>I've always liked William Shirer's take on Nietzsche and the Nazis:
>
>
>Yet I think no one who lived in the Third Reich could have failed to
>be impressed by Nietzsche's influence on it . . . >Yet Nazi scribblers
>never tired of extolling him. Hitler often
>visited the Nietzsche museum in Weimar and publicized his veneration
>for the philosopher by posing for photographs of himself staring in
>rapture at the bust of the great man.
>
>There was some ground for this appropriation of Nietzsche as one of
>the originators of the Nazi Weltanschauung. Had not the philosopher
>thundered against democracy and parliaments, preached the will to
>power, praised war and proclaimed the coming of the master race and
>the superman--and in the most telling aphorisms? A Nazi could proudly
>quote him on almost every conceivable subject, and did. -
I dunno. I was a student of Walter Kaufmann, Jew, Zionist, and Nietzsche scholar, who devoted a good part of a long career to attacking this sort of rubbish. There is a lot in Nietzsche that liberal democrats like Bard and me and socialists like me and most on this list cannot stomach. But the association with the Nazis is just a smear. Marx was quoted by the Stalinists, who posed by his bust and appropriated him at every turn, but we don't say that means that Marx was some sort of proto-Stalinist. An author, especially (as Andrew Kliman reminds us) a dead one, cannot be held responsible for every vile misuse of his words. Please, let's talk about Nietzsche's views, but leavr the Nazis out of it.
jks
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