when he writes,"The art of propaganda lies in understanding the emotional ideas of the great masses. The fact that our smart alecks do not understand this merely shows how mentally lazy and conceited they are," (180). He also calls them "Angsthasen" (chicken-hearted); "For the cursing and 'beefing' you could hear at the front were never an incitement to shirk duty or a glorification of the chicken-hearted. No! The coward still passed as a coward and as nothing else" (192). Opposers were "the type of lazybones who could perfectly well think, but from sheer mental laziness seizes gratefully on everything that someone else has thought, with the modest assumption that the someone else has exerted himself considerably" (241), and he believed that "only a bourgeois 'einfaltspinsel' (blockhead) is capable of imagining that Bolshevism has been exorcised" (661). In Mein Kampf Hitler already knows everything better than anybody else. Whoever attempts to argue against him is quickly brushed aside as being incapable, or stupid.It should not be surprising that Hitler also makes frequent use of other formulaic phrases which date from the warfare of the Middle Ages or the military in general. After all, there is a reason for this book's being called "Mein Kampf" or "My Battle", and such proverbial phrases as "gegen jdn. Sturm laufen" (to be up in arms against), "Since the Social Democrats best know the value of force from their own experience, they are most up in arms against those in whose nature they detect any of this substance which is so rare" (43); "auf Leben und Tod" (for life and death), "For me (Hitler), to be sure, these incidents had the virtue that the squad of my loyal followers came to feel really attached to me, and was soon sworn for life and death by my side" (558); and "bei der Stange halten" (to stick to one's guns), "The enormous propaganda which had made the British people persevere and stick to their guns in this war, which re...
