War Propaganda
humaneness and aesthetic feeling would disappear from the inhabited world if the races which have created and upheld these concepts were to be lost.
In a people’s struggle for its existence in the world, therefore, these concepts are of but minor importance; they have no part in determining the form of the struggle if the moment comes when they might cripple the force of self-preservation in a struggling people. Always that is the only visible result.
So far as the question of humaneness is concerned, even Moltke pointed out that in war this always consists in the shortness of the process, which is to say that the most drastic style of fighting best achieves it.
If anyone should try to advance upon us in such matters with drivel about aesthetic feelings, etc., there can be but one answer: Questions of destiny so important as a people’s struggle for existence do away with any duty to be beautiful. The least beautiful thing that can exist in human life is and must be the yoke of slavery. Or do these artists’s-quarter decadents find the present lot of the German nation “aesthetic”? We have truly no need to discuss the matter with the Jews, the modern inventors of this perfume of civilization. Their whole existence is protest incarnate against the aesthetics of the Lord’s image.
If considerations of humaneness and beauty do not count in the battle, neither can they be used as standards to judge propaganda.
Propaganda in the war was a means to an end: the German people’s struggle for existence; and hence the propaganda could be considered only in the light of the principles which there applied. The crudest weapons were humane if they brought quicker victory, and only those methods were beautiful which helped assure the dignity of freedom for the nation. This was the only possible attitude toward the question of war propaganda in such a life-and-death struggle.
If this had been realized in so-called competent quarters, the existing uncertainty about form and use of that weapon would never have arisen; for propaganda is only another weapon, if a truly fearful one in the hands of an expert.
179
