Aqualung opening Riff
joer...@ck.uk
"Aqualung", in which he mentions a little detail about the title track
that I found quite stunning. The original U.S. (he says the original -
period - but that is not accurate) album had only ONE opening riff,
that is right before Clive Bunker and Ian come in, whereas from 1974
on, the other issues had two. Thirty years of Aqualung and I had never
noticed that before!! I checked my scratchy original US copy, and it
is true! ...But I also have the original UK Chrysalis one (distributed
by Island), and there are TWO riffs in there! I guess those people at
Reprise Records must have thought they were "hearing double", then
cut it out by half!
Tull Is The Devil
Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
Volume One - A Reckoning
Chapter II: Years of Study and Suffering in
Vienna
WHEN my mother died, Fate, at least in one respect, had made its
decisions.
In the last months of her sickness, I had gone to Vienna to take
the entrance examination for the Academy. I had set
out with a pile of drawings, convinced that it would be child's play to
pass the examination. At the Realschule I had been by
far the best in my class at drawing, and since then my ability had
developed amazingly; my own satisfaction caused me to
take a joyful pride in hoping for the best.
Yet sometimes a drop of bitterness put in its appearance: my
talent
for painting seemed to be excelled by my talent for
drawing, especially in almost all fields of architecture. At the same
time my interest in architecture as such increased steadily,
and this development was accelerated after a two weeks' trip to Vienna
which I took when not yet sixteen. The purpose of
my trip was to study the picture gallery in the Court Museum, but I had
eyes for scarcely anything but the Museum itself.
From morning until late at night, I ran from one object of interest to
another, but it was always the buildings which held my
primary interest. For hours I could stand in front of the Opera, for
hours I could gaze at the Parliament; the whole Ring
Boulevard seemed to me like an enchantment out of -The
Thousand-and-One-Nights.
Now I was in the fair city for the second time, waiting with
burning impatience, but also with confident self-assurance,
for the result of my entrance examination. I was so convinced that I
would be successful that when I received my rejection,
it struck me as a bolt from the blue. Yet that is what happened. When I
presented myself to the rector, requesting an
explanation for my non-acceptance at the Academy's school of painting,
that gentleman assured me that the drawings I had
submitted incontrovertibly showed my unfitness for painting, and that
my
ability obviously lay in the field of architecture; for
me, he said, the Academy's school of painting was out of the question,
the place for me was the School of Architecture. It
was incomprehensible to him that I had never attended an architectural
school or received any other training in architecture.
Downcast, I left von Hansen's magnificent building on the
Schillerplatz,
for the first time in my young life at odds with
myself. For what I had just heard about my abilities seemed like a
lightning flash, suddenly revealing a conflict with which I
had long been afflicted, although until then I had no clear conception
of
its why and wherefore.
In a few days I myself knew that I should some day become an
architect.
To be sure, it was an incredibly hard road; for the studies I had
neglected out of spite at the Realschule were sorely
needed. One could not attend the Academy's architectural school without
having attended the building school at the Technic,
and the latter required a high-school degree. I had none of all this.
The
fulfill- ment of my artistic dream seemed physically
impossible.
When after the death of my mother I went to Vienna for the third
time, to remain for many years, the time which had
mean-while elapsed had restored my calm and determination. My old
defiance had come back to me and my goal was now
clear and definite before my eyes. I wanted to become an architect, and
obstacles do not exist to be surrendered to, but only
to be broken. I was determined to overcome these obstacles, keeping
before my eyes the image of my father, who had
started out as the child of a village shoemaker, and risen by his own
efforts to be a government official. I had a better
foundation to build on, and hence my possibilities in the struggle were
easier, and what then seemed to be the harshness of
Fate, I praise today as wisdom and Providence. While the Goddess of
Suffering took me in her arms, often threatening to
crush me, my will to resistance grew, and in the end this will was
victorious.
I owe it to that period that I grew hard and am still capable of
being hard. And even more, I exalt it for tearing me
away from the hollowness of comfortable life; for drawing the mother's
darling out of his soft downy bed and giving him
'Dame Care' for a new mother; for hurling me, despite all resistance,
into a world of misery and poverty, thus making me
acquainted with those for whom I was later to fight.
In this period my eyes were opened to two menaces of which I had
previously scarcely known the names, and whose
terrible importance for the existence of the German people I certainly
did not understand: Marxism and Jewry.
