THE
folkish state, a general picture of which I have attempted
to draw in broad outlines, will not be realized by the mere
knowledge of what is necessary to this state. It is not enough
to know how a folkish state should look. Far more important
is the program for its creation. We may not expect the present
parties, which after all are primarily beneficiaries of the
present state, to arrive of their own accord at a change of
orientation and of their own free will to modify their present
attitude. What makes this all the more impossible is that
their real leading elements are always Jews and only Jews.
And the development we are going through today, if continued
unobstructed, would fulfill the Jewish prophecy - the Jew
would really devour the peoples of the earth, would become
their master.
Thus,
confronting the millions of German 'bourgeois' and 'proletarians,'
who for the most part, from cowardice coupled with stupidity,
trot toward their ruin, he pursues his way inexorably, in
the highest consciousness of his future goal. A party which
is led by him can, therefore, stand for no other interests
beside his interests; and with the concerns of Aryan nations,
these have nothing in common.
And
so, if we wish to transform the ideal image of a folkish state
into practical reality, we must, independent of the powers
that have thus far ruled public life, seek a new force that
is willing and able to take up the struggle for such an idea.
For it will take a struggle, in view of the fact that the
first task is not creation of a folkish state conception,
but above all elimination of the existing Jewish one. As so
frequently in history, the main difficulty lies, not in the
form of the new state of things, but in making place for it.
Prejudices and interests unite in a solid phalanx and attempt
with all possible means to prevent the victory of an idea
that is displeasing to them or that menaces them.
And
so, unfortunately, the fighter for such a new idea, important
as it may be to put positive emphasis on it, is forced to
carry through first of all the negative part of the fight,
that part which should lead to the elimination of the present
state of affairs.
A
young doctrine of great and new fundamental significance will,
displeasing as this may be to the individual, be forced to
employ as its first weapon the probe of criticism in
all its sharpness.
It
indicates a lack of deep insight into historical developments
when today people who call themselves folkish make a great
point of assuring us over and over that they do not plan to
engage in negative criticism, but only in constructive
work; this absurd childish stammering is 'folkish' in
the worst sense and shows how little trace the history even
of their own times has left in these minds. Marxism
also had a goal, and it, too, has a constructive activity
(even if it is only to erect a despotism of international
world Jewish finance); but previously, nevertheless, it practiced
criticism for seventy years, annihilating, disintegrating
criticism, and again criticism, which continued until the
old state was undermined by this persistent corrosive acid
and brought to collapse. Only then did its actual 'construction'
begin. And that was self-evident, correct and logical. An
existing condition is not eliminated just by emphasizing and
arguing for a future one. For it is not to be presumed that
the adherents, let alone the beneficiaries of the condition
now existing, could all be converted and won over to the new
one merely by demonstrating its necessity. On the contrary,
it is only too possible that in this case two conditions will
remain in existence side by side, and that the so-called philosophy
will become a party, unable to raise itself above its
limitations. For the philosophy is intolerant; it cannot content
itself with the role of one 'party beside others,' but imperiously
demands, not only its own exclusive and unlimited recognition,
but the complete transformation of all public life in accordance
with its views. It can, therefore, not tolerate the simultaneous
continuance of a body representing the former condition.
This
is equally true of religions.
Christianity
could not content itself with building up its own altar; it
was absolutely forced to undertake the destruction of the
heathen altars. Only from this fanatical intolerance could
its apodictic faith take form; this intolerance is, in fact,
its absolute presupposition.
The
objection may very well be raised that such phenomena in world
history arise for the most part from specifically Jewish modes
of thought, in fact, that this type of intolerance and fanaticism
positively embodies the Jewish nature. This may be a thousand
times true; we may deeply regret this fact and establish with
justifiable loathing that its appearance in the history of
mankind is something that was previously alien to history
- yet this does not alter the fact that this condition is
with us today. The men who want to redeem our German people
from its present condition have no need to worry their heads
thinking how lovely it would be if this and that did not exist
: they must try to ascertain how the given condition can be
eliminated. A philosophy filled with infernal intolerance
will only be broken by a new idea, driven forward by the same
spirit, championed by the same mighty will, and at the same
time pure and absolutely genuine in itself.
The
individual may establish with pain today that with the appearance
of Christianity the first spiritual terror entered into the
far freer ancient world, but he will not be able to contest
the {act that since then the world has been afflicted and
dominated by this coercion, and that coercion is broken only
by coercion, and terror only by terror. Only then can a new
state of affairs be constructively created.
