Part 14 (1/2)
Economically he brings about the destruction of the State by a systematic method of sabotaging social enterprises until these become so costly that they are taken out of the hands of the State and then submitted to the control of Jewish finance. Politically he works to withdraw from the State its means of susbsistence, inasmuch as he undermines the foundations of national resistance and defence, destroys the confidence which the people have in their Government, reviles the past and its history and drags everything national down into the gutter.
Culturally his activity consists in bowdlerizing art, literature and the theatre, holding the expressions of national sentiment up to scorn, overturning all concepts of the sublime and beautiful, the worthy and the good, finally dragging the people to the level of his own low mentality.
Of religion he makes a mockery. Morality and decency are described as antiquated prejudices and thus a systematic attack is made to undermine those last foundations on which the national being must rest if the nation is to struggle for its existence in this world.
(l) Now begins the great and final revolution. As soon as the Jew is in possession of political power he drops the last few veils which have hitherto helped to conceal his features. Out of the democratic Jew, the Jew of the People, arises the 'Jew of the Blood', the tyrant of the peoples. In the course of a few years he endeavours to exterminate all those who represent the national intelligence. And by thus depriving the peoples of their natural intellectual leaders he fits them for their fate as slaves under a lasting despotism.
Russia furnishes the most terrible example of such a slavery. In that country the Jew killed or starved thirty millions of the people, in a bout of savage fanaticism and partly by the employment of inhuman torture. And he did this so that a gang of Jewish literati and financial bandits should dominate over a great people.
But the final consequence is not merely that the people lose all their freedom under the domination of the Jews, but that in the end these parasites themselves disappear. The death of the victim is followed sooner or later by that of the vampire.
If we review all the causes which contributed to bring about the downfall of the German people we shall find that the most profound and decisive cause must be attributed to the lack of insight into the racial problem and especially in the failure to recognize the Jewish danger.
It would have been easy enough to endure the defeats suffered on the battlefields in August 1918. They were nothing when compared with the military victories which our nation had achieved. Our downfall was not the result of those defeats; but we were overthrown by that force which had prepared those defeats by systematically operating for several decades to destroy those political instincts and that moral stamina which alone enable a people to struggle for its existence and therewith secure the right to exist.
By neglecting the problem of preserving the racial foundations of our national life, the old Empire abrogated the sole right which ent.i.tles a people to live on this planet. Nations that make mongrels of their people, or allow their people to be turned into mongrels, sin against the Will of Eternal Providence. And thus their overthrow at the hands of a stronger opponent cannot be looked upon as a wrong but, on the contrary, as a restoration of justice. If a people refuses to guard and uphold the qualities with which it has been endowed by Nature and which have their roots in the racial blood, then such a people has no right to complain over the loss of its earthly existence.
Everything on this earth can be made into something better. Every defeat may be made the foundation of a future victory. Every lost war may be the cause of a later resurgence. Every visitation of distress can give a new impetus to human energy. And out of every oppression those forces can develop which bring about a new re-birth of the national soul - provided always that the racial blood is kept pure.
But the loss of racial purity will wreck inner happiness for ever. It degrades men for all time to come. And the physical and moral consequences can never be wiped out.
If this unique problem be studied and compared with the other problems of life we shall easily recognize how small is their importance in comparison with this. They are all limited to time; but the problem of the maintenance or loss of the purity of the racial blood will last as long as man himself lasts.
All the symptoms of decline which manifested themselves already in pre-war times can be traced back to the racial problem.
Whether one is dealing with questions of general law, or monstrous excrescences in economic life, of phenomena which point to a cultural decline or political degeneration, whether it be a question of defects in the school-system or of the evil influence which the Press exerts over the adult population - always and everywhere these phenomena are at bottom caused by a lack of consideration for the interests of the race to which one's own nation belongs, or by the failure to recognize the danger that comes from allowing a foreign race to exist within the national body.
That is why all attempts at reform, all inst.i.tutions for social relief, all political striving, all economic progress and all apparent increase in the general stock of knowledge, were doomed to be unproductive of any significant results. The nation, as well as the organization which enables it to exist - namely, the State - were not developing in inner strength and stability, but, on the contrary, were visibly losing their vitality. The false brilliance of the Second Empire could not disguise the inner weakness. And every attempt to invigorate it anew failed because the main and most important problem was left out of consideration.
