I am sure that the subject has been given consideration before, but in light of some of my recent treads, it becomes interesting to me as now.
I asked the question previously of “Hail Hitler???” as a question to those who still follow Hitler in light of his confirmed attrocities. Simply put, to me, you cannot dissasociate Hitler with the death of five million human beings in concentration camps. "Hail Hitler would be the same as a “Hail Aushwitz”.
Sauwelios took the challenge and placed Nietzsche in the middle. I was told in full cynicism, that there was nothing wrong with genocide, and that even the great Nietzsche would have approved:
"The weak and the failures shall perish: first principle of our love of man. And they shall even be given every possible assistance."
[Nietzsche, The Antichristian, section 2.]
“The great majority of men have no right to existence, but are a misfortune to higher men. I do not yet grant the failures the right. There are also peoples that are failures.”
[The Will to Power, section 872.]
– though of course, I was also told that:
"One might say Nazism is to Nietzsche as Christianity is to Plato: Nazism is Nietzscheanism for “the people”.
So, on one hand, we find that as Sauwelios believes, that Mein Kampf sets out a Nietzschean program. Could that be indeed true? Could it be that instead of Rosenberg, the philosopher who should had been tried at Nuremberg was Nietzsche?
Sauwelios has told me that Nietzsche would have approved of a program of mass murder of jews. In his own signature it now quotes WP:
"To gain that tremendous energy of greatness in order to shape the man of the future through breeding and, on the other hand, the annihilation of millions of failures, and not to perish of the suffering one creates, though nothing like it has ever existed!"
[Nietzsche, WP 964.]
Initially, perhaps, Nietzsche might have advocated for a man just as Hitler, willing to kill vast numbers of men women and children without being destroyed by the deed. Perhaps this was preferred by Nietzsche than to keep alieve a de-natured beast- a lion de-fanged. Perhaps Nietzsche would have preferred a Hitler a thousand times over a Martin Luther King Jr or a Ghandi.
This impression, which Sauwelios has taken as authoritative, is most clearly drawn from Will to Power. Other books are more bening and cautious, if still caustic. WTP is the preferred source for the belief that Nietzsche and Hitler had a lot in common. Could it had been all due to his sister’s efforts?
In his Ecce Homo we have Nietzsche reflecting on the dangers he knew his legacy would face, as even then his sister was getting married to the doctrine of anti-semitism literally. Why would a man who would be later linked with the ultimate anti-semite, Hitler, object to his sister getting married to one and lamented his name being tarnished by association to them? Would Nietzsche have also tried to dissasociate himself from Aushwitz? He calls for annihilation from his creators, but of values:
“and whoever wants to be [in the original text of TSZ: “must be”] a creator in good and evil [in the original text of TSZ: evil is followed by “verily”] , must first be an annihilator and break values.”
His Overman would be called a devil, and terrible in his goodness, but he is refering to the honesty of the overman, as opposed to the contradictions and lies found in the common christian priest, the average St Paul, who enslaves man’s instincts. The Overman let’s loose from these artificial fetters. Art is merely another shackle as well. But the troubling implication would be that man, freed from the shackles imposed on him by christianity is a mass murderer. I don’t believe that Nietzsche takes this angle. he gives many instances of men that most closely resemble his ideal, but you do not find anything like Hitler, though many men and states before Hitler did prosecute jews and conducted pogroms. Would that had been his ideal, he would have had to invocke the very anti-semites he objected to.
A better figure of influence on Hitler, then, might be Richard Wagner, but Nietzsche broke off with the composser, though retaining some admiration. But even Wagner might not be compleatly pleased that his name was so tied to Aushwitz. Nietzsche’s solution was apparently, some might disagree, to one’s overcoming, through self-mastery, the impositions of a slave morality. It does not seem to me that extermination of the slave was the answer. The Overman might have had great designs for Europe, but they would have sonner included intermixing with the jewish blood than the annihilation of the jewish blood altogether. When he attacks the weak peoples, he never forgets of his own people, the germans. He praises the values of judaism as much as he despises them, for the results are, from a perspective, the achievement of power.
Antisemitism is the expression of a lack of power. The antisemite is the vulgar man- the lowest man- and if you look at Hitler’s cabinet, you can’t but agree with this. The failure of men leads to frustration and to a revolt against the master. In germany’s case, the master race was not the teutonic race but the jewish race and then as before, a repetition occured, though ironically, the Pharaoh was now a jew.
In the end Nietzsche would have failed at being a good nationalist, anti-semitist, and prophet for Nazism. Nazism might have been simply the danger to his legacy which made Nietzsche weary in the end.
