Mein Kampf
lopers” to do but to watch in silence while the “elect” marched straight to damnation, trailing the good folk after them like the Pied Piper of Hamelin.
The underlying reason why it was possible to offer, and to make comprehensible to a whole people, the nonsense of “economic conquest” as a practical political method, and the preservation of “world peace” as a political goal, was a general diseased state of our entire political thinking.
With the triumphal march of German industry and invention, and the growing successes of German trade, people realized less and less that the whole thing was possible only on the presupposition of a strong state. On the contrary, in many circles people went so far as to argue that the state itself owed its existence solely to these facts, that it was primarily an economic institution, should be governed by economic interest, and hence depended for its existence upon economic life—a condition which was thereupon praised as by far the healthiest and most natural one.
But the state has nothing whatever to do with any particular economic concept or development. It is not a union of economic contracting parties within a definite limited area to perform economic tasks.
It is the organization of a community of physically and spiritually similar living beings, the better to make possible the preservation of their species as well as the attainment of the goal which Providence has set for their existence. That and that alone is the purpose and meaning of a state. The economic system is but one of the many means necessary to attain this goal. It can never be the cause or purpose of a state unless from the beginning it rests on a wrong, because unnatural, basis. That is the only explanation for the fact that the existence of a state as such need not even presuppose any definite territorial limitations. This is necessary only for peoples which desire to assure the sustenance of their own species on their own resources, that is, which are ready to decide the battle of existence by their own
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