they are not called by
Destiny to fill the highest positions; and only very few are left who
can be classed among the elect. In the realm of thought and of artistic
creation, and even in the economic field, this same process of selection
takes place, although--especially in the economic field--its operation
is heavily handicapped. This same principle of selection rules in the
administration of the State and in that department of power which
personifies the organized military defence of the nation. The idea of
personality rules everywhere, the authority of the individual over his
subordinates and the responsibility of the individual towards the
persons who are placed over him. It is only in political life that this
very natural principle has been completely excluded. Though all human
civilization has resulted exclusively from the creative activity of the
individual, the principle that it is the mass which counts--through the
decision of the majority--makes its appearance only in the
administration of the national community especially in the higher
grades; and from there downwards the poison gradually filters into all
branches of national life, thus causing a veritable decomposition. The
destructive workings of Judaism in different parts of the national body
can be ascribed fundamentally to the persistent Jewish efforts at
undermining the importance of personality among the nations that are
their hosts and, in place of personality, substituting the domination of
the masses. The constructive principle of Aryan humanity is thus
displaced by the destructive principle of the Jews, They become the
'ferment of decomposition' among nations and races and, in a broad
sense, the wreckers of human civilization.

Marxism represents the most striking phase of the Jewish endeavour to
eliminate the dominant significance of personality in every sphere of
human life and replace it by the numerical power of the masses. In
politics the parliamentary form of government is the expression of this
effort. We can observe the fatal effects of it everywhere, from the
smallest parish council upwards to the highest governing circles of the
nation. In the field of economics we see the trade union movement, which
does not serve the real interests of the employees but the destructive
aims of international Jewry. Just to the same degree in which the
principle of personality is excluded from the economic life of the
nation, and the influence and activities of the masses substituted in
its stead, national economy, which should be for the service and benefit
of the community as a whole, will gradually deteriorate in its creative
capacity. The shop committees which, instead of caring for the interests
of the employees, strive to influence the process of production, serve
the same destructive purpose. They damage the general productive system
and consequently injure the individual engaged in industry. For in the
long run it is impossible to satisfy popular demands merely by
high-sounding theoretical phrases. These can be satisfied only by
supplying goods to meet the individual needs of daily life and by so
doing create the conviction that, through the productive collaboration
of its members, the folk community serves the interests of the
individual.

Even if, on the basis of its mass-theory, Marxism should prove itself
capable of taking over and developing the present economic system, that
would not signify anything. The question as to whether the Marxist
doctrine be right or wrong cannot be decided by any test which would
show that it can administer for the future what already exists to-day,
but only by asking whether it has the creative power to build up
according to its own principles a civilization which would be a
counterpart of what already exists. Even if Marxism were a thousandfold
capable of taking over the economic life as we now have it and
maintaining it in operation under Marxist direction, such an achievement
would prove nothing; because, on the basis of its own principles,
Marxism would never be able to create something which could supplant
what exists to-day.

And Marxism itself has furnished the proof that it cannot do this. Not
only has it been unable anywhere to create a cultural or economic system
of its own; but it was not even able to develop, according to its own
principles, the civilization and economic system it found ready at hand.
It has had to make compromises, by way of a return to the principle of
personality, just as it cannot dispense with that principle in its own
organization.

The racial WELTANSCHAUUNG is fundamentally distinguished from the
Marxist by reason of the fact that the former recognizes the
significance of race and therefore also personal worth and has made
these the pillars of its structure. These are the most important factors
of its WELTANSCHAUUNG.

If the National Socialist Movement should fail to understand the
fundamental importance of this essential principle, if it should merely
varnish the external appearance of the present State and adopt the
majority principle, it would really do nothing more than compete with
Marxism on its own ground. For that reason it would not have the right
to call itself a WELTANSCHAUUNG. If the social programme of the
movement consisted in eliminating personality and putting the multitude
in its place, then National Socialism would be corrupted with the poison
of Marxism, just as our national-bourgeois parties are.

The People's State must assure the welfare of its citizens by
recognizing the importance of personal values under all circumstances
and by preparing the way for the maximum of productive efficiency in all
the various branches of economic life, thus securing to the individual
the highest possible share in the general output.

Hence the People's State must mercilessly expurgate from all the leading
circles in the government of the country the parliamentarian principle,
according to which decisive power through the majority vote is invested
in the multitude. Personal responsibility must be substituted in its
stead.

From this the following conclusion results:

The best constitution and the best form of government is that which
makes it quite natural for the best brains to reach a position of
dominant importance and influence in the community.

Just as in the field of economics men of outstanding ability cannot be
designated from above but must come forward in virtue of their own
efforts, and just as there is an unceasing educative process that leads
from the smallest shop to the largest undertaking, and just as life
itself is the school in which those lessons are taught, so in the
political field it is not possible to 'discover' political talent all in
a moment. Genius of an extraordinary stamp is not to be judged by normal
standards whereby we judge other men.

In its organization the State must be established on the principle of
personality, starting from the smallest cell and ascending up to the
supreme government of the country.

There are no decisions made by the majority vote, but only by
responsible persons. And the word 'council' is once more restored to its
original meaning. Every man in a position of responsibility will have
councillors at his side, but the decision is made by that individual
person alone.

The principle which made the former Prussian Army an admirable
instrument of the German nation will have to become the basis of our
statal constitution, that is to say, full authority over his
subordinates must be invested in each leader and he must be responsible
to those above him.

Even then we shall not be able to do without those corporations which at
present we call parliaments. But they will be real councils, in the
sense that they will have to give advice. The responsibility can and
must be borne by one individual, who alone will be vested with authority
and the right to command.

Parliaments as such are necessary because they alone furnish the
opportunity for leaders to rise gradually who will be entrusted
subsequently with positions of special responsibility.

The following is an outline of the picture which the organization will
present:

From the municipal administration up to the government of the REICH, the
People's State will not have any body of representatives which makes its
decisions through the majority vote. It will have only advisory bodies
to assist the chosen leader for the time being and he will distribute
among them the various duties they are to perform. In certain fields
they may, if necessary, have to assume full responsibility, such as the
leader or president of each corporation possesses on a larger scale.

In principle the People's State must forbid the custom of taking advice
on certain political problems--economics, for instance--from persons
who are entirely incompetent because they lack special training and
practical experience in such matters. Consequently the State must divide
its representative bodies into a political chamber and a corporative
chamber that represents the respective trades and professions.

To assure an effective co-operation between those two bodies, a selected
body will be placed over them. This will be a special senate.

No vote will be taken in the chambers or senate. They are to be
organizations for work and not voting machines. The individual members
will have consultive votes but no right of decision will be attached
thereto. The right of decision belongs exclusively to the president, who
must be entirely responsible for the matter under discussion.

This principle of combining absolute authority with absolute
responsibility will gradually cause a selected group of leaders to
emerge; which is not even thinkable in our present epoch of
irresponsible parliamentarianism.

The political construction of the nation will thereby be brought into
harmony with those laws to which the nation already owes its greatness
in the economic and cultural spheres.

Regarding the possibility of putting these principles into practice, I
should like to call attention to the fact that the principle of
parliamentarian democracy, whereby decisions are enacted through the
majority vote, has not always ruled the world. On the contrary, we find
it prevalent only during short periods of history, and those have always
been periods of decline in nations and States.
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« Reply #65 on: July 19, 2008, 01:35:13 am »

One must not believe, however, that such a radical change could be
effected by measures of a purely theoretical character, operating from
above downwards; for the change I have been describing could not be
limited to transforming the constitution of a State but would have to
include the various fields of legislation and civic existence as a
whole. Such a revolution can be brought about only by means of a
movement which is itself organized under the inspiration of these
principles and thus bears the germ of the future State in its own
organism.

Therefore it is well for the National Socialist Movement to make itself
completely familiar with those principles to-day and actually to put
them into practice within its own organization, so that not only will it
be in a position to serve as a guide for the future State but will have
its own organization such that it can subsequently be placed at the
disposal of the State itself.




CHAPTER V



WELTANSCHAUUNG AND ORGANIZATION


The People's State, which I have tried to sketch in general outline,
will not become a reality in virtue of the simple fact that we know the
indispensable conditions of its existence. It does not suffice to know
what aspect such a State would present. The problem of its foundation is
far more important. The parties which exist at present and which draw
their profits from the State as it now is cannot be expected to bring
about a radical change in the regime or to change their attitude on
their own initiative. This is rendered all the more impossible because
the forces which now have the direction of affairs in their hands are
Jews here and Jews there and Jews everywhere. The trend of development
which we are now experiencing would, if allowed to go on unhampered,
lead to the realization of the Pan-Jewish prophecy that the Jews will
one day devour the other nations and become lords of the earth.

In contrast to the millions of 'bourgeois' and 'proletarian' Germans,
who are stumbling to their ruin, mostly through timidity, indolence and
stupidity, the Jew pursues his way persistently and keeps his eye always
fixed on his future goal. Any party that is led by him can fight for no
other interests than his, and his interests certainly have nothing in
common with those of the Aryan nations.

If we would transform our ideal picture of the People's State into a
reality we shall have to keep independent of the forces that now control
public life and seek for new forces that will be ready and capable of
taking up the fight for such an ideal. For a fight it will have to be,
since the first objective will not be to build up the idea of the
People's State but rather to wipe out the Jewish State which is now in
existence. As so often happens in the course of history, the main
difficulty is not to establish a new order of things but to clear the
ground for its establishment. Prejudices and egotistic interests join
together in forming a common front against the new idea and in trying by
every means to prevent its triumph, because it is disagreeable to them
or threatens their existence.

That is why the protagonist of the new idea is unfortunately, in spite
of his {254}desire for constructive work, compelled to wage a
destructive battle first, in order to abolish the existing state of
affairs.

A doctrine whose principles are radically new and of essential
importance must adopt the sharp probe of criticism as its weapon, though
this may show itself disagreeable to the individual followers.

It is evidence of a very superficial insight into historical
developments if the so-called folkists emphasize again and again that
they will adopt the use of negative criticism under no circumstances but
will engage only in constructive work. That is nothing but puerile
chatter and is typical of the whole lot of folkists. It is another proof
that the history of our own times has made no impression on these minds.
Marxism too has had its aims to pursue and it also recognizes
constructive work, though by this it understands only the establishment
of despotic rule in the hands of international Jewish finance.
Nevertheless for seventy years its principal work still remains in the
field of criticism. And what disruptive and destructive criticism it has
been! Criticism repeated again and again, until the corrosive acid ate
into the old State so thoroughly that it finally crumbled to pieces.
Only then did the so-called 'constructive' critical work of Marxism
begin. And that was natural, right and logical. An existing order of
things is not abolished by merely proclaiming and insisting on a new
one. It must not be hoped that those who are the partisans of the
existing order and have their interests bound up with it will be
converted and won over to the new movement simply by being shown that
something new is necessary. On the contrary, what may easily happen is
that two different situations will exist side by side and that a
WELTANSCHAUUNG is transformed into a party, above which level it will
not be able to raise itself afterwards. For a WELTANSCHAUUNG is
intolerant and cannot permit another to exist side by side with it. It
imperiously demands its own recognition as unique and exclusive and a
complete transformation in accordance with its views throughout all the
branches of public life. It can never allow the previous state of
affairs to continue in existence by its side.

And the same holds true of religions.

Christianity was not content with erecting an altar of its own. It had
first to destroy the pagan altars. It was only in virtue of this
passionate intolerance that an apodictic faith could grow up. And
intolerance is an indispensable condition for the growth of such a
faith.

It may be objected here that in these phenomena which we find throughout
the history of the world we have to recognize mostly a specifically
Jewish mode of thought and that such fanaticism and intolerance are
typical symptoms of Jewish mentality. That may be a thousandfold true;
and it is a fact deeply to be regretted. The appearance of intolerance
and fanaticism in the history of mankind may be deeply regrettable, and
it may be looked upon as foreign to human nature, but the fact does not
change conditions as they exist to-day. The men who wish to liberate our
German nation from the conditions in which it now exists cannot cudgel
their brains with thinking how excellent it would be if this or that had
never arisen. They must strive to find ways and means of abolishing what
actually exists. A philosophy of life which is inspired by an infernal
spirit of intolerance can only be set aside by a doctrine that is
advanced in an equally ardent spirit and fought for with as determined a
will and which is itself a new idea, pure and absolutely true.

Each one of us to-day may regret the fact that the advent of
Christianity was the first occasion on which spiritual terror was
introduced into the much freer ancient world, but the fact cannot be
denied that ever since then the world is pervaded and dominated by this
kind of coercion and that violence is broken only by violence and terror
by terror. Only then can a new regime be created by means of
constructive work. Political parties are prone to enter compromises; but
a WELTANSCHAUUNG never does this. A political party is inclined to
adjust its teachings with a view to meeting those of its opponents, but
a WELTANSCHAUUNG proclaims its own infallibility.

In the beginning, political parties have also and nearly always the
intention of {255}securing an exclusive and despotic domination for
themselves. They always show a slight tendency to become
WELTANSCHHAUUNGen. But the limited nature of their programme is in
itself enough to rob them of that heroic spirit which a WELTANSCHAUUNG
demands. The spirit of conciliation which animates their will attracts
those petty and chicken-hearted people who are not fit to be
protagonists in any crusade. That is the reason why they mostly become
struck in their miserable pettiness very early on the march. They give
up fighting for their ideology and, by way of what they call 'positive
collaboration,' they try as quickly as possible to wedge themselves into
some tiny place at the trough of the existent regime and to stick there
as long as possible. Their whole effort ends at that. And if they should
get shouldered away from the common manger by a competition of more
brutal manners then their only idea is to force themselves in again, by
force or chicanery, among the herd of all the others who have similar
appetites, in order to get back into the front row, and finally--even
at the expense of their most sacred convictions--participate anew in
that beloved spot where they find their fodder. They are the jackals of
politics.

But a general WELTANSCHAUUNG will never share its place with something
else. Therefore it can never agree to collaborate in any order of things
that it condemns. On the contrary it feels obliged to employ every means
in fighting against the old order and the whole world of ideas belonging
to that order and prepare the way for its destruction.

These purely destructive tactics, the danger of which is so readily
perceived by the enemy that he forms a united front against them for his
common defence, and also the constructive tactics, which must be
aggressive in order to carry the new world of ideas to success--both
these phases of the struggle call for a body of resolute fighters. Any
new philosophy of life will bring its ideas to victory only if the most
courageous and active elements of its epoch and its people are enrolled
under its standards and grouped firmly together in a powerful fighting
organization. To achieve this purpose it is absolutely necessary to
select from the general system of doctrine a certain number of ideas
which will appeal to such individuals and which, once they are expressed
in a precise and clear-cut form, will serve as articles of faith for a
new association of men. While the programme of the ordinary political
party is nothing but the recipe for cooking up favourable results out of
the next general elections, the programme of a WELTANSCHAUUNG
represents a declaration of war against an existing order of things,
against present conditions, in short, against the established
WELTANSCHAUUNG.

It is not necessary, however, that every individual fighter for such a
new doctrine need have a full grasp of the ultimate ideas and plans of
those who are the leaders of the movement. It is only necessary that
each should have a clear notion of the fundamental ideas and that he
should thoroughly assimilate a few of the most fundamental principles,
so that he will be convinced of the necessity of carrying the movement
and its doctrines to success. The individual soldier is not initiated in
the knowledge of high strategical plans. But he is trained to submit to
a rigid discipline, to be passionately convinced of the justice and
inner worth of his cause and that he must devote himself to it without
reserve. So, too, the individual follower of a movement must be made
acquainted with its far-reaching purpose, how it is inspired by a
powerful will and has a great future before it.

Supposing that each soldier in an army were a general, and had the
training and capacity for generalship, that army would not be an
efficient fighting instrument. Similarly a political movement would not
be very efficient in fighting for a WELTANSCHAUUNG if it were made up
exclusively of intellectuals. No, we need the simple soldier also.
Without him no discipline can be established.

By its very nature, an organization can exist only if leaders of high
intellectual ability are served by a large mass of men who are
emotionally devoted to the cause. To maintain discipline in a company of
two hundred men who are equally intelligent and capable would turn out
more difficult in the long run than in a company of one hundred and
ninety less gifted men and ten who have had a higher education.