To me Vienna, the city which, to so many, is the epitome of
innocent pleasure, a festive playground for merrymakers,
represents, I am sorry to say, merely the living memory of the saddest
period of my life.
Even today this city can arouse in me nothing but the most dismal
thoughts. For me the name of this Phaeacian city I
represents five years of hardship and misery. Five years in which I was
forced to earn a living, first as a day laborer, then as
a small painter; a truly meager living which never sufficed to appease
even my daily hunger. Hunger was then my faithful
bodyguard; he never left me for a moment and partook of all I had,
share
and share alike. Every book I acquired aroused his
interest; a visit to the Opera prompted his attentions for days at a
time; my life was a continuous struggle with this pitiless
friend. And yet during this time I studied as never before. Aside from
my
architecture and my rare visits to the Opera,
paid-for in hunger, I had but one pleasure: my books.
At that time I read enormously and thoroughly. All the free time
my
work left me was employed in my studies. In this
way I forged in a few years' time the foundations of a knowledge from
which I still draw nourishment today.
And even more than this:
In this period there took shape within me a world picture and a
philosophy which became the granite foundation of all
my acts. In addition to what I then created, I have had to learn
little;
and I have had to alter nothing.
On the contrary.
Today I am firmly convinced that basically and on the whole all
creative ideas appear in our youth, in so far as any
such are present. I distinguish between the wisdom of age, consisting
solely in greater thoroughness and caution due to the
experience of a long life, and the genius of youth, which pours out
thoughts and ideas with inexhaustible fertility, but cannot
for the moment develop them because of their very abundance. It is this
youthful genius which provides the building
materials and plans for the future, from which a wiser age takes the
stones, carves them and completes the edifice, in so far
as the so-called wisdom of age has not stifled the genius of youth.
The life which I had hitherto led at home differed little or not
at
all from the life of other people. Carefree, I could
await the new day, and there was no social problem for me. The
environment of my youth consisted of petty-bourgeois
circles, hence of a world having very little relation to the purely
manual worker. For, strange as it may seem at first glance,
the cleft between this class, which in an economic sense is by no means
so brilliantly situated, and the manual worker is
often deeper than we imagine. The reason for this hostility, as we
might
almost call it, lies in the fear of a social group, which
has but recently raised itself above the level of the manual worker,
that
it will sink back into the old despised class, or at least
become identified with it. To this, in many cases, we must add the
repugnant memory of the cultural poverty of this lower
class, the frequent vulgarity of its social intercourse; the petty
bourgeois' own position in society, however insignificant it
may be, makes any contact with this outgrown stage of life and culture
intolerable.
Consequently, the higher classes feel less constraint in their
dealings with the lowest of their fellow men than seems
possible to the 'upstart.'
For anyone is an upstart who rises by his own efforts from his
previous position in life to a higher one.
Ultimately this struggle, which is often so hard, kills all pity.
Our own painful struggle for existence destroys our
feeling for the misery of those who have remained behind.
In this respect Fate was kind to me. By forcing me to return to
this world of poverty and insecurity, from which my
father had risen in the course of his life, it removed the blinders of
a
narrow petty-bourgeois upbringing from my eyes. Only
now did I learn to know humanity, learning to distinguish between empty
appearances or brutal externals and the inner being.
After the turn of the century, Vienna was, socially speaking, one
of the most backward cities in Europe.
Dazzling riches and loathsome poverty alternated sharply. In the
center and in the inner districts you could really feel
the pulse of this realm of fifty-two millions, with all the dubious
magic
of the national melting pot. The Court with its
dazzling glamour attracted wealth and intelligence from the rest of the
country like a magnet. Added to this was the strong
centralization of the Habsburg monarchy in itself.
It offered the sole possibility of holding this medley of nations
together in any set form. But the consequence was an
extraordinary concentration of high authorities in the imperial capital
Yet not only in the political and intellectual sense was Vienna
the
center of the old Danube monarchy, but
economically as well. The host of high of officers, government
officials,
artists, and scholars was confronted by an even
greater army of workers, and side by side with aristocratic and
commercial wealth dwelt dire poverty. Outside the palaces on
the Ring loitered thousands of unemployed, and beneath this Via
Triumphalis of old Austria dwelt the homeless in the gloom
and mud of the canals.
In hardly any German city could the social question have been
studied better than in Vienna. But make no mistake.
