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Volume IV · Page 508
| continued to supply the fuel until they,
themselves, were scorched by the flame they had been so enthusiastically
tending. If history has taught anything, it has demonstrated with devastating
finality that most of the evils of the world have been due to craven
subservience by subchiefs upon a man who through boundless ambition
unrestrained by conscience has formulated plans which, proposed by anyone else,
would be rejected as mad. Dictatorship in government can only lead to disaster because whatever benefits derive from centralized control are lost in the infinite damage which inevitably follows lack of responsibility. That unlimited authority and power are poisons which destroy judgment and reason is a demonstrable fact as conclusively established as any chemical formula tried and tested in a laboratory. The genius of true democratic government is that no one person is allowed to take the nation with its millions of people into the valley of decisive action without the advice, counsel, and approval of those who are to be subjected to the hazards, hardships, and potentially fatal consequences of that decision. The defendants must have found themselves repeatedly at the crossroads where and when there was still the opportunity to turn in the direction of the ideals which they had once known, but the willful determination to follow the trail of blood prints of their voluntarily accepted leader could only take them to the goal they had never intended. It is possible that currently the defendants realize the mistake which they made. Though most of them have sought to rationalize their deeds, though they attempted to explain that every executioner's rifle was aimed at a national peril, it is possible they now grasp the disservice they have done not only to humanity but to their own Fatherland. It may even be that through this trial with its sobering revelations, they will have demonstrated what are the inevitable consequences of any plan which stems from hatred and intolerance; and here they may have proved what has never been disproved: There is only one Fuehrer, and that is truth. Alfred Rosenberg, the acknowledged master philosopher of nazism wrote on "The Myth of Blood" — |
"A new faith is arising today. The myth of the blood, the faith, to defend with the blood the divine essence of man. The faith, embodied in clearest knowledge that the Nordic blood represents that mysterium which has replaced and overcome the old sacraments." |
| What does this mean? No one has yet deciphered its cadenced incoherence, but as Rosenberg himself claimed in it conclusive proof of the master race, others were willing to assume in this torturing abstruseness the authority of a revealed writing. Be- […neath] |
