Nietzsche....

As long as I'm writing about the Nazis here, I may as well write some more. Jerry, you may not like this, so close your good lil' eyes.

And the blog mentions Nietzsche, yet I've written very little about Nietzsche. I like Nietzsche in some ways and perhaps in the future I may say something more. But this history is about the Nazis and Nietzsche. It may be good for fans of Nietzsche who happen across this blog to know the inherent danger of his ideas. It is not as if Nietzsche denied it or covered it up. He liked being the dangerous or dark philosopher.

Example, he notes with approval:
"My latest book [Beyond Good and Evil] was greeted in one Basel newspaper in the following way: 'Those trucks that shipped the dynamite necessary for the construction of the railroad over the St. Gotthard carried a black flag of warning, indicating deadly danger; in this sense we call the book of the philosopher Nietzsche a dangerous book.'"
(Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 6, No. 3, Jun., 1945
Friedrich Nietzsche in the Judgment of Posterity
By Walter Eckstein :318)

He did not like the One known as the Light of the world, not at all. He was like a false prophet par excellence.

Nietzsche, on the Jewish influence:
"In connection with the tremendous and immeasurably fateful initiative provided by the Jews through this most fundamental of all declarations of war, I recall the proposition I arrived at on a previous occasion (Beyond Good and Evil, section 195) that with the Jews there begins the slave revolt in morality: that revolt which has a history of two thousand years behind it...."
(On the Genealogy of Morals, Ecce Homo (1967, Random House)
Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by WalterKaufmann. :34)

"Was that the end of it? Had the greatest of all conflicts [between the poison of the Jewish 'slave influence and the noble master values] of ideals been placated for all time? Or only adjourned, indefinately adjourned?

Must the ancient fire not some day flare up much more terribly, after much longer preparation? More: must one not desire it with all one's might? even will it? even promote it? .....it has long since been abundantly clear what my aim is, what the aim of that dangerous slogan is that is inscribed at the head of my last book: Beyond Good and Evil."
(Ib :55)

He says,
"Must the ancient fire not some day flare up much more terribly....."

The Nazis believed it and burned the Jews in fires. It's almost like Satan saying, "I hate that Jewish blood. It's that blood!" Sheesh, the blood of Jesus was symbolic, I think.

They also followed Nietzsche's advice in trying to struggle against the Jewish influence:
"Men who can't divest themselves of manners of previous centuries, and scoff and sling mud at things which are holy and matters of belief to others, once and for all do not belong in the SS."
( The German Churches Under
Hitler: Backround, Struggle, and Epilogue
(Detriot: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1979)
By Ernst Christian Helmreich :218)

The medicalization of a philosophy, its manifestation:
"The violent cure must draw, however selectively, upon existing intellectual tradition. The Nazis found that tradition in Nietzsche, whom they interpreted as advocating war as therapy for weakness and the cultivation of 'that deep impersonal hatred, that cold-blooded murderousness coupled with good conscience, that communal, organizing zest in the destruction of the enemy' as a path to collective health. Above all, Nietzsche's vision was one of all-consuming illness and cure. The condition, he declared, was 'not....sickness but sickliness,' by which he meant perpetual weakness and concern with morality. Nietzsche went on to declare that 'one is healthy when...one feels that the 'bite' of conscience is like a dog biting on a stone--when one is ashamed of one's remorse,' andone can attribute 'more health of the soul' to a criminal who 'does not slander his deed after it is done' than to the sinner who 'abase[s] himself before the cross.'"
(The Nazi Doctors; Medical Killing and
the Psychology of Genocide
By Robert Lifton :486)

The attempted disconnect from all intellect,
"...it is true that Nietzsche became the father of a strong irrationalistic trend in recent German philosophy, from which unmistakable lines of connection lead to certain political slogans of National Socialism, such as 'the destructive intellect,''blood and soil,' and the 'Myth of the twentieth century.' Hans Prinzhoon....praisesNietzsche for having searched for the roots of individual 'fate-character' in [naturalism,and so] the vital or biological stratum of'blood-heritage' (Bluterbe) and 'culture-space'(Kulturraum), and no longer in the intellectual factors of culture, ideals and morality...."
(Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 6,
No. 3, Jun., 1945
Friedrich Nietzsche in the Judgment of Posterity
By Walter Eckstein, :318)

Scholars of the time noted,
"The Nazis can also find support for their current racial doctrines in the work of Nietzsche. One passage is especially famous......

'It is impossible not to recognize at the core of all these aristocratic races the beast of prey; the magnificent blonde brute, avidly rampant for spoil and victory; this hidden core needed an outlet from time to time—the Roman, Arabic, German, and Japanese nobility, the Homeric heroes, the Scandinavian Vikings, are all alike in this need. It is the aristocratic races who have left the idea “Barbarian”on all the tracks in which they have marched. . . . The profound, icy mistrust which the German provokes as soon as he arrives at power, even at the present time, is always still an aftermath of that inextinguishable horror with which for whole centuries Europe has regarded the wrath of the blonde Teuton beast.'

Nietzsche affords passages still closer to what the Germans today mean by Rassenhygiene. Europe is degenerating because of the shocking mixture of blood modern times have brought about: 'Europe, the scene of a senseless, precipitate attempt at a radical blending of classes, and consequently of races, is therefore skeptical in all its heights and depths, sick unto death of its will.' "
(The National Socialists' Use of Nietzsche
By Crane Brinton
Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 1,
No. 2.(Apr., 1940), pp. 131-150)

Basically, most socialists are effeminate or begin in that way. So John Kerry has to try to go hunting and have someone shoots some geese for him, "Me manly man now!" Or Al Gore has to be more of an "Alpha male." Grow a beard Al, because you love mommy Nature a little too much.

It's funny. But here is the danger, someone like Nietzsche comes along and inspires people who are mainly just apathetic moral degenerates living in decadence to be more 'vir'ile or act more like a 'vir'tuous hero. Who? A Messiah or a soldier, imitating something of transcendence, no greater love has any man than that he lay down his life, you see. It is an act, though. The socialist is still a moral degenerate just imitating actual virtue or virility. But you still have moral degenerates acting active and assertive, instead of being more passive. It would be like Howard Dean beginning to scream and yell. Or, trying to....it's a little hard at first. He's just screaming and yelling with little idea of what anything is about. It's just to scream and yell. Just place the "worker's party" before him and he can scream at them.

Yet they still believe in their old effete passivity, somewhat. Despite the new act, it's still there. Thus, they are only being intolerant of that damnable "intolerance" and the like. The Democratic party is in some sense, trying to decide what its problem is. They will most likely not quit being socialists. So here is to hoping that they do not try more and more to go, "Me manly man, now!"

Combine nationalism with atheistic socialism and you get the National Socialists. Combine nationalism with theistic conservatism and you get the Founding Fathers of America.