Politics & Power Quote by Julius Streicher

America’s “fortune” isn’t just money here; it’s a moral alibi. Streicher’s line needles a linguistic trick: when wealth arrives fast, the culture doesn’t say “he took it” or “he grabbed it,” it says “he made his fortune” - as if prosperity were a handcrafted object, earned by skill and sweat rather than by leverage, luck, or predation. The phrasing turns a suspicious outcome into a respectable biography. That’s the point: language laundering power.

The subtext is less curiosity about American idiom than contempt for what he wants his audience to see as a uniquely American hypocrisy: a society that sanctifies rapid accumulation with a euphemism that implies destiny. “Fortune” carries the old double meaning - riches and fate. Streicher exploits that ambiguity to suggest Americans confuse profit with providence, making the market into a kind of god that “chooses” winners. It’s a sly jab that frames capitalism as both naive and morally hollow.

Context matters, because Streicher was not a neutral observer. As a Nazi propagandist later executed at Nuremberg, he specialized in turning social critique into ideological weaponry. The line functions as a wedge: a seemingly mild, almost anthropological observation that can be tightened into a broader smear of liberal modernity (and, in his larger project, into conspiratorial scapegoating). Its effectiveness comes from that incrementalism: start with a true-ish quirk of speech, then invite the audience to distrust the entire society that speaks that way.