It would be a mistake to think that the followers of the various political parties which tried to doctor the condition of the German people, or even all their leaders, were bad in themselves or meant wrong. Their activity even at best was doomed to fail, merely because of the fact that they saw nothing but the symptoms of our general malady and they tried to doctor the symptoms while they overlooked the real cause of the disease. If one makes a methodical study of the lines along which the old Empire developed one cannot help seeing, after a careful political a.n.a.lysis, that a process of inner degeneration had already set in even at the time when the united Empire was formed and the German nation began to make rapid external progress. The general situation was declining, in spite of the apparent political success and in spite of the increasing economic wealth. At the elections to the Reichstag the growing number of Marxist votes indicated that the internal breakdown and the political collapse were then rapidly approaching. All the victories of the so-called bourgeois parties were fruitless, not only because they could not prevent the numerical increase in the growing ma.s.s of Marxist votes, even when the bourgeois parties triumphed at the polls, but mainly because they themselves were already infected with the germs of decay. Though quite unaware of it, the bourgeois world was infected from within with the deadly virus of Marxist ideas. The fact that they sometimes openly resisted was to be explained by the compet.i.tive strife among ambitious political leaders, rather than by attributing it to any opposition in principle between adversaries who were determined to fight one another to the bitter end. During all those years only one protagonist was fighting with steadfast perseverance. This was the Jew. The Star of David steadily ascended as the will to national self-preservation declined.
Therefore it was not a solid national phalanx that, of itself and out of its own feeling of solidarity, rushed to the battlefields in August 1914. But it was rather the manifestation of the last flicker from the instinct of national self-preservation against the progress of the paralysis with which the pacifist and Marxist doctrine threatened our people. Even in those days when the destinies of the nation were in the balance the internal enemy was not recognized; therefore all efforts to resist the external enemy were bound to be in vain. Providence did not grant the reward to the victorious sword, but followed the eternal law of retributive justice. A profound recognition of all this was the source of those principles and tendencies which inspire our new movement. We were convinced that only by recognizing such truths could we stop the national decline in Germany and lay a granite foundation on which the State could again be built up, a State which would not be a piece of mechanism alien to our people, const.i.tuted for economic purposes and interests, but an organism created from the soul of the people themselves.
A GERMAN STATE IN A GERMAN NATION.
Chapter Twelve:.
Here at the close of the volume I shall describe the first stage in the progress of our movement and shall give a brief account of the problems we had to deal with during that period. In doing this I have no intention of expounding the ideals which we have set up as the goal of our movement; for these ideals are so momentous in their significance that an exposition of them will need a whole volume. Therefore I shall devote the second volume of this book to a detailed survey of the principles which form the programme of our movement and I shall attempt to draw a picture of what we mean by the word 'State'. When I say 'we' in this connection I mean to include all those hundreds of thousands who have fundamentally the same longing, though in the individual cases they cannot find adequate words to describe the vision that hovers before their eyes. It is a characteristic feature of all great reforms that in the beginning there is only one single protagonist to come forward on behalf of several millions of people. The final goal of a great reformation has often been the object of profound longing on the parts of hundreds of thousands for many centuries before, until finally one among them comes forward as a herald to announce the will of that mult.i.tude and become the standard-bearer of the old yearning, which he now leads to a realization in a new idea.
The fact that millions of our people yearn at heart for a radical change in our present conditions is proved by the profound discontent which exists among them. This feeling is manifested in a thousand ways. Some express it in a form of discouragement and despair. Others show it in resentment and anger and indignation. Among some the profound discontent calls forth an att.i.tude of indifference, while it urges others to violent manifestations of wrath. Another indication of this feeling may be seen on the one hand in the att.i.tude of those who abstain from voting at elections and, on the other, in the large numbers of those who side with the fanatical extremists of the left wing.
To these latter people our young movement had to appeal first of all. It was not meant to be an organization for contented and satisfied people, but was meant to gather in all those who were suffering from profound anxiety and could find no peace, those who were unhappy and discontented. It was not meant to float on the surface of the nation but rather to push its roots deep among the ma.s.ses.