This 'studying' cannot be done from lofty heights. No one who has not
been seized in the jaws of this murderous viper can
know its poison fangs. Otherwise nothing results but superficial
chatter
and false sentimentality. Both are harmful. The
former because it can never penetrate to the core of the problem, the
latter because it passes it by. I do not know which is
more terrible: inattention to social misery such as we see every day
among the majority of those who have been favored by
fortune or who have risen by their own efforts, or else the snobbish,
or
at times tactless and obtrusive, condescension of
certain women of fashion in skirts or in trousers, who ' feel for the
people.' In any event, these gentry sin far more than their
minds, devoid of all instinct, are capable of realizing. Consequently,
and much to their own amazement, the result of their
social 'efforts' is always nil, frequently, in fact, an indignant
rebuff,
though this, of course, is passed off as a proof of the
people's ingratitude.
Such minds are most reluctant to realize that social endeavor has
nothing in common with this sort of thing; that above
all it can raise no claim to gratitude, since its function is not to
distribute favors but to restore rights.
I was preserved from studying the social question in such a way.
By
drawing me within its sphere of suffering, it did
not seem to invite me to 'study,' but to experience it in my own skin.
It
was none of its doing that the guinea pig came
through the operation safe and sound.
An attempt to enumerate the sentiments I experienced in that
period
could never be even approximately complete; I
shall describe here only the most essential impressions, those which
often moved me most deeply, and the few lessons which
I derived from them at the time.
The actual business of finding work was, as a rule, not hard for
me, since I was not a skilled craftsman, but was
obliged to seek my daily bread as a so-called helper and sometimes as a
casual laborer.
I adopted the attitude of all those who shake the dust of Europe from
their feet with the irrevocable intention of founding a
new existence in the New World and conquering a new home. Released from
all the old, paralyzing ideas of profession and
position, environment and tradition, they snatch at every livelihood
that
offers itself, grasp at every sort of work, progressing
step by step to the realization that honest labor, no matter of what
sort, disgraces no one. I, too, was determined to leap into
this new world, with both feet, and fight my way through.
I soon learned that there was always some kind of work to be had, but
equally soon I found out how easy it was to lose it.
The uncertainty of earning my daily bread soon seemed to me one of the
darkest sides of my new life.
The ' skilled' worker does not find himself out on the street as
frequently as the unskilled; but he is not entirely
immune to this fate either. And in his case the loss of livelihood
owing
to lack of work is replaced by the lock-out, or by
going on strike himself.
In this respect the entire economy suffers bitterly from the
individual's
insecurity in earning his daily bread.
The peasant boy who goes to the big city, attracted by the easier
nature of the work (real or imaginary), by shorter
hours, but most of all by the dazzling light emanating from the
metropolis, is accustomed to a certain security in the matter of
livelihood. He leaves his old job only when there is at least some
prospect of a new one. For there is a great lack of
agricultural workers, hence the probability of any long period of
unemployment is in itself small. It is a mistake to believe
that the young fellow who goes to the big city is made of poorer stuff
than his brother who continues to make an honest
living from the peasant sod. No, on the contrary: experience shows that
all those elements which emigrate consist of the
healthiest and most energetic natures, rather than conversely. Yet
among
these 'emigrants' we must count, not only those
who go to America, but to an equal degree the young farmhand who
resolves
to leave his native village for the strange city.
He, too, is prepared to face an uncertain fate. As a rule he arrives in
the big city with a certain amount of money; he has no
need to lose heart on the very first day if he has the ill fortune to
find no work for any length of time. But it is worse if, after
finding a job, he soon loses it. To find a new one, especially in
winter,
is often difficult if not impossible. Even so, the first
weeks are tolerable. He receives an unemployment benefit from his union
funds and manages as well as possible. But when
his last cent is gone and the union, due to the long duration of his
unemployment, discontinues its payments, great hardships
begin. Now he walks the streets, hungry; often he pawns and sells his
last possessions; his clothing becomes more and more
wretched; and thus he sinks into external surroundings which, on top of
his physical misfortune, also poison his soul. If he is
evicted and if (as is so often the case) this occurs in winter, his
misery is very great. At length he finds some sort of job
again. But the old story is repeated. The same thing happens a second
time, the third time perhaps it is even worse, and little
by little he learns to bear the eternal insecurity with greater and
greater indifference. At last the repetition becomes a habit.
