The Right To Self-Defence

AFTER WE had laid down our arms, in November 1918, a policy was adopted which led gradually to our complete subjugation.

History shows that nations which lay down their arms without being absolutely forced to do so:

• subsequently prefer to submit to the greatest humiliations rather than resort to arms again.
• loses all strength of character

That is intelligible on purely human grounds.

A shrewd conqueror will always enforce his exactions on the conquered only by stages, as far as that is possible.

This prevents the people from taking up arms again.

The more the extortions passively accepted, the less will justified will resistance be in the eyes of other people.

The fall of Carthage is a terrible example of the slow agony of a people which ended in destruction. It was the fault of the people themselves.

In his THREE ARTICLES OF FAITH, Clausewitz expressed this idea admirably:

“The stigma of shame incurred by a cowardly submission can never be effaced. The drop of poison which thus enters the blood of a nation will be transmitted to posterity. It will undermine and paralyse the strength of later generations.”

“Even the loss of its liberty after a sanguinary and honourable struggle assures the resurgence of the nation and is the vital nucleus from which one day a new tree can draw firm roots.”

Naturally a nation which has lost all sense of honour and all strength of character will not feel the force of such a doctrine.

But any nation that takes it to heart will never fall very low. Only those who forget it or do not wish to acknowledge it will collapse.

Hence those responsible for a cowardly submission cannot be expected suddenly to take thought with themselves, for the purpose of changing their former conduct and directing it in the way pointed out by human reason and experience.

On the contrary, they will repudiate such a doctrine, until the people either become permanently habituated to the yoke of slavery or the better elements of the nation push their way into the foreground and forcibly take power away from the hands of an infamous and corrupt regime.

In the first case those who hold power will be pleased with the state of affairs, because the conquerors often entrust them with the task of supervising the slaves. And these utterly characterless beings then exercise that power to the detriment of their own people, more cruelly than the most cruel-hearted stranger that might be nominated by the enemy himself.

From 1806 to 1813 Prussia was in a state of collapse.

An equal period of time has passed over our heads from 1918 until to-day.

Seven years after November 1918 the Locarno Treaty was signed.

Once the shameful Armistice had been signed our people were unable to pluck up sufficient courage and energy to call a halt suddenly to the conduct of our adversary as the oppressive measures were being constantly renewed.

The enemy was too shrewd to put forward all his demands at once. He confined his duress always to those exactions which, in his opinion and that of our German Government, could be submitted to for the moment: so that in this way they did not risk causing an explosion of public feeling. But according as the single impositions were increasingly subscribed to and tolerated it appeared less justifiable to do now in the case of one sole imposition or act of duress what had not been previously done in the case of so many others, namely, to oppose it.

That is the ‘drop of poison’ of which Clausewitz speaks. Once this lack of character is manifested the resultant condition becomes steadily aggravated and weighs like an evil inheritance on all future decisions. It may become as a leaden weight around the nation’s neck, which cannot be shaken off but which forces it to drag out its existence in slavery.

Thus, in Germany, edicts for disarmament and oppression and economic plunder followed one after the other, making us politically helpless. The result of all this was to create that mood which made so many look upon the Dawes Plan as a blessing and the Locarno Treaty as a success. From a higher point of view we may speak of one sole blessing in the midst of so much misery. This blessing is that, though men may be fooled, Heaven can’t be bribed.

For Heaven withheld its blessing. Since that time Misery and Anxiety have been the constant companions of our people, and Distress is the one Ally that has remained loyal to us. In this case also Destiny has made no exceptions.

It has given us our deserts. Since we did not know how to value honour any more, it has taught us to value the liberty to seek for bread. Now that the nation has learned to cry for bread, it may one day learn to pray for freedom.

The collapse of our nation in the years following 1918 was bitter and manifest. And yet that was the time chosen to persecute us in the most malicious way our enemies could devise, so that what happened afterwards could have been foretold by anybody then.

The government to which our people submitted was as hopelessly incompetent as it was conceited, and this was especially shown in repudiating those who gave any warning that disturbed or displeased.

Then we saw–and to-day also–the greatest parliamentary nincompoops, really common saddlers and glove-makers–not merely by trade, for that would signify very little–suddenly raised to the rank of statesmen and sermonizing to humble mortals from that pedestal.

It did not matter, and it still does not matter, that such a ‘statesman’, after having displayed his talents for six months or so as a mere windbag, is shown up for what he is and becomes the object of public raillery and sarcasm.

It does not matter that he has given the most evident proof of complete incompetency. No. That does not matter at all. On the contrary, the less real service the parliamentary statesmen of this Republic render the country, the more savagely they persecute all who expect that parliamentary deputies should show some positive results of their activities.

They persecute everybody who dares to point to the failure of these activities and predict similar failures for the future. If one finally succeeds in nailing down one of these parliamentarians to hard facts, so that this political artist can no longer deny the real failure of his whole action and its results, then he will find thousands of grounds for excuse, but will in no way admit that he himself is the chief cause of the evil.

In the winter of 1922-23, at the latest, it ought to have been generally recognized that, even after the conclusion of peace, France was still endeavouring with iron consistency to attain those ends which had been originally envisaged as the final purpose of the War.

Nobody could think of believing that for four and a half years France continued to pour out the not abundant supply of her national blood in the most decisive struggle throughout all her history in order subsequently to obtain compensation through reparations for the damages sustained.

Even Alsace and Lorraine, taken by themselves, would not account for the energy with which the French conducted the War, if Alsace-Lorraine were not already considered as a part of the really vast programme which French foreign policy had envisaged for the future.

The aim of that programme was: Disintegration of Germany into a collection of small states.

It was for this that Chauvinist France waged war; and in doing so she was in reality selling her people to be the serfs of the international Jew.

French war aims would have been obtained through the World War if, as was originally hoped in Paris, the struggle had been carried out on German soil. Let us imagine the bloody battles of the World War not as having taken place on the Somme, in Flanders, in Artois, in front of Warsaw, Nizhni-Novogorod, Kowno, and Riga but in Germany, in the Ruhr or on the Maine, on the Elbe, in front of Hanover, Leipzig, Nürnberg, etc.

If such happened, then we must admit that the destruction of Germany might have been accomplished. It is very much open to question if our young federal State could have borne the hard struggle for four and a half years, as it was borne by a France that had been centralized for centuries, with the whole national imagination focused on Paris.

If this titanic conflict between the nations developed outside the frontiers of our fatherland, not only is all the merit due to the immortal service rendered by our old army but it was also very fortunate for the future of Germany. I am fully convinced that if things had taken a different course there would no longer be a German REICH to-day but only ‘German States’.

And that is the only reason why the blood which was shed by our friends and brothers in the War was at least not shed in vain.

The course which events took was otherwise.