Looked at from the purely political point of view, the situation in 1918 was as follows: A nation had been torn into two parts. One part, which was by far the smaller of the two, contained the intellectual cla.s.ses of the nation from which all those employed in physical labour were excluded. On the surface these intellectual cla.s.ses appeared to be national-minded, but that word meant nothing else to them except a very vague and feeble concept of the duty to defend what they called the interests of the State, which in turn seemed identical with those of the dynastic regime. This cla.s.s tried to defend its ideas and reach its aims by carrying on the fight with the aid of intellectual weapons, which could be used only here and there and which had only a superficial effect against the brutal measures employed by the adversaries, in the face of which the intellectual weapons were of their very nature bound to fail. With one violent blow the cla.s.s which had hitherto governed was now struck down. It trembled with fear and accepted every humiliation imposed on it by the merciless victor.
Over against this cla.s.s stood the broad ma.s.ses of manual labourers who were organized in movements with a more or less radically Marxist tendency. These organized ma.s.ses were firmly determined to break any kind of intellectual resistance by the use of brute force. They had no nationalist tendencies whatsoever and deliberately repudiated the idea of advancing the interests of the nation as such. On the contrary, they promoted the interests of the foreign oppressor. Numerically this cla.s.s embraced the majority of the population and, what is more important, included all those elements of the nation without whose collaboration a national resurgence was not only a practical impossibility but was even inconceivable.
For already in 1918 one thing had to be clearly recognized; namely, that no resurgence of the German nation could take place until we had first restored our national strength to face the outside world. For this purpose arms are not the preliminary necessity, though our bourgeois 'statesmen' always blathered about it being so; what was wanted was will-power. At one time the German people had more than sufficient military armament. And yet they were not able to defend their liberty because they lacked those energies which spring from the instinct of national self-preservation and the will to hold on to one's own. The best armament is only dead and worthless material as long as the spirit is wanting which makes men willing and determined to avail themselves of such weapons. Germany was rendered defenceless not because she lacked arms, but because she lacked the will to keep her arms for the maintenance of her people.
To-day our Left-wing politicians in particular are constantly insisting that their craven-hearted and obsequious foreign policy necessarily results from the disarmament of Germany, whereas the truth is that this is the policy of traitors. To all that kind of talk the answer ought to be: No, the contrary is the truth. Your action in delivering up the arms was dictated by your anti-national and criminal policy of abandoning the interests of the nation. And now you try to make people believe that your miserable whining is fundamentally due to the fact that you have no arms. Just like everything else in your conduct, this is a lie and a falsification of the true reason.
But the politicians of the Right deserve exactly the same reproach. It was through their miserable cowardice that those ruffians of Jews who came into power in 1918 were able to rob the nation of its arms. The conservative politicians have neither right nor reason on their side when they appeal to disarmament as the cause which compelled them to adopt a policy of prudence (that is to say, cowardice). Here, again, the contrary is the truth. Disarmament is the result of their lack of spirit.
Therefore the problem of restoring Germany's power is not a question of how can we manufacture arms but rather a question of how we can produce that spirit which enables a people to bear arms. Once this spirit prevails among a people then it will find a thousand ways, each of which leads to the necessary armament. But a coward will not fire even a single shot when attacked though he may be armed with ten pistols. For him they are of less value than a blackthorn in the hands of a man of courage.
The problem of re-establis.h.i.+ng the political power of our nation is first of all a problem of restoring the instinct of national self-preservation for if no other reason than that every preparatory step in foreign policy and every foreign judgment on the worth of a State has been proved by experience to be grounded not on the material size of the armament such a State may possess but rather on the moral capacity for resistance which such a State has or is believed to have. The question whether or not a nation be desirable as an ally is not so much determined by the inert ma.s.s of arms which it has at hand but by the obvious presence of a st.u.r.dy will to national self-preservation and a heroic courage which will fight through to the last breath. For an alliance is not made between arms but between men.
The British nation will therefore be considered as the most valuable ally in the world as long as it can be counted upon to show that brutality and tenacity in its government, as well as in the spirit of the broad ma.s.ses, which enables it to carry through to victory any struggle that it once enters upon, no matter how long such a struggle may last, or however great the sacrifice that may be necessary or whatever the means that have to be employed; and all this even though the actual military equipment at hand may be utterly inadequate when compared with that of other nations.