And so this man, who was formerly so hard-working, grows lax in
his
whole view of life and gradually becomes the
instrument of those who use him only for their own base advantage. He
has
so often been unemployed through no fault of
his own that one time more or less ceases to matter, even when the aim
is
no longer to fight for economic rights, but to
destroy political, social, or culturaL values in general. He may not be
exactly enthusiastic about strikes, but at any rate he has
become indifferent.
With open eyes I was able to follow this process in a thousand
examples. The more I witnessed it, the greater grew
my revulsion for the big city which first avidly sucked men in and then
so cruelly crushed them.
When they arrived, they belonged to their people; after remaining
for a few years, they were lost to it.
I, too, had been tossed around by life in the metropolis- in my
own
skin I could feel the effects of this fate and taste
them with my soul. One more thing I saw: the rapid change from work to
unemployment and vice versa, plus the resultant
fluctuation of income, end by destroying in many all feeling for
thrift,
or any understanding for a prudent ordering of their
lives. It would seem that the body gradually becomes accustomed to
living
on the fat of the land in good times and going
hungry in bad times. Indeed, hunger destroys any resolution for
reasonable budgeting in better times to come by holding up
to the eyes of its tormented victim an eternal mirage of good living
and
raising this dream to such a pitch of longing that a
pathological desire puts an end to all restraint as soon as wages and
earnings make it at all possible. The consequence is that
once the man obtains work he irresponsibly forgets all ideas of order
and
discipline, and begins to live luxuriously for the
pleasures of the moment. This upsets even the small weekly budget, as
even here any intelligent apportionment is lacking; in
the beginning it suffices for five days instead of seven, later only
for
three, finally scarcely for one day, and in the end it is
drunk up in the very first night.
Often he has a wife and children at home. Sometimes they, too, are
infected by this life, especially when the man is good to
them on the whole and actually loves them in his own way. Then the
weekly
wage is used up by the whole family in two or
three days; they eat and drink as long as the money holds out and the
last days they go hungry. Then the wife drags herself
out into the neighborhood, borrows a little, runs up little debts at
the
food store, and in this way strives to get through the
hard last days of the week. At noon they all sit together before their
meager and sometimes empty bowls, waiting for the
next payday, speaking of it, making plans, and, in their hunger,
dreaming
of the happiness to come.
And so the little children, in their earliest beginnings, are
made
familiar with this misery.
It ends badly if the man goes his own way from the very beginning
and the woman, for the children's sake, opposes
him. Then there is fighting and quarreling, and, as the man grows
estranged from his wife, he becomes more intimate with
alcohol. He is drunk every Saturday, and, with her instinct of
selfpreservation for herself and her children, the woman has to
fight to get even a few pennies out of him; and, to make matters worse,
this usually occurs on his way from the factory to
the barroom. When at length he comes home on Sunday or even Monday
night,
drunk and brutal, but always parted from
his last cent, such scenes often occur that God have mercy!
I have seen this in hundreds of instances. At first I was
repelled
or even outraged, but later I understood the whole
tragedy of this misery and its deeper causes. These people are the
unfortunate victims of bad conditions!
Even more dismal in those days were the housing conditions. The misery
in
which the Viennese day laborer lived was
frightful to behold. Even today it fills me with horror when I think of
these wretched caverns, the lodging houses and
tenements, sordid scenes of garbage, repulsive filth, and worse.
What was-and still is-bound to happen some day, when the stream
of
unleashed slaves pours forth from these
miserable dens to avenge themselves on their thoughtless fellow men F
For thoughtless they are!
Thoughtlessly they let things slide along, and with their utter
lack of intuition fail even to suspect that sooner or later
Fate must bring retribution, unless men conciliate Fate while there is
still time.
How thankful I am today to the Providence which sent me to that school!
In it I could no longer sabotage the subjects I did
not like. It educated me quickly and thoroughly.
If I did not wish to despair of the men who constituted my
environment at that time, I had to learn to distinguish
between their external characters and lives and the foundations of
their
development. Only then could all this be borne
without losing heart. Then, from all the misery and despair, from all
the
filth and outward degeneration, it was no longer
human beings that emerged, but the deplorable results of deplorable
laws;
and the hardship of my own life, no easier than the
others, preserved me from capitulating in tearful sentimentality to the
degenerate products of this process of development.
No, this is not the way to understand all these things!
