Beginning of Political Activity
foundation of independent national self-preservation in the process of fighting against capital. I saw Germany’s development far too clearly not to have known that the hardest struggle would have to be fought not against hostile peoples, but against international capital. In Feder’s lecture I heard a mighty watchword for this coming struggle.
And here too subsequent developments showed how right our feeling was. Today we are no longer laughed at by our sly-boots bourgeois politicians; today even they (so far as they are not deliberate liars) see that international finance capital not only took the lead in fostering the war, but now especially, after the struggle is ended, is leaving nothing undone to make the peace into a Hell.
The struggle against international finance and loan capital has become the most important point in the program of the German nation’s struggle for its economic independence and freedom.
So far as the objections of so-called practical men are concerned, we may answer them thus: all fears of the terrible economic results of “breaking the slavery of interest” in practice are unnecessary; for in the first place previous economic panaceas have sat but ill upon the German people, and the comments on questions of self-preservation strongly remind us of the verdict of similar experts in earlier days—for instance of the Bavarian Medical Faculty upon the question of introducing the railroad. It is known that none of this exalted body’s fears have since been realized; travelers in the trains of the new “steamhorse” did not become dizzy, spectators were not made ill, and the board fences to render the new invention invisible have been given up—only the blank walls before the heads of all so-called “experts” being preserved for posterity.
But in the second place we should remember this: any idea, even the best, becomes dangerous if it supposes itself an end in itself, while in reality it is but a means to an end—and for me and all true National Socialists there is but one doctrine: people and Fatherland.
What we must fight for is to assure the existence and the in-
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