Once it is understood that the restoration of Germany is a question of reawakening the will to political self-preservation we shall see quite clearly that it will not be enough to win over those elements that are already national-minded but that the deliberately anti-national ma.s.ses must be converted to believe in the national ideals.
A young movement that aims at re-establis.h.i.+ng a German State with full sovereign powers will therefore have to make the task of winning over the broad ma.s.ses a special objective of its plan of campaign. Our so-called 'national bourgeoisie' are so lamentably supine, generally speaking, and their national spirit appears so f.e.c.kless, that we may feel sure they will offer no serious resistance against a vigorous national foreign - or domestic policy. Even though the narrow-minded German bourgeoisie should keep up a pa.s.sive resistance when the hour of deliverance is at hand, as they did in Bismarck's time, we shall never have to fear any active resistance on their part, because of their recognized proverbial cowardice.
It is quite different with the ma.s.ses of our population, who are imbued with ideas of internationalism. Through the primitive roughness of their natures they are disposed to accept the preaching of violence, while at the same time their Jewish leaders are more brutal and ruthless. They will crush any attempt at a German revival, just as they smashed the German Army by striking at it from the rear. Above all, these organized ma.s.ses will use their numerical majority in this Parliamentarian State not only to hinder any national foreign policy, but also to prevent Germany from restoring her political power and therewith her prestige abroad. Thus she becomes excluded from the ranks of desirable allies. For it is not we ourselves alone who are aware of the handicap that results from the existence of fifteen million Marxists, democrats, pacifists and followers of the Centre, in our midst, but foreign nations also recognize this internal burden which we have to bear and take it into their calculations when estimating the value of a possible alliance with us. n.o.body would wish to form an alliance with a State where the active portion of the population is at least pa.s.sively opposed to any resolute foreign policy.
The situation is made still worse by reason of the fact that the leaders of those parties which were responsible for the national betrayal are ready to oppose any and every attempt at a revival, simply because they want to retain the positions they now hold. According to the laws that govern human history it is inconceivable that the German people could resume the place they formerly held without retaliating on those who were both cause and occasion of the collapse that involved the ruin of our State. Before the judgment seat of posterity November 1918 will not be regarded as a simple rebellion but as high treason against the country.
Therefore it is not possible to think of re-establis.h.i.+ng German sovereignty and political independence without at the same time reconstructing a united front within the nation, by a peaceful conversion of the popular will.
Looked at from the standpoint of practical ways and means, it seems absurd to think of liberating Germany from foreign bondage as long as the ma.s.ses of the people are not willing to support such an ideal of freedom. After carefully considering this problem from the purely military point of view, everybody, and in particular every officer, will agree that a war cannot be waged against an outside enemy by battalions of students; but that, together with the brains of the nation, the physical strength of the nation is also necessary. Furthermore it must be remembered that the nation would be robbed of its irreplaceable a.s.sets by a national defence in which only the intellectual circles, as they are called, were engaged. The young German intellectuals who joined the volunteer regiments and fell on the battlefields of Flanders in the autumn of 1914 were bitterly missed later on. They were the dearest treasure which the nation possessed and their loss could not be made good in the course of the war. And it is not only the struggle itself which could not be waged if the working ma.s.ses of the nation did not join the storm battalions, but the necessary technical preparations could not be made without a unified will and a common front within the nation itself. Our nation which has to exist disarmed, under the thousand eyes appointed by the Versailles Peace Treaty, cannot make any technical preparations for the recovery of its freedom and human independence until the whole army of spies employed within the country is cut down to those few whose inborn baseness would lead them to betray anything and everything for the proverbial thirty pieces of silver. But we can deal with such people. The millions, however, who are opposed to every kind of national revival simply because of their political opinions, const.i.tute an insurmountable obstacle. At least the obstacle will remain insurmountable as long as the cause of their opposition, which is international Marxism, is not overcome and its teachings banished from both their hearts and heads.
From whatever point of view we may examine the possibility of recovering our independence as a State and a people, whether we consider the problem from the standpoint of technical rearmament or from that of the actual struggle itself, the necessary pre-requisite always remains the same. This pre-requisite is that the broad ma.s.ses of the people must first be won over to accept the principle of our national independence.