Even then I saw that only a twofold road could lead to the goal
of
improving these conditions:
The deepest sense of social responsibility for the creation of
better foundations for our development, coupled with
brutal determination on breaking down incurable tenors.
Just as Nature does not concentrate her greatest attention in
preserving what exists, but in breeding offspring to carry
on the species, likewise, in human life, it is less important
artificially to alleviate existing evil, which, in view of human
nature, is ninety-nine per cent impossible, than to ensure
from the start healthier channels for a future development.
During my struggle for existence in Vienna, it had become clear
to
me that
Social activity must never and on no account be directed toward
philanthropic flim-flam, but rather toward the
elimination of the basic deficiencies in the organization of our
economic
and cultural life that must-or at all events can-lead to
the degeneration of the individual .
The difficulty of applying the most extreme and brutal methods
against the criminals who endanger the state lies not
least in the uncertainty of our judgment of the inner motives or causes
of such contemporary phenomena.
This uncertainty is only too well founded in our own sense of
guilt
regarding such tragedies of degeneration; be that as
it may, it paralyzes any serious and firm decision and is thus partly
responsible for the weak and half-hearted, because
hesitant, execution of even the most necessary measures of
selfpreservation.
Only when an epoch ceases to be haunted by the shadow of its own
consciousness of guilt will it achieve the inner
calm and outward strength brutally and ruthlessly to prune off the wild
shoots and tear out the weeds.
Since the Austrian state had practically no social legislation or
jurisprudence, its weakness in combating even
malignant tumors was glaring.
I do not know what horrified me most at that time: the economic
misery of my companions, their moral and ethical
coarseness, or the low level of their intellectual development.
How often does our bourgeoisie rise in high moral indignation
when
they hear some miserable tramp declare that it is
all the same to him whether he is a German or not, that he feels
equally
happy wherever he is, as long as he has enough to
live on!
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 morality as such, of the state or society, it is all the
same, everything is reviled in the most obscene terms and
dragged into the filth of the basest possible outlook. When at the age
of
fourteen the young man is discharged from school, it
is hard to decide what is
------------------------------------------------------------
** dieu et mon quacky ** honi soit qui mal y nyuk **
------------------------------------------------------------
TULL IS THE DEVIL!!!!! OYYYYYYYYYY!!!
SPEECH OF NOVEMBER 6, 1938
WHAT seems to us almost a miracle as we look back upon it is nothing
else
than the reward for infinite and unwearying labor.... And now for that
labor we have received from Providence our reward, just as the Germany
of
1918 received its reward. At that time Germany shared in those
blessings which we think of under the collective idea Democracy. But
Germany has learned that democracy in practice is a different thing from
democracy in theory.
If today at times in foreign countries Parliamentarians or politicians
venture to maintain that Germany has not kept her treaties, then we can give
as our
answer to these men: the greatest breach of a treaty that ever was
practiced on the German people. Every promise which had been made to Germany
in the Fourteen Points - those promises on the faith of which Germany
had
laid down her arms - was afterwards broken. In 1932 Germany was faced
with final collapse. The German Reich and people both seemed lost. And
then came the German resurrection. It began with a change of faith. While
all
the German parties before us believed in forces and ideals which lay
outside of the German Reich and outside of our people, we National
Socialists
have resolutely championed belief in our own people, starting from that
watchword of eternal validity: God helps only those who are prepared and
determined to help themselves. In the place of all those international
factors - Democracy, the Conscience of Peoples, the Conscience of the World,
the League of Nations, and the like - we have set a single factor - our
own people. . . .
We were all convinced that a true community of the people is not
produced
overnight - it is not attained through theories or programs - but that
through many decades, yes, and perhaps always and for all time the
individual must be trained for this community. This work of education we
have
carried through ever since the Party was founded and especially since
we
came into power. But nothing is perfect in this world and no success can be
felt to be finally satisfying. And so, even today, we have no wish to
maintain that our achievement is already the realization of our ideal. We
have
an
ideal which floats before our minds and in accordance with that ideal
we
educate Germans, generation after generation. So National Socialism will
continually be transformed from a profession of political faith to a
real
education of the people....
The umbrella-carrying types of our former bourgeois world of parties
are
extinguished and they will never return...
From the very first day I have proclaimed as a fundamental principle:
'the German is either the first soldier in the world or he is no soldier at
all.' No
soldiers at all we cannot be, and we do not wish to be. Therefore we
shall be only the first. As one who is a lover of peace I have endeavored to
create for the German people such an army and such munitions as are
calculated to convince others, too, to seek peace.
