Your points are all excellent, and reflect to a certain extent the problems with charts which tend to oversimplify and show only unidimensional relationships. I agree with all your points.
Nietzsche did not inherently spawn the Nazi movement. I need to make clearer in the text on the web page that it was German Nazi biased interpretations of Nietzsche that matter in the chart, and that Nietzsche's philosophy is a hotly debated matter with substantial arguments made by credible scholars that Nietzsche would have disowned Hitler's interpretation.
Same thing with the chart's mention of scientific racism. I also need to point out that Hitler relied on the racialized anthropology of the day to develop the racial theory of Aryanism.
Thanks. Your comments were really helpful. I will go make the changes this evening.
-Chip Berlet
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
> [mailto:owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com]On Behalf Of Michael Pollak
> Sent: Wednesday, July 17, 2002 2:03 AM
> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
> Subject: RE: White Order of Thule = Nordicist fascism &
antisemitic
> Whitesupremacy
>
>
>
> On Tue, 16 Jul 2002, Chip Berlet wrote:
>
> > The case that Elizabeth was more antisemitic and altered
> her brother's
> > work when she edited it? Even if this is true, Friedrich still
> > articulated the idea of Will to Power and the idea of a
> superior type of
> > man. No?
>
> Well yes, but both were almost entirely philosophical
> notions. The Will
> to Power is an assertion that everyone, including you and me,
> define the
> world in categories that make us look good and our enemies
> look bad. We
> can't help ourselves. Even when we are being honest we are
> trying to win.
> And every framework, while illuminating part of reality,
> distorts other
> parts.
>
> The superior sort of man is one who can admit this sort of
> perspectivalism
> and still carry on thinking and acting and judging rather than
getting
> vertigo and giving in to despair or the need to believe in an
ultimate
> truth.
>
> That's putting a huge amount in a nutshell, of course. But it's a
lot
> closer to the truth than saying he was the father of Nazism.
> He was an
> anti-anti-semite and an anti-German-nationalist. Those were
> Elizabeth's
> emendments, along with others designed to make it look like
> he celebrated
> bloody war rather than philosophical war.
>
> Mind you, there is a lot of slack in there. He very much
> enjoyed using
> the perspective of barbarians as an example; he was quite
> tied up with the
> heroic period of the Indo-European hypothesis (aka at that time as
the
> Indo-Aryan hypothesis); and he didn't like mass democracy and
> is full of
> reactionary bon mots. Also he loved paradoxical and
slap-in-the-face
> formulations. And he left a mountain of unpublished stuff,
> he wrote in
> fragments, and he went crazy at the end. And then there's
> his friendship
> with Wagner. Elements like this complicate interpretation and
make it
> possible for an Elizabeth to support her case, and for a
> causal reader to
> come away thinking he was the exponent of a new barbarism.* But if
you
> want to say that someone is the father of the Nazi use of the term
> Uebermensch, then I think it's fair to say that'd be Elizabeth.
>
> But why not just leave that square out of the chart entirely
> and just say
> that Master Race theory started with Nazism? Because if you
> want to go
> back before that, as far as I understand it, German
> scientific racism came
> chiefly out of German anthropology, which had nothing to do with
> Nietzsche, except insofar as they can both partially be
> traced back to the
> same roots in the developing phase of the Indo-European
> hypothesis, when
> linguistic unity was conflated with national and racial unity --
and
> whence their common use of term Aryan.
>
> Michael
>
> * This reminds me of my favorite casual reader of Nietzsche
> joke, which
> seems germane to a chart about right wing crazies. It was in
> the movie A
> Fish Called Wanda. Jamie Lee Curtis calls Kevin Kline a
> mindless gorilla
> who always uses force when there are better ways. He says "I'm
not a
> gorilla! Gorillas don't read Nietzsche!" And she answers
> "Yes they do!
> They just don't understand him!"
>
>
>
>