Mein Kampf
this world’s soil as another has. In this case we must not let political frontiers distract us from the frontiers of eternal justice. If this earth really has room for all to live on, let us be given the soil we need in order to exist.
True, no one will do so willingly. But here the law of self-preservation takes effect; and what is denied to amity the fist must take. If our forefathers had made their decisions by the same pacifist nonsense as the present day does, we would possess but a third of our existing territory—but in that case there would scarcely be a German people left to suffer in Europe. No; it is to the natural determination to fight for our own existence that we owe the two Ostmarken of the Empire, and hence the inner strength of a large state and racial territory, which alone has allowed us to survive to the present day.
For another reason, too, this solution would have been the correct one: many European states today are like inverted pyramids. Their European territory is ridiculously small compared to their load of colonies, foreign trade, etc. We can rightly say, apex in Europe, base all over the world—as distinguished from the American Union, whose base is still on its own continent, while only the apex touches the rest of the earth. And hence indeed come the enormous strength of that State and the weakness of most European colonial powers.
England is no proof to the contrary, because in face of the British Empire we all too easily forget the Anglo-Saxon world as such. If only because of its linguistic and cultural ties with the American Union, England’s position cannot be compared with that of any other state in Europe.
For Germany, accordingly, the sole possibility of carrying through a sound territorial policy lay in acquiring new land in Europe itself. Colonies are useless for this purpose unless they are suitable for large-scale settlement by Europeans. But in the nineteenth century that sort of colonial territory could no longer be obtained by peaceful means. Such a colonial policy would of course have been possible only by way of a severe struggle, which in that case would have been more usefully
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