{256}The Social-Democrats have profited very much by recognizing this
truth. They took the broad masses of our people who had just completed
military service and learned to submit to discipline, and they subjected
this mass of men to the discipline of the Social-Democratic
organization, which was no less rigid than the discipline through which
the young men had passed in their military training. The
Social-Democratic organization consisted of an army divided into
officers and men. The German worker who had passed through his military
service became the private soldier in that army, and the Jewish
intellectual was the officer. The German trade union functionaries may
be compared to the non-commissioned officers. The fact, which was always
looked upon with indifference by our middle-classes, that only the
so-called uneducated classes joined Marxism was the very ground on which
this party achieved its success. For while the bourgeois parties,
because they mostly consisted of intellectuals, were only a feckless
band of undisciplined individuals, out of much less intelligent human
material the Marxist leaders formed an army of party combatants who obey
their Jewish masters just as blindly as they formerly obeyed their
German officers. The German middle-classes, who never; bothered their
heads about psychological problems because they felt themselves superior
to such matters, did not think it necessary to reflect on the profound
significance of this fact and the secret danger involved in it. Indeed
they believed. that a political movement which draws its followers
exclusively from intellectual circles must, for that very reason, be of
greater importance and have better grounds. for its chances of success,
and even a greater probability of taking over the government of the
country than a party made up of the ignorant masses. They completely
failed to realize the fact that the strength of a political party never
consists in the intelligence and independent spirit of the rank-and-file
of its members but rather in the spirit of willing obedience with which
they follow their intellectual leaders. What is of decisive importance
is the leadership itself. When two bodies of troops are arrayed in
mutual combat victory will not fall to that side in which every soldier
has an expert knowledge of the rules of strategy, but rather to that
side which has the best leaders and at the same time the best
disciplined, most blindly obedient and best drilled troops.

That is a fundamental piece of knowledge which we must always bear in
mind when we examine the possibility of transforming a WELTANSCHAUUNG
into a practical reality.

If we agree that in order to carry a WELTANSCHAUUNG into practical
effect it must be incorporated in a fighting movement, then the logical
consequence is that the programme of such a movement must take account
of the human material at its disposal. Just as the ultimate aims and
fundamental principles must be absolutely definite and unmistakable, so
the propagandist programme must be well drawn up and must be inspired by
a keen sense of its psychological appeals to the minds of those without
whose help the noblest ideas will be doomed to remain in the eternal,
realm of ideas.

If the idea of the People's State, which is at present an obscure wish,
is one day to attain a clear and definite success, from its vague and
vast mass of thought it will have to put forward certain definite
principles which of their very nature and content are calculated to
attract a broad mass of adherents; in other words, such a group of
people as can guarantee that these principles will be fought for. That
group of people are the German workers.

That is why the programme of the new movement was condensed into a few
fundamental postulates, twenty-five in all. They are meant first of all
to give the ordinary man a rough sketch of what the movement is aiming
at. They are, so to say, a profession of faith which on the one hand is
meant to win adherents to the movement and, on the other, they are meant
to unite such adherents together in a covenant to which all have
subscribed.

In these matters we must never lose sight of the following: What we call
the programme of the movement is absolutely right as far as its ultimate
aims are concerned, but as regards the manner in which that programme is
formulated, certain psychological considerations had to be taken
into account. Hence, in the course of time, the opinion may well arise
that certain principles should be expressed differently and might be
better formulated. But any attempt at a different formulation has a
fatal effect in most cases. For something that ought to be fixed and
unshakable thereby becomes the subject of discussion. As soon as one
point alone is removed from the sphere of dogmatic certainty, the
discussion will not simply result in a new and better formulation which
will have greater consistency but may easily lead to endless debates and
general confusion. In such cases the question must always be carefully
considered as to whether a new and more adequate formulation is to be
preferred, though it may cause a controversy within the movement, or
whether it may not be better to retain the old formula which, though
probably not the best, represents an organism enclosed in itself, solid
and internally homogeneous. All experience shows that the second of
these alternatives is preferable. For since in these changes one is
dealing only with external forms such corrections will always appear
desirable and possible. But in the last analysis the generality of
people think superficially and therefore the great danger is that in
what is merely an external formulation of the programme people will see
an essential aim of the movement. In that way the will and the combative
force at the service of the ideas are weakened and the energies that
ought to be directed towards the outer world are dissipated in
programmatic discussions within the ranks of the movement.

For a doctrine that is actually right in its main features it is less
dangerous to retain a formulation which may no longer be quite adequate
instead of trying to improve it and thereby allowing a fundamental
principle of the movement, which had hitherto been considered as solid
as granite, to become the subject of a general discussion which may have
unfortunate consequences. This is particularly to be avoided as long as
a movement is still fighting for victory. For would it be possible to
inspire people with blind faith in the truth of a doctrine if doubt and
uncertainty are encouraged by continual alterations in its external
formulation?

The essentials of a teaching must never be looked for in its external
formulas, but always in its inner meaning. And this meaning is
unchangeable. And in its interest one can only wish that a movement
should exclude everything that tends towards disintegration and
uncertainty in order to preserve the unified force that is necessary for
its triumph.

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« Reply #66 on: July 19, 2008, 01:35:51 am »

Here again the Catholic Church has a lesson to teach us. Though
sometimes, and often quite unnecessarily, its dogmatic system is in
conflict with the exact sciences and with scientific discoveries, it is
not disposed to sacrifice a syllable of its teachings. It has rightly
recognized that its powers of resistance would be weakened by
introducing greater or less doctrinal adaptations to meet the temporary
conclusions of science, which in reality are always vacillating. And
thus it holds fast to its fixed and established dogmas which alone can
give to the whole system the character of a faith. And that is the
reason why it stands firmer to-day than ever before. We may prophesy
that, as a fixed pole amid fleeting phenomena, it will continue to
attract increasing numbers of people who will be blindly attached to it
the more rapid the rhythm of changing phenomena around it.

Therefore whoever really and seriously desires that the idea of the
People's State should triumph must realize that this triumph can be
assured only through a militant movement and that this movement must
ground its strength only on the granite firmness of an impregnable and
firmly coherent programme. In regard to its formulas it must never make
concessions to the spirit of the time but must maintain the form that
has once and for all been decided upon as the right one; in any case
until victory has crowned its efforts. Before this goal has been reached
any attempt to open a discussion on the opportuneness of this or that
point in the programme might tend to disintegrate the solidity and
fighting strength of the movement, according to the measures in which
its followers might take part in such an internal dispute. Some
'improvements' introduced to-day might be subjected to a critical
examination to-morrow, in order to substitute it with something better
{258}the day after. Once the barrier has been taken down the road is
opened and we know only the beginning, but we do not know to what
shoreless sea it may lead.

This important principle had to be acknowledged in practice by the
members of the National Socialist Movement at its very beginning. In its
programme of twenty-five points the National Socialist German Labour
Party has been furnished with a basis that must remain unshakable. The
members of the movement, both present and future, must never feel
themselves called upon to undertake a critical revision of these leading
postulates, but rather feel themselves obliged to put them into practice
as they stand. Otherwise the next generation would, in its turn and with
equal right, expend its energy in such purely formal work within the
party, instead of winning new adherents to the movement and thus adding
to its power. For the majority of our followers the essence of the
movement will consist not so much in the letter of our theses but in the
meaning that we attribute to them.

The new movement owes its name to these considerations, and later on its
programme was drawn up in conformity with them. They are the basis of
our propaganda. In order to carry the idea of the People's State to
victory, a popular party had to be founded, a party that did not consist
of intellectual leaders only but also of manual labourers. Any attempt
to carry these theories into effect without the aid of a militant
organization would be doomed to failure to-day, as it has failed in the
past and must fail in the future. That is why the movement is not only
justified but it is also obliged to consider itself as the champion and
representative of these ideas. Just as the fundamental principles of the
National Socialist Movement are based on the folk idea, folk ideas are
National Socialist. If National Socialism would triumph it will have to
hold firm to this fact unreservedly, and here again it has not only the
right but also the duty to emphasize most rigidly that any attempt to
represent the folk idea outside of the National Socialist German Labour
Party is futile and in most cases fraudulent.

If the reproach should be launched against our movement that it has
'monopolized' the folk idea, there is only one answer to give.

Not only have we monopolized the folk idea but, to all practical intents
and purposes, we have created it.

For what hitherto existed under this name was not in the least capable
of influencing the destiny of our people, since all those ideas lacked a
political and coherent formulation. In most cases they are nothing but
isolated and incoherent notions which are more or less right. Quite
frequently these were in open contradiction to one another and in no
case was there any internal cohesion among them. And even if this
internal cohesion existed it would have been much too weak to form the
basis of any movement.

Only the National Socialist Movement proved capable of fulfilling this
task.

All kinds of associations and groups, big as well as little, now claim
the title VÖLKISCH. This is one result of the work which National
Socialism has done. Without this work, not one of all these parties
would have thought of adopting the word VÖLKISCH at all. That expression
would have meant nothing to them and especially their directors would
never have had anything to do with such an idea. Not until the work of
the German National Socialist Labour Party had given this idea a
pregnant meaning did it appear in the mouths of all kinds of people. Our
party above all, by the success of its propaganda, has shown the force
of the folk idea; so much so that the others, in an effort to gain
proselytes, find themselves forced to copy our example, at least in
words.

Just as heretofore they exploited everything to serve their petty
electoral purposes, to-day they use the word VÖLKISCH only as an
external and hollow-sounding phrase for the purpose of counteracting the
force of the impression which the National Socialist Party makes on the
members of those other parties. Only the desire to maintain their
existence and the fear that our movement may prevail, because it is
based on a WELTANSCHAUUNG that is of universal importance, and because
they feel that the exclusive character of our movement betokens danger
for them--only for these reasons do they use words which they
repudiated eight {259}years ago, derided seven years ago, branded as
stupid six years ago, combated five years ago, hated four years ago, and
finally, two years ago, annexed and incorporated them in their present
political vocabulary, employing them as war slogans in their struggle.

And so it is necessary even now not to cease calling attention to the
fact that not one of those parties has the slightest idea of what the
German nation needs. The most striking proof of this is represented by
the superficial way in which they use the word VÖLKISCH.

Not less dangerous are those who run about as semi-folkists formulating
fantastic schemes which are mostly based on nothing else than a fixed
idea which in itself might be right but which, because it is an isolated
notion, is of no use whatsoever for the formation of a great homogeneous
fighting association and could by no means serve as the basis of its
organization. Those people who concoct a programme which consists partly
of their own ideas and partly of ideas taken from others, about which
they have read somewhere, are often more dangerous than the outspoken
enemies of the VÖLKISCH idea. At best they are sterile theorists but
more frequently they are mischievous agitators of the public mind. They
believe that they can mask their intellectual vanity, the futility of
their efforts, and their lack of stability, by sporting flowing beards
and indulging in ancient German gestures.

In face of all those futile attempts, it is therefore worth while to
recall the time when the new National Socialist Movement began its
fight.




CHAPTER VI



THE FIRST PERIOD OF OUR STRUGGLE


The echoes of our first great meeting, in the banquet hall of the
Hofbräuhaus on February 24th, 1920, had not yet died away when we began
preparations for our next meeting. Up to that time we had to consider
carefully the venture of holding a small meeting every month or at most
every fortnight in a city like Munich; but now it was decided that we
should hold a mass meeting every week. I need not say that we anxiously
asked ourselves on each occasion again and again: Will the people come
and will they listen? Personally I was firmly convinced that if once
they came they would remain and listen.

During that period the hall of the Hofbrau Haus in Munich acquired for
us, National Socialists, a sort of mystic significance. Every week there
was a meeting, almost always in that hall, and each time the hall was
better filled than on the former occasion, and our public more
attentive.

Starting with the theme, 'Responsibility for the War,' which nobody at
that time cared about, and passing on to the discussion of the peace
treaties, we dealt with almost everything that served to stimulate the
minds of our audience and make them interested in our ideas. We drew
attention to the peace treaties. What the new movement prophesied again
and again before those great masses of people has been fulfilled almost
in every detail. To-day it is easy to talk and write about these things.
But in those days a public mass meeting which was attended not by the
small bourgeoisie but by proletarians who had been aroused by agitators,
to criticize the Peace Treaty of Versailles meant an attack on the
Republic and an evidence of reaction, if not of monarchist tendencies.
The moment one uttered the first criticism of the Versailles Treaty one
could expect an immediate reply, which became almost stereotyped: 'And
Brest-Litowsk?' 'Brest-Litowsk!' And then the crowd would murmur and the
murmur would gradually swell into a roar, until the speaker would have
to give up his attempt to persuade them. It would be like knocking one's
head against a wall, so desperate were these people. They would not
listen nor understand that Versailles was a scandal and a disgrace and
that the dictate signified an act of highway robbery against our people.
The disruptive work done by the Marxists and the poisonous propaganda of
the external enemy had robbed these people of their reason. And one had
no right to complain. For the guilt on this side was enormous. What had
the German bourgeoisie done to call a halt to this terrible campaign of
disintegration, to oppose it and open a way to a recognition of the
truth by giving a better and more thorough explanation of the situation
than that of the Marxists? Nothing, nothing. At that time I never saw
those who are now the great apostles of the people. Perhaps they spoke
to select groups, at tea parties of their own little coteries; but there
where they should have been, where the wolves were at work, they never
risked their appearance, unless it gave them the opportunity of yelling
in concert with the wolves.

As for myself, I then saw clearly that for the small group which first
composed our movement the question of war guilt had to be cleared up,
and cleared up in the light of historical truth. A preliminary condition
for the future success of our movement was that it should bring
knowledge of the meaning of the peace treaties to the minds of the
popular masses. In the opinion of the masses, the peace treaties then
signified a democratic success. Therefore, it was necessary to take the
opposite side and dig ourselves into the minds of the people as the
enemies of the peace treaties; so that later on, when the naked truth of
this despicable swindle would be disclosed in all its hideousness, the
people would recall the position which we then took and would give us
their confidence.

Already at that time I took up my stand on those important fundamental
questions where public opinion had gone wrong as a whole. I opposed
these wrong notions without regard either for popularity or for hatred,
and I was ready to face the fight. The National Socialist German Labour
Party ought not to be the beadle but rather the master of public
opinion. It must not serve the masses but rather dominate them.

In the case of every movement, especially during its struggling stages,
there is naturally a temptation to conform to the tactics of an opponent
and use the same battle-cries, when his tactics have succeeded in
leading the people to crazy conclusions or to adopt mistaken attitudes
towards the questions at issue. This temptation is particularly strong
when motives can be found, though they are entirely illusory, that seem
to point towards the same ends which the young movement is aiming at.
Human poltroonery will then all the more readily adopt those arguments
which give it a semblance of justification, 'from its own point of
view,' in participating in the criminal policy which the adversary is
following.

On several occasions I have experienced such cases, in which the
greatest energy had to be employed to prevent the ship of our movement
from being drawn into a general current which had been started
artificially, and indeed from sailing with it. The last occasion was
when our German Press, the Hecuba of the existence of the German nation,
succeeded in bringing the question of South Tyrol into a position of
importance which was seriously damaging to the interests of the German
people. Without considering what interests they were serving, several
so-called 'national' men, parties and leagues, joined in the general
cry, simply for fear of public opinion which had been excited by the
Jews, and foolishly contributed to help in the struggle against a system
which we Germans ought, particularly in those days, to consider as the
one ray of light in this distracted world. While the international
World-Jew is slowly but surely strangling us, our so-called patriots
vociferate against a man and his system which have had the courage to
liberate themselves from the shackles of Jewish Freemasonry at least in
one quarter of the globe and to set the forces of national resistance
against the international world-poison. But weak characters were tempted
to set their sails according to the direction of the wind and capitulate
before the shout of public opinion. For it was veritably a capitulation.
They are so much in the habit of lying and so morally base that men may
not admit this even to themselves, but the truth remains that only
cowardice and fear of the public feeling aroused by the Jews induced
certain people to join in the hue and cry. All the other reasons put
forward were only miserable excuses of paltry culprits who were
conscious of their own crime.

There it was necessary to grasp the rudder with an iron hand and turn
the movement about, so as to save it from a course that would have led
it on the rocks. Certainly to attempt such a change of course was not a
popular manoeuvre at that time, because all the leading forces of public
opinion had been active and a great flame of public feeling illuminated
only one direction. Such a decision almost always brings disfavour on
those who dare to take it. In the course of history not a few men have
been stoned for an act for which posterity has afterwards thanked them
on its knees.

But a movement must count on posterity and not on the plaudits of the
movement. It may well be that at such moments certain individuals have
to endure hours of anguish; but they should not forget that the moment
of liberation will come and that a movement which purposes to reshape
the world must serve the future and not the passing hour.

On this point it may be asserted that the greatest and most enduring
successes in history are mostly those which were least understood at the
beginning, because they were in strong contrast to public opinion and
the views and wishes of the time.

We had experience of this when we made our own first public appearance.
In all truth it can be said that we did not court public favour but made
an onslaught on the follies of our people. In those days the following
happened almost always: I presented myself before an assembly of men who
believed the opposite of what I wished to say and who wanted the
opposite of what I believed in. Then I had to spend a couple of hours in
persuading two or three thousand people to give up the opinions they had
first held, in destroying the foundations of their views with one blow
after another and finally in leading them over to take their stand on
the grounds of our own convictions and our WELTANSCHAUUNG.

