I don’t find anything on Google that corroborates this claim. The closest I found was this Goebbels quote that is vaguely similar:
If you have any credible evidence to back up this claim, please present it. Until then, I must conclude it never happened.
At the very least, I think it means that an individual and his country are symbiotic, and in peace and general uneventfulness that relationship involves the government doing much for the individual, while in times of strife that relationship involves the individual acting subservient to the needs of the state, the state being the agent organizing against the cause of said strife (be that natural disasters or war).
So long as this is a rallying cry, I salute it. When used to justify actions like conscription, I abhor it.
The intention behind the statement is good. The problem is that the idiots of the world use similar statements to argue that the individual should serve the interests of the state.
It should always be the other way around: the state exists to serve the individual.
In my high school class we were studying speeches and we saw a video of one of Hitlers rallies. My german was better back then… and he said the more or less the same words Kennedy did.
Yesterday I checked some sites with Hitler Speeches and there were way too many of them. Even using search words I couldnt find this specific speech. Key words like “ask”, “country”, etc… were repeated way too often.
The rally was in a stadium and I thought it was a Nuremberg rally… but I checked those speeches finding no result. Will try some more.
- As for the state-citizen relationship... it should be mutual. State should serve the individual and so should the individual serve the state. Treating the state as some kind of service provider that you pay fees (taxes) and expect X quantaty of service back just isnt enough. Nor do I want to be a slave of the system.Seraching thru some Hitler speeches… found this pearl: