The State

IN 1920-1921 the effete bourgeois class accused our movement again and again of taking up a negative attitude towards the modern State.

But the bourgeois class itself had no uniform opinion as to what the State really meant.

The chairs in State universities give obscure definitions.

These various theorists may be classed in 3 groups:

1. Those who hold that the State is a voluntary association of men who have agreed to set up and obey a ruling authority.

This is the largest group. This includes those who worship our present principle of legalized authority. They believe that the will of the people has no part in the whole affair.

For them, the fact that the State exists is sufficient reason to consider it sacred and inviolable.

They think that the means is substituted for the end, by a sort of sleight-of-hand movement.

The State no longer exists for serving men but men exist for adoring the State’s authority which is vested in its functionaries, even down to the smallest official.

To prevent this ecstatic adoration from changing, the State’s authority is limited simply to preserving order and tranquillity.

In Bavaria, this view is upheld by the artful politicians of the Bavarian Centre, which is called the ‘Bavarian Populist Party’.

In Austria the Black-and-Yellow legitimists adopt a similar attitude.

In the REICH, the conservative elements follow the same line of thought.

2. Those who would make the existence of the State dependent on some conditions.

This group is somewhat smaller in numbers. They insist that there should be:

• a uniform system of government
• only one language should be used, though solely for technical reasons of administration.

In this view, the State’s authority is to promote the good of its subjects.

Ideas of ‘freedom’, mostly based on a misunderstanding of the meaning of that word, enter into the concept of the State as it exists in the minds of this group. The form of government is no longer considered inviolable simply because it exists. It must submit to the test of practical efficiency.

Its venerable age no longer protects it from being criticized in the light of modern exigencies. Moreover, in this view the first duty laid upon the State is to guarantee the economic well-being of the individual citizens. Hence it is judged from the practical standpoint and according to general principles based on the idea of economic returns.

The chief representatives of this theory of the State are to be found among the average German bourgeoisie, especially our liberal democrats.

3. The State is to realize the tendencies that arise from a policy of power, on the part of a people who are ethnically homogeneous and with the same language.

The third group is numerically the smallest.

But those who hold this view are not clear about what they mean by ’tendencies arising from a policy of power’.

The push for a common language so that the State can:

• have a solid basis to extend its power outside its own frontiers

• carry out nationalization in a definite direction.

  • I think this is a mistake.

During the last century, ‘Germanization’ was frivolously played with, though the practice was often well intended.

• It meant forcing other people to speak the German language.

I heard in Pan-German circles, I have heard that the Austrian Germans might succeed in Germanizing the Austrian Slavs if only the Government would cooperate.

But I think it is a mistake to think that a Nigger or a Chinaman would become a German by:

• learning the German language
• votinng for a German political party.

Our bourgeois nationalists never saw that such a process of Germanization is in reality de-Germanization.

A common German language might bridge various peoples.

• But it would annihilate the German element through a process of bastardization

A conquering race usually succeeded by forcing the people to speak the conqueror’s tongue.

After a thousand years, their language was spoken by another people. Thus, the conqueror finally became the conquered.

Blood makes a race, not language.

Therefore, Germanization is the changing of the people’s blood, which is obviously impossible.

A change is possible only by a mixture of blood.

But in this case, the quality of the superior race would be debased.

Such a mixture would destroy those qualities which had enabled the conquering race to achieve victory over an inferior people.

Cultural creativeness especially disappears when a superior race intermixes with an inferior one.

For a certain time there will be a conflict between the different mentalities.

A declining nation might finally rally its cultural creative power.

But these results are due only to the activity of elements that have remained over from the superior race or hybrids of the first crossing in whom the superior blood has remained dominant and seeks to assert itself.

But this will never happen with the final descendants of such hybrids. These are always in a state of cultural retrogression.

The failure of the Germanization of Austria according to Joseph 2nd’s plan was fortunate.

The Austrian State would have been able to survive because of it. But the common language would have debased the racial quality of the German element.

In the course of centuries, a herd instinct might have been developed with the herd itself deteriorating in quality.

A national State might have arisen, but a people who had been culturally creative would have disappeared.

For the German nation, it was better that this intermixture process did not take place. It was renounced, not for any high-minded reasons, but simply through the short-sighted pettiness of the Habsburgs.

If it had taken place, the German people would not now be looked on as a cultural factor.

In Austria and the REICH, these so-called national circles were, and still are, under the influence of similar erroneous ideas.

Many people, under the same false reasoning, demanded the East was to be Germanized as a policy towards Poland.

They believed that the Polish people could be Germanized through the German language. The result would have been fatal.

A foreign race would have used the German language to express modes of thought that were foreign to the German. It would thus compromise the dignity and nobility of our nation.

When the German patois of the Jews enter the United States, they are classed as Germans.

This is because many Americans are ignorant of German conditions. This creates so much indirect damage to German prestige.

Among us, nobody would think of taking these unhygienic immigrants from the East for members of the German race merely because they speak German.

What has been beneficially Germanized in the course of history was the land which our ancestors conquered with the sword and colonized with German tillers of the soil.

To the extent that they introduced foreign blood into our national body in this colonization, they have helped to disintegrate our racial character, a process which has resulted in our German hyper-individualism, though this latter characteristic is even now frequently praised.

In this third group also there are people who, to a certain degree, consider the State as an end in itself. Hence they consider its preservation as one of the highest aims of human existence. Our analysis may be summed up as follows: