The broad masses of a people consist neither of professors nor of diplomats. The scantiness of the abstract knowledge they possess directs their sentiments more to the world of feeling. That is where their positive or negative attitude lies. It is receptive only to an expression of force in one of these two directions and never to a halfmeasure hovering between the two. Their emotional attitude at the same time conditions their extraordinary stability. Faith is harder to shake than knowledge, love succumbs less to change than respect, hate is more enduring than aversion, and the impetus to the mightiest upheavals on this earth has at all times consisted less in a scientific knowledge dominating the masses than in a fanaticism which inspired them and sometimes in a hysteria which drove them forward. Anyone who wants to win the broad masses must know the key that opens the door to their heart. Its name is not objectivity (read weakness), but will and power.
The people at all times see the proof of their own right in ruthless attack on a foe, and to them renouncing the destruction of the adversary seems like uncertainty with regard to their own right if not a sign of their own unriglxt.
The broad masses are only a piece of Nature and their sentiment does not understand the mutual handshake of people who daim that they want the opposite things. What they desire is the victory of the stronger and the destruction of the weak or his unconditional subjection.
The nationalization of our masses will succeed only when, aside from all the positive struggle for the soul of our people, their international poisoners are exterminated.
Anyone who wants to free the German blood from the manifestations and vices of today, which were originally alien to its nature, will first have to redeem it from the foreign virus of these manifestations.
Without the clearest knowledge of the racial problem and hence of the Jewish problem there will never be a resurrection of the German nation.
The racial question gives the key not only to world history, but to all human culture.
The integration of an occupational group which has become a class with the national community, or merely with the state, is not accomplished by the lowering of higher dasses but by uplifting the lower dasses. This process in turn can never be upheld by the higher class, but only by the lower class fighting for its equal rights. The presentday bourgeoisie was not organized into the state by measures of the nobility, but by its own energy under its own leadership.
The German worker will not be raised to the framework of the German national community via feeble scenes of fraternization, but by a conscious raising of his social and cultural situation until the most serious differences may be viewed as bridged. A movement which sets this development as its goal will have to take its supporters primarily from this camp.’ It may fall back on the intelligentsia only in so far as the latter has completely understood the goal to be achieved. This process of transformation and equalization will not be completed in ten or twenty years; experience shows that it comprises many generations.
The severest obstade to the presentday worker’s approach to the national community lies not in the defense of his class interests, but in his international leadership and attitude which are hostile to the people and the fatherland. The same unions with a fanatical national leadership in political and national matters would make millions of workers into the most valuable members of their nation regardless of the various struggles that took place over purely economic matters.
A movement which wants honestly to give the German worker back to his people and tear him away from the international delusion must sharply attack a conception dominant above all in employer circles, which under national community understands the unresisting economic surrender of the employee to the employer and which chooses to regard any attempt at safeguarding even justified interests regarding the employee’s economic existence as an attack on the national community. Such an assertion is not only untrue, but a conscious lie, because the national community imposes its obligations not only on one side but also on the other.
Just as surely as a worker sins against the spirit of a real national community when, without regard for the common welfare and the survival of a national economy, he uses his power to raise extortionate demands, an employer breaks this community to the same extent when he conducts his business in an inhuman, exploiting way, misuses the national labor force and makes millions out of its sweat. He then has no right to designate himself as national, no right to speak of a national community; no, he is a selfish scoundrel who induces social unrest and provokes future conflicts which whatever happens must end in harming the nation.
Thus, the reservoir from which the young movement must gather its supporters will primarily be the masses of our workers. Its work will be to tear these away from the international delusion, to free them from their social distress, to raise them out of their cultural misery and lead them to the national community as a valuable, united factor, national in feeling and desire.
If, in the circles of the national intelligentsia, there are found men with the warmest hearts for their people and its future, imbued with the deepest knowledge of the importance of this struggle for the soul of these masses, they will be highly welcome in the ranks of this movement, as a valuable spiritual backbone. But winning over the bourgeois voting cattle can never be the aim of this movement. If it were, it would burden itself with a dead weight which by its whole nature would paralyze our power to recruit from the broad masses. For regardless of the theoretical beauty of the idea of leading together the broadest masses from below and from above within the framework of the movement, there is the opposing fact that by psychological propagandizing of bourgeois masses in general meetings, it may be possible to create moods and even to spread insight, but not to do away with qualities of character or, better expressed, vices whose development and origin embrace centuries. The difference with regard to the cultural level on both sides and the attitude on both sides toward questions raised by economic interests is at present still so great that, as soon as the intoxication of the meetings has passed, it would at once manifest itself as an obstacle.
Finally, the goal is not to undertake a reskatification in the camp that is national to begin with, but to win over the antinational camp.
And this point of view, finally, is determining for the tactical attitude of the whole movement.
(7) This onesided but thereby clear position must express itself in the propaganda of the movement and on the other hand in turn is required on propagandist grounds.
