Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler

another building in spite of my experience. In this decision I was reinforced by Poverty which,
a few weeks later, after I had spent what little I had saved from my wages. enfolded me in her
heartless arms. I had to go back whether I wanted to or not. The same old story began anew
and ended very much the same as the first time.
I wrestled with my innermost soul: are these people human, worthy to belong to a great
nation?
A painful question; for if it is answered in the affirmative, the struggle for my nationality
really ceases to be worth the hardships and sacrifices which the best of us have to make for
the sake of such scum; and if it is answered in the negative, our nation is pitifully poor in
human beings.
On such days of reflection and cogitation, I pondered with anxious concern on the masses of
those no longer belonging to their people and saw them swelling to the proportions of a
menacing army.
With what changed feeling I now gazed at the endless columns of a mass demonstration of
Viennese workers that took place one day as they marched past four abreast! For neatly two
hours I stood there watching with bated breath the gigantic human dragon slowly winding
by. In oppressed anxiety, I finally left the place and sauntered homeward. In a tobacco shop
on the way I saw the Arbeiter-Zeitung, the central organ of the old Austrian Social
Democracy. It was available in a cheap people's cafe, to which I often went to read
newspapers; but up to that time I had not been able to bring myself to spend more than two
minutes on the miserable sheet, whose whole tone affected me like moral vitriol. Depressed
by the demonstration, I was driven on by an inner voice to buy the sheet and read it
carefully. That evening I did so, fighting down the fury that rose up in me from time to time
at this concentrated solution of lies.
More than any theoretical literature, my daily reading of the Social Democratic press enabled
me to study the inner nature of these thought-processes.
For what a difference between the glittering phrases about freedom, beauty, and dignity in
the theoretical literature, the delusive welter of words seemingly expressing the most
profound and laborious wisdom, the loathsome humanitarian morality- all this written with
the incredible gall that comes with prophetic certainty-and the brutal daily press, shunning
no villainy, employing every means of slander, lying with a virtuosity that would bend iron
beams, all in the name of this gospel of a new humanity. The one is addressed to the
simpletons of the middle, not to mention the upper, educated, 'classes,' the other to the
masses.
For me immersion in the literature and press of this doctrine and organization meant finding
my way back to my own people.
What had seemed to me an unbridgable gulf became the source of a greater love than ever
before.
Only a fool can behold the work of this villainous poisoner and still condemn the victim. The
more independent I made myself in the next few years the clearer grew my perspective, hence
my insight into the inner causes of the Social Democratic successes. I now understood the
significance of the brutal demand that I read only Red papers, attend only Red meetings,
read only Red books, etc. With plastic clarity I saw before my eyes the inevitable result of this
doctrine of intolerance.
The psyche of the great masses is not receptive to anything that is half-hearted and weak.
Like the woman, whose psychic state is determined less by grounds of abstract reason than
by an indefinable emotional longing for a force which will complement her nature, and who,
consequently, would rather bow to a strong man than dominate a weakling, likewise the
masses love a commander more than a petitioner and feel inwardly more satisfied by a
doctrine, tolerating no other beside itself, than by the granting of liberalistic freedom with
which, as a rule, they can do little, and are prone to feel that they have been abandoned.
They are equally unaware of their shameless spiritual terrorization and the hideous abuse of