> History is a long affair. Over time, some people
> simply exhibit more drive and enterprising than
> others. Some decide to wake up earlier, explore new
> horizons, discover new lands, and fight for new
> possessions. Others decide to stay home and brag about
> how their beer is so much better than in the
> neighboring village. And even while in conquest, after
> a spell of pillage and slaughter, some decide to stay
> and commit to a long-term development of conquered
> lands. Others just steal some trophies, rape some
> local maidens, and hurry back to their villages,
> bragging about their exploits.
Isn't the kind of national "spirit" extolled here similar to what Heidegger claimed was "the inner truth and greatness of National Socialism"? It's also in Hegel as the "passions" of "world- historical" individuals such as Caesar and Napoleon, but there it's treated as instrumental to the end of actualizing a truly ethical community; it's not the end in itself of human being fully actualized at its "inception".
Pankratov seems to echo the following sort of thing in Nietzsche.
"Here there is one thing we shall be the last to deny: he who knows these 'good men' only as enemies knows only evil enemies, and the same men who are held so sternly in check inter pares by custom, respect, usage, gratitude, and even more by mutual suspicion and jealousy, and who on the other hand in their relations with one another show themselves so resourceful in consideration, self- control, delicacy, loyalty, pride, and friendship—once they go outside, where the strange, the stranger is found, they are not much better than uncaged beasts of prey. There they savor a freedom from all social constraints, they compensate themselves in the wilderness for the tension engendered by protracted confinement and enclosure within the peace of society, they go back to the innocent conscience of the beast of prey, as triumphant monsters who perhaps emerge from a disgusting [Scheusslichen] procession of murder, arson, rape, and torture, exhilarated and undisturbed of soul, as if it were no more than a student's prank, convinced they have provided the poets with a lot more material for song and praise. One cannot fail to see at the bottom of all these noble races the beast of prey, the splendid blond beast prowling about avidly in search of spoil and victory; this hidden core needs to erupt from time to time, the animal has to get out again and go back to the wilderness: the Roman, Arabian, Germanic, Japanese nobility, the Homeric heroes, the Scandinavian Vikings—they all shared this need.
"It is the noble races that have left behind them the concept 'barbarian' wherever they have gone; even their highest culture betrays a consciousness of it and even a pride in it (for example, when Pericles says to his Athenians in his famous funeral oration "our boldness has gained access to every land and sea, everywhere raising imperishable monuments to its goodness and wickedness"). This 'boldness' of noble races, mad, absurd, and sudden in its expression, the incalculability, even incredibility of their undertakings— Pericles specially commends the rhathymia of the Athenians—their indifference to and contempt for security, body, life, comfort, their hair-raising [Entsetzliche] cheerfulness and profound joy in all destruction, in all the voluptuousness of victory and cruelty—all this came together, in the minds of those who suffered from it, in the image of the 'barbarian,' the 'evil enemy,' perhaps as the 'Goths,' the 'Vandals.' The deep and icy mistrust the German still arouses today whenever he gets into a position of power is an echo of that inextinguishable horror with which Europe observed for centuries that raging of the blond Germanic beast (although between the old Germanic tribes and us Germans there exists hardly a conceptual relationship, let alone one of blood)." Genealogy of Morals, First Essay, Section 11.
"It seems to me that the delicacy and even more the tartuffery of tame domestic animals (which is to say modern men, which is to say us) resists a really vivid comprehension of the degree to which cruelty constituted the great festival pleasure of more primitive men and was indeed an ingredient of almost every one of their pleasures; and how naively, how innocently their thirst for cruelty manifested itself, how, as a matter of principle, they posited "disinterested malice" (or, in Spinoza's words, sympathia malevolens) as a normal quality of man—and thus as something to which the conscience cordially says Yes! ... To see others suffer does one good, to make others suffer even more: this is a hard saying but an ancient, mighty, human, all-too-human principle to which even the apes might subscribe; for it has been said that in devising bizarre cruelties they anticipate man and are, as it were, his 'prelude.' Without cruelty there is no festival: thus the longest and most ancient part of human history teaches and in punishment there is so much that is festive!" Genealogy of Morals, Second Essay, Section 6.
Ted