Causes of the Collapse
ceived its defeat is the best of signs that the true cause of our collapse must be sought elsewhere than in the purely military loss of a few positions or the failure of an offensive; for if the front as such had really failed, and if its misfortune had brought about the Fatherland’s catastrophe, the German people would have received the defeat in an altogether different way. They would have borne the subsequent disaster with clenched teeth, or have bewailed it, overpowered by anguish; their hearts would have been full of rage and anger against the enemy, victorious through the wiles of Chance or the will of Fate; like the Roman Senate, the nation would have gone to meet the beaten divisions bearing the thanks of the Fatherland for their sacrifice, and begging them not to despair of the Empire. Even the capitulation would have been signed only with the brain, while the heart already was seeking the revival to come.
Thus would a defeat have been received that was due to Fate alone. There would have been no laughing and dancing, no boasting of cowardice and glorifying of defeat, no jeering at the fighting troops and dragging their flag and cockade in the mud; but above all, things would never have come to the fearful pass which caused an English officer, Colonel Repington, to say contemptuously: “Every third German is a traitor.” No, this pestilence would never have risen to the choking flood which for five years past has drowned the last remnants of the world’s respect for us.
This it is which best proves the falsehood of the statement that the lost war is the cause of the German collapse. No, this military collapse itself was the result of a whole series of manifestations of disease and their germs, which had attacked the German nation even in times of peace. This was the first universally visible catastrophic result of moral poisoning, of a decline in the instinct of self-preservation and all that goes with it, which had begun many years since to undermine the people and the Empire.
But it took all the fathomless truthlessness of Jewry and its Marxist battle-organization to put the blame for the collapse on the very man who was trying single-handed with super-human
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