THE Strasser brothers were very influential members of the National Socialist German Workers Party. Following an argument with Hitler, Otto Strasser resigned from the party while his brother Gregor was shot during the Night of the Long Knives in 1934. Their radical nationalist views live on, however, and are as relevant today as they were in the 1930's.

Otto Strasser

ON PRIVATE PROPERTY. . .
"Whoever recognises the truth of the saying 'Property makes free', whoever affirms the necessity for a sustaining stratum in any satisfactory social order — must look forward to the new order which will aim at the de-proletarianisation of the people, and at our liberation from the social and economic monopolies under whose harrow no sort of freedom is possible."

 ON EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY . . .
"I have castigated and repudiated the liberal illusion of human equality, I nevertheless ardently champion the . . . doctrine that equality of opportunity is essential."

 ON EDUCATION . . .
"Hitherto the main object of schooling has been to 'impart information', but henceforward it will be regarded as at least equally important to train character."

"The child will be growing up into the German cultural world, without having his mind unduly diverted towards alien cultures during the receptive years of childhood."

 ON THE LEADERSHIP PRINCIPLE . . .
"The Idea is divine in origin, while men are only its vehicles, the body in which the Word is made flesh. The leader is made to serve the Idea, and it is to the Idea alone that we owe absolute allegiance. The leader is human, and it is human to err."
"The Idea is the decisive thing, and the individual conscience should be called upon to decide if there is any divergence between the Idea and the leader."
"The man who is unaware of his own limitations inevitably crashes, and drags everything else down with him."

ON HATE . . .
"Hate must be born of love. One must be capable of loving to know what is hateful, and so have the strength to destroy it."

ON THE NATIONAL REVOLUTION . . .
"The German people wants a German revolution, that is to say a national and social revolution"

ON CULTURE . . .
"Simplifying life would not mean a 'relapse into barbarism', for culture is not dependent 'upon luxury or upon the gratification of needlessly created wants."

ON MARXISM . . .
"Marxism is a socialism both liberal and alien, a doctrine whose liberal factors necessarily unfit it for the upbuilding of the socialist future."

"Thanks to Marx, Engels, Kautsky etc., all typical liberals both by origin and by nature, socialism took the liberal path towards alienism, as was plainly shown by its relation to the International, its class-war tactics, and its materialist philosophy."

ON MACHINERY . . .
"It is assuredly time . . . to end the tyranny of technique, to overthrow the dominion of the machine, and to make technique and the machine once more. servants instead of masters — for their dominion has been an unmitigated curse."

ON URBAN LIFE . . .
"Those who understand that life in our huge tentacular towns is a danger to the race cannot fail to regard systematic de-urbanisation as urgently required for the sake of the people."

"Owing to the rapid growth of towns, of enormous towns, tentacular towns, people have been uprooted from the countryside and 'intellectualised' in a way that has weakened their healthy instincts; this has been accompanied by a growing inclination to overrate both machinery and sport, these in their turn tending to hasten the general despiritualisation of life."

 ON LIBERAL DEMOCRACY . . .
"A genuine commonwealth of the people can . . . only be established by the destruction of the existing party system."

"From their very nature political parties have a vital interest in sundering the people into factions."

 ON THE GUILD SYSTEM . . .
"The alternative to the bankrupt alien 'solutions' of Communism and Capitalism, the idea which we represent is the . . . political representation of parties, trades and professions based on our ancient Guild system."

ON MATERIALISM . . .
"The Philosophy of the liberal epoch has been and still is materialism. Nothing typifies Marxism more plainly than the fact that it is tainted with alien views of socialism, that its program is shaped by the materialist philosophy which it shares with liberalism."

"To the liberal capitalist and liberal Marxian ideal of modern mammoth factories producing vast quantities of goods, we should contrapose the . . . ideal of a full and free life, so that it will be the task of a responsible government to create the economic and social conditions essential to the realisation of such an ideal."
 

Gregor Strasser

ON SOCIALISM . . .
"We National Socialists are socialists, genuine national, German socialists."

"From the Right we shall take Nationalism which has so disastrously allied itself with capitalism, and from the Left we shall take Socialism, which has made such an unhappy union with internationalism. Thus we shall form the National Socialism which will be the motive force of a new Germany and new Europe."

"We are 'socialists' and not mere 'social reformers' and we do not hesitate to say it although the Marxians have so painful distorted the meaning of the former term."

ON CAPITALISM . . .
"The capitalist economic system with it exploitation of those who are economically weak, with its robbery of the workers labour power, with its unethical way of appraising human beings by the number of things and the amount of money the possess, instead of by their internal values and their achievements, must be replaced by a new and just economic system, in a won by German socialism."

ON MATERIALISM . . .
"The most deplorable legacy of the capitalist economic system is that it has taught us to judge all things by the standards of money ownership, possession."