Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler

The so-called liberal press was actively engaged in digging the grave of the German people
and the German Reich. We can pass by the lying Marxist sheets in silence; to them lying is
just as vitally necessary as catching mice for a cat; their function is only to break the people's
national and patriotic backbone and make them ripe for the slave's yoke of international
capital and its masters, the Jews.
And what did the state do against this mass poisoning of the nation? Nothing, absolutely
nothing. A few ridiculous decrees, a few fines for villainy that went too far, and that was the
end of it. Instead, they hoped to curry favor with this plague by flattery, by recognition of the
'value' of the press, its 'importance,' its 'educational mission,' and more such nonsense-as for
the Jews, they took all this with a crafty smile and acknowledged it with sly thanks.
The reason, however, for this disgraceful failure on the part of the state was not that it did
not recognize the danger, but rather in a cowardice crying to high Heaven and the resultant
halfheartedness of all decisions and measures. No one had the courage to use thoroughgoing
radical methods, but in this as in everything else they tinkered about with a lot of halfway
prescriptions, and instead of carrying the thrust to the heart, they at most irritated the viperwith
the result that not only did everything remain as before, but on the contrary the power
of the institutions which should have been combated increased from year to year.
The defensive struggle of the German government at that time against the press-mainly that
of Jewish origin-which was slowly ruining the nation was without any straight line, irresolute
and above all without any visible goal. The intelligence of the privy councilors failed
completely when it came to estimating the importance of this struggle, to choosing means or
drawing up a clear plan. Planlessly they fiddled about; sometimes, after being bitten too
badly, they locked up one of the journalistic vipers for a few weeks or months, but they left
the snakes' nest as such perfectly unmolested.
True-this resulted partly from the infinitely wily tactics of the Jews, on the one hand, and
from a stupidity and innocence such as only privy councilors are capable of, on the other.
The Jew was much too clever to allow his entire press to be attacked uniformly. No, one part
of it existed in order to cover the other. While the Marxist papers assailed in the most
dastardly way everything that can be holy to man; while they infamously attacked the state
and the government and stirred up large sections of the people against one another, the
bourgeois-democratic papers knew how to give an appearance of their famous objectivity,
painstakingly avoided all strong words, well knowing that empty heads can judge only by
externals and never have the faculty of penetrating the inner core, so that for them the value
of a thing is measured by this exterior instead of by the content; a human weakness to which
they owe what esteem they themselves enjoy.
For these people the Frankfurter Zeitung was the embodiment of respectability. For it never
uses coarse expressions, it rejects all physical brutality and keeps appealing for struggle with
'intellectual' weapons, a conception, strange to say, to which especially the least intelligent
people are most attached. This is a result of our half-education which removes people from
the instinct of Nature and pumps a certain amount of knowledge into them, but cannot
create full understanding, since for this industry and good will alone are no use; the
necessary intelligence must be present, and what is more, it must be inborn. The ultimate
wisdom is always the understanding of the instinct '-that is: a man must never fall into the
lunacy of believing that he has really risen to be lord and master of Nature-which is so easily
induced by the conceit of half-education; he must understand the fundamental necessity of
Nature's rule, and realize how much his existence is subjected to these laws of eternal fight
and upward struggle. Then he will feel that in a universe where planets revolve around suns,
and moons turn about planets, where force alone forever masters weakness, compelling it to
be an obedient slave or else crushing it, there can be no special laws for man. For him, too,
the eternal principles of this ultimate wisdom hold sway. He can try to comprehend them;
but escape them, never.