Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler

This lack of 'national pride' is most profoundly deplored, and horror at such an attitude is
expressed in no uncertain terms.
How many people have asked themselves what was the real reason for the superiority of their
own sentiments?
How many are aware of the infinite number of separate memories of the greatness of our
national fatherland in all the fields of cultural and artistic life, whose total result is to inspire
them with just pride at being members of a nation so blessed?
How many suspect to how great an extent pride in the fatherland depends on knowledge of
its greatness in all these fields?
Do our bourgeois circles ever stop to consider to what an absurdly small extent this
prerequisite of pride in the fatherland is transmitted to the 'people'?
Let us not try to condone this by saying that ' it is no better in other countries,' and that in
those countries the worker avows his nationality 'notwithstanding.' Even if this were so, it
could serve as no excuse for our own omissions. But it is not so; for the thing that we
constantly designate as 'chauvinistic' education; for example among the French people, is
nothing other than extreme emphasis on the greatness of France in all the fields of culture,
or, as the Frenchman puts it, of 'civilization The fact is that the young Frenchman is not
brought up to be objective, but is instilled with the most subjective conceivable view, in so far
as the importance of the political or cultural greatness of his fatherland is concerned.
This education will always have to be limited to general and extremely broad values which, if
necessary, must be engraved in the memory and feeling of the people by eternal repetition.
But to the negative sin of omission is added in our country the positive destruction of the
little which the individual has the good fortune to learn in school. The rats that politically
poison our nation gnaw even this little from the heart and memory of the broad masses, in so
far as this has not been previously accomplished by poverty and suffering.
Imagine, for instance, the following scene:
In a basement apartment, consisting of two stuffy rooms, dwells a worker's family of seven.
Among the five children there is a boy of, let us assume, three years. This is the age in which
the first impressions are made on the consciousness of the child Talented persons retain
traces of memory from this period down to advanced old age. The very narrowness and
overcrowding of the room does not lead to favorable conditions. Quarreling and wrangling will
very frequently arise as a result. In these circumstances, people do not live with one another,
they press against one another. Every argument, even the most trifling, which in a spacious
apartment can be reconciled by a mild segregation, thus solving itself, here leads to
loathsome wrangling without end. Among the children, of course, this is still bearable; they
always fight under such circumstances, and among themselves they quickly and thoroughly
forget about it. But if this battle is carried on between the parents themselves, and almost
every day in forms which for vulgarity often leave nothing to be desired, then, if only very
gradually, the results of such visual instruction must ultimately become apparent in the
children. The character the) will inevitably assume if this mutual quarrel takes the form of
brutal attacks of the father against the mother, of drunken beatings, is hard for anyone who
does not know this milieu to imagine. At the age of six the pitiable little boy suspects the
existence of things which can inspire even an adult with nothing but horror. Morally
poisoned, physically undernourished, his poor little head full of lice, the young 'citizen' goes
off to public school. After a great struggle he may learn to read and write, but that is about
all. His doing any homework is out of the question. On the contrary, the very mother and
father, even in the presence of the children, talk about his teacher and school in terms which
are not fit to be repeated, and are more inclined to curse the latter to their face than to take
their little offspring across their knees and teach them some sense. All the other things that
the little fellow hears at home do not tend to increase his respect for his dear fellow men.
Nothing good remains of humanity, no institution remains unassailed; beginning with his
teacher and up to the head of the government, whether it is a question of religion or of