I learned something that was important at that time, namely, to snatch
from the hands of the enemy the weapons which he was using in his reply.
I soon noticed that our adversaries, especially in the persons of those
who led the discussion against us, were furnished with a definite
repertoire of arguments out of which they took points against our claims
which were being constantly repeated. The uniform character of this mode
of procedure pointed to a systematic and unified training. And so we
were able to recognize the incredible way in which the enemy's
propagandists had been disciplined, and I am proud to-day that I
discovered a means not only of making this propaganda ineffective but of
beating the artificers of it at their own work. Two years later I was
master of that art.

In every speech which I made it was important to get a clear idea
beforehand of the probable form and matter of the counter-arguments we
had to expect in the discussion, so that in the course of my own speech
these could be dealt with and refuted. To this end it was necessary to
mention all the possible objections and show their inconsistency; it was
all the easier to win over an honest listener by expunging from his
memory the arguments which had been impressed upon it, so that we
anticipated our replies. What he had learned was refuted without having
been mentioned by him and that made him all the more attentive to what I
had to say.

That was the reason why, after my first lecture on the 'Peace Treaty of
Versailles,' which I delivered to the troops while I was still a
political instructor in my regiment, I made an alteration in the title
and subject and henceforth spoke on 'The Treaties of Brest-Litowsk and
Versailles.' For after the discussion which followed my first lecture I
quickly ascertained that in reality people knew nothing about the Treaty
of Brest-Litowsk and that able party propaganda had succeeded in
presenting that Treaty as one of the most scandalous acts of violence in
the history of the world.

As a result of the persistency with which this falsehood was repeated
again and again before the masses of the people, millions of Germans saw
in the Treaty of Versailles a just castigation for the crime we had
committed at Brest-Litowsk. Thus they considered all opposition to
Versailles as unjust and in many cases there was an honest moral dislike
to such a proceeding. And this was also the reason why the shameless and
monstrous word 'Reparations' came into common use in Germany. This
hypocritical falsehood appeared to millions of our exasperated fellow
countrymen as the fulfilment of a higher justice. It is a terrible
thought, but the fact was so. The best proof of this was the propaganda
which I initiated against Versailles by explaining the Treaty of
Brest-Litowsk. I compared the two treaties with one another, point by
point, and showed how in truth the one treaty was immensely humane, in
contradistinction to the inhuman barbarity of the other. The effect was
very striking. Then I spoke on this theme before an assembly of two
thousand persons, during which I often saw three thousand six hundred
hostile eyes fixed on me. And three hours later I had in front of me a
swaying mass of righteous indignation and fury. A great lie had been
uprooted from the hearts and brains of a crowd composed of thousands of
individuals and a truth had been implanted in its place.

The two lectures--that 'On the Causes of the World War' and 'On the
Peace Treaties of Brest-Litowsk and Versailles' respectively--I then
considered as the most important of all. Therefore I repeated them
dozens of times, always giving them a new intonation; until at least on
those points a definitely clear and unanimous opinion reigned among
those from whom our movement recruited its first members.

Furthermore, these gatherings brought me the advantage that I slowly
became a platform orator at mass meetings, and gave me practice in the
pathos and gesture required in large halls that held thousands of
people.
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« Reply #67 on: July 19, 2008, 01:36:28 am »

Outside of the small circles which I have mentioned, at that time I
found no party engaged in explaining things to the people in this way.
Not one of these parties was then active which talk to-day as if it was
they who had brought about the change in public opinion. If a political
leader, calling himself a nationalist, pronounced a discourse somewhere
or other on this theme it was only before circles which for the most
part were already of his own conviction and among whom the most that was
done was to confirm them in their opinions. But that was not what was
needed then. What was needed was to win over through propaganda and
explanation those whose opinions and mental attitudes held them bound to
the enemy's camp.

The one-page circular was also adopted by us to help in this propaganda.
While still a soldier I had written a circular in which I contrasted the
Treaty of Brest-Litowsk with that of Versailles. That circular was
printed and distributed in large numbers. Later on I used it for the
party, and also with good success. Our first meetings were distinguished
by the fact that there were tables covered with leaflets, papers, and
pamphlets of every kind. But we relied principally on the spoken word.
And, in fact, this is the only means capable of producing really great
revolutions, which can be explained on general psychological grounds.

In the first volume I have already stated that all the formidable events
which have changed the aspect of the world were carried through, not by
the written but by the spoken word. On that point there was a long
discussion in a certain section of the Press during the course of which
our shrewd bourgeois people strongly opposed my thesis. But the reason
for this attitude confounded the sceptics. The bourgeois intellectuals
protested against my attitude simply because they themselves did not
have the force or ability to influence the masses through the spoken
word; for they always relied exclusively on the help of writers and did
not enter the arena themselves as orators for the purpose of arousing
the people. The development of events necessarily led to that condition
of affairs which is characteristic of the bourgeoisie to-day, namely,
the loss of the psychological instinct to act upon and influence the
masses.

An orator receives continuous guidance from the people before whom he
speaks. This helps him to correct the direction of his speech; for he
can always gauge, by the faces of his hearers, how far they follow and
understand him, and whether his words are producing the desired effect.
But the writer does not know his reader at all. Therefore, from the
outset he does not address himself to a definite human group of persons
which he has before his eyes but must write in a general way. Hence, up
to a certain extent he must fail in psychological finesse and
flexibility. Therefore, in general it may be said that a brilliant
orator writes better than a brilliant writer can speak, unless the
latter has continual practice in public speaking. One must also remember
that of itself the multitude is mentally inert, that it remains attached
to its old habits and that it is not naturally prone to read something
which does not conform with its own pre-established beliefs when such
writing does not contain what the multitude hopes to find there.
Therefore, some piece of writing which has a particular tendency is for
the most part read only by those who are in sympathy with it. Only a
leaflet or a placard, on account of its brevity, can hope to arouse a
momentary interest in those whose opinions differ from it. The picture,
in all its forms, including the film, has better prospects. Here there
is less need of elaborating the appeal to the intelligence. It is
sufficient if one be careful to have quite short texts, because many
people are more ready to accept a pictorial presentation than to read a
long written description. In a much shorter time, at one stroke I might
say, people will understand a pictorial presentation of something which
it would take them a long and laborious effort of reading to understand.

The most important consideration, however, is that one never knows into
what hands a piece of written material comes and yet the form in which
its subject is presented must remain the same. In general the effect is
greater when the form of treatment corresponds to the mental level of
the reader and suits his nature. Therefore, a book which is meant for
the broad masses of the people must try from the very start to gain its
effects through a style and level of ideas which would be quite
different from a book intended to be read by the higher intellectual
classes.

Only through his capacity for adaptability does the force of the written
word approach that of oral speech. The orator may deal with the same
subject as a book deals with; but if he has the genius of a great and
popular orator he will scarcely ever repeat the same argument or the
same material in the same form on two consecutive occasions. He will
always follow the lead of the great mass in such a way that from the
living emotion of his hearers the apt word which he needs will be
suggested to him and in its turn this will go straight to the hearts of
his hearers. Should he make even a slight mistake he has the living
correction before him. As I have already said, he can read the play of
expression on the faces of his hearers, first to see if they understand
what he says, secondly to see if they take in the whole of his argument,
and, thirdly, in how far they are convinced of the justice of what has
been placed before them. Should he observe, first, that his hearers do
not understand him he will make his explanation so elementary and clear
that they will be able to grasp it, even to the last individual.
Secondly, if he feels that they are not capable of following him he will
make one idea follow another carefully and slowly until the most
slow-witted hearer no longer lags behind. Thirdly, as soon as he has the
feeling that they do not seem convinced that he is right in the way he
has put things to them he will repeat his argument over and over again,
always giving fresh illustrations, and he himself will state their
unspoken objection. He will repeat these objections, dissecting them and
refuting them, until the last group of the opposition show him by their
behaviour and play of expression that they have capitulated before his
exposition of the case.

Not infrequently it is a case of overcoming ingrained prejudices which
are mostly unconscious and are supported by sentiment rather than
reason. It is a thousand times more difficult to overcome this barrier
of instinctive aversion, emotional hatred and preventive dissent than to
correct opinions which are founded on defective or erroneous knowledge.
False ideas and ignorance may be set aside by means of instruction, but
emotional resistance never can. Nothing but an appeal to these hidden
forces will be effective here. And that appeal can be made by scarcely
any writer. Only the orator can hope to make it.

A very striking proof of this is found in the fact that, though we had a
bourgeois Press which in many cases was well written and produced and
had a circulation of millions among the people, it could not prevent the
broad masses from becoming the implacable enemies of the bourgeois
class. The deluge of papers and books published by the intellectual
circles year after year passed over the millions of the lower social
strata like water over glazed leather. This proves that one of two
things must be true: either that the matter offered in the bourgeois
Press was worthless or that it is impossible to reach the hearts of the
broad masses by means of the written word alone. Of course, the latter
would be specially true where the written material shows such little
psychological insight as has hitherto been the case.

It is useless to object here, as certain big Berlin papers of
German-National tendencies have attempted to do, that this statement is
refuted by the fact that the Marxists have exercised their greatest
influence through their writings, and especially through their principal
book, published by Karl Marx. Seldom has a more superficial argument
been based on a false assumption. What gave Marxism its amazing
influence over the broad masses was not that formal printed work which
sets forth the Jewish system of ideas, but the tremendous oral
propaganda carried on for years among the masses. Out of one hundred
thousand German workers scarcely one hundred know of Marx's book. It has
been studied much more in intellectual circles and especially by the
Jews than by the genuine followers of the movement who come from the
lower classes. That work was not written for the masses, but exclusively
for the intellectual leaders of the Jewish machine for conquering the
world. The engine was heated with quite different stuff: namely, the
journalistic Press. What differentiates the bourgeois Press from the
Marxist Press is that the latter is written by agitators, whereas the
bourgeois Press would like to carry on agitation by means of
professional writers. The Social-Democrat sub-editor, who almost always
came directly from the meeting to the editorial offices of his paper,
felt his job on his finger-tips. But the bourgeois writer who left his
desk to appear before the masses already felt ill when he smelled the
very odour of the crowd and found that what he had written was useless
to him.

What won over millions of workpeople to the Marxist cause was not the EX
CATHEDRA style of the Marxist writers but the formidable propagandist
work done by tens of thousands of indefatigable agitators, commencing
with the leading fiery agitator down to the smallest official in the
syndicate, the trusted delegate and the platform orator. Furthermore,
there were the hundreds of thousands of meetings where these orators,
standing on tables in smoky taverns, hammered their ideas into the heads
of the masses, thus acquiring an admirable psychological knowledge of
the human material they had to deal with. And in this way they were
enabled to select the best weapons for their assault on the citadel of
public opinion. In addition to all this there were the gigantic
mass-demonstrations with processions in which a hundred thousand men
took part. All this was calculated to impress on the petty-hearted
individual the proud conviction that, though a small worm, he was at the
same time a cell of the great dragon before whose devastating breath the
hated bourgeois world would one day be consumed in fire and flame, and
the dictatorship of the proletariat would celebrate its conclusive
victory.

This kind of propaganda influenced men in such a way as to give them a
taste for reading the Social Democratic Press and prepare their minds
for its teaching. That Press, in its turn, was a vehicle of the spoken
word rather than of the written word. Whereas in the bourgeois camp
professors and learned writers, theorists and authors of all kinds, made
attempts at talking, in the Marxist camp real speakers often made
attempts at writing. And it was precisely the Jew who was most prominent
here. In general and because of his shrewd dialectical skill and his
knack of twisting the truth to suit his own purposes, he was an
effective writer but in reality his MÉTIER was that of a revolutionary
orator rather than a writer.

For this reason the journalistic bourgeois world, setting aside the fact
that here also the Jew held the whip hand and that therefore this press
did not really interest itself in the instructtion of the broad masses,
was not able to exercise even the least influence over the opinions held
by the great masses of our people.

It is difficult to remove emotional prejudices, psychological bias,
feelings, etc., and to put others in their place. Success depends here
on imponderable conditions and influences. Only the orator who is gifted
with the most sensitive insight can estimate all this. Even the time of
day at which the speech is delivered has a decisive influence on its
results. The same speech, made by the same orator and on the same theme,
will have very different results according as it is delivered at ten
o'clock in the forenoon, at three in the afternoon, or in the evening.
When I first engaged in public speaking I arranged for meetings to take
place in the forenoon and I remember particularly a demonstration that
we held in the Munich Kindl Keller 'Against the Oppression of German
Districts.' That was the biggest hall then in Munich and the audacity of
our undertaking was great. In order to make the hour of the meeting
attractive for all the members of our movement and the other people who
might come, I fixed it for ten o'clock on a Sunday morning. The result
was depressing. But it was very instructive. The hall was filled. The
impression was profound, but the general feeling was cold as ice. Nobody
got warmed up, and I myself, as the speaker of the occasion, felt
profoundly unhappy at the thought that I could not establish the
slightest contact with my audience. I do not think I spoke worse than
before, but the effect seemed absolutely negative. I left the hall very
discontented, but also feeling that I had gained a new experience. Later
on I tried the same kind of experiment, but always with the same
results.

That was nothing to be wondered at. If one goes to a theatre to see a
matinée performance and then attends an evening performance of the same
play one is astounded at the difference in the impressions created. A
sensitive person recognizes for himself the fact that these two states
of mind caused by the matinee and the evening performance respectively
are quite different in themselves. The same is true of cinema
productions. This latter point is important; for one may say of the
theatre that perhaps in the afternoon the actor does not make the same
effort as in the evening. But surely it cannot be said that the cinema
is different in the afternoon from what it is at nine o'clock in the
evening. No, here the time exercises a distinct influence, just as a
room exercises a distinct influence on a person. There are rooms which
leave one cold, for reasons which are difficult to explain. There are
rooms which refuse steadfastly to allow any favourable atmosphere to be
created in them. Moreover, certain memories and traditions which are
present as pictures in the human mind may have a determining influence
on the impression produced. Thus, a representation of Parsifal at
Bayreuth will have an effect quite different from that which the same
opera produces in any other part of the world. The mysterious charm of
the House on the 'Festival Heights' in the old city of The Margrave
cannot be equalled or substituted anywhere else.

In all these cases one deals with the problem of influencing the freedom
of the human will. And that is true especially of meetings where there
are men whose wills are opposed to the speaker and who must be brought
around to a new way of thinking. In the morning and during the day it
seems that the power of the human will rebels with its strongest energy
against any attempt to impose upon it the will or opinion of another. On
the other hand, in the evening it easily succumbs to the domination of a
stronger will. Because really in such assemblies there is a contest
between two opposite forces. The superior oratorical art of a man who
has the compelling character of an apostle will succeed better in
bringing around to a new way of thinking those who have naturally been
subjected to a weakening of their forces of resistance rather than in
converting those who are in full possession of their volitional and
intellectual energies.

The mysterious artificial dimness of the Catholic churches also serves
this purpose, the burning candles, the incense, the thurible, etc.

In this struggle between the orator and the opponent whom he must
convert to his cause this marvellous sensibility towards the
psychological influences of propaganda can hardly ever be availed of by
an author. Generally speaking, the effect of the writer's work helps
rather to conserve, reinforce and deepen the foundations of a mentality
already existing. All really great historical revolutions were not
produced by the written word. At most, they were accompanied by it.

It is out of the question to think that the French Revolution could have
been carried into effect by philosophizing theories if they had not
found an army of agitators led by demagogues of the grand style. These
demagogues inflamed popular passion that had been already aroused, until
that volcanic eruption finally broke out and convulsed the whole of
Europe. And the same happened in the case of the gigantic Bolshevik
revolution which recently took place in Russia. It was not due to the
writers on Lenin's side but to the oratorical activities of those who
preached the doctrine of hatred and that of the innumerable small and
great orators who took part in the agitation.

The masses of illiterate Russians were not fired to Communist
revolutionary enthusiasm by reading the theories of Karl Marx but by the
promises of paradise made to the people by thousands of agitators in the
service of an idea.

It was always so, and it will always be so.

