[lbo-talk] Nietzsche Selection

Charles Brown cbrown at michiganlegal.org
Tue Jun 12 10:44:29 PDT 2007


As to the stuff about Nietzsche being a Nazi precursor or Kauffman being anti-communist, I dunno who was going on about that. I posted quite a bit of stuff that deflates the Nietzsche-as-proto-Nazi myth that unfortunately some folks still cling to, or basically agree with, such as the World Socialist Website, who also manage to tar even Foucault in their multi-part demolition of Nietzsche. Nietzsche absolutely hated German nationalism and despised anti-Semites, as passages I've quoted showed.

-B.

^^^^^^ CB; Don't you think he hated German nationalism for the wrong reason ? In that context , nationalism represents the rise of bourgeois democracy which is progressive relative to feudal aristocratic anti-democracy. N. is an anti-democrat, and probably hates the democratic element of nationalism. He isn't against German militarism and warmaking, imperialism. Those are things he seems to admire, as in Romans and other conquerors. He seems to attack German nationalism from the right.

I definitely subscribe to the thesis that N.'s thought contributed to the development of the Nazi ideology ( there's a thread on the WSW analysis in the archives here); Or the other way to think of it is that N. reflects similar themes in German history and culture as the N's do. I just think N. did directly influence the N's because Nietzche was popular. Supposedly, German solidiers were reading copies of Thus Spoke Z, as they marched to war in WWI. That's not hard to believe. The feeling of N. is like he's geeking somebody up to do conquest, to dominate somebody else.

Doesn't matter that there are differences. There are too many similarities, like "superman". "Master race" fits right in with N's scheme. The spirit of the two is similar. The spiirit of N. is similar to that of the N's. Intuitively, N.'s stuff reads like a cheerleading manual for warmaking, mastering other people. Those are the essential similarities next to which the differences seem unimportant. The Nazis may have been eclectic, but big chunks of their thing have a really Nietzschean feel to them. The N's may vulgarize N. , but the spirit and feeling are very similar.



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