Political
parties are inclined to compromises; philosophies never. Political
parties even reckon with opponents; philosophies proclaim
their infallibility.
Political
parties, too, almost always have the original purpose of attaining
exclusive despotic domination; a slight impulse toward a philosophy
is almost always inherent in them. Yet the very narrowness
of their program robs them of the heroism which a philosophy
demands. The conciliatory nature of their will attracts small
and weakly spirits with which no crusades can be fought. And
so, for the most part, they soon bog down in their own pitiful
pettiness: They abandon the struggle for a philosophy and
attempt instead, by so-called 'positive collaboration,'
to conquer as quickly as possible a little place at the feeding
trough of existing institutions and to keep it as long as
possible. That is their entire endeavor. And if they should
be pushed away from the general feeding crib by a somewhat
brutal competing boarder, their thoughts and actions are directed
solely, whether by force or trickery, toward pushing their
way back to the front of the hungry herd and finally, even
at the cost of their holy conviction, toward refreshing themselves
at the beloved swill pail. Jackals of politics!
Since
a philosophy of life is never willing to share with another,
it cannot be willing either to collaborate in an existing
régime which it condemns, but feels obligated to combat this
régime and the whole hostile world of ideas with all possible
means; that is, to prepare its downfall.
This
purely destructive fight - the danger of which is at once
recognized by all others and which consequently encounters
general resistance - as well as the positive struggle, attacking
to make way for its own world of ideas, requires determined
fighters. And so a philosophy will lead its idea to victory
only if it unites the most courageous and energetic elements
of its epoch and people in its ranks, and puts them into the
solid forms of a fighting organization. For this, however,
taking these elements into consideration, it must pick out
certain ideas from its general world picture and clad them
in a form which, in its precise, slogan-like brevity, seems
suited to serve as a creed for a new community of men. While
the program of a solely political party is the formula
for a healthy outcome of the next elections, the program of
a philosophy is the formulation of a declaration of
war against the existing order against a definite state of
affairs; in short, against an existing view of life in general.
It
is not necessary that every individual fighting for this philosophy
should obtain a full insight and precise knowledge of the
ultimate ideas and thought processes of the leaders of the
movement. What is necessary is that some few, really great
ideas be made clear to him, and that the essential fundamental
lines be burned inextinguishably into him, so that he is entirely
permeated by the necessity of the victory of his movement
and its doctrine. The individual soldier is not initiated
into the thought processes of higher strategy either. He is,
on the contrary, trained in rigid discipline and fanatical
faith in the justice and power of his cause, and taught to
stake his life for it without reservation; the same must occur
with the individual adherent of a movement of great scope,
great future, and the greatest will.
Useless
as an army would be, whose individual soldiers were all generals,
even if it were only by virtue of their education and their
insight, equally useless is a political movement, fighting
for a philosophy, if it is only a reservoir of 'bright'
people. No, it also needs the primitive soldier, since otherwise
an inner discipline is unobtainable.
It
lies in the nature of an organization that it can only
exist if a broad mass, with a more emotional attitude, serves
a high intellectual leadership. A company of two hundred men
of equal intellectual ability would in the long run be harder
to discipline than a company of a hundred and ninety intellectually
less capable men and ten with higher education.
Social
Democracy in its day drew the greatest profit from this fact.
It took members of the broad masses, discharged from military
service where they had been trained in discipline! and drew
them into its equally rigid party discipline. And its organization
represented an army of officers and soldiers. The German manual
worker became the soldier, the Jewish intellectual
the officer; and the German trade-union officials can
be regarded as the corps of noncommissioned officers. The
thing which our bourgeoisie always viewed with headshaking,
the fact that only the so-called uneducated masses belonged
to the Marxist movement, was in reality the basis for its
success. For while the bourgeois parties with their one-sided
intellectualism constituted a worthless undisciplined band,
the Marxists with their unintellectual human material formed
an army of party soldiers, who obeyed their Jewish leader
as blindly as formerly their German officer. The German bourgeoisie,
which as a matter of principle never concerned itself with
psychological problems because it stood so high above them,
found it, here too, unnecessary to reflect, and recognize
the deeper meaning, as well as the secret danger, of this
fact. They thought, on the contrary, that a political movement,
formed only from the circles of the 'intelligentsia,' is for
this very reason more valuable and possesses a greater claim,
in fact a greater likelihood, of taking over the government
than the uneducated masses. They never understood that
the strength of a political party lies by no means in the
greatest possible independent intellect of the individual
members, but rather in the disciplined obedience with which
its members follow the intellectual leadership. The decisive
factor is the leadership itself. If two bodies of troops battle
each other, the one to conquer will not be the one in which
every individual has received the highest strategic training,
but that one which has the most superior leadership
and at the same time the most disciplined, blindly obedient,
best-drilled troop.