It is just typical of our pig-headed intellectuals, who live apart from
the practical world, to think that a writer must of necessity be
superior to an orator in intelligence. This point of view was once
exquisitely illustrated by a critique, published in a certain National
paper which I have already mentioned, where it was stated that one is
often disillusioned by reading the speech of an acknowledged great
orator in print. That reminded me of another article which came into my
hands during the War. It dealt with the speeches of Lloyd George, who
was then Minister of Munitions, and examined them in a painstaking way
under the microscope of criticism. The writer made the brilliant
statement that these speeches showed inferior intelligence and learning
and that, moreover, they were banal and commonplace productions. I
myself procured some of these speeches, published in pamphlet form, and
had to laugh at the fact that a normal German quill-driver did not in
the least understand these psychological masterpieces in the art of
influencing the masses. This man criticized these speeches exclusively
according to the impression they made on his own blasé mind, whereas the
great British Demagogue had produced an immense effect on his audience
through them, and in the widest sense on the whole of the British
populace. Looked at from this point of view, that Englishman's speeches
were most wonderful achievements, precisely because they showed an
astounding knowledge of the soul of the broad masses of the people. For
that reason their effect was really penetrating. Compare with them the
futile stammerings of a Bethmann-Hollweg. On the surface his speeches
were undoubtedly more intellectual, but they just proved this man's
inability to speak to the people, which he really could not do.
Nevertheless, to the average stupid brain of the German writer, who is,
of course, endowed with a lot of scientific learning, it came quite
natural to judge the speeches of the English Minister--which were made
for the purpose of influencing the masses--by the impression which they
made on his own mind, fossilized in its abstract learning. And it was
more natural for him to compare them in the light of that impression
with the brilliant but futile talk of the German statesman, which of
course appealed to the writer's mind much more favourably. That the
genius of Lloyd George was not only equal but a thousandfold superior to
that of a Bethmann-Hollweg is proved by the fact that he found for his
speeches that form and expression which opened the hearts of his people
to him and made these people carry out his will absolutely. The
primitive quality itself of those speeches, the originality of his
expressions, his choice of clear and simple illustration, are examples
which prove the superior political capacity of this Englishman. For one
must never judge the speech of a statesman to his people by the
impression which it leaves on the mind of a university professor but by
the effect it produces on the people. And this is the sole criterion of
the orator's genius.

The astonishing development of our movement, which was created from
nothing a few years ago and is to-day singled out for persecution by all
the internal and external enemies of our nation, must be attributed to
the constant recognition and practical application of those principles.

Written matter also played an important part in our movement; but at the
stage of which I am writing it served to give an equal and uniform
education to the directors of the movement, in the upper as well as in
the lower grades, rather than to convert the masses of our adversaries.
It was only in very rare cases that a convinced and devoted Social
Democrat or Communist was induced to acquire an understanding of our
WELTANSCHAUUNG or to study a criticism of his own by procuring and
reading one of our pamphlets or even one of our books. Even a newspaper
is rarely read if it does not bear the stamp of a party affiliation.
Moreover, the reading of newspapers helps little; because the general
picture given by a single number of a newspaper is so confused and
produces such a fragmentary impression that it really does not influence
the occasional reader. And where a man has to count his pennies it
cannot be assumed that, exclusively for the purpose of being objectively
informed, he will become a regular reader or subscriber to a paper which
opposes his views. Only one who has already joined a movement will
regularly read the party organ of that movement, and especially for the
purpose of keeping himself informed of what is happening in the
movement.
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« Reply #68 on: July 19, 2008, 01:36:55 am »

It is quite different with the 'spoken' leaflet. Especially if it be
distributed gratis it will be taken up by one person or another, all the
more willingly if its display title refers to a question about which
everybody is talking at the moment. Perhaps the reader, after having
read through such a leaflet more or less thoughtfully, will have new
viewpoints and mental attitudes and may give his attention to a new
movement. But with these, even in the best of cases, only a small
impulse will be given, but no definite conviction will be created;
because the leaflet can do nothing more than draw attention to something
and can become effective only by bringing the reader subsequently into a
situation where he is more fundamentally informed and instructed. Such
instruction must always be given at the mass assembly.

Mass assemblies are also necessary for the reason that, in attending
them, the individual who felt himself formerly only on the point of
joining the new movement, now begins to feel isolated and in fear of
being left alone as he acquires for the first time the picture of a
great community which has a strengthening and encouraging effect on most
people. Brigaded in a company or battalion, surrounded by his
companions, he will march with a lighter heart to the attack than if he
had to march alone. In the crowd he feels himself in some way thus
sheltered, though in reality there are a thousand arguments against such
a feeling.

Mass demonstrations on the grand scale not only reinforce the will of
the individual but they draw him still closer to the movement and help
to create an ESPRIT DE CORPS. The man who appears first as the
representative of a new doctrine in his place of business or in his
factory is bound to feel himself embarrassed and has need of that
reinforcement which comes from the consciousness that he is a member of
a great community. And only a mass demonstration can impress upon him
the greatness of this community. If, on leaving the shop or mammoth
factory, in which he feels very small indeed, he should enter a vast
assembly for the first time and see around him thousands and thousands
of men who hold the same opinions; if, while still seeking his way, he
is gripped by the force of mass-suggestion which comes from the
excitement and enthusiasm of three or four thousand other men in whose
midst he finds himself; if the manifest success and the concensus of
thousands confirm the truth and justice of the new teaching and for the
first time raise doubt in his mind as to the truth of the opinions held
by himself up to now--then he submits himself to the fascination of
what we call mass-suggestion. The will, the yearning and indeed the
strength of thousands of people are in each individual. A man who enters
such a meeting in doubt and hesitation leaves it inwardly fortified; he
has become a member of a community.

The National Socialist Movement should never forget this, and it should
never allow itself to be influenced by these bourgeois duffers who think
they know everything but who have foolishly gambled away a great State,
together with their own existence and the supremacy of their own class.
They are overflowing with ability; they can do everything, and they know
everything. But there is one thing they have not known how to do, and
that is how to save the German people from falling into the arms of
Marxism. In that they have shown themselves most pitiably and miserably
impotent. So that the present opinion they have of themselves is only
equal to their conceit. Their pride and stupidity are fruits of the same
tree.

If these people try to disparage the importance of the spoken word
to-day, they do it only because they realize--God be praised and
thanked--how futile all their own speechifying has been.




CHAPTER VII



THE CONFLICT WITH THE RED FORCES


In 1919-20 and also in 1921 I attended some of the bourgeois meetings.
Invariably I had the same feeling towards these as towards the
compulsory dose of castor oil in my boyhood days. It just had to be
taken because it was good for one: but it certainly tasted unpleasant.
If it were possible to tie ropes round the German people and forcibly
drag them to these bourgeois meetings, keeping them there behind barred
doors and allowing nobody to escape until the meeting closed, then this
procedure might prove successful in the course of a few hundred years.
For my own part, I must frankly admit that, under such circumstances, I
could not find life worth living; and indeed I should no longer wish to
be a German. But, thank God, all this is impossible. And so it is not
surprising that the sane and unspoilt masses shun these 'bourgeois mass
meetings' as the devil shuns holy water.

I came to know the prophets of the bourgeois WELTANSCHAUUNG, and I was
not surprised at what I learned, as I knew that they attached little
importance to the spoken word. At that time I attended meetings of the
Democrats, the German Nationalists, the German People's Party and the
Bavarian People's Party (the Centre Party of Bavaria). What struck me at
once was the homogeneous uniformity of the audiences. Nearly always they
were made up exclusively of party members. The whole affair was more
like a yawning card party than an assembly of people who had just passed
through a great revolution. The speakers did all they could to maintain
this tranquil atmosphere. They declaimed, or rather read out, their
speeches in the style of an intellectual newspaper article or a learned
treatise, avoiding all striking expressions. Here and there a feeble
professorial joke would be introduced, whereupon the people sitting at
the speaker's table felt themselves obliged to laugh--not loudly but
encouragingly and with well-bred reserve.

And there were always those people at the speaker's table. I once
attended a meeting in the Wagner Hall in Munich. It was a demonstration
to celebrate the anniversary of the Battle of Leipzig. (Note 17) The
speech was delivered or rather read out by a venerable old professor from
one or other of the universities. The committee sat on the platform: one
monocle on the right, another monocle on the left, and in the centre a
gentleman with no monocle. All three of them were punctiliously attired
in morning coats, and I had the impression of being present before a
judge's bench just as the death sentence was about to be pronounced or
at a christening or some more solemn religious ceremony. The so-called
speech, which in printed form may have read quite well, had a disastrous
effect. After three quarters of an hour the audience fell into a sort of
hypnotic trance, which was interrupted only when some man or woman left
the hall, or by the clatter which the waitresses made, or by the
increasing yawns of slumbering individuals. I had posted myself behind
three workmen who were present either out of curiosity or because they
were sent there by their parties. From time to time they glanced at one
another with an ill-concealed grin, nudged one another with the elbow,
and then silently left the hall. One could see that they had no
intention whatsoever of interrupting the proceedings, nor indeed was it
necessary to interrupt them. At long last the celebration showed signs
of drawing to a close. After the professor, whose voice had meanwhile
become more and more inaudible, finally ended his speech, the gentleman
without the monocle delivered a rousing peroration to the assembled
'German sisters and brothers.' On behalf of the audience and himself he
expressed gratitude for the magnificent lecture which they had just
heard from Professor X and emphasized how deeply the Professor's words
had moved them all. If a general discussion on the lecture were to take
place it would be tantamount to profanity, and he thought he was voicing
the opinion of all present in suggesting that such a discussion should
not be held. Therefore, he would ask the assembly to rise from their
seats and join in singing the patriotic song, WIR SIND EIN EINIG VOLK
VON BRÜDERN. The proceedings finally closed with the anthem, DEUTSCHLAND
ÜBER ALLES.

[Note 17. The Battle of Leipzig (1813), where the Germans inflicted an
overwhelming defeat on Napoleon, was the decisive event which put an end
to the French occupation of Germany.

The occupation had lasted about twenty years. After the Great War, and
the partial occupation of Germany once again by French forces, the
Germans used to celebrate the anniversary of the Battle of Leipzig as a
symbol of their yearning.]

And then they all sang. It appeared to me that when the second verse was
reached the voices were fewer and that only when the refrain came on
they swelled loudly. When we reached the third verse my belief was
confirmed that a good many of those present were not very familiar with
the text.

But what has all this to do with the matter when such a song is sung
wholeheartedly and fervidly by an assembly of German nationals?

After this the meeting broke up and everyone hurried to get outside, one
to his glass of beer, one to a cafe, and others simply into the fresh
air.

Out into the fresh air! That was also my feeling. And was this the way
to honour an heroic struggle in which hundreds of thousands of Prussians
and Germans had fought? To the devil with it all!

That sort of thing might find favour with the Government, it being
merely a 'peaceful' meeting. The Minister responsible for law and order
need not fear that enthusiasm might suddenly get the better of public
decorum and induce these people to pour out of the room and, instead of
dispersing to beer halls and cafes, march in rows of four through the
town singing DEUTSCHLAND hoch in Ehren and causing some unpleasantness
to a police force in need of rest.

No. That type of citizen is of no use to anyone.

On the other hand the National Socialist meetings were by no means
'peaceable' affairs. Two distinct WELTANSCHHAUUNGen raged in bitter
opposition to one another, and these meetings did not close with the
mechanical rendering of a dull patriotic song but rather with a
passionate outbreak of popular national feeling.

It was imperative from the start to introduce rigid discipline into our
meetings and establish the authority of the chairman absolutely. Our
purpose was not to pour out a mixture of soft-soap bourgeois talk; what
we had to say was meant to arouse the opponents at our meetings! How
often did they not turn up in masses with a few individual agitators
among them and, judging by the expression on all their faces, ready to
finish us off there and then.

Yes, how often did they not turn up in huge numbers, those supporters of
the Red Flag, all previously instructed to smash up everything once and
for all and put an end to these meetings. More often than not everything
hung on a mere thread, and only the chairman's ruthless determination
and the rough handling by our ushers baffled our adversaries'
intentions. And indeed they had every reason for being irritated.

The fact that we had chosen red as the colour for our posters sufficed
to attract them to our meetings. The ordinary bourgeoisie were very
shocked to see that, we had also chosen the symbolic red of Bolshevism
and they regarded this as something ambiguously significant. The
suspicion was whispered in German Nationalist circles that we also were
merely another variety of Marxism, perhaps even Marxists suitably
disguised, or better still, Socialists. The actual difference between
Socialism and Marxism still remains a mystery to these people up to this
day. The charge of Marxism was conclusively proved when it was
discovered that at our meetings we deliberately substituted the words
'Fellow-countrymen and Women' for 'Ladies and Gentlemen' and addressed
each other as 'Party Comrade'. We used to roar with laughter at these
silly faint-hearted bourgeoisie and their efforts to puzzle out our
origin, our intentions and our aims.

We chose red for our posters after particular and careful deliberation,
our intention being to irritate the Left, so as to arouse their
attention and tempt them to come to our meetings--if only in order to
break them up--so that in this way we got a chance of talking to the
people.

In those years' it was indeed a delightful experience to follow the
constantly changing tactics of our perplexed and helpless adversaries.
First of all they appealed to their followers to ignore us and keep away
from our meetings. Generally speaking this appeal was heeded. But, as
time went on, more and more of their followers gradually found their way
to us and accepted our teaching. Then the leaders became nervous and
uneasy. They clung to their belief that such a development should not be
ignored for ever, and that terror must be applied in order to put an end
to it.

Appeals were then made to the 'class-conscious proletariat' to attend
our meetings in masses and strike with the clenched hand of the
proletarian at the representatives of a 'monarchist and reactionary
agitation'.

Our meetings suddenly became packed with work-people fully
three-quarters of an hour before the proceedings were scheduled to
begin. These gatherings resembled a powder cask ready to explode at any
moment; and the fuse was conveniently at hand. But matters always turned
out differently. People came as enemies and left, not perhaps prepared
to join us, yet in a reflective mood and disposed critically to examine
the correctness of their own doctrine. Gradually as time went on my
three-hour lectures resulted in supporters and opponents becoming united
in one single enthusiastic group of people. Every signal for the
breaking-up of the meeting failed. The result was that the opposition
leaders became frightened and once again looked for help to those
quarters that had formerly discountenanced these tactics and, with some
show of right, had been of the opinion that on principle the workers
should be forbidden to attend our meetings.

Then they did not come any more, or only in small numbers. But after a
short time the whole game started all over again. The instructions to
keep away from us were ignored; the comrades came in steadily increasing
numbers, until finally the advocates of the radical tactics won the day.
We were to be broken up.

Yet when, after two, three and even eight meetings, it was realized that
to break up these gatherings was easier said than done and that every
meeting resulted in a decisive weakening of the red fighting forces,
then suddenly the other password was introduced: 'Proletarians, comrades
and comradesses, avoid meetings of the National Socialist agitators'.

The same eternally alternating tactics were also to be observed in the
Red Press. Soon they tried to silence us but discovered the uselessness
of such an attempt. After that they swung round to the opposite tactics.
Daily 'reference' was made to us solely for the purpose of absolutely
ridiculing us in the eyes of the working-classes. After a time these
gentlemen must have felt that no harm was being done to us, but that, on
the contrary, we were reaping an advantage in that people were asking
themselves why so much space was being devoted to a subject which was
supposed to be so ludicrous. People became curious. Suddenly there was a
change of tactics and for a time we were treated as veritable criminals
against mankind. One article followed the other, in which our criminal
intentions were explained and new proofs brought forward to support what
was said. Scandalous tales, all of them fabricated from start to finish,
were published in order to help to poison the public mind. But in a
short time even these attacks also proved futile; and in fact they
assisted materially because they attracted public attention to us.

In those days I took up the standpoint that it was immaterial whether
they laughed at us or reviled us, whether they depicted us as fools or
criminals; the important point was that they took notice of us and that
in the eyes of the working-classes we came to be regarded as the only
force capable of putting up a fight. I said to myself that the followers
of the Jewish Press would come to know all about us and our real aims.

One reason why they never got so far as breaking up our meetings was
undoubtedly the incredible cowardice displayed by the leaders of the
opposition. On every critical occasion they left the dirty work to the
smaller fry whilst they waited outside the halls for the results of the
break up.

We were exceptionally well informed in regard to our opponents'
intentions, not only because we allowed several of our party colleagues
to remain members of the Red organizations for reasons of expediency,
but also because the Red wire-pullers, fortunately for us, were
afflicted with a degree of talkativeness that is still unfortunately
very prevalent among Germans. They could not keep their own counsel, and
more often than not they started cackling before the proverbial egg was
laid. Hence, time and again our precautions were such that Red agitators
had no inkling of how near they were to being thrown out of the
meetings.

This state of affairs compelled us to take the work of safeguarding our
meetings into our own hands. No reliance could be placed on official
protection. On the contrary; experience showed that such protection
always favoured only the disturbers. The only real outcome of police
intervention would be that the meeting would be dissolved, that is to
say, closed. And that is precisely what our opponents granted.

Generally speaking, this led the police to adopt a procedure which, to
say the least, was a most infamous sample of official malpractice. The
moment they received information of a threat that the one or other
meeting was to be broken up, instead of arresting the would-be
disturbers, they promptly advised the innocent parties that the meeting
was forbidden. This step the police proclaimed as a 'precautionary
measure in the interests of law and order'.

