less immense surprises, but instead are integrated into a natural, indeed self evident, system of fundamental, well grounded, permanent development of a Folk.
That present State leaders pay little attention to this viewpoint is partly due to the nature of democracy, to which they owe their very existence, but secondly to the fact that the State has become a purely formal mechanism which appears to them as an aim in itself, which must not in the least coincide with the interests of a specific Folk. Folk and State have become two different concepts. It will be the task of the National Socialist Movement to bring about a fundamental change here.
Chapter 4
ELEMENTS OF FOREIGN POLICY
Consequently if the task of domestic policy — besides the obvious one of satisfying the so called questions of the day — must be the steeling and strengthening of a nation by means of a systematic cultivation and promotion of its inner values, the task of foreign policy is to correspond to and collaborate with this policy in order to create and to secure the vital prerequisites abroad. A healthy foreign policy, therefore, will always keep the winning of the basis of a Folk’s sustenance immovably in sight as its ultimate goal. Domestic policy must secure the inner strength of a Folk so that it can assert itself in the sphere of foreign policy. Foreign policy must secure the life of a Folk for its domestic political development. Hence domestic policy and foreign policy are not only most closely linked, but must also mutually complement one another. The fact that in the great conjunctures of human history domestic policy as well as foreign policy has paid homage to other principles is not at all a proof of soundness, but rather proves the error of such action. Innumerable Nations and States have perished as a warning example to us, because they did not follow the above mentioned elementary principles. How little man thinks of the possibility of death during his life is a noteworthy fact. And how little he arranges the details of his life in accordance with the experiences that innumerable men before him had to have and which, as such, are all known to him. There are always exceptions who bear this in mind and who, by virtue of their personality, try to force on their fellow men the laws of life that lay at the base of the experiences of past epochs. Hence it is noteworthy that innumerable hygienic measures which perforce redound to the advantage of a Folk, and which individually are uncomfortable, must be formally forced upon the main body of a Folk through the autocratic standing of individual persons, in order however to disappear again when the authority of the personality is extinguished through the mass insanity of democracy. The average man has the greatest fear of death and in reality thinks of it most rarely. The important man concerns himself with it most emphatically, and nevertheless fears it the least. The one lives blindly from day to day, sins heedlessly, in order suddenly to collapse before the inevitable. The other observes its coming most carefully and, to be sure, looks it in the eye with calm and composure.
Such is exactly the case in the lives of nations. It is often terrible to see how little men want to learn from history, how with such imbecilic indifference they gloss over their experiences, how thoughtlessly they sin without considering that it is precisely through their sins that so and so many Nations and States have perished, indeed vanished from the Earth. And indeed how little they concern themselves with the fact that even for the short time span for which we possess an insight into history, States and Nations have arisen which were sometimes almost gigantic in size, but which two thousand years later vanished without a trace, that world powers once ruled cultural spheres of which only Sagas give us any information, that giant cities have sunk into ruins, and that their rubble heap has hardly survived to show presentday mankind at least the site on which they were located. The cares, hardships and sufferings of these millions and millions of individual men, who as a living substance were at one time the bearers and victims of these events, are almost beyond all imagination.
Unknown men. Unknown soldiers of history. And truly, how indifferent is the present. How unfounded its eternal optimism, and how ruinous its wilful ignorance, its incapacity to see, and its unwillingness to learn. And if it depended on the broad masses, the game of the child playing with the fire with which he is unfamiliar would repeat itself uninterruptedly and also to an infinitely greater extent. Hence it is the task of men who feel themselves called as educators of a Folk to learn on their own from history, and to apply their knowledge in a practical manner [now], without regard to the view, understanding, ignorance or even the refusal of the mass.
The greatness of a man is all the more important, the greater his courage, in opposition to a generally prevailing but ruinous view, to lead by his better insight to general victory. His victory will appear all the greater, the more enormous the resistances which had to be overcome, and the more hopeless the struggle seemed at first.
The National Socialist Movement would have no right to regard itself as a truly great phenomenon in the life of the German Folk, if it could not muster the courage to learn from the experiences of the past, and to force the laws of life it represents on the German Folk despite all resistance. As powerful as its inner reform work will be in this connection, equally it must [may] never forget that in the long run there will be no resurgence of our Folk if its activity in the sphere of foreign policy does not succeed in securing the general precondition for the sustenance of our Folk. Hence it has become the fighter for freedom and bread in the highest sense of the word.
Freedom and bread is the simplest and yet, in reality, the greatest foreign policy slogan that can exist for any Folk: the freedom of being able to order and regulate the life of a Folk, according to its own interests, and the bread that this Folk requires for its existence.
If today, therefore, I come forward as a critic of our Folk’s leadership in the sphere of foreign policy both past and present, I am aware that the errors which I see today have also been seen by others. What distinguishes me from the latter perhaps is only the fact that in most cases it has only involved critical perceptions having no practical consequences, whereas, on the basis of my insight into the errors and faults of former and present German domestic and foreign policy, I strive to deduce proposals for a change and improvement and to forge the instrument with which these changes and improvements can some day be realised.
For example, the foreign policy of the Wilhelminian period was in many cases viewed by not a few people as catastrophic and characterised accordingly. Innumerable warnings came, especially from the circles of the Pan German League of that time, which were justified in the highest sense of the word. I can put myself in the tragic situation that befell all these men who raised their voices in warning, and who saw how and in what a Folk perishes, and yet were not able to help. In the last decades of the unfortunate foreign policy of the pre War period in Germany, parliament, that is, democracy, was not powerful enough to choose the heads for the political leadership of the Reich by itself. This was still an imperial right, whose formal existence no one yet dared to shake. But the influence of democracy had grown so strong, however, that a certain direction already seemed to be prescribed to the imperial decisions. Hence this had disastrous consequences, for now a national minded man who raised his voice in warning, on the one hand, could no longer count on being invested with a very responsible post against the pronounced tendency of democracy, whereas, conversely, on the basis of general patriotic ideas, he could not fight against His Majesty The Kaiser with the final weapon of opposition.
The idea of a March On Rome in pre War Germany would have been absurd. Thus the national opposition found itself in the worst of situations. Democracy had not yet triumphed, but it already stood in a furious struggle against the monarchic conceptions of government. The monarchical State itself responded to the struggle of democracy, not with the determination to destroy the latter, but rather with endless concessions.
Anyone who at that time took a stand against one of the two institutions ran the danger of being attacked by both. Anyone who opposed an imperial decision on national grounds was proscribed by patriotic circles as much as he was abused by the adherents of democracy. Anyone who took a position against democracy was fought by democracy and left in the lurch by the patriots. Indeed, he ran the danger of being most ignominiously betrayed by German officialdom in the wretched hope that through such a sacrifice it could gain Jehovah’s approval, and temporarily stop the yelping of the pack of Jewish press hounds. Under the conditions of that time, there was no prospect at hand of making one’s way to a responsible position in the leadership of the German Government against the will of the democrats or against the will of His Majesty The Kaiser, and thereby being able to change the course of foreign policy. Further, this led to the fact that German foreign policy could be contested exclusively on paper, which consequently launched a criticism that necessarily took on the characteristic features of journalism, the longer it continued. The consequence of this, however, was that increasingly less value was placed on positive proposals, in view of the lack of any possibility of their realisation, whereas the purely critical consideration of foreign policy occasioned the innumerable objections that one could adduce in all their fullness, all the more so
