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while it urges others to violent manifestations of wrath. Another indication of this feeling may be seen on the one hand in the attitude of those who abstain from voting at elections and, on the other, in the large numbers of those who side with the fanatical extremists of the left wing.
To these latter people our young movement had to appeal first of all. It was not meant to be an organization for contented and satisfied people, but was meant to gather in all those who were suffering from profound anxiety and could find no peace, those who were unhappy and discontented. It was not meant to float on the surface of the nation but rather to push its roots deep among the masses.
Looked at from the purely political point of view, the situation in 1918 was as follows: A nation had been torn into two parts. One part, which was by far the smaller of the two, contained the intellectual classes of the nation from which all those employed in physical labour were excluded. On the surface these intellectual classes appeared to be national-minded, but that word meant nothing else to them except a very vague and feeble concept of the duty to defend what they called the interests of the State, which in turn seemed identical with those of the dynastic regime. This class tried to defend its ideas and reach its aims by carrying on the fight with the aid of intellectual weapons, which could be used only here and there and which had only a superficial effect against the brutal measures employed by the adversaries, in the face of which the intellectual weapons were of their very nature bound to fail. With one violent blow the class which had hitherto governed was now struck down. It trembled with fear and accepted every humiliation imposed on it by the merciless victor.
Over against this class stood the broad masses of manual labourers who were organized in movements with a more or less radically Marxist tendency. These organized masses were firmly determined to break any kind of intellectual resistance by the use of brute force. They had no nationalist tendencies whatsoever and deliberately repudiated the idea of advancing the interests of the nation as such. On the contrary, they promoted the interests of the foreign oppressor. Numerically this class embraced the majority of the population and, what is more important, included all those elements of the nation without whose collaboration a national resurgence was not only a practical impossibility but was even inconceivable.
For already in 1918 one thing had to be clearly recognized; namely, that no resurgence of the German nation could take place until we had first restored our national strength to face the outside world. For this purpose arms are not the preliminary necessity, though our bourgeois 'statesmen' always blathered about it being so; what was wanted was will-power. At one time the German people had more than sufficient military armament. And yet they were not able to defend their liberty because they lacked those energies which spring from the instinct of national self-preservation and the will to hold on to one's own. The best armament is only dead and worthless material as long as the spirit is wanting which makes men willing and determined to avail themselves of such weapons. Germany was rendered defenceless not because she lacked arms, but because she lacked the will to keep her arms for the maintenance of her people.
To-day our Left-wing politicians in particular are constantly insisting that their craven-hearted and obsequious foreign policy necessarily results from the disarmament of Germany, whereas the truth is that this is the policy of traitors. To all that kind of talk the answer ought to be: No, the contrary is the truth. Your action in delivering up the arms was dictated by your anti-national and criminal policy of abandoning the interests of the nation. And now you try to make people believe that your miserable whining is fundamentally due to the fact that you have no arms. Just like everything else in your conduct, this is a lie and a falsification of the true reason.
But the politicians of the Right deserve exactly the same reproach. It was through their miserable cowardice that those ruffians of Jews who came into power in 1918 were able to rob the nation of its arms. The conservative politicians have neither right nor reason on their side when they appeal to disarmament as the cause which