The political work and activities of decent people could therefore
always be hindered by desperate ruffians who had the means at their
disposal. In the name of peace and order State authority bowed down to
these ruffians and demanded that others should not provoke them. When
National Socialism desired to hold meetings in certain parts and the
labour unions declared that their members would resist, then it was not
these blackmailers that were arrested and gaoled. No. Our meetings were
forbidden by the police. Yes, this organ of the law had the unspeakable
impudence to advise us in writing to this effect in innumerable
instances. To avoid such eventualities, it was necessary to see to it
that every attempt to disturb a meeting was nipped in the bud. Another
feature to be taken into account in this respect is that all meetings
which rely on police protection must necessarily bring discredit to
their promoters in the eyes of the general public. Meetings that are
only possible with the protective assistance of a strong force of police
convert nobody; because in order to win over the lower strata of the
people there must be a visible show of strength on one's own side. In
the same way that a man of courage will win a woman's affection more
easily than a coward, so a heroic movement will be more successful in
winning over the hearts of a people than a weak movement which relies on
police support for its very existence.

It is for this latter reason in particular that our young movement was
to be charged with the responsibility of assuring its own existence,
defending itself; and conducting its own work of smashing the Red
opposition.
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« Reply #69 on: July 19, 2008, 01:37:15 am »

The work of organizing the protective measures for our meetings was
based on the following:

(1) An energetic and psychologically judicious way of conducting the
meeting.

(2) An organized squad of troops to maintain order.

In those days we and no one else were masters of the situation at our
meetings and on no occasion did we fail to emphasize this. Our opponents
fully realized that any provocation would be the occasion of throwing
them out of the hall at once, whatever the odds against us. At meetings,
particularly outside Munich, we had in those days from five to eight
hundred opponents against fifteen to sixteen National Socialists; yet we
brooked no interference, for we were ready to be killed rather than
capitulate. More than once a handful of party colleagues offered a
heroic resistance to a raging and violent mob of Reds. Those fifteen or
twenty men would certainly have been overwhelmed in the end had not the
opponents known that three or four times as many of themselves would
first get their skulls cracked. Arid that risk they were not willing to
run. We had done our best to study Marxist and bourgeois methods of
conducting meetings, and we had certainly learnt something.

The Marxists had always exercised a most rigid discipline so that the
question of breaking up their meetings could never have originated in
bourgeois quarters. This gave the Reds all the more reason for acting on
this plan. In time they not only became past-masters in this art but in
certain large districts of the REICH they went so far as to declare that
non-Marxist meetings were nothing less than a cause of' provocation
against the proletariat. This was particularly the case when the
wire-pullers suspected that a meeting might call attention to their own
transgressions and thus expose their own treachery and chicanery.
Therefore the moment such a meeting was announced to be held a howl of
rage went up from the Red Press. These detractors of the law nearly
always turned first to the authorities and requested in imperative and
threatening language that this 'provocation of the proletariat' be
stopped forthwith in the 'interests of law and order'. Their language
was chosen according to the importance of the official blockhead they
were dealing with and thus success was assured. If by chance the
official happened to be a true German--and not a mere figurehead--and he
declined the impudent request, then the time-honoured appeal to stop
'provocation of the proletariat' was issued together with instructions
to attend such and such a meeting on a certain date in full strength for
the purpose of 'putting a stop to the disgraceful machinations of the
bourgeoisie by means of the proletarian fist'.

The pitiful and frightened manner in which these bourgeois meetings are
conducted must be seen in order to be believed. Very frequently these
threats were sufficient to call off such a meeting at once. The feeling
of fear was so marked that the meeting, instead of commencing at eight
o'clock, very seldom was opened before a quarter to nine or nine
o'clock. The Chairman thereupon did his best, by showering compliments
on the 'gentleman of the opposition' to prove how he and all others
present were pleased (a palpable lie) to welcome a visit from men who as
yet were not in sympathy with them for the reason that only by mutual
discussion (immediately agreed to) could they be brought closer together
in mutual understanding. Apart from this the Chairman also assured them
that the meeting had no intention whatsoever of interfering with the
professed convictions of anybody. Indeed no. Everyone had the right to
form and hold his own political views, but others should be allowed to
do likewise. He therefore requested that the speaker be allowed to
deliver his speech without interruption--the speech in any case not
being a long affair. People abroad, he continued, would thus not come to
regard this meeting as another shameful example of the bitter fraternal
strife that is raging in Germany. And so on and so forth

The brothers of the Left had little if any appreciation for that sort of
talk; the speaker had hardly commenced when he was shouted down. One
gathered the impression at times that these speakers were graceful for
being peremptorily cut short in their martyr-like discourse. These
bourgeois toreadors left the arena in the midst of a vast uproar, that
is to say, provided that they were not thrown down the stairs with
cracked skulls, which was very often the case.

Therefore, our methods of organization at National Socialist meetings
were something quite strange to the Marxists. They came to our meetings
in the belief that the little game which they had so often played could
as a matter of course be also repeated on us. "To-day we shall finish
them off." How often did they bawl this out to each other on entering
the meeting hall, only to be thrown out with lightning speed before they
had time to repeat it.

In the first place our method of conducting a meeting was entirely
different. We did not beg and pray to be allowed to speak, and we did
not straightway give everybody the right to hold endless discussions. We
curtly gave everyone to understand that we were masters of the meeting
and that we would do as it pleased us and that everyone who dared to
interrupt would be unceremoniously thrown out. We stated clearly our
refusal to accept responsibility for anyone treated in this manner. If
time permitted and if it suited us, a discussion would be allowed to
take place. Our party colleague would now make his speech.... That kind
of talk was sufficient in itself to astonish the Marxists.

Secondly, we had at our disposal a well-trained and organized body of
men for maintaining order at our meetings. On the other hand the
bourgeois parties protected their meetings with a body of men better
classified as ushers who by virtue of their age thought they were
entitled to-authority and respect. But as Marxism has little or no
respect for these things, the question of suitable self-protection at
these bourgeois meetings was, so to speak, in practice non-existent.

When our political meetings first started I made it a special point to
organize a suitable defensive squad--a squad composed chiefly of young
men. Some of them were comrades who had seen active service with me;
others were young party members who, right from the start, had been
trained and brought up to realize that only terror is capable of
smashing terror--that only courageous and determined people had made a
success of things in this world and that, finally, we were fighting for
an idea so lofty that it was worth the last drop of our blood. These
young men had been brought up to realize that where force replaced
common sense in the solution of a problem, the best means of defence was
attack and that the reputation of our hall-guard squads should stamp us
as a political fighting force and not as a debating society.

And it was extraordinary how eagerly these boys of the War generation
responded to this order. They had indeed good reason for being bitterly
disappointed and indignant at the miserable milksop methods employed by
the bourgeoise.

Thus it became clear to everyone that the Revolution had only been
possible thanks to the dastardly methods of a bourgeois government. At
that time there was certainly no lack of man-power to suppress the
revolution, but unfortunately there was an entire lack of directive
brain power. How often did the eyes of my young men light up with
enthusiasm when I explained to them the vital functions connected with
their task and assured them time and again that all earthly wisdom is
useless unless it be supported by a measure of strength, that the gentle
goddess of Peace can only walk in company with the god of War, and that
every great act of peace must be protected and assisted by force. In
this way the idea of military service came to them in a far more
realistic form--not in the fossilized sense of the souls of decrepit
officials serving the dead authority of a dead State, but in the living
realization of the duty of each man to sacrifice his life at all times
so that his country might live.

How those young men did their job!

Like a swarm of hornets they tackled disturbers at our meetings,
regardless of superiority of numbers, however great, indifferent to
wounds and bloodshed, inspired with the great idea of blazing a trail
for the sacred mission of our movement.

As early as the summer of 1920 the organization of squads of men as hall
guards for maintaining order at our meetings was gradually assuming
definite shape. By the spring of 1921 this body of men were sectioned
off into squads of one hundred, which in turn were sub-divided into
smaller groups.

The urgency for this was apparent, as meanwhile the number of our
meetings had steadily increased. We still frequently met in the Munich
Hofbräuhaus but more frequently in the large meeting halls throughout
the city itself. In the autumn and winter of 1920-1921 our meetings in
the Bürgerbräu and Munich Kindlbräu had assumed vast proportions and it
was always the same picture that presented itself; namely, meetings of
the NSDAP (The German National Socialist Labour Party) were always
crowded out so that the police were compelled to close and bar the doors
long before proceedings commenced.

The organization of defence guards for keeping order at our meetings
cleared up a very difficult question. Up till then the movement had
possessed no party badge and no party flag. The lack of these tokens was
not only a disadvantage at that time but would prove intolerable in the
future. The disadvantages were chiefly that members of the party
possessed no outward broken of membership which linked them together,
and it was absolutely unthinkable that for the future they should remain
without some token which would be a symbol of the movement and could be
set against that of the International.

More than once in my youth the psychological importance of such a symbol
had become clearly evident to me and from a sentimental point of view
also it was advisable. In Berlin, after the War, I was present at a
mass-demonstration of Marxists in front of the Royal Palace and in the
Lustgarten. A sea of red flags, red armlets and red flowers was in
itself sufficient to give that huge assembly of about 120,000 persons an
outward appearance of strength. I was now able to feel and understand
how easily the man in the street succumbs to the hypnotic magic of such
a grandiose piece of theatrical presentation.

The bourgeoisie, which as a party neither possesses or stands for any
WELTANSCHAUUNG, had therefore not a single banner. Their party was
composed of 'patriots' who went about in the colours of the REICH. If
these colours were the symbol of a definite WELTANSCHAUUNG then one
could understand the rulers of the State regarding this flag as
expressive of their own WELTANSCHAUUNG, seeing that through their
efforts the official REICH flag was expressive of their own
WELTANSCHAUUNG.

But in reality the position was otherwise.

The REICH was morticed together without the aid of the German
bourgeoisie and the flag itself was born of the War and therefore merely
a State flag possessing no importance in the sense of any particular
ideological mission.

Only in one part of the German-speaking territory--in
German-Austria--was there anything like a bourgeois party flag in
evidence. Here a section of the national bourgeoisie selected the 1848
colours (black, red and gold) as their party flag and therewith created
a symbol which, though of no importance from a weltanschauliche
viewpoint, had, nevertheless, a revolutionary character from a national
point of view. The most bitter opponents of this flag at that time, and
this should not be forgotten to-day, were the Social Democrats and the
Christian Socialists or clericals. They, in particular, were the ones
who degraded and besmirched these colours in the same way as in 1918
they dragged black, white and red into the gutter. Of course, the black,
red and gold of the German parties in the old Austria were the colours
of the year 1848: that is to say, of a period likely to be regarded as
somewhat visionary, but it was a period that had honest German souls as
its representatives, although the Jews were lurking unseen as
wire-pullers in the background. It was high treason and the shameful
enslavement of the German territory that first of all made these colours
so attractive to the Marxists of the Centre Party; so much so that
to-day they revere them as their most cherished possession and use them
as their own banners for the protection of the flag they once foully
besmirched.
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« Reply #70 on: July 19, 2008, 01:37:53 am »

It is a fact, therefore, that, up till 1920, in opposition to the
Marxists there was no flag that would have stood for a consolidated
resistance to them. For even if the better political elements of the
German bourgeoisie were loath to accept the suddenly discovered black,
red and gold colours as their symbol after the year 1918, they
nevertheless were incapable of counteracting this with a future
programme of their own that would correspond to the new trend of
affairs. At the most, they had a reconstruction of the old REICH in
mind.

And it is to this way of thinking that the black, white and red colours
of the old REICH are indebted for their resurrection as the flag of our
so-called national bourgeois parties.

It was obvious that the symbol of a régime which had been overthrown by
the Marxists under inglorious circumstances was not now worthy to serve
as a banner under which the same Marxism was to be crushed in its turn.
However much any decent German may love and revere those old colours,
glorious when placed side by side in their youthful freshness, when he
had fought under them and seen the sacrifice of so many lives, that flag
had little value for the struggle of the future.

In our Movement I have always adopted the standpoint that it was a
really lucky thing for the German nation that it had lost its old flag
(Note 18). This standpoint of mine was in strong contrast to that of the
bourgeois politicians. It may be immaterial to us what the Republic does
under its flag. But let us be deeply grateful to fate for having so
graciously spared the most glorious war flag for all time from becoming
an ignominious rag. The REICH of to-day, which sells itself and its
people, must never be allowed to adopt the honourable and heroic black,
white and red colours.

[Note 18. The flag of the German Empire, founded in 1871, was
Black-White-Red. This was discarded in 1918 and Black-Red-Gold was chosen
as the flag of the German Republic founded at Weimar in 1919. The flag
designed by Hitler--red with a white disc in the centre, bearing the
black swastika--is now the national flag.]

As long as the November outrage endures, that outrage may continue to
bear its own external sign and not steal that of an honourable past. Our
bourgeois politicians should awaken their consciences to the fact that
whoever desires this State to have the black, white and red colours is
pilfering from the past. The old flag was suitable only for the old
REICH and, thank Heaven, the Republic chose the colours best suited to
itself.

This was also the reason why we National Socialists recognized that
hoisting the old colours would be no symbol of our special aims; for we
had no wish to resurrect from the dead the old REICH which had been
ruined through its own blunders, but to build up a new State.

The Movement which is fighting Marxism to-day along these lines must
display on its banner the symbol of the new State.

The question of the new flag, that is to say the form and appearance it
must take, kept us very busy in those days. Suggestions poured in from
all quarters, which although well meant were more or less impossible in
practice. The new flag had not only to become a symbol expressing our
own struggle but on the other hand it was necessary that it should prove
effective as a large poster. All those who busy themselves with the
tastes of the public will recognize and appreciate the great importance
of these apparently petty matters. In hundreds of thousands of cases a
really striking emblem may be the first cause of awakening interest in a
movement.

For this reason we declined all suggestions from various quarters for
identifying our movement by means of a white flag with the old State or
rather with those decrepit parties whose sole political objective is the
restoration of past conditions. And, apart from this, white is not a
colour capable of attracting and focusing public attention. It is a
colour suitable only for young women's associations and not for a
movement that stands for reform in a revolutionary period.

Black was also suggested--certainly well-suited to the times, but
embodying no significance to empress the will behind our movement. And,
finally, black is incapable of attracting attention.

White and blue was discarded, despite its admirable aesthetic appeal--as
being the colours of an individual German Federal State--a State that,
unfortunately, through its political attitude of particularist
narrow-mindedness did not enjoy a good reputation. And, generally
speaking, with these colours it would have been difficult to attract
attention to our movement. The same applies to black and white.

Black, red and gold did not enter the question at all.

And this also applies to black, white and red for reasons already
stated. At least, not in the form hitherto in use. But the effectiveness
of these three colours is far superior to all the others and they are
certainly the most strikingly harmonious combination to be found.

I myself was always for keeping the old colours, not only because I, as
a soldier, regarded them as my most sacred possession, but because in
their aesthetic effect, they conformed more than anything else to my
personal taste. Accordingly I had to discard all the innumerable
suggestions and designs which had been proposed for the new movement,
among which were many that had incorporated the swastika into the old
colours. I, as leader, was unwilling to make public my own design, as it
was possible that someone else could come forward with a design just as
good, if not better, than my own. As a matter of fact, a dental surgeon
from Starnberg submitted a good design very similar to mine, with only
one mistake, in that his swastika with curved corners was set upon a
white background.

After innumerable trials I decided upon a final form--a flag of red
material with a white disc bearing in its centre a black swastika. After
many trials I obtained the correct proportions between the dimensions of
the flag and of the white central disc, as well as that of the swastika.
And this is how it has remained ever since.

At the same time we immediately ordered the corresponding armlets for
our squad of men who kept order at meetings, armlets of red material, a
central white disc with the black swastika upon it. Herr Füss, a Munich
goldsmith, supplied the first practical and permanent design.

The new flag appeared in public in the midsummer of 1920. It suited our
movement admirably, both being new and young. Not a soul had seen this
flag before; its effect at that time was something akin to that of a
blazing torch. We ourselves experienced almost a boyish delight when one
of the ladies of the party who had been entrusted with the making of the
flag finally handed it over to us. And a few months later those of us in
Munich were in possession of six of these flags. The steadily increasing
strength of our hall guards was a main factor in popularizing the
symbol.

And indeed a symbol it proved to be.

Not only because it incorporated those revered colours expressive of our
homage to the glorious past and which once brought so much honour to the
German nation, but this symbol was also an eloquent expression of the
will behind the movement. We National Socialists regarded our flag as
being the embodiment of our party programme. The red expressed the
social thought underlying the movement. White the national thought. And
the swastika signified the mission allotted to us--the struggle for the
victory of Aryan mankind and at the same time the triumph of the ideal
of creative work which is in itself and always will be anti-Semitic.

