Mein Kampf
the form of acquiring the intellectual substance of the unjustly persecuted movement. Many people do this simply from a feeling of opposition toward an attempt to club down an idea by brutal violence.
Thus the number of inward followers grows at the same rate that the persecution increases. Hence the complete destruction of the new teaching can be carried out only by way of so tremendous and ever-increasing an extermination that finally the people or state in question loses all the really valuable blood it has. Retribution is at hand, however, because a so-called “internal” purge may indeed take place, but only at the price of general exhaustion. And such a proceeding will always be futile from the beginning if the doctrines to be combatted have gone beyond a certain small circle.
Here too, therefore, as with all growths, the first part of childhood is still most liable to possible destruction, while resistance increases with the years, to yield to fresh youth only with approaching senility, even if in a different form and for different reasons.
And indeed almost all attempts to uproot a doctrine and its organized results by violence with no intellectual basis are failures, quite frequently in fact producing the opposite from the intended result, for the following reasons:
The very first essential for a fight by the weapons of naked violence is always persistence. That is to say, only regular and steady employment of the methods used to suppress a doctrine, etc., can possibly make the project a success. But the moment there is any vacillation, and violence alternates with forbearance, the doctrine being suppressed will not only keep recovering, but will be able to derive new values from each persecution, because, on recession of a wave of pressure, indignation at what has been suffered brings new followers to the old doctrine, while existing adherents cling to it with greater defiance and deeper hatred than ever; in fact after the danger is gone, even apostates try to return to their old attitude. The very first essential
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