It was not without good reason that when we laid down a clearly defined programme for the new movement we excluded the word VĂ–LKISCH from it. The concept underlying the term VĂ–LKISCH cannot serve as the basis of a movement, because it is too indefinite and general in its application. Therefore, if somebody called himself VĂ–LKISCH such a designation could not be taken as the hall-mark of some definite, party affiliation.
One feels it a disgrace when one notices the kind of people who float about nowadays with the VĂ–LKISCH symbol stuck in their buttonholes, and at the same time to notice how many people have various ideas of their own as to the significance of that symbol. A well-known professor in Bavaria, a famous combatant who fights only with the weapons of the mind and who boasts of having marched against Berlin--by shouldering the weapons of the mind, of course--believes that the word VĂ–LKISCH is synonymous with 'monarchical'. But this learned authority has hitherto neglected to explain how our German monarchs of the past can be identified with what we generally mean by the word VĂ–LKISCH to-day. I am afraid he will find himself at a loss if he is asked to give a precise answer. For it would be very difficult indeed to imagine anything less
Everybody interprets this concept in his own way. But such multifarious opinions cannot be adopted as the basis of a militant political movement. I need not call attention to the absolute lack of worldly wisdom, and especially the failure to understand the soul of the nation, which is displayed by these Messianic Precursors of the Twentieth Century. Sufficient attention has been called to those people by the ridicule which the left-wing parties have bestowed on them. They allow them to babble on and sneer at them.
I do not set much value on the friendship of people who do not succeed in getting disliked by their enemies. Therefore, we considered the friendship of such people as not only worthless but even dangerous to our young movement. That was the principal reason why we first called ourselves a PARTY. We hoped that by giving ourselves such a name we might scare away a whole host of VĂ–LKISCH dreamers. And that was the reason also why we named our Party, THE NATIONAL SOCIALIST GERMAN LABOUR PARTY.
The first term, Party, kept away all those dreamers who live in the past and all the lovers of bombastic nomenclature, as well as those who went around beating the big drum for the VĂ–LKISCH idea. The full name of the Party kept away all those heroes whose weapon is the sword of the spirit and all those whining poltroons who take refuge behind their so-called 'intelligence' as if it were a kind of shield.
It was only to be expected that this latter class would launch a massed attack against us after our movement had started; but, of course, it was only a pen-and-ink attack, for the goose-quill is the only weapon which these VĂ–LKISCH lancers wield. We had declared one of our principles thus: "We shall meet violence with violence in our own defence". Naturally that principle disturbed the equanimity of the knights of the pen. They reproached us bitterly not only for what they called our crude worship of the cudgel but also because, according to them, we had no intellectual forces on our side. These charlatans did not think for a moment that a Demosthenes could be reduced to silence at a mass-meeting by fifty idiots who had come there to shout him down and use their fists against his supporters. The innate cowardice of the pen-and-ink