ABSTRACT
Adolph Hitler's Mein Kampf invokes hatred and death as guardians of social order. The purpose of rhetoric and of all political symbolic action, Hitler repeats many times, is to give people a deep sense of community. The conditions for doing this, the stage on which the political drama must be mounted, is the public mass meeting. A mass meeting, to be effective with the masses, must be staged carefully as a drama of struggle between good and evil. The means by which the orator moves his mass audience is the spoken word. The word, in turn, is an incitement to battle, based on unreason. The political orator of the masses is not appealing to reason but to feeling—for all human beings have prejudices which are not founded on reason. Such prejudices are supported only by feeling, and often people are unconscious of these feelings.