Two years later, when our squad of hall guards had long since grown into
storm detachments, it seemed necessary to give this defensive
organization of a young WELTANSCHAUUNG a particular symbol of victory,
namely a Standard. I also designed this and entrusted the execution of
it to an old party comrade, Herr Gahr, who was a goldsmith. Ever since
that time this Standard has been the distinctive token of the National
Socialist struggle.

The increasing interest taken in our meetings, particularly during 1920,
compelled us at times to hold two meetings a week. Crowds gathered round
our posters; the large meeting halls in the town were always filled and
tens of thousands of people, who had been led astray by the teachings of
Marxism, found their way to us and assisted in the work of fighting for
the liberation of the REICH. The public in Munich had got to know us. We
were being spoken about. The words 'National Socialist' had become
common property to many and signified for them a definite party
programme. Our circle of supporters and even of members was constantly
increasing, so that in the winter of 1920-21 we were able to appear as a
strong party in Munich.

At that time there was no party in Munich with the exception of the
Marxist parties--certainly no nationalist party--which was able to hold
such mass demonstrations as ours. The Munich Kindl Hall, which held
5,000 people, was more than once overcrowded and up till then there was
only one other hall, the Krone Circus Hall, into which we had not
ventured.

At the end of January 1921 there was again great cause for anxiety in
Germany. The Paris Agreement, by which Germany pledged herself to pay
the crazy sum of a hundred milliards of gold marks, was to be confirmed
by the London Ultimatum.

Thereupon an old-established Munich working committee, representative of
so-called VÖLKISCH groups, deemed it advisable to call for a public
meeting of protest. I became nervous and restless when I saw that a lot
of time was being wasted and nothing undertaken. At first a meeting was
suggested in the KÖNIG PLATZ; on second thoughts this was turned down,
as someone feared the proceedings might be wrecked by Red elements.
Another suggestion was a demonstration in front of the Feldherrn Hall,
but this also came to nothing. Finally a combined meeting in the Munich
Kindl Hall was suggested. Meanwhile, day after day had gone by; the big
parties had entirely ignored the terrible event, and the working
committee could not decide on a definite date for holding the
demonstration.

On Tuesday, February 1st, I put forward an urgent demand for a final
decision. I was put off until Wednesday. On that day I demanded to be
told clearly if and when the meeting was to take place. The reply was
again uncertain and evasive, it being stated that it was 'intended' to
arrange a demonstration that day week.

At that I lost all patience and decided to conduct a demonstration of
protest on my own. At noon on Wednesday I dictated in ten minutes the
text of the poster and at the same time hired the Krone Circus Hall for
the next day, February 3rd.

In those days this was a tremendous venture. Not only because of the
uncertainty of filling that vast hall, but also because of the risk of
the meeting being wrecked.

Numerically our squad of hall guards was not strong enough for this vast
hall. I was also uncertain about what to do in case the meeting was
broken up--a huge circus building being a different proposition from an
ordinary meeting hall. But events showed that my fears were misplaced,
the opposite being the case. In that vast building a squad of wreckers
could be tackled and subdued more easily than in a cramped hall.

One thing was certain: A failure would throw us back for a long time to
come. If one meeting was wrecked our prestige would be seriously injured
and our opponents would be encouraged to repeat their success. That
would lead to sabotage of our work in connection with further meetings
and months of difficult struggle would be necessary to overcome this.

We had only one day in which to post our bills, Thursday. Unfortunately
it rained on the morning of that day and there was reason to fear that
many people would prefer to remain at home rather than hurry to a
meeting through rain and snow, especially when there was likely to be
violence and bloodshed.

And indeed on that Thursday morning I was suddenly struck with fear that
the hall might never be filled to capacity, which would have made me
ridiculous in the eyes of the working committee. I therefore immediately
dictated various leaflets, had them printed and distributed in the
afternoon. Of course they contained an invitation to attend the meeting.

Two lorries which I hired were draped as much as possible in red, each
had our new flag hoisted on it and was then filled with fifteen or
twenty members of our party. Orders were given the members to canvas the
streets thoroughly, distribute leaflets and conduct propaganda for the
mass meeting to be held that evening. It was the first time that lorries
had driven through the streets bearing flags and not manned by Marxists.
The public stared open-mouthed at these red-draped cars, and in the
outlying districts clenched fists were angrily raised at this new
evidence of 'provocation of the proletariat'. Were not the Marxists the
only ones entitled to hold meetings and drive about in motor lorries?

At seven o'clock in the evening only a few had gathered in the circus
hall. I was being kept informed by telephone every ten minutes and was
becoming uneasy. Usually at seven or a quarter past our meeting halls
were already half filled; sometimes even packed. But I soon found out
the reason why I was uneasy. I had entirely forgotten to take into
account the huge dimensions of this new meeting place. A thousand people
in the Hofbräuhaus was quite an impressive sight, but the same number in
the Circus building was swallowed up in its dimensions and was hardly
noticeable. Shortly afterwards I received more hopeful reports and at a
quarter to eight I was informed that the hall was three-quarters filled,
with huge crowds still lined up at the pay boxes. I then left for the
meeting.

I arrived at the Circus building at two minutes past eight. There was
still a crowd of people outside, partly inquisitive people and many
opponents who preferred to wait outside for developments.
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« Reply #71 on: July 19, 2008, 01:38:22 am »

When I entered the great hall I felt the same joy I had felt a year
previously at the first meeting in the Munich Hofbräu Banquet Hall; but
it was not until I had forced my way through the solid wall of people
and reached the platform that I perceived the full measure of our
success. The hall was before me, like a huge shell, packed with
thousands and thousands of people. Even the arena was densely crowded.
More than 5,600 tickets had been sold and, allowing for the unemployed,
poor students and our own detachments of men for keeping order, a crowd
of about 6,500 must have been present.

My theme was 'Future or Downfall' and I was filled with joy at the
conviction that the future was represented by the crowds that I was
addressing.

I began, and spoke for about two and a half hours. I had the feeling
after the first half-hour that the meeting was going to be a big
success. Contact had been at once established with all those thousands
of individuals. After the first hour the speech was already being
received by spontaneous outbreaks of applause, but after the second hour
this died down to a solemn stillness which I was to experience so often
later on in this same hall, and which will for ever be remembered by all
those present. Nothing broke this impressive silence and only when the
last word had been spoken did the meeting give vent to its feelings by
singing the national anthem.

I watched the scene during the next twenty minutes, as the vast hall
slowly emptied itself, and only then did I leave the platform, a happy
man, and made my way home.

Photographs were taken of this first meeting in the Krone Circus Hall in
Munich. They are more eloquent than words to demonstrate the success of
this demonstration. The bourgeois papers reproduced photographs and
reported the meeting as having been merely 'nationalist' in character;
in their usual modest fashion they omitted all mention of its promoters.

Thus for the first time we had developed far beyond the dimensions of an
ordinary party. We could no longer be ignored. And to dispel all doubt
that the meeting was merely an isolated success, I immediately arranged
for another at the Circus Hall in the following week, and again we had
the same success. Once more the vast hall was overflowing with people;
so much so that I decided to hold a third meeting during the following
week, which also proved a similar success.

After these initial successes early in 1921 I increased our activity in
Munich still further. I not only held meetings once a week, but during
some weeks even two were regularly held and very often during midsummer
and autumn this increased to three. We met regularly at the Circus Hall
and it gave us great satisfaction to see that every meeting brought us
the same measure of success.

The result was shown in an ever-increasing number of supporters and
members into our party.

Naturally, such success did not allow our opponents to sleep soundly. At
first their tactics fluctuated between the use of terror and silence in
our regard. Then they recognized that neither terror nor silence could
hinder the progress of our movement. So they had recourse to a supreme
act of terror which was intended to put a definite end to our activities
in the holding of meetings.

As a pretext for action along this line they availed themselves of a
very mysterious attack on one of the Landtag deputies, named Erhard
Auer. It was declared that someone had fired several shots at this man
one evening. This meant that he was not shot but that an attempt had
been made to shoot him. A fabulous presence of mind and heroic courage
on the part of Social Democratic leaders not only prevented the
sacrilegious intention from taking effect but also put the crazy
would-be assassins to flight, like the cowards that they were. They were
so quick and fled so far that subsequently the police could not find
even the slightest traces of them. This mysterious episode was used by
the organ of the Social Democratic Party to arouse public feeling
against the movement, and while doing this it delivered its old
rigmarole about the tactics that were to be employed the next time.
Their purpose was to see to it that our movement should not grow but
should be immediately hewn down root and branch by the hefty arm of the
proletariat.

A few days later the real attack came. It was decided finally to
interrupt one of our meetings which was billed to take place in the
Munich Hofbräuhaus, and at which I myself was to speak.

On November 4th, 1921, in the evening between six and seven o'clock I
received the first precise news that the meeting would positively be
broken up and that to carry out this action our adversaries had decided
to send to the meeting great masses of workmen employed in certain 'Red'
factories.

It was due to an unfortunate accident that we did not receive this news
sooner. On that day we had given up our old business office in the
Sternecker Gasse in Munich and moved into other quarters; or rather we
had given up the old offices and our new quarters were not yet in
functioning order. The telephone arrangements had been cut off by the
former tenants and had not yet been reinstalled. Hence it happened that
several attempts made that day to inform us by telephone of the break-up
which had been planned for the evening did not reach us.

Consequently our order troops were not present in strong force at that
meeting. There was only one squad present, which did not consist of the
usual one hundred men, but only of about forty-six. And our telephone
connections were not yet sufficiently organized to be able to give the
alarm in the course of an hour or so, so that a sufficiently powerful
number of order troops to deal with the situation could be called. It
must also be added that on several previous occasions we had been
forewarned, but nothing special happened. The old proverb, 'Revolutions
which were announced have scarcely ever come off', had hitherto been
proved true in our regard.

Possibly for this reason also sufficiently strong precautions had not
been taken on that day to cope with the brutal determination of our
opponents to break up our meeting.

Finally, we did not believe that the Hofbräuhaus in Munich was suitable
for the interruptive tactics of our adversaries. We had feared such a
thing far more in the bigger halls, especially that of the Krone Circus.
But on this point we learned a very serviceable lesson that evening.
Later, we studied this whole question according to a scientific system
and arrived at results, both interesting and incredible, and which
subsequently were an essential factor in the direction of our
organization and in the tactics of our Storm Troops.

When I arrived in the entrance halt of the Hofbräuhaus at 7.45 that
evening I realizcd that there could be no doubt as to what the 'Reds'
intended. The hall was filled, and for that reason the police had barred
the entrances. Our adversaries, who had arrived very early, were in the
hall, and our followers were for the most part outside. The small
bodyguard awaited me at the entrance. I had the doors leading to the
principal hall closed and then asked the bodyguard of forty-five or
forty-six men to come forward. I made it clear to the boys that perhaps
on that evening for the first time they would have to show their
unbending and unbreakable loyalty to the movement and that not one of us
should leave the hall unless carried out dead. I added that I would
remain in the hall and that I did not believe that one of them would
abandon me, and that if I saw any one of them act the coward I myself
would personally tear off his armlet and his badge. I demanded of them
that they should come forward if the slightest attempt to sabotage the
meeting were made and that they must remember that the best defence is
always attack.

I was greeted with a triple 'HEIL' which sounded more hoarse and violent
than usual.

Then I advanced through the hall and could take in the situation with my
own eyes. Our opponents sat closely huddled together and tried to pierce
me through with their looks. Innumerable faces glowing with hatred and
rage were fixed on me, while others with sneering grimaces shouted at me
together. Now they would 'Finish with us. We must look out for our
entrails. To-day they would smash in our faces once and for all.' And
there were other expressions of an equally elegant character. They knew
that they were there in superior numbers and they acted accordingly.

Yet we were able to open the meeting; and I began to speak. In the Hall
of the Hofbräuhaus I stood always at the side, away from the entry and
on top of a beer table. Therefore I was always right in the midst of the
audience. Perhaps this circumstance was responsible for creating a
certain feeling and a sense of agreement which I never found elsewhere.

Before me, and especially towards my left, there were only opponents,
seated or standing. They were mostly robust youths and men from the
Maffei Factory, from Kustermann's, and from the factories on the Isar,
etc. Along the right-hand wall of the hall they were thickly massed
quite close to my table. They now began to order litre mugs of beer, one
after the other, and to throw the empty mugs under the table. In this
way whole batteries were collected. I should have been surprised had
this meeting ended peacefully.

In spite of all the interruptions, I was able to speak for about an hour
and a half and I felt as if I were master of the situation. Even the
ringleaders of the disturbers appeared to be convinced of this; for they
steadily became more uneasy, often left the hall, returned and spoke to
their men in an obviously nervous way.

A small psychological error which I committed in replying to an
interruption, and the mistake of which I myself was conscious the moment
the words had left my mouth, gave the sign for the outbreak.

There were a few furious outbursts and all in a moment a man jumped on a
seat and shouted "Liberty". At that signal the champions of liberty
began their work.

In a few moments the hall was filled with a yelling and shrieking mob.
Numerous beer-mugs flew like howitzers above their heads. Amid this
uproar one heard the crash of chair legs, the crashing of mugs, groans
and yells and screams.

It was a mad spectacle. I stood where I was and could observe my boys
doing their duty, every one of them.

There I had the chance of seeing what a bourgeois meeting could be.

The dance had hardly begun when my Storm Troops, as they were called
from that day onwards, launched their attack. Like wolves they threw
themselves on the enemy again and again in parties of eight or ten and
began steadily to thrash them out of the hall. After five minutes I
could see hardly one of them that was not streaming with blood. Then I
realized what kind of men many of them were, above all my brave Maurice
Hess, who is my private secretary to-day, and many others who, even
though seriously wounded, attacked again and again as long as they could
stand on their feet. Twenty minutes long the pandemonium continued. Then
the opponents, who had numbered seven or eight hundred, had been driven
from the hall or hurled out headlong by my men, who had not numbered
fifty. Only in the left corner a big crowd still stood out against our
men and put up a bitter fight. Then two pistol shots rang out from the
entrance to the hall in the direction of the platform and now a wild din
of shooting broke out from all sides. One's heart almost rejoiced at
this spectacle which recalled memories of the War.

At that moment it was not possible to identify the person who had fired
the shots. But at any rate I could see that my boys renewed the attack
with increased fury until finally the last disturbers were overcome and
flung out of the hall.

About twenty-five minutes had passed since it all began. The hall looked
as if a bomb had exploded there. Many of my comrades had to be bandaged
and others taken away. But we remained masters of the situation. Hermann
Essen, who was chairman of the meeting, announced: "The meeting will
continue. The speaker shall proceed." So I went on with my speech.

When we ourselves declared the meeting at an end an excited police
officer rushed in, waved his hands and declared: "The meeting is
dissolved."

Without wishing to do so I had to laugh at this example of the law's
delay. It was the authentic constabulary officiosiousness. The smaller
they are the greater they must always appear.

That evening we learned a real lesson. And our adversaries never forgot
the lesson they had received.

Up to the autumn of 1923 the Münchener post did not again mention the
clenched fists of the Proletariat.
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« Reply #72 on: July 19, 2008, 01:39:10 am »

CHAPTER VIII



THE STRONG IS STRONGEST WHEN ALONE


In the preceding chapter I mentioned the existence of a co-operative
union between the German patriotic associations. Here I shall deal
briefly with this question.

In speaking of a co-operative union we generally mean a group of
associations which, for the purpose of facilitating their work,
establish mutual relations for collaborating with one another along
certain lines, appointing a common directorate with varying powers and
thenceforth carrying out a common line of action. The average citizen is
pleased and reassured when he hears that these associations, by
establishing a co-operative union among one another, have at long last
discovered a common platform on which they can stand united and have
eliminated all grounds of mutual difference. Therewith a general
conviction arises, to the effect that such a union is an immense gain in
strength and that small groups which were weak as long as they stood
alone have now suddenly become strong. Yet this conviction is for the
most part a mistaken one.

It will be interesting and, in my opinion, important for the better
understanding of this question if we try to get a clear notion of how it
comes about that these associations, unions, etc., are established, when
all of them declare that they have the same ends in view. In itself it
would be logical to expect that one aim should be fought for by a single
association and it would be more reasonable if there were not a number
of associations fighting for the same aim. In the beginning there was
undoubtedly only one association which had this one fixed aim in view.
One man proclaimed a truth somewhere and, calling for the solution of a
definite question, fixed his aim and founded a movement for the purpose
of carrying his views into effect.

That is how an association or a party is founded, the scope of whose
programme is either the abolition of existing evils or the positive
establishment of a certain order of things in the future.