If propaganda is to be effective for the movement, it must be addressed to only one quarter, since otherwise, in view of the difference in the intellectual training of the two camps in question, either it will not be understood by the one group, or by the other it would be rejected as obvious and therefore uninteresting Even the style and the tone of its individual products cannot be equally effective for two such extreme groups. If propaganda renounces primitiveness of expression, it does not find its way to the feeling of the broad masses. If, however, in word and gesture, it uses the masses’ harshness of sentiment and expression, it will be rejected by the socalled intelligentsia as coarse and vulgar. Among a hundred socalled speakers there are hardly ten capable of speaking with equal effect today before a public consisting of street.sweepers, locksmiths, sewercleaners, etc., and tomorrow holding a lecture with necessarily the same thought content in an auditorium full of university professors and students. But among a thousand speakers there is perhaps only a single one who can manage to speak to locksmiths and university professors at the same time, in a form which not only is suitable to the receptivity of both parties, but also influences both parties with equal effect or actually lashes them into a wild storm of applause. We must always bear in mind that even the most beautiful idea of a sublime theory in most cases can be disseminated only through the small and smallest minds. The important thing is not what the genius who has created an idea has in mind, but what, in what form, and with what success the proph ets of this idea transmit it to the broad masses.
The strong attractive power of the Social Democracy, yes, of the whole Marxist movement, rested in large part on the homogeneity and hence onesidedness of the public it addressed. The more seemingly limited, indeed, the narrower its ideas were, the more easily they were taken up and assimilated by a mass whose intellectual level corresponded to the material offered.
Likewise for the new movement a simple and clear line thus resulted.
Propaganda must be adjusted to the broad masses in content and in form, and its soundness is to be measured exdusively by its effective result.
In a mass meeting of all classes it is not that speaker who is mentally closest to the intellectuals present who speaks best, but the one who conquers the heart of the masses.
A member of the intelligentsia present at such a meeting, who carps at the intellectual level of the speech despite the speaker’s obvious effect on the lower strata he has set out to conquer, proves the complete incapacity of his thinking and the worthlessness of his person for the young movement. It can use only that intellectual who comprehends the task and goal of the movement to such an extent that he has learned to judge the activity of propaganda according to its success and not according to the impressions which it leaves behind in himself. For propaganda is not intended to provide entertainment for people who are nationalminded to begin with, but to win the enemies of our nationality, in so far as they are of our blood.
In general those trends of thought which I have briefly summed up under the heading of war propaganda should be determining and decisive for our movement in the manner and execution of its own enlightenment work.
That it was right was demonstrated by its success (8) The goal of a political reform movement will never be reached by enlightenment work or by influencing ruling circles, but only by the achievement of political power. Every worldmoving idea has not only the right, but also the duty, of securing, those means which make possible the execution of its ideas. Success is the one earthly judge concerning the right or wrong of such an effort, and under success we must not understand, as in the year 1918, the achievement of power in itself, but an exercise of that power that will benefit the nation. Thus, a coup d’etat must not be regarded as successful if, as senseless state’s attorneys in Germany think today, the revolutionaries have succeeded in possessing themselves of the state power, but only if by the realization of the purposes and aims underlying such a revolutionary action, more benefit accrues to the nation than under the past regime. Something which cannot very well be claimed for the German revolution, as the gangster job of autumn 1918, calls itself.
If the achievement of political power constitutes the precondition for the practical execution of reform purposes, the movement with reform purposes must from the first day of its existence feel itself a movement of the masses and not a literary teaclub or a shopkeepers’ bowling society.
(9) The young movement is in its nature and inner organization antiparliamentarian; that is, it rejects, in general and in its own inner structure, a principle of majority rule in which the leader is degraded to the level of a mere executant of other people’s will and opinion. In little as well as big things, the movement advocates the principle of a Germanic democracy: the leader is elected, but then enjoys unconditional authority.
The practical consequences of this principle in the movement are the following:
The first chairman of a local group is elected, but then he is the responsible leader of the local group. All committees are subordinate to him and not, conversely, he to a committee. There are no electoral committees, but only committees for work. The responsible leader, the first chairman, organizes the work. The first principle applies to the next higher organization, the precinct, the district or county. The leader is always elected, but thereby he is vested with unlimited powers and authority. And, finally, the same applies to the leadership of the whole party. The chairman is elected, but he is the exclusive leader of the movements All committees are subordinate to him and not he to the committees. He makes the decisions and hence bears the responsibility on his shoulders. Members of the movement are free to call him to account before the forum of a new election, to divest him of his office in so far as he has infringed on the principles of the movement or served its interests badly. His place is then taken by an abler, new man, enjoying, however} the same authority and the same responsibility.
It is one of the highest tasks of the movement to make this principle determining, not only within its own ranks, but for the entire state.
Any man who wants to be leader bears, along with the highest unlimited authority, also the ultimate and heaviest responsibility.
Anyone who is not equal to this or is too cowardly to bear the consequences of his acts is not fit to be leader; only the hero is cut out for this.