The World War
the result would be so horrible even I did not yet suppose possible.
What was to be done next? The leaders of the whole movement should have been put under lock and key at once; they should have been put on trial, and the nation ridded of them. Every resource of military power should have been used ruthlessly to exterminate the pestilence. The parties should have been dissolved, the Reichstag brought to reason, with the bayonet if necessary, or best of all it should have been abolished at once. Just as the Republic dissolves parties today, so they should have resorted to this means then, and with more reason. After all, the existence or non-existence of a whole people was at stake!
This would indeed have raised another question: can intellectual ideas be exterminated by the sword at all? Can violence be used to combat “world-concepts”?
I asked myself this question more than once at that time.
If we think through analogous cases, which can be found in the history of religious matters especially, we arrive at the following principle:
Conceptions and ideas, as well as movements on a definite intellectual basis, true or false, can, after a certain point in their growth, be broken by forcible methods of a technical sort only if these physical weapons at the same time represent a new kindling idea, thought, or world-concept.
The use of force alone without the driving power of a basic intellectual conception can never destroy an idea and its spread except by complete extermination of its very last adherent and the destruction of all tradition. But this usually means the disappearance of such a state from the realm of power politics, often for an endless time, and sometimes forever; for experience shows that a blood sacrifice of this sort hits the best part of the nation, since any persecution carried on without an intellectual basis appears morally unjustified, and spurs precisely the most valuable part of a people to protest—a protest which takes
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