There are, it is true, people who abuse the hedgehog because it has
spines. But they have only got to leave the animal in peace. No hedgehog has
ever
attacked anyone unless he was first threatened. That should be our
position, too. Folk must not come too near us. We want nothing else than to
be
left
in peace; we want the possibility of going on with our work, we claim
for
our people the right to live, the same right which others claim for
themselves.
And that the democratic States above all others should grasp and
understand, for they never stop talking about equality of rights. If they
keep
talking
about the rights of small peoples, how can they be outraged if in its
turn a great people claims the same right? Our National Socialist Army
serves
to
secure and guarantee this claim of right.
It is with this in view that in foreign policy also I have initiated a
change in our attitude and have drawn closer to those who like us were
compelled to
stand up for their rights.
And when today I examine the results of this action of ours, then I am
able to say: Judge all of you for yourselves: Have we not gained enormously
through acting on these principles?
But precisely for this reason we do not wish that we should ever forget
what has made these successes of ours possible. When certain foreign
newspapers write: 'But all that you could have gained by the way of
negotiation,' we know very well that Germany before our day did nothing but
negotiate continuously. For fifteen years they only negotiated and they
lost everything for their pains. I, too, am ready to negotiate but I leave
no
one in
any doubt that neither by way of negotiation nor by any other way will
I
allow the rights of Germany to be cut down. Never forget, German people, to
what it is you owe your successes - to what Movement, to what ideas,
and
to what principles! And in the second place: always be cautious, be ever
on your guard!
It is very fine to talk of international peace and international
disarmament, but I am mistrustful of a disarmament in weapons of war so long
as there has
been no disarmament of the spirit.
There has been formed in the world the curious custom of dividing
peoples
into so-called 'authoritarian' States, that is disciplined States, and
democratic States. In the authoritarian, that is, the disciplined
States,
it goes without saying that one does not abuse foreign peoples, does not lie
about
them, does not incite to war. But the democratic States are precisely
'democratic,' that is, that all this can happen there In the authoritarian
States a
war - agitation is of course impossible, for their Governments are
under
an obligation to see to it that there is no such thing. In the democracies,
on
the
other hand, the Governments have only one duty: to maintain democracy,
and that means the liberty, if necessary, to incite to war....
Mr. Churchill had stated his view publicly, namely that the present
regime in Germany must be overthrown with the aid of forces within Germany
which would gladly co-operate. If Mr. Churchill would but spend less of
his time in emigre circles, that is with traitors to their country
maintained
and
paid abroad, and more of his time with Germans, then he would realize
the
utter madness and stupidity of his idle chatter. I can only assure this
gentleman, who would appear to be living in the moon, of one thing:
there
is no such force in Germany which could turn against the present regime.
I will not refuse to grant to this gentleman that, naturally we have no
right to demand that the other peoples should alter their constitutions.
But,
as
leader of the Germans, I have the duty to consider this constitution of
theirs and the possibilities which result from it. When a few days ago in
the
House of Commons the Deputy Leader of the Opposition declared that he
made no secret of the fact that he would welcome the destruction of
Germany and Italy, then, of course, I cannot prevent it if perhaps this
man on the basis of the democratic rules of the game should in fact with his
party
in one or two years become the Government. But of one thing I can
assure
him: I can prevent him from destroying Germany. And just as I am
convinced that the German people will take care that the plans of these
gentlemen so far as Germany is concerned will never succeed, so in precisely
the same way Fascist Italy will, I know, take care for itself!
I believe that for us all these international hopes can only teach us
to
stand firm together and to cling to our friends. The more that we in Germany
form
a single community, the less favorable will be the prospects of these
inciters to war, and the closer we unite ourselves in particular with the
State which
is in a position similar to ours, with Italy, the less desire they will
have to pick a quarrel with us! . . .
Germany has become greater by the most natural way, by a way which
could
not be more morally unassailable.... When the rest of the world speaks
of disarmament, then we too are ready for disarmament, but under one
condition: the war-agitation must first be disarmed!
So long as the others only talk of disarmament, while they infamously
continue to incite to war, we must presume that they do but wish to steal
from
us
our arms, in order once more to prepare for us the fate of 1918-19. And
in that case, my only answer to Mr. Churchill and his like must be: That
happens once only and it will not be repeated! . . .