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" "The press to-day is an army with carefully organized arms and branches, with journalists as officers, and readers as soldiers. But here, as in every army, the soldier obeys blindly, and war-aims and operation-plans change without his knowledge. The reader neither knows, nor is allowed to know, the purposes for which he is used, nor even the role that he is to play. A more appalling caricature of freedom of thought cannot be imagined. Formerly a man did not dare to think freely. Now he dares, but cannot; his will to think is only a willingness to think to order, and this is what he feels as his liberty.
Oswald Arnold Gottfried Spengler (29 May 1880 – 8 May 1936) was a German historian, philosopher and political writer, most famous for his Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West), the first volume of which was published in the summer of 1918 and by 1926 had gone through thirty printings.
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The concepts "bourgeoisie" and "proletariat" reflect the typically English preference for business rather than manual work. (But of course not over mental work. Just as the English intellectual was by choice either a Tory or a Whig, he has had to choose between the two new economic parties. Being a "gentleman", he has naturally opted for big business.) The former is a blessing, the latter a calamity; the one is noble, the other base. But with their hatred the misfortunate ones say, "Business is the evil occupation, manual labor the good." This is the explanation for the mental attitude which gave rise to Marx's social criticism and which has made him so catastrophic for true socialism. He knew the nature of work only from the English viewpoint, as a means of getting rich, as a means lacking in all moral depth. Only success and money, the visible and tangible signs of God’s grace, were of ethical import. The Englishman has no inkling of the dignity of hard work. For him, work is a debasing thing, an ugly necessity. Pity the poor soul who has nothing but work, who owns nothing without more and more work, but who above all will never have wealth in the future! Had Marx understood the meaning of Prussian work, of activity for its own sake, of service in the name of the totality, for "all together" and not for oneself, of duty that ennobles regardless of the kind of work performed—had he been able to comprehend these things, his Manifesto would probably never have been written.
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Socialism means power, power, and more power. Thoughts and schemes are nothing without power. The path to power has already been mapped: the valuable elements of German labor in union with the best representatives of the Old Prussian state idea, both groups determined to build a strictly socialist state to democratize our nation in the Prussian manner; both forged into a unit by the same sense of duty, by the awareness of a great obligation, by the will to obey in order to rule, to die in order to win, by the strength to make immense sacrifices in order to accomplish what we were born for, what we are, what could not be without us.