cannot penetrate, who causes
fear. In small countries having only land borders, this attitude of
suspicion and fear must become an integral part of the whole psychic
structure of the national consciousness. Fear becomes morbid; nations
have illusions and delusions based upon fear. There are reasons for
believing that all aggression contains a pessimistic motive, or
background, and that this pessimistic background is based upon the
emotion of fear. Countries that are most positively aggressive have
such a pessimistic strain. Pessimism is a shadow that lies across the
path of progress of modern Germany. This fear motive, the quality of
the animal that charges when at bay, is to be seen throughout all
German history. Germany's fear of Russia must certainly be blamed for
a great part of the pessimistic strain in the temperament of Germany,
and therefore as an important factor among the causes of the great
war. Every war appears to the people who conduct it as defensive,
precisely because every war is to some extent based upon fear, and
fear in national consciousness is a persistent sense of living by a
defensive strategy. It is existence that nations always think and talk
of fighting for; it is existence about which they have apprehensions.
Beneath all group life there is this sense of fear, since fear itself
was a large factor in creating that life. When people live together,
repress individual desires and participate in a common life we may
know that one of the strongest bonds of this social life is fear. The
need of defense is a more fundamental motive in national life than is
aggression. A "shudder runs through a nation about to go to battle."
The lusts of war are aroused later by the overcoming of fear.

Germany's inclination to preventive wars, her incessant plea of being
about to be attacked, can by no means be interpreted as pure
deception, or as an effort to make political capital. Germany's army
_was_ primarily for defense, because a defensive strategy is the only
strategy that Germany with her position and her temperament can adopt.
Germany's great army was Germany's compensation, in consciousness, for
the insignificance of her territory. It was for defense. It was also a
compensation for a feeling of inferiority, in Adler's sense.
Fanaticism, envy, depreciation of others, aggression, morbid and
excessive ambition were all fruits from the same stem. The gloom which
many have found in German life, and the pessimi