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Mein Kampf

Unfortunately I can only answer, no. Everything that was really undertaken in this direction was so inadequate and wrong from the start that at best it did no good, and often it was actually harmful.

Inadequate in form, psychologically wrong in essence—such must be our judgment after a careful scrutiny of German war propaganda.

People do not seem to have been quite clear in their minds even on the first question, namely, Is propaganda a means or an end?

It is a means, and must accordingly be judged from the standpoint of purpose; its form must be adapted to attain the end it serves. It is also obvious that the importance of the end may vary from the standpoint of general necessity, and that the intrinsic value of propaganda varies accordingly. But the end for which we were struggling during the war was the most exalted and tremendous that is thinkable for man: the freedom and independence of our people, security of livelihood for the future—and the nation’s honor: something which still exists or rather should exist despite all the contrary opinions of today. Peoples without honor usually lose their freedom and independence sooner or later, which in turn accords with a higher justice, since generations of rascals without honor deserve no freedom. No one who is willing to be a craven slave can or should possess any honor, for it would swiftly become an object of universal contempt in any case.

The German people were fighting for a human existence, and the purpose of propaganda in the war should have been to back up the fight; to help win the victory should have been its goal.

When peoples are fighting for their existence on this planet, and are faced with the fatal question, to be or not to be, all considerations of humaneness or aesthetics crumble into nothing; for these conceptions are not floating in the ether of the world, but are born of Man’s imagination, and are bound to it. His departure from this world dissolves those concepts into nothing again, for Nature knows them not. Even so, they are peculiar to the men of but a few peoples, or rather races, and this to whatever degree they spring of themselves from these men’s feelings. In fact

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