Once such a movement has come into existence it may lay practical claim
to certain priority rights. The natural course of things would now be
that all those who wish to fight for the same objective as this movement
is striving for should identify themselves with it and thus increase its
strength, so that the common purpose in view may be all the better
served. Especially men of superior intelligence must feel, one and all,
that by joining the movement they are establishing precisely those
conditions which are necessary for practical success in the common
struggle. Accordingly it is reasonable and, in a certain sense,
honest--which honesty, as I shall show later, is an element of very
great importance--that only one movement should be founded for the
purpose of attaining the one aim.

The fact that this does not happen must be attributed to two causes. The
first may almost be described as tragic. The second is a matter for
pity, because it has its foundation in the weaknesses of human nature.
But, on going to the bottom of things, I see in both causes only facts
which give still another ground for strengthening our will, our energy
and intensity of purpose; so that finally, through the higher
development of the human faculties, the solution of the problem in
question may be rendered possible.

The tragic reason why it so often happens that the pursuit of one
definite task is not left to one association alone is as follows:
Generally speaking, every action carried out on the grand style in this
world is the expression of a desire that has already existed for a long
time in millions of human hearts, a longing which may have been
nourished in silence. Yes, it may happen that throughout centuries men
may have been yearning for the solution of a definite problem, because
they have been suffering under an unendurable order of affairs, without
seeing on the far horizon the coming fulfilment of the universal
longing. Nations which are no longer capable of finding an heroic
deliverance from such a sorrowful fate may be looked upon as effete.
But, on the other hand, nothing gives better proof of the vital forces
of a people and the consequent guarantee of its right to exist than that
one day, through a happy decree of Destiny, a man arises who is capable
of liberating his people from some great oppression, or of wiping out
some bitter distress, or of calming the national soul which had been
tormented through its sense of insecurity, and thus fulfilling what had
long been the universal yearning of the people.

An essential characteristic of what are called the great questions of
the time is that thousands undertake the task of solving them and that
many feel themselves called to this task: yea, even that Destiny itself
has proposed many for the choice, so that through the free play of
forces the stronger and bolder shall finally be victorious and to him
shall be entrusted the task of solving the problem.

Thus it may happen that for centuries many are discontented with the
form in which their religious life expresses itself and yearn for a
renovation of it; and so it may happen that through this impulse of the
soul some dozens of men may arise who believe that, by virtue of their
understanding and their knowledge, they are called to solve the
religious difficulties of the time and accordingly present themselves as
the prophets of a new teaching or at least as declared adversaries of
the standing beliefs.

Here also it is certain that the natural law will take its course,
inasmuch as the strongest will be destined to fulfil the great mission.
But usually the others are slow to acknowledge that only one man is
called. On the contrary, they all believe that they have an equal right
to engage in the solution of the diffculties in question and that they
are equally called to that task. Their contemporary world is generally
quite unable to decide which of all these possesses the highest gifts
and accordingly merits the support of all.

So in the course of centuries, or indeed often within the same epoch,
different men establish different movements to struggle towards the same
end. At least the end is declared by the founders of the movements to be
the same, or may be looked upon as such by the masses of the people. The
populace nourishes vague desires and has only general opinions, without
having any precise notion of their own ideals and desires or of the
question whether and how it is impossible for these ideals and desires
to be fulfilled.

The tragedy lies in the fact that many men struggle to reach the same
objective by different roads, each one genuinely believing in his own
mission and holding himself in duty bound to follow his own road without
any regard for the others.

These movements, parties, religious groups, etc., originate entirely
independently of one another out of the general urge of the time, and
all with a view to working towards the same goal. It may seem a tragic
thing, at least at first sight, that this should be so, because people
are too often inclined to think that forces which are dispersed in
different directions would attain their ends far more quickly and more
surely if they were united in one common effort. But that is not so. For
Nature herself decides according to the rules of her inexorable logic.
She leaves these diverse groups to compete with one another and dispute
the palm of victory and thus she chooses the clearest, shortest and
surest way along which she leads the movement to its final goal.

How could one decide from outside which is the best way, if the forces
at hand were not allowed free play, if the final decision were to rest
with the doctrinaire judgment of men who are so infatuated with their
own superior knowledge that their minds are not open to accept the
indisputable proof presented by manifest success, which in the last
analysis always gives the final confirmation of the justice of a course
of action.

Hence, though diverse groups march along different routes towards the
same objective, as soon as they come to know that analogous efforts are
being made around them, they will have to study all the more carefully
whether they have chosen the best way and whether a shorter way may not
be found and how their efforts can best be employed to reach the
objective more quickly.

Through this rivalry each individual protagonist develops his faculties
to a still higher pitch of perfection and the human race has frequently
owed its progress to the lessons learned from the misfortunes of former
attempts which have come to grief. Therefore we may conclude that we
come to know the better ways of reaching final results through a state
of things which at first sight appeared tragic; namely, the initial
dispersion of individual efforts, wherein each group was unconsciously
responsible for such dispersion.

In studying the lessons of history with a view to finding a way for the
solution of the German problem, the prevailing opinion at one time was
that there were two possible paths along which that problem might be
solved and that these two paths should have united from the very
beginning. The chief representatives and champions of these two paths
were Austria and Prussia respectively, Habsburg and Hohenzollern. All
the rest, according to this prevalent opinion, ought to have entrusted
their united forces to the one or the other party. But at that time the
path of the most prominent representative, the Habsburg, would have been
taken, though the Austrian policy would never have led to the foundation
of a united German REICH.

Finally, a strong and united German REICH arose out of that which many
millions of Germans deplored in their hearts as the last and most
terrible manifestation of our fratricidal strife. The truth is that the
German Imperial Crown was retrieved on the battle field of Königgrätz
and not in the fights that were waged before Paris, as was commonly
asserted afterwards.

Thus the foundation of the German REICH was not the consequence of any
common will working along common lines, but it was much more the outcome
of a deliberate struggle for hegemony, though the protagonists were
often hardly conscious of this. And from this struggle Prussia finally
came out victorious. Anybody who is not so blinded by partisan politics
as to deny this truth will have to agree that the so-called wisdom of
men would never have come to the same wise decision as the wisdom of
Life itself, that is to say, the free play of forces, finally brought to
realization. For in the German lands of two hundred years before who
would seriously have believed that Hohenzollern Prussia, and not
Habsburg, would become the germ cell, the founder and the tutor of the
new REICH? And, on the other hand, who would deny to-day that Destiny
thus acted wiser than human wisdom. Who could now imagine a German REICH
based on the foundations of an effete and degenerate dynasty?

No. The general evolution of things, even though it took a century of
struggle, placed the best in the position that it had merited.

And that will always be so. Therefore it is not to be regretted if
different men set out to attain the same objective. In this way the
strongest and swiftest becomes recognized and turns out to be the
victor.

Now there is a second cause for the fact that often in the lives of
nations several movements which show the same characteristics strive
along different ways to reach what appears to be the same goal. This
second cause is not at all tragic, but just something that rightly calls
forth pity. It arises from a sad mixture of envy, jealousy, ambition,
and the itch for taking what belongs to others. Unfortunately these
failings are often found united in single specimens of the human
species.

The moment a man arises who profoundly understands the distress of his
people and, having diagnosed the evil with perfect accuracy, takes
measures to cure it; the moment he fixes his aim and chooses the means
to reach it--then paltry and pettifogging people become all attention
and eagerly follow the doings of this man who has thus come before the
public gaze. Just like sparrows who are apparently indifferent, but in
reality are firmly intent on the movements of the fortunate companion
with the morsel of bread so that they may snatch it from him if he
should momentarily relax his hold on it, so it is also with the human
species. All that is needed is that one man should strike out on a new
road and then a crowd of poltroons will prick up their ears and begin to
sniff for whatever little booty may possibly lie at the end of that
road. The moment they think they have discovered where the booty is to
be gathered they hurry to find another way which may prove to be quicker
in reaching that goal.

As soon as a new movement is founded and has formulated a definite
programme, people of that kind come forward and proclaim that they are
fighting for the same cause. This does not imply that they are ready
honestly to join the ranks of such a movement and thus recognize its
right of priority. It implies rather that they intend to steal the
programme and found a new party on it. In doing this they are shameless
enough to assure the unthinking public that for a long time they had
intended to take the same line of action as the other has now taken, and
frequently they succeed in thus placing themselves in a favourable
light, instead of arousing the general disapprobation which they justly
deserve. For it is a piece of gross impudence to take what has already
been inscribed on another's flag and display it on one's own, to steal
the programme of another, and then to form a separate group as if all
had been created by the new founder of this group. The impudence of such
conduct is particularly demonstrated when the individuals who first
caused dispersion and disruption by their new foundation are those
who--as experience has shown--are most emphatic in proclaiming the
necessity of union and unity the moment they find they cannot catch up
with their adversary's advance.

It is to that kind of conduct that the so-called 'patriotic
disintegration' is to be attributed.

Certainly in the years 1918--1919 the founding of a multitude of new
groups, parties, etc., calling themselves 'Patriotic,' was a natural
phenomenon of the time, for which the founders were not at all
responsible. By 1920 the National Socialist German Labour Party had
slowly crystallized from all these parties and had become supreme. There
could be no better proof of the sterling honesty of certain individual
founders than the fact that many of them decided, in a really admirable
manner, to sacrifice their manifestly less successful movements to the
stronger movement, by joining it unconditionally and dissolving their
own.

This is specially true in regard to Julius Streicher, who was at that
time the protagonist of the German Socialist party in Nürnberg. The
National Socialist German Labour Party had been founded with similar
aims in view, but quite independently of the other. I have already said
that Streicher, then a teacher in Nürnberg, was the chief protagonist of
the German Socialist Party. He had a sacred conviction of the mission
and future of his own movement. As soon, however, as the superior
strength and stronger growth of the National Socialist Party became
clear and unquestionable to his mind, he gave up his work in the German
Socialist Party and called upon his followers to fall into line with the
National Socialist German Labour Party, which had come out victorious
from the mutual contest, and carry on the fight within its ranks for the
common cause. The decision was personally a difficult one for him, but
it showed a profound sense of honesty.

When that first period of the movement was over there remained no
further dispersion of forces: for their honest intentions had led the
men of that time to the same honourable, straightforward and just
conclusion. What we now call the 'patriotic disintegration' owes its
existence exclusively to the second of the two causes which I have
mentioned. Ambitious men who at first had no ideas of their own, and
still less any concept of aims to be pursued, felt themselves 'called'
exactly at that moment in which the success of the National Socialist
German Labour Party became unquestionable.

Suddenly programmes appeared which were mere transcripts of ours. Ideas
were proclaimed which had been taken from us. Aims were set up on behalf
of which we had been fighting for several years, and ways were mapped
out which the National Socialists had for a long time trodden. All kinds
of means were resorted to for the purpose of trying to convince the
public that, although the National Socialist German Labour Party had now
been for a long time in existence, it was found necessary to establish
these new parties. But all these phrases were just as insincere as the
motives behind them were ignoble.

In reality all this was grounded only on one dominant motive. That
motive was the personal ambition of the founders, who wished to play a
part in which their own pigmy talents could contribute nothing original
except the gross effrontery which they displayed in appropriating the
ideas of others, a mode of conduct which in ordinary life is looked upon
as thieving.

At that time there was not an idea or concept launched by other people
which these political kleptomaniacs did not seize upon at once for the
purpose of applying to their own base uses. Those who did all this were
the same people who subsequently, with tears in their eyes, profoundly
deplored the 'patriotic disintegration' and spoke unceasingly about the
'necessity of unity'. In doing this they nurtured the secret hope that
they might be able to cry down the others, who would tire of hearing
these loud-mouthed accusations and would end up by abandoning all claim
to the ideas that had been stolen from them and would abandon to the
thieves not only the task of carrying these ideas into effect but also
the task of carrying on the movements of which they themselves were the
original founders.

When that did not succeed, and the new enterprises, thanks to the paltry
mentality of their promoters, did not show the favourable results which
had been promised beforehand, then they became more modest in their
pretences and were happy if they could land themselves in one of the
so-called 'co-operative unions'.

At that period everything which could not stand on its own feet joined
one of those co-operative unions, believing that eight lame people
hanging on to one another could force a gladiator to surrender to them.

But if among all these cripples there was one who was sound of limb he
had to use all his strength to sustain the others and thus he himself
was practically paralysed.

We ought to look upon the question of joining these working coalitions
as a tactical problem, but, in coming to a decision, we must never
forget the following fundamental principle:

Through the formation of a working coalition associations which are weak
in themselves can never be made strong, whereas it can and does happen
not infrequently that a strong association loses its strength by joining
in a coalition with weaker ones. It is a mistake to believe that a
factor of strength will result from the coalition of weak groups;
because experience shows that under all forms and all conditions the
majority represents the duffers and poltroons. Hence a multiplicity of
associations, under a directorate of many heads, elected by these same
associations, is abandoned to the control of poltroons and weaklings.
Through such a coalition the free play of forces is paralysed, the
struggle for the selection of the best is abolished and therewith the
necessary and final victory of the healthier and stronger is impeded.
Coalitions of that kind are inimical to the process of natural
development, because for the most part they hinder rather than advance
the solution of the problem which is being fought for.

It may happen that, from considerations of a purely tactical kind, the
supreme command of a movement whose goal is set in the future will enter
into a coalition with such associations for the treatment of special
questions and may also stand on a common platform with them, but this
can be only for a short and limited period. Such a coalition must not be
permanent, if the movement does not wish to renounce its liberating
mission. Because if it should become indissolubly tied up in such a
combination it would lose the capacity and the right to allow its own
forces to work freely in following out a natural development, so as to
overcome rivals and attain its own objective triumphantly.

It must never be forgotten that nothing really great in this world has
ever been achieved through coalitions, but that such achievements have
always been due to the triumph of the individual. Successes achieved
through coalitions, owing to the very nature of their source, carry the
germs of future disintegration in them from the very start; so much so
that they have already forfeited what has been achieved. The great
revolutions which have taken place in human thought and have veritably
transformed the aspect of the world would have been inconceivable and
impossible to carry out except through titanic struggles waged between
individual natures, but never as the enterprises of coalitions.
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« Reply #73 on: July 19, 2008, 01:41:01 am »

And, above all things, the People's State will never be created by the
desire for compromise inherent in a patriotic coalition, but only by the
iron will of a single movement which has successfully come through in
the struggle with all the others.




CHAPTER IX



FUNDAMENTAL IDEAS REGARDING THE NATURE AND ORGANIZATION OF THE STORM TROOPS


The strength of the old state rested on three pillars: the monarchical
form of government, the civil service, and the army. The Revolution of
1918 abolished the form of government, dissolved the army and abandoned
the civil service to the corruption of party politics. Thus the
essential supports of what is called the Authority of the State were
shattered. This authority nearly always depends on three elements, which
are the essential foundations of all authority.

Popular support is the first element which is necessary for the creation
of authority. But an authority resting on that foundation alone is still
quite frail, uncertain and vacillating. Hence everyone who finds himself
vested with an authority that is based only on popular support must take
measures to improve and consolidate the foundations of that authority by
the creation of force. Accordingly we must look upon power, that is to
say, the capacity to use force, as the second foundation on which all
authority is based. This foundation is more stable and secure, but not
always stronger, than the first. If popular support and power are united
together and can endure for a certain time, then an authority may arise
which is based on a still stronger foundation, namely, the authority of
tradition. And, finally, if popular support, power, and tradition are
united together, then the authority based on them may be looked upon as
invincible.

In Germany the Revolution abolished this last foundation. There was no
longer even a traditional authority. With the collapse of the old REICH,
the suppression of the monarchical form of government, the destruction
of all the old insignia of greatness and the imperial symbols, tradition
was shattered at a blow. The result was that the authority of the State
was shaken to its foundations.

The second pillar of statal authority, namely POWER, also ceased to
exist. In order to carry through the Revolution it was necessary to
dissolve that body which had hitherto incorporated the organized force
and power of the State, namely, the Army. Indeed, some detached
fragments of the Army itself had to be employed as fighting elements in
the Revolution. The Armies at the front were not subjected in the same
measure to this process of disruption; but as they gradually left
farther behind them the fields of glory on which they had fought
heroically for four-and-half years, they were attacked by the solvent
acid that had permeated the Fatherland; and when they arrived at the
demobilizing centres they fell into that state of confusion which was
styled voluntary obedience in the time of the Soldiers' Councils.

Of course it was out of the question to think of founding any kind of
authority on this crowd of mutineering soldiers, who looked upon
military service as a work of eight hours per day. Therefore the second
element, that which guarantees the stability of authority, was also
abolished and the Revolution had only the original element, popular
support, on which to build up its authority. But this basis was
extraordinarily insecure. By means of a few violent thrusts the
Revolution had shattered the old statal edifice to its deepest
foundations, but only because the normal equilibrium within the social
structure of the nation had already been destroyed by the war.

