Mein Kampf
ment upon my comrades’ faces when we clashed in person with the Tommies in Flanders. After the first few days of battle it began to dawn on everyone that these Scotsmen were not altogether like those it had been thought well to depict in comic journals and newspaper dispatches.
That was when I first began to consider what the most suitable form of propaganda was.
But this falsification did have one advantage for its perpetrators: the example, untrue though it was, could be used to demonstrate the soundness of economic conquest of the world. What the Englishman could do, we must be able to do also; our much greater honesty, the lack of any specifically English “perfidy” was considered a great advantage for us. People hoped thus the more easily to win the friendship particularly of the smaller nations, as well as the confidence of the great ones.
Because we believed it all quite seriously, we never dreamed that our honesty was an abomination to the rest of the world, which considered such behavior an extremely cunning form of mendacity. It was not until our Revolution, that they could realize the unbounded stupidity of our “honest” intentions, no doubt to their vast astonishment.
Only this nonsense of “peaceful economic conquest” of the world could make the nonsense of the Triple Alliance clear and comprehensible. With what other state could they possibly ally themselves? With Austria they could not, it is true, go forth to “warlike conquest,” even in Europe. This was the inward weakness of the Alliance from the first moment. Bismarck could permit himself this makeshift, but that did not mean every bungling successor could do the same, least of all in an age when the essential presuppositions even of Bismarck’s alliance had long since ceased to exist; for Bismarck still believed Austria was a German state. But with the gradual introduction of universal suffrage the country had sunk to a parliament-governed, un-German hurly-burly.
As a matter of race policy, too, the alliance with Austria was simply ruinous. The growth was tolerated of a new Slavic great
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