The good and bad in Adolf Hitler

[Lutiferre]

I've been thinking a bit about Adolf Hitler lately. Not because I'm a fan, but simply because I consider the intensely historistic and moralistic feelings attached to his name in the herd to be surprising: Hitler as inhuman, Hitler as a monster, a pure devil, nothing but an evil tyrant, etc. Hardly even has the consideration arised: Hitler as man.

What was the true nature of Adolf Hitler? Let's think outside the box for a moment.

What were his virtues and vices? What was the good and the bad in him?

[Lutiferre]

The good: Hitler as Nietzschean, showing appreciation of a great teacher?

http://i48.tinypic.com/359jln7.jpg
(The Nietzsche Museum).

Unlikely perhaps. Who knows?

[Murphy]

Get back into the shadows Lutiferre.. we haven't made you fit for human company just yet :D!

[Lutiferre]

Get back into the shadows Lutiferre.. we haven't made you fit for human company just yet :D!
You're not human, you are Scottish!

Anyway, please don't hijack this thread.

[Loki]

"Good" or "bad" are subjective concepts, and sadly, society loves to slap those nonsensical (religious?) labels upon people.

Hitler was just a guy like you and me, trying to live out his dream. He succeeded for the most, until near his death.

[Lutiferre]

"Good" or "bad" are subjective concepts, and sadly, society loves to slap those nonsensical (religious?) labels upon people.
Of course. Which is why I said the good and bad in Adolf Hitler, Hitler as as "composed" and imperfect as anyone else.

Which is to say, what is admirable in him and what is not? What do you value which he achieved? There are many ways to articulate it, but in simpler terms, "good or bad" in him.


Hitler was just a guy like you and me, trying to live out his dream. He succeeded for the most, until near his death.
If realizing your values is a value, then perhaps there's much to be admired in Hitler.

[The Black Prince]

An artisan painting with politics, painting fantasy but not able to cope with reality, the artisan weakness pur sang.

[Jarl]

An artisan painting with politics, painting fantasy but not able to cope with reality, the artisan weakness pur sang.

Judging by his speeches... he must have been a very nervous, emotional and dictatorial man, or a fantastic actor.

[Lutiferre]

An artisan painting with politics, painting fantasy but not able to cope with reality, the artisan weakness pur sang.
Painting with politics sounds brilliant. A bit like "painting with reality", reality as art? Politics as art? Murder as art?

[The Black Prince]

Painting with politics sounds brilliant. A bit like "painting with reality", reality as art? Politics as art? Murder as art?
In a way, a lot of artisans are very creative and also living beyond reality. Think about Van Gogh, Degas, Picasso, or just the above average art student. I think he was much similar. At the downside a 'frustrated' artisan given the powers of control on a similar frustrated industrious juggernaut (read Germany in the 1930's) is a monstrous combination.

[Jarl]

;) Hitler was more of a politican than an artist.

[The Black Prince]

Sorry I meant artisan, not just artist. An artisan like a painter, sculptor or theatrical person, one making a living of the arts. And yes, he was a politician by his career but not by personality. He wasn't a man of compromis and debate that could handle critics very well.;)

[Lutiferre]

In a way, a lot of artisans are very creative and also living beyond reality. Think about Van Gogh, Degas, Picasso, or just the above average art student. I think he was much similar. At the downside a 'frustrated' artisan given the powers of control on a similar frustrated industrious industrial juggernaut (read Germany in the 1930's) is a monstrous combination.
Fatal for some, but for Hitler, perhaps it was a fantastic experience, an intoxication, a rush, to obtain the power and do exactly as he intensely desired to do. The casualties are irrelevant if looked at from an aesthetic perspective after all - the aesthetic completion, intoxication, satisfaction is a sufficient justification for any collateral damage. The deletion of six million jews in the name of adrenaline and dopamine, is a neat possibility.

[Radojica]

Bad thing about Hitler: he existed

Good thing about Hitler: but not anymore

[Lutiferre]

Bad thing about Hitler: he existed
Why was it bad? Because of secondary facts?


Good thing about Hitler: but not anymore
What is so good about his ceasing to exist? Did a better reality ensue? And why better? And isn't a large part of that, in fact, thanks to him and the causalities he was responsible for? (e.g. even a negation of his own views)

[Tabiti]

From my point of view:
Good: He was intelligent, had talent, interested in spirituality, esoteric sciences, liked animals, popularized healthy life style and vegetarianism, moral values, etc;
Bad: He was too nervous, unstable, egoistic, too much self-confident, imprudent, relied on other people, wasn't the greatest military leader and tactic.

[Lulletje Rozewater]

Some quotes from people who knew him and later,such as Kennedy

· Kind and paternal man who ate little aside from mashed potato and passionately loved his dog.
· I admit, I was fascinated by Adolf Hitler. He was a pleasant boss and a fatherly friend. I deliberately ignored all the warning voices inside me and enjoyed the time by his side almost until the bitter end.
· It wasn't what he said, but the way he said things and how he did things. Such things included his modest appetite, and the way he ate only side dishes - always avoiding meat.
· Hitler's greatest pleasure was when (sheepdog) Blondie would jump a few centimetres higher than the last time, and he would say that going out with his dog was the most relaxing thing he could do.
· "Are you well rested, my child?" Hitler asked. "I have something to dictate to you."
- Traudl Junge, Hitler