This
is the basic insight which we must constantly bear in mind
in examining the possibility of transforming a philosophy
into action.
And
so, if, in order to carry a philosophy to victory, we must
transform it into a fighting movement, logically the program
of the movement must take into consideration the human material
that stands at its disposal. As immutable as the ultimate
aims and the leading ideas must be, with equal wisdom and
psychological soundness the recruiting program must be adapted
to the minds of those without whose aid the most beautiful
idea would remain eternally an idea.
If
the folkish idea wants to arrive at a clear from the unclear
will of today, it must pick out from the broad world of its
ideas certain guiding principles, suited in their essence
and content to binding a broad mass of men, that mass which
alone guarantees the struggle for this idea as laid down in
our philosophy.
Therefore,
the program of the new movement was summed up in a few guiding
principles, twenty-five in all. They were devised to give,
primarily to the man of the people, a rough picture of the
movement's aims. They are in a sense a political creed,
which on the one hand recruits for the movement and on the
other is suited to unite and weld together by a commonly recognized
(obligation those who have been recruited.
Here
the following insight must never leave us: Since the so-called
program of the movement is absolutely correct in its
ultimate aims, but in its formulation had to take psychological
forces into account, in the course of time the conviction
may well arise that in individual instances certain of the
guiding principles ought perhaps to be framed differently,
given a better formulation. Every attempt to do this, however,
usually works out catastrophically. For in this way something
which should be unshakable is submitted to discussion, which,
as soon as a single point is deprived of its dogmatic, creedlike
formulation, will not automatically yield a new, better, and
above all unified, formulation, but will far sooner lead to
endless debates and a general confusion. In such a case, it
always remains to be considered which is better: a new, happier
formulation which causes an argument within the movement,
or a form which at the moment may not be the very best, but
which represents a solid, unshakable, inwardly unified organism.
And any examination will show that the latter is preferable.
For, since in changes it is always merely the outward formulation
that is involved, such corrections will again and again seem
possible or desirable. Finally, in view of the superficial
character of men, there is the great danger that they will
see the essential task of a movement in this purely outward
formulation of a program. Then the will and the power
to fight for an idea recede, and the activity which should
turn outward will wear itself out in inner programmatic squabbles.
With
a doctrine that is really sound in its broad outlines, it
is less harmful to retain a formulation, even if it should
not entirely correspond to reality, than by improving it to
expose what hitherto seemed a granite principle of the movement
to general discussion with all its evil consequences. Above
all, it is impossible as long as a movement is still fighting
for victory. For how shall we fill people with blind faith
in the correctness of a doctrine, if we ourselves spread uncertainty
and doubt by constant changes in its outward structure?
The
truth is that the most essential substance must never be sought
in the outward formulation, but only and always in the inner
sense. This is immutable; and in the interest of this immutable
inner sense, we can only wish that the movement preserve the
necessary strength to fight for it by avoiding all actions
that splinter and create uncertainty.
Here,
too, we can learn by the example of the Catholic Church. Though
its doctrinal edifice, and in part quite superfluously, comes
into collision with exact science and research, it is none
the less unwilling to sacrifice so much as one little syllable
of its dogmas. It has recognized quite correctly that its
power of resistance does not lie in its lesser or greater
adaptation to the scientific findings of the moment, which
in reality are always fluctuating, but rather in rigidly holding
to dogmas once established, for it is only such dogmas which
lend to the whole body the character of a faith. And so today
it stands more firmly than ever. It can be prophesied that
in exactly the same measure in which appearances evade us,
it will gain more and more blind support as a static pole
amid the flight of appearances.
And
so, anyone who really and seriously desires the victory of
a folkish philosophy must not only recognize that, for the
achievement of such a success in the first place, only a movement
capable of struggle is suitable, out that, in the second place,
such a movement itself will stand firm only if based on unshakable
certainty and firmness in its program. It must not run the
risk of making concessions in its formulation to the momentary
spirit of the times, but must retain forever a form that has
once been found favorable, in any case until crowned by victory.
Before that, any attempt to bring about arguments as
to the expediency of this or that point in the program splinters
the solidity and the fighting force of the movement, proportionately
as its adherents participate in such an inner discussion.
