2.25 JEWISH DIALECTICS

The great masses can be rescued, but only by sacrificing much time and patience.

But a Jew can never be parted from his opinions.

It was simple enough, at that time, to try to show them the absurdity of their teaching. Within my small circle, I talked to them until my throat ached and my voice grew hoarse. I believed that I could finally convince them of the danger inherent in Marxist foolishness. But I only achieved the contrary result. It seemed that the more they understood the destructiveness of Social-Democratic doctrine and its consequences, the more firmly they clung to it.

The more I debated with them, the more familiar I became with their argumentative tactics. At the outset they counted upon the stupidity of their opponents; but when they got so tied up that they couldn’t find a way out, they played the trick of acting as innocent simpletons. Should that fail, in spite of their tricks of logic, they acted as if they couldn’t understand the counter arguments, and jumped away to another topic of discussion. They

stated truisms and platitudes; and if you accepted these, they applied them to other matters of an essentially different nature. If you pointed this out, they escaped again and avoided any precise statement. Whenever one tried to get a firm grip on one of these apostles, one’s hand grasped only a jelly- like slime—that slipped through the fingers, and then recombined into a solid mass a moment later.

But if you really struck a blow on one of these adversaries and, due to the audience present, he had to concede the point, a surprise was in store for you the following day. The Jew would be utterly oblivious to what had happened the day before. He would start once again by repeating his former absurdities, as if nothing had happened. If you became indignant and reminded him of yesterday’s defeat, he feigned astonishment, and couldn’t remember a thing—except that on the day before, he was proven correct.

Sometimes I was simply dumbfounded.

I don’t know what amazed me more: the agility of their speech or their art of lying.

I gradually came to hate them.

Adolf Hitler (Chancellor of the German Reich) Mein Kampf, 1925