Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler

I came to know these people too well not to feel the profoundest disgust at their miserable
play-acting. But they make a ridiculous impression on the broad masses, and the Jew has
every reason to spare these folkish comedians, even to prefer them to the true fighters for a
coming German state. With all this, these people are boundlessly conceited; despite all the
proofs of their complete incompetence, they daim to know everything better and become a
real plague for all straightforward and honest fighters to whom heroism seems worth
honoring, not only in the past, but who also endeavor to give posterity a similar picture by
their own actions.
And often it can be distinguished only with difficulty which of these people act out of inner
stupidity or incompetence and which only pretend to for certain reasons. Especially with the
so-called religious reformers on an old Germanic basis, I always have the feeling that they
were sent by those powers which do not want the resurrection of our people. For their whole
activity leads the people away from the common struggle against the common enemy, the
Jew, and instead lets them waste their strength on inner religious squabbles as senseless as
they are disastrous. For these very reasons the establishment of a strong central power
implying the unconditional authority of a Kadership is necessary in the movement. By it
alone can such ruinous elements be squelched. And for this reason the greatest enemies of a
uniform, strictly led and conducted movement are to be found in the circles of these folkish
wandering Jews. In the movement they hate the power that checks their mischief.
Not for nothing did the young movement establish a definite program in which it did not use
the word 'folkish.' The concept folkish, in view of its conceptual boundlessness, is no possible
basis for a movement and offers no standard for membership in one. The more indefinable
this concept is in practice, the more and broader interpretations it permits, the greater
becomes the possibility of invoking its authority. The insertion of such an indefinable and
variously interpretable concept into the political struggle leads to the destruction of any strict
fighting solidarity, since the latter does not permit leaving to the individual the definition of
his faith and will.
And it is disgraceful to see all the people who run around today with the word 'folkish' on
their caps and how many have their own interpretation of this concept. A Bavarian professor
by the name of Bayer,l a famous fighter with spiritual weapons, rich in equally spiritual
marches on Berlin, thinks that the concept folkish consists only in a monarchistic attitude.
This learned mind, however, has thus far forgotten to give a closer explanation of the identity
of our German monarchs of the past with the folkish opinion of today. And I fear that in this
the gentleman would not easily succeed. For anything less folkish than most of the Germanic
monarchic state formations can hardly be imagined. If this were not so, they would never
have disappeared, or their disappearance would offer proof of the unsoundness of the folkish
outlook.
And so everyone shoots off his mouth about this concept as he happens to understand it. As
a basis for a movement of political struggle, such a multiplicity of opinions is out of the
question.
I shall not even speak of the unworldliness of these folkish Saint Johns of the twentieth
century or their ignorance of the popular soul. It is sufliciently illustrated by the ridicule with
which they are treated by the Left, which lets them talk and iaughs at them.
Anyone in this world who does not succeed in being hated by his adversaries does not seem
to me to be worth much as a friend. And thus the friendship of these people for our young
movement was not only worthless, but solely and always harmful, and it was also the main
reason why, first of all, we chose the name of 'party'-we had grounds for hoping that by this
alone a whole swarm of these folkish sleepwalkers would be frightened away from us-and
why in the second place we termed ourselves National Socialist German Workers' Party.
The first expression kept away the antiquity enthusiasts, the big-mouths and superficial
proverb-makers of the so-called folkish idea,' and the second freed us from the entire host of