If we do not regain our external freedom every step forward in domestic reform will at best be an augmentation of our productive powers for the benefit of those nations that look upon us as a colony to be exploited. The surplus produced by any so-called improvement would only go into the hands of our international controllers and any social betterment would at best increase the product of our labour in favour of those people. No cultural progress can be made by the German nation, because such progress is too much bound up with the political independence and dignity of a people.
Therefore, as we can find a satisfactory solution for the problem of Germany's future only by winning over the broad ma.s.ses of our people for the support of the national idea, this work of education must be considered the highest and most important task to be accomplished by a movement which does not strive merely to satisfy the needs of the moment but considers itself bound to examine in the light of future results everything it decides to do or refrain from doing.
As early as 1919 we were convinced that the nationalization of the ma.s.ses would have to const.i.tute the first and paramount aim of the new movement. From the tactical standpoint, this decision laid a certain number of obligations on our shoulders.
(1) No social sacrifice could be considered too great in this effort to win over the ma.s.ses for the national revival.
In the field of national economics, whatever concessions are granted to-day to the employees are negligible when compared with the benefit to be reaped by the whole nation if such concessions contribute to bring back the ma.s.ses of the people once more to the bosom of their own nation. Nothing but meanness and shortsightedness, which are characteristics that unfortunately are only too prevalent among our employers, could prevent people from recognizing that in the long run no economic improvement and therefore no rise in profits are possible unless internal solidarity be restored among the bulk of the people who make up our nation.
If the German trades unions had defended the interests of the working-cla.s.ses uncompromisingly during the War; if even during the War they had used the weapon of the strike to force the industrialists - who were greedy for higher dividends - to grant the demands of the workers for whom the unions acted; if at the same time they had stood up as good Germans for the defence of the nation as stoutly as for their own claims, and if they had given to their country what was their country's due - then the War would never have been lost. How ludicrously insignificant would all, and even the greatest, economic concession have been in face of the tremendous importance of such a victory.
For a movement which would restore the German worker to the German people it is therefore absolutely necessary to understand clearly that economic sacrifices must be considered light in such cases, provided of course that they do not go the length of endangering the independence and stability of the national economic system.
(2) The education of the ma.s.ses along national lines can be carried out only indirectly, by improving their social conditions; for only by such a process can the economic conditions be created which enable everybody to share in the cultural life of the nation.
(3) The nationalization of the broad ma.s.ses can never be achieved by half-measures - that is to say, by feebly insisting on what is called the objective side of the question - but only by a ruthless and devoted insistence on the one aim which must be achieved. This means that a people cannot be made 'national' according to the signification attached to that word by our bourgeois cla.s.s to-day - that is to say, nationalism with many reservations - but national in the vehement and extreme sense. Poison can be overcome only by a counter-poison, and only the supine bourgeois mind could think that the Kingdom of Heaven can be attained by a compromise.
The broad ma.s.ses of a nation are not made up of professors and diplomats. Since these ma.s.ses have only a poor acquaintance with abstract ideas, their reactions lie more in the domain of the feelings, where the roots of their positive as well as their negative att.i.tudes are implanted. They are susceptible only to a manifestation of strength which comes definitely either from the positive or negative side, but they are never susceptible to any half-hearted att.i.tude that wavers between one pole and the other. The emotional grounds of their att.i.tude furnish the reason for their extraordinary stability. It is always more difficult to fight successfully against Faith than against knowledge. Love is less subject to change than respect. Hatred is more lasting than mere aversion. And the driving force which has brought about the most tremendous revolutions on this earth has never been a body of scientific teaching which has gained power over the ma.s.ses, but always a devotion which has inspired them, and often a kind of hysteria which has urged them to action.
Whoever wishes to win over the ma.s.ses must know the key that will open the door to their hearts. It is not objectivity, which is a f.e.c.kless att.i.tude, but a determined will, backed up by force, when necessary.
(4) The soul of the ma.s.ses can be won only if those who lead the movement for that purpose are determined not merely to carry through the positive struggle for their own aims but are also determined to destroy the enemy that opposes them.