European culture will be changed, the value of the States decreasing, however, in accordance with the sinking value of the Folks.
A policy which is fundamentally peaceful, on the other hand, would at first make possible the preservation of its best blood carriers, but on the whole it would educate the Folk to a weakness which, one day, must lead to failure, once the basis of existence of such a Folk appears to be threatened. Then, instead of fighting for daily bread, the nation rather will cut down on this bread and, what is even more probable, limit the number of people either through peaceful emigration or through birth control, in order in this way to escape an enormous distress.
Thus the fundamentally peaceful policy becomes a scourge for a Folk. For what, on the one hand, is effected by permanent war, is effected on the other by emigration. Through it a Folk is slowly robbed of its best blood in hundreds of thousands of individual life catastrophes. It is sad to know that our whole national political wisdom, insofar as it does not see any advantage at all in emigration, at most deplores the weakening of the number of its own people, or at best speaks of a cultural fertiliser which is thereby given to other States. What is not perceived is the worst. Since the emigration does not proceed according to territory, nor according to age categories, but instead remains subject to the free rule of fate, it always drains away from a Folk the most courageous and the boldest people, the most determined and most prepared for resistance. The peasant youth who emigrated to America 150 years ago was as much the most determined and most adventurous man in his village as the worker who today goes to Argentina. The coward and weakling would rather die at home than pluck up the courage to earn his bread in an unknown, foreign land. Regardless whether it is distress, misery, political pressure or religious compulsion that weighs on people, it will always be those who are the healthiest and the most capable of resistance who will be able to put up the most resistance. The weakling will always be the first to subject himself. His preservation is generally as little a gain for the victor as the stay at homes are for the mother country. Not seldom, therefore, the law of action is passed on from the mother country to the colonies, because there a concentration of the highest human values has taken place in a wholly natural way. However, the positive gain for the new country is thus a loss for the mother country. As soon as a Folk once loses its best, strongest and most natural forces through emigration in the course of centuries, it will hardly be able any more to muster the inner strength to put up the necessary resistance to fate in critical times. It will then sooner grasp at birth control. Even here the loss in numbers is not decisive, but the terrible fact that, through birth control, the highest potential values of a Folk are destroyed at the very outset. For the greatness and future of a Folk is determined through the sum of its capacities for the highest achievements in all fields. But these are personality values which do not appear linked to primogeniture. If we were to strike off from our German cultural life, from our science, indeed from our whole existence as such, all that which was created by men who were not first born sons, then Germany would hardly be a Balkan State. The German Folk would no longer have any claim to being valued as a cultural Folk. Moreover, it must be considered that, even in the case of those men who as first born nevertheless accomplished great things for their Folk, it must first be examined whether one of their ancestors at least had not been a first born. For when in his whole ancestral series the chain of the first born appears as broken just once [one man], then he also belongs to those who would not have existed had our forefathers always paid homage to this principle. In the life of nations, however, there are no vices of the past that are [would be] right in the present.
The fundamentally peaceful policy, with the subsequent bleeding to death of a nation through emigration and birth control, is likewise all the more catastrophic the more it involves a Folk which is made up of racially unequal elements. For in this case as well the best racial elements are taken away from the Folk through emigration, whereas through birth control in the homeland it is likewise those who in consequence of their racial value have worked themselves up to the higher levels of life and society who are at first affected.
Gradually then their replenishment would follow out of the bled, inferior broad masses, and finally, after centuries, lead to a lowering of the whole value of the Folk altogether. Such a nation will have long ceased to possess real life vitality.
Thus a policy which is fundamentally peaceful will be precisely as harmful and devastating in its effects as a policy which knows war as its only weapon.
Politics must fight about the life of a Folk, and for this life; moreover, it must always choose the weapons of its struggles so that life in the highest sense of the word is served. For one does not make politics in order to be able to die, rather one may only at times call upon men to die so that a nation can live. The aim is the preservation of life and not heroic death, or even cowardly resignation.
Chapter 2
THE NECESSITY OF STRIFE
A Folk’s struggle for existence is first and foremost determined by the following fact:
Regardless of how high the cultural importance of a Folk may be, the struggle for daily bread stands at the forefront of all vital necessities. To be sure, brilliant leaders can hold great goals before a Folk’s eyes, so that it can be further diverted from material things in order to serve higher spiritual ideals. In general, the merely material interest will rise in exact proportion as ideal spiritual outlooks are in the process of disappearing. The more primitive the spiritual life of man, the more animallike he becomes, until finally he regards food intake as the one and only aim of life. Hence a Folk can quite well endure a certain limitation of material goals, as long as it is given compensation in the form of active ideals. But if these ideals are not to result in the ruin of a Folk, they should never exist unilaterally at the expense of material nourishment, so that the health of the nation seems to be threatened by them. For a starved Folk will indeed either collapse in consequence of its physical undernourishment, or perforce bring about a change in its situation. Sooner or later, however, physical collapse brings spiritual collapse in its train. Then all ideals also come to an end. Thus ideals are good and healthy as long as they keep on strengthening a Folk’s inner and general forces, so that in the last analysis they can again be of benefit in waging the struggle for existence. Ideals which do not serve this purpose are evil, though they may appear a thousand times outwardly beautiful, because they remove a Folk more and more from the reality of life.
But the bread which a Folk requires is conditioned by the living space at its disposal. A healthy Folk, at least, will always seek to find the satisfaction of its needs on its own soil. Any other condition is pathological and dangerous, even if it makes possible the sustenance of a Folk for centuries. World trade, world economy, tourist traffic, and so on, and so forth, are all transient means for securing a nation’s sustenance. They are dependent upon factors which are partly beyond calculation, and which, on the other hand, lie beyond a nation’s power. At all times the surest foundation for the existence of a Folk has been its own soil.
But now we must consider the following:
The number of a Folk is a variable factor. It will always rise in a healthy Folk. Indeed, such an increase alone makes it possible to guarantee a Folk’s future in accordance with human calculations. As a result, however, the demand for commodities also grows constantly. In most cases the so called domestic increase in production can satisfy only the rising demands of mankind, but in no way the increasing population. This applies especially to European nations. In the last few centuries, especially in most recent times, the European Folks have increased their needs to such an extent that the rise in European soil productivity, which is possible from year to year under favourable conditions, can hardly keep pace with the growth of general life needs as such. The increase of population can be balanced only through an increase, that is, an enlargement, of living space. Now the number of a Folk is variable, the soil as such, however, remains constant. This means that the increase of a Folk is a process, so self evident because it is so natural, that it is not regarded as something extraordinary. On the other hand, an increase in territory is conditioned by the general distribution of possessions in the world; an act of special revolution, an extraordinary process, so that the ease with which a population increases stands in sharp contrast to the extraordinary difficulty of territorial changes.
Yet the regulation of the relation between population and territory is of tremendous importance for a nation’s existence. Indeed, we can justly say that the whole life struggle of a Folk, in truth, consists in safeguarding the territory it requires as a general prerequisite for the sustenance of the increasing population. Since the population grows incessantly, and the soil as such remains stationary, tensions perforce must gradually arise which at first find expression in distress, and which for a certain time can be balanced through greater industry, more ingenious production methods, or special austerity. But there comes a day when these tensions can no longer be eliminated
