Mein Kampf
ploys them; but there must be no hesitation in using illegal means if the oppressor also resorts to them.
In general it must never be forgotten that the highest purpose of man’s existence is not the maintenance of a state, let alone of a government, but the preservation of his own kind.
Let that be in danger of suppression or destruction, and the question of legality is but subordinate. Then, though the methods of the ruling power be a thousand times “legal,” the self-preservation of the oppressed is always the noblest justification for a struggle using any and every weapon.
Only because that statement is recognized as true does this earth’s history show such tremendous examples of wars of independence against inward or outward enslavement of peoples.
The law of humanity is above the law of the state.
But if a people is defeated in its battle for the rights of man, that means simply that in the scales of Fate it weighed too lightly to have the good fortune of survival in our mundane world. For anyone who is unready or unable to fight for his life has already been marked for extinction by an eternally just Providence. The world is not for coward peoples.
How easy it is for a tyranny to wrap itself in the cloak of so-called “legality” we see most plainly and strikingly once again by the example of Austria.
The legal state power at that time rested on the anti-German foundation of the Parliament, with its non-German majority—and on the equally anti-German ruling House. These two elements embodied the entire authority of the state. An attempt to change the lot of the German-Austrian people by that path would have been nonsense. Consequently our admirers of the “legal” way, as the only “permissible” one, and of the state’s authority itself, were bound to think that all resistance must be abandoned because it could not be carried on by legal means. But this must inevitably have meant the end of the German people in the Monarchy, and that quickly. Germanity was in fact saved from that fate only by the collapse of the state.
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