This does not mean that an 'improvement' carried out today
might not tomorrow be subjected to renewed critical tests
only to find a better substitute the day after tomorrow. Once
you tear down barriers in this connection, you open a road,
the beginning of which is known, but whose end is lost in
the infinite.
This
important realization had to be applied in the young National
Socialist movement. The National Socialist German Workers'
Party obtained with its program of twenty-five theses a foundation
which must remain unshakable. The task of the present
and future members of our movement must not consist in a critical
revision of these theses, but rather in being bound by them.
For otherwise the next generation in turn could, with the
same right, squander its strength on such purely formal work
within the party, instead of recruiting new adherents and
thereby new forces for the movement. For the great number
of the adherents, the essence of our movement will consist
less in the letter of our theses than in the meaning which
we are able to give them.
It
was to these realizations that the young movement owed its
name; the program was later framed according to them and,
furthermore, the manner of their dissemination is based on
them. In order to help the folkish ideas to victory, a party
of the people had to be created, a party which consists not
only of intellectual leaders, but also of manual workers!
Any
attempt to realize folkish ideas without such a militant organization
would today, just as in the past and in the eternal future,
remain without success.
And so the movement has not only the right, but also
the duty, of regarding itself as a pioneer and representative
of these ideas. To the same degree as the basic ideas of the
National Socialist movement are folkish, the folkish
ideas are National Socialist. And if National Socialism
wants to conquer, it must unconditionally and exclusively
espouse this truth. Here, too, it has not only the right,
but also the duty, of sharply emphasizing the fact that any
attempt to put forward the folkish idea outside the framework
of the National Socialist German Workers' Party is impossible,
and in most cases based on a positive swindle.
If
today anyone reproaches the movement for acting as if the
folkish idea were their monopoly, there is but one answer:
Not
only a monopoly, but a working monopoly.
For
what previously existed under this concept was not suited
to influence the destiny of our people even in the slightest,
since all these ideas lacked a clear and coherent formulation.
For the most part there were single, disconnected ideas of
greater or lesser soundness, not seldom standing in mutual
contradiction, in no case having any inner tie between them.
And even had such a tie been present, in its weakness it would
never have sufficed to orientate and build a movement on.
Only
the National Socialist movement accomplished this.
*...............*...............*
If
today all sorts of clubs and clublets, groups and grouplets,
and, if you will, 'big parties' lay claim to the word 'folkish,'
this in itself is a consequence of the influence of the National
Socialist movement. Without its work, it would never have
occurred to all these organizations even to pronounce the
word 'folkish.' This word would have meant nothing to
them, and especially their leading minds would have stood
in no relation of any sort to this concept. Only the work
of the NSDAP for the first time made this concept a word full
of content, which is now taken up by every conceivable kind
of people; above all, in its own successful campaigning activity,
it snowed and demonstrated the force of these folkish ideas,
so that mere desire to get ahead forces the others, ostensibly
at least, to desire similar ends.
Just
as hitherto they used everything for their petty election
speculation, the folkish concept has today remained for them
only an external empty slogan with which they attempt to counterbalance,
among their own members, the attractive force of the National
Socialist movement. For it is only concern for their own existence
as well as fear of the rise of our new philosophy-borne movement,
whose universal importance as well as its dangerous exclusiveness
they sense, that puts into their mouth words which eight years
ago they did not know, seven years ago ridiculed, six years
ago branded as absurd, five years ago combated, four years
ago hated, three years ago persecuted, only at length to annex
them two years ago, and, combined with the rest of their vocabulary,
to use them as a battle-cry in the fight.
And
even today we must point out again and again that all these
parties lack the slightest idea of what the German people
needs. The most striking proof of this is the superficiality
with which they mouth the word 'folkish.'
And
no less dangerous are all those who horse around pretending
to be folkish, forge fantastic plans, for the most part based
on nothing but some idée fixe, which in itself
might be sound, but in its isolation remains none the less
without any importance for the formation of a great unified
fighting community, and in no case is suited to building one.
These people, who partly from their own thinking, partly from
what they have read, brew up a program, are frequently more
dangerous than the open enemies of the folkish idea. In the
best case they are sterile theoreticians, but for the most
part disastrous braggarts, and not seldom they believe that
with flowing beards and primeval Teutonic gestures they can
mask the intellectual and mental hollowness of their activities
and abilities.
In
contrast to all these useless attempts, it is therefore good
if we recall to mind the time in which the young National
Socialist movement began its struggle.