"This ability to believe is rather weak in some circles, above all in those with money and education. They may trust more in pure cold reason than a glowing idealistic heart. Our so-called intellectuals do not like to hear this, but it is true anyway. They know so much that in the end they do not know what to do with their wisdom. They can see the past, but not much of the present, and nothing at all of the future. Their imagination is insufficient to deal with a distant goal in a way such that one already thinks it achieved.
That is why their carping criticisms generally focus on laughable trivialities. Whenever some unavoidable difficulty pops up, the kind of thing that always happens, they are immediately inclined to doubt everything and to throw the baby out with the bath water. To them difficulties are not there to be mastered, rather to be surrendered to.
One cannot make history with such quivering people. They are only the chaff in God's breath. Thankfully, they are only a thin intellectual or social upper class, particularly in the case of Germany. They are not an upper class in the sense that they govern the nation, rather more a fact of nature like the bubbles of fat that always float on the surface of things.
Today, they seek to give good advice to National Socialist Germany from abroad. We do not have to ask them for it. They focus all their energies on the small problems that always are there, complain about the cost and believe that crises and unavoidable tensions are on the way. They are the complainers who never tire of bringing National Socialist Germany before the so-called court of world opinion. In the past they always found willing and thankful followers. Today, they only have a few backward intellectual Philistines in their camp.
The people want nothing to do with them. These Philistines are the 8/10 of one percent of the German people who have always said no, who always say no now, and who will always say no in the future. We cannot win them over, and do not even want to. They said no when Austria joined the Reich; they said no when the Sudetenland followed. They always say no as a matter of principle."
-Joseph Goebbels 1938 |
