democracy:
When the capable minds of a nation, which are always in the minority, are regarded as only of the same value as all the rest, then genius, capacity, the value of personality are slowly rendered subject to the majority, and this process is then falsely named the rule of the people. For this is not rule of the people, but in reality the rule of stupidity, of mediocrity, of half-heartedness, of cowardice, of weakness, and of inadequacy. It is more the rule of the people to let a people be governed and led in all the walks of life by its most capable individuals, those who are born for the task, rather than… by a majority who in the very nature of things must always find these realms entirely alien to them.
The democratic principle of equality, he continued, was not an inconsequential idea with merely theroretic bearing. Rather, in the short or long run it would extend into all the aspects of life and could slowly poison a nation. Private property, he told the industrialists, was fundamentally incompatible with the principle of democracy. For the logical and moral rationale for private property was the belief that people are different in nature and achievement. At this point, Hitler came to the heart of his argument:
Once this is admitted, it is madness to say: in the economic sphere there are undoubtedly differences in value, but that is not true in the political sphere. It is absurd to build up economic life on the conception of achievement, of the value of personality, and therefore in practice on the authority of personality, but in the political sphere to deny the authority of personality and to thrust into its place the law of the greater number— democracy. In that case there must slowly arise a gulf between the economic and the political point of view, and to bridge that gulf an attempt will be made to assimilate the former to the latter…. In the economic sphere communism is analogous to democracy in the political sphere. We find ourselves today in a period in which these two fundamental principles clash in all areas where they meet….
In the State there is an organization—the army—which cannot in any way be democratized without surrendering its very existence…. The army can exist only if it maintains the absolutely undemocratic principle of unconditional authority proceeding downwards and absolute responsibility proceeding upwards. But the result is that in a State in which the whole political life—beginning with the municipality and ending with the Reichstag—is built upon the conception of democracy, the army is bound to gradually become an alien body.
He cited many other examples to demonstrate this structural contradiction, and then described the menacing spread of the democratic, and hence the communistic, idea in Germany. He dwelt at length on the terrors of Bolshevism:
Can’t you see that Bolshevism today is not merely a mob storming about in some of our streets in Germany but is a conception of the world which is on the point of subjecting to itself the entire Asiatic Continent, and… will gradually shatter the whole world and bring it down in ruins. Bolshevism, if it proceeds unchecked, will transform the world as completely as in times past did Christianity…. Thirty or fifty years count for nothing where fundamental ideologies are at issue. Three hundred years after Christ Christianity was only slowly beginning to establish itself throughout all of southern Europe.
Because of Germany’s intellectual confusion and psychological disintegration, he continued, Communism had already made greater inroads there than in other countries. Millions of persons had been persuaded that Communism was the “logical theoretical complement of their actual, practical economic situation.” It was therefore wrong to seek the causes of the present misery in external factors and to attempt to fight them with external methods. Economic measures or “another twenty emergency decrees” would not be able to halt the disintegration of the nation. The reasons for Germany’s decline were political in nature and therefore required political decisions, nothing less than “a fundamental solution”:
That solution rests upon the realization that economic systems in collapse have always as their forerunner the collapse of the State and not vice versa—that there can be no flourishing economic life which has not before it and behind it the flourishing powerful State as its protection—that there was no Carthaginian economic life without the fleet of Carthage….
But the power and well-being of states, he added, are a consequence of their internal organization, of the “firmness of common views on certain fundamental questions.” Germany is in a state of great internal dissension; approximately half of the people are Bolshevistic, in the broad sense of the word, the other half nationalistic. One half affirm private property; the other half regard it as a kind of theft. One half consider treason a crime, the other half a duty. In order to halt this decomposition and to overcome Germany’s impotence, he had created a movement and an ideology:
For here you see before you an organization… inspired to the highest degree by nationalist sentiment, built on the concept of the absolute authority of the leadership in all spheres, at every stage—the sole party in whose adherents not only the conception of internationalism but also the idea of democracy has been completely overcome, which in its entire organization acknowledges the principles of Command and Obedience, and which has thus introduced into the political life of Germany a body numbering millions which is built up on the principle of achievement. Here is an organization which is filled with an indomitable aggressive spirit, an organization which when a political opponent says, “We regard your behavior as a provocation,” for the first time does not submissively retire from the scene but brutally enforces its own will and hurls against the opponent the retort, We fight today! We fight tomorrow! And if you do not regard our meeting today as a provocation we shall hold another one next week…. And when you say, “You must not come into the street,” we go into the street nevertheless. And when you say, “We shall kill you,” however many sacrifices you force upon us, this young Germany will always continue its marches…. And when people cast in our teeth our intolerance, we proudly acknowledge it—yes, we have formed the inexorable decision to destroy Marxism in Germany down to its very last root. And this decision we formed not from any love of brawling; I could easily imagine a pleasanter life than being harried all over Germany….
Today we stand at the turning point of Germany’s destiny. If th^ present course continues, Germany must one day land in Bolshevist chaos, but if this development is broken, then our people must be enrolled in a school of iron discipline…. Either we will succeed in once more forging out of this conglomerate of parties, leagues, associations, ideologies, upper-class conceit and lower-class madness an iron-hard national body, or Germany will finally perish because of the lack of this inner consolidation….
People say to me so often: “You are only the drummer of nationalist Germany.” And what if I were only the drummer? It would be a far more statesmanlike achievement to drum a new faith into this German people than gradually to squander the only faith they have [cheers from the audience]…. I know quite well, gentlemen, that when National Socialists march through the streets and suddenly a tumult and commotion breaks out in the evening, then the bourgeois draws back the window curtain, looks out, and says: “Once more my night’s rest disturbed; no more sleep for me.”… But remember there is sacrifice involved when those many hundred thousands of SA and SS men of the National Socialist movement every day have to climb into their trucks, protect meetings, stage marches, exert themselves night after night and then come back in the gray dawn either to workshop and factory or as unemployed to take the pittance of the dole…. If the whole German nation today had the same faith in its vocation as these hundred thousands, if the whole nation possessed this idealism, Germany would stand in the eyes of the world otherwise than she stands now! [Loud applause.]22
Yet for all the applause, at the end of the meeting only about a third of the audience joined in Fritz Thyssen’s cry of