Every national body is made up of three main classes. At one extreme we
have the best of the people, taking the word 'best' here to indicate
those who are highly endowed with the civic virtues and are noted for
their courage and their readiness to sacrifice their private interests.
At the other extreme are the worst dregs of humanity, in whom vice and
egotistic interests prevail. Between these two extremes stands the third
class, which is made up of the broad middle stratum, who do not
represent radiant heroism or vulgar vice.

The stages of a nation's rise are accomplished exclusively under the
leadership of the best extreme.

Times of normal and symmetrical development, or of stable conditions,
owe their existence and outwardly visible characteristics to the
preponderating influence of the middle stratum. In this stage the two
extreme classes are balanced against one another; in other words, they
are relatively cancelled out.

Times of national collapse are determined by the preponderating
influence of the worst elements.

It must be noted here, however, that the broad masses, which constitute
what I have called the middle section, come forward and make their
influence felt only when the two extreme sections are engaged in mutual
strife. In case one of the extreme sections comes out victorious the
middle section will readily submit to its domination. If the best
dominate, the broad masses will follow it. Should the worst extreme turn
out triumphant, then the middle section will at least offer no
opposition to it; for the masses that constitute the middle class never
fight their own battles.

The outpouring of blood for four-and-a-half years during the war
destroyed the inner equilibrium between these three sections in so far
as it can be said--though admitting the sacrifices made by the middle
section--that the class which consisted of the best human elements
almost completely disappeared through the loss of so much of its blood
in the war, because it was impossible to replace the truly enormous
quantity of heroic German blood which had been shed during those
four-and-a-half years. In hundreds of thousands of cases it was always a
matter of 'VOLUNTEERS to the front', VOLUNTEERS for patrol and duty,
VOLUNTEER dispatch carriers, VOLUNTEERS for establishing and working
telephonic communications, VOLUNTEERS for bridge-building, VOLUNTEERS
for the submarines, VOLUNTEERS for the air service, VOLUNTEERS for the
storm battalions, and so on, and so on. During four-and-a-half years,
and on thousands of occasions, there was always the call for volunteers
and again for volunteers. And the result was always the same. Beardless
young fellows or fully developed men, all filled with an ardent love for
their country, urged on by their own courageous spirit or by a lofty
sense of their duty--it was always such men who answered the call for
volunteers. Tens of thousands, indeed hundreds of thousands, of such men
came forward, so that that kind of human material steadily grew scarcer
and scarcer. What did not actually fall was maimed in the fight or
gradually had to join the ranks of the crippled because of the wounds
they were constantly receiving, and thus they had to carry on
interminably owing to the steady decrease in the supply of such men. In
1914 whole armies were composed of volunteers who, owing to a criminal
lack of conscience on the part of our feckless parliamentarians, had not
received any proper training in times of peace, and so were thrown as
defenceless cannon-fodder to the enemy. The four hundred thousand who
thus fell or were permanently maimed on the battlefields of Flanders
could not be replaced any more. Their loss was something far more than
merely numerical. With their death the scales, which were already too
lightly weighed at that end of the social structure which represented
our best human quality, now moved upwards rapidly, becoming heavier on
the other end with those vulgar elements of infamy and cowardice--in
short, there was an increase in the elements that constituted the worst
extreme of our population.

And there was something more: While for four-and-a-half years our best
human material was being thinned to an exceptional degree on the
battlefields, our worst people wonderfully succeeded in saving
themselves. For each hero who made the supreme sacrifice and ascended
the steps of Valhalla, there was a shirker who cunningly dodged death on
the plea of being engaged in business that was more or less useful at
home.

And so the picture which presented itself at the end of the war was
this: The great middle stratum of the nation had fulfilled its duty and
paid its toll of blood. One extreme of the population, which was
constituted of the best elements, had given a typical example of its
heroism and had sacrificed itself almost to a man. The other extreme,
which was constituted of the worst elements of the population, had
preserved itself almost intact, through taking advantage of absurd laws
and also because the authorities failed to enforce certain articles of
the military code.

This carefully preserved scum of our nation then made the Revolution.
And the reason why it could do so was that the extreme section composed
of the best elements was no longer there to oppose it. It no longer
existed.

Hence the German Revolution, from the very beginning, depended on only
one section of the population. This act of Cain was not committed by the
German people as such, but by an obscure CANAILLE of deserters,
hooligans, etc.

The man at the front gladly welcomed the end of the strife in which so
much blood had been shed. He was happy to be able to return home and see
his wife and children once again. But he had no moral connection with
the Revolution. He did not like it, nor did he like those who had
provoked and organized it. During the four-and-a-half years of that
bitter struggle at the front he had come to forget the party hyenas at
home and all their wrangling had become foreign to him.

The Revolution was really popular only with a small section of the
German people: namely, that class and their accomplices who had selected
the rucksack as the hall-mark of all honourable citizens in this new
State. They did not like the Revolution for its own sake, though many
people still erroneously believe the contrary, but for the consequences
which followed in its train.

But it was very difficult to establish any abiding authority on the
popular support given to these Marxist freebooters. And yet the young
Republic stood in need of authority at any cost, unless it was ready to
agree to be overthrown after a short period of chaos by an elementary
force assembled from those last elements that still remained among the
best extreme of the population.

The danger which those who were responsible for the Revolution feared
most at that time was that, in the turmoil of the confusion which they
themselves had created, the ground would suddenly be taken from under
their feet, that they might be suddenly seized and transported to
another terrain by an iron grip, such as has often appeared at these
junctures in the history of nations. The Republic must be consolidated
at all costs.

Hence it was forced almost immediately after its foundation to erect
another pillar beside that wavering pillar of popularity. They found
that power must be organized once again in order to procure a firmer
foundation for their authority.

When those who had been the matadors of the Revolution in December 1918,
and January and February 1919, felt the ground trembling beneath their
feet they looked around them for men who would be ready to reinforce
them with military support; for their feeble position was dependent only
on whatever popular favour they enjoyed. The 'anti-militarist' Republic
had need of soldiers. But the first and only pillar on which the
authority of the State rested, namely, its popularity, was grounded only
on a conglomeration of rowdies and thieves, burglars, deserters,
shirkers, etc. Therefore in that section of the nation which we have
called the evil extreme it was useless to look for men who would be
willing to sacrifice their lives on behalf of a new ideal. The section
which had nourished the revolutionary idea and carried out the
Revolution was neither able nor willing to call on the soldiers to
protect it. For that section had no wish whatsoever to organize a
republican State, but to disorganize what already existed and thus
satisfy its own instincts all the better. Their password was not the
organization and construction of the German Republic, but rather the
plundering of it.
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« Reply #74 on: July 19, 2008, 01:41:56 am »

Hence the cry for help sent out by the public representatives, who were
beset by a thousand anxieties, did not find any response among this
class of people, but rather provoked a feeling of bitterness and
repudiation. For they looked upon this step as the beginning of a breach
of faith and trust, and in the building up of an authority which was no
longer based on popular support but also on force they saw the beginning
of a hostile move against what the Revolution meant essentially for
those elements. They feared that measures might be taken against the
right to robbery and absolute domination on the part of a horde of
thieves and plunderers--in short, the worst rabble--who had broken out
of the convict prisons and left their chains behind.

The representatives of the people might cry out as much as they liked,
but they could get no help from that rabble. The cries for help were met
with the counter-cry 'traitors' by those very people on whose support
the popularity of the regime was founded.

Then for the first time large numbers of young Germans were found who
were ready to button on the military uniform once again in the service
of 'Peace and Order', as they believed, shouldering the carbine and
rifle and donning the steel helmet to defend the wreckers of the
Fatherland. Volunteer corps were assembled and, although hating the
Revolution, they began to defend it. The practical effect of their
action was to render the Revolution firm and stable. In doing this they
acted in perfect good faith.

The real organizer of the Revolution and the actual wire-puller behind
it, the international Jew, had sized up the situation correctly. The
German people were not yet ripe to be drawn into the blood swamp of
Bolshevism, as the Russian people had been drawn. And that was because
there was a closer racial union between the intellectual classes in
Germany and the manual workers, and also because broad social strata
were permeated with cultured people, such as was the case also in the
other States of Western Europe; but this state of affairs was completely
lacking in Russia. In that country the intellectual classes were mostly
not of Russian nationality, or at least they did not have the racial
characteristics of the Slav. The thin upper layer of intellectuals which
then existed in Russia might be abolished at any time, because there was
no intermediate stratum connecting it organically with the great mass of
the people. There the mental and moral level of the great mass of the
people was frightfully low.

In Russia the moment the agitators were successful in inciting broad
masses of the people, who could not read or write, against the upper
layer of intellectuals who were not in contact with the masses or
permanently linked with them in any way--at that moment the destiny of
Russia was decided, the success of the Revolution was assured. Thereupon
the analphabetic Russian became the slave of his Jewish dictators who,
on their side, were shrewd enough to name their dictatorship 'The
Dictatorship of the People'.

In the case of Germany an additional factor must be taken into account.
Here the Revolution could be carried into effect only if the Army could
first be gradually dismembered. But the real author of the Revolution
and of the process of disintegration in the Army was not the soldier who
had fought at the front but the CANAILLE which more or less shunned the
light and which were either quartered in the home garrisons or were
officiating as 'indispensables' somewhere in the business world at home.
This army was reinforced by ten thousand deserters who, without running
any particular risk, could turn their backs on the Front. At all times
the real poltroon fears nothing so much as death. But at the Front he
had death before his eyes every day in a thousand different shapes.
There has always been one possible way, and one only, of making weak or
wavering men, or even downright poltroons, face their duty steadfastly.
This means that the deserter must be given to understand that his
desertion will bring upon him just the very thing he is flying from. At
the Front a man may die, but the deserter MUST die. Only this draconian
threat against every attempt to desert the flag can have a terrifying
effect, not merely on the individual but also on the mass. Therein lay
the meaning and purpose of the military penal code.

It was a fine belief to think that the great struggle for the life of a
nation could be carried through if it were based solely on voluntary
fidelity arising from and sustained by the knowledge that such a
struggle was necessary. The voluntary fulfilment of one's duty is a
motive that determines the actions of only the best men, but not of the
average type of men. Hence special laws are necessary; just as, for
instance, the law against stealing, which was not made for men who are
honest on principle but for the weak and unstable elements. Such laws
are meant to hinder the evil-doer through their deterrent effect and
thus prevent a state of affairs from arising in which the honest man is
considered the more stupid, and which would end in the belief that it is
better to have a share in the robbery than to stand by with empty hands
or allow oneself to be robbed.

It was a mistake to believe that in a struggle which, according to all
human foresight, might last for several years it would be possible to
dispense with those expedients which the experience of hundreds and even
of thousands of years had proved to be effective in making weak and
unstable men face and fulfil their duty in difficult times and at
moments of great nervous stress.

For the voluntary war hero it is, of course, not necessary to have the
death penalty in the military code, but it is necessary for the cowardly
egoists who value their own lives more than the existence of the
community in the hour of national need. Such weak and characterless
people can be held back from surrendering to their cowardice only by the
application of the heaviest penalties. When men have to struggle with
death every day and remain for weeks in trenches of mire, often very
badly supplied with food, the man who is unsure of himself and begins to
waver cannot be made to stick to his post by threats of imprisonment or
even penal servitude. Only by a ruthless enforcement of the death
penalty can this be effected. For experience shows that at such a time
the recruit considers prison a thousand times more preferable than the
battlefield. In prison at least his precious life is not in danger. The
practical abolition of the death penalty during the war was a mistake
for which we had to pay dearly. Such omission really meant that the
military penal code was no longer recognized as valid. An army of
deserters poured into the stations at the rear or returned home,
especially in 1918, and there began to form that huge criminal
organization with which we were suddenly faced, after November 7th,
1918, and which perpetrated the Revolution.

The Front had nothing to do with all this. Naturally, the soldiers at
the Front were yearning for peace. But it was precisely that fact which
represented a special danger for the Revolution. For when the German
soldiers began to draw near home, after the Armistice, the
revolutionaries were in trepidation and asked the same question again
and again: What will the troops from the Front do? Will the field-greys
stand for it?

During those weeks the Revolution was forced to give itself at least an
external appearance of moderation, if it were not to run the risk of
being wrecked in a moment by a few German divisions. For at that time,
even if the commander of one division alone had made up his mind to
rally the soldiers of his division, who had always remained faithful to
him, in an onslaught to tear down the red flag and put the 'councils' up
against the wall, or, if there was any resistance, to break it with
trench-mortars and hand grenades, that division would have grown into an
army of sixty divisions in less than four weeks. The Jew wire-pullers
were terrified by this prospect more than by anything else; and to
forestall this particular danger they found it necessary to give the
Revolution a certain aspect of moderation. They dared not allow it to
degenerate into Bolshevism, so they had to face the existing conditions
by putting up the hypocritical picture of 'order and tranquillity'.
Hence many important concessions, the appeal to the old civil service
and to the heads of the old Army. They would be needed at least for a
certain time, and only when they had served the purpose of Turks' Heads
could the deserved kick-out be administered with impunity. Then the
Republic would be taken entirely out of the hands of the old servants of
the State and delivered into the claws of the revolutionaries.

They thought that this was the only plan which would succeed in duping
the old generals and civil servants and disarm any eventual opposition
beforehand through the apparently harmless and mild character of the new
regime.

Practical experience has shown to what extent the plan succeeded.

The Revolution, however, was not made by the peaceful and orderly
elements of the nation but rather by rioters, thieves and robbers. And
the way in which the Revolution was developing did not accord with the
intentions of these latter elements; still, on tactical grounds, it was
not possible to explain to them the reasons for the course things were
taking and make that course acceptable.

As Social Democracy gradually gained power it lost more and more the
character of a crude revolutionary party. Of course in their inner
hearts the Social Democrats wanted a revolution; and their leaders had
no other end in view. Certainly not. But what finally resulted was only
a revolutionary programme; but not a body of men who would be able to
carry it out. A revolution cannot be carried through by a party of ten
million members. If such a movement were attempted the leaders would
find that it was not an extreme section of the population on which they
had to depend butrather the broad masses of the middle stratum; hence
the inert masses.

Recognizing all this, already during the war, the Jews caused the famous
split in the Social Democratic Party. While the Social Democratic Party,
conforming to the inertia of its mass following, clung like a leaden
weight on the neck of the national defence, the actively radical
elements were extracted from it and formed into new aggressive columns
for purposes of attack. The Independent Socialist Party and the
Spartacist League were the storm battalions of revolutionary Marxism.
The objective assigned to them was to create a FAIT ACCOMPLI, on the
grounds of which the masses of the Social Democratic Party could take
their stand, having been prepared for this event long beforehand. The
feckless bourgeoisie had been estimated at its just value by the
Marxists and treated EN CANAILLE. Nobody bothered about it, knowing well
that in their canine servility the representatives of an old and
worn-out generation would not be able to offer any serious resistance.

When the Revolution had succeeded and its artificers believed that the
main pillars of the old State had been broken down, the Army returning
from the Front began to appear in the light of a sinister sphinx and
thus made it necessary to slow down the national course of the
Revolution. The main body of the Social Democratic horde occupied the
conquered positions, and the Independent Socialist and Spartacist storm
battalions were side-tracked.

But that did not happen without a struggle.

The activist assault formations that had started the Revolution were
dissatisfied and felt that they had been betrayed. They now wanted to
continue the fight on their own account. But their illimitable
racketeering became odious even to the wire-pullers of the Revolution.
For the Revolution itself had scarcely been accomplished when two camps
appeared. In the one camp were the elements of peace and order; in the
other were those of blood and terror. Was it not perfectly natural that
our bourgeoisie should rush with flying colours to the camp of peace and
order? For once in their lives their piteous political organizations
found it possible to act, inasmuch as the ground had been prepared for
them on which they were glad to get a new footing; and thus to a certain
extent they found themselves in coalition with that power which they
hated but feared. The German political bourgeoisie achieved the high
honour of being able to associate itself with the accursed Marxist
leaders for the purpose of combating Bolshevism.

Thus the following state of affairs took shape as early as December 1918
and January 1919:

A minority constituted of the worst elements had made the Revolution.
And behind this minority all the Marxist parties immediately fell into
step. The Revolution itself had an outward appearance of moderation,
which aroused against it the enmity of the fanatical extremists. These
began to launch hand-grenades and fire machine-guns, occupying public
buildings, thus threatening to destroy the moderate appearance of the
Revolution. To prevent this terror from developing further a truce was
concluded between the representatives of the new regime and the
adherents of the old order, so as to be able to wage a common fight
against the extremists. The result was that the enemies of the Republic
ceased to oppose the Republic as such and helped to subjugate those who
were also enemies of the Republic, though for quite different reasons.
But a further result was that all danger of the adherents of the old
State putting up a fight against the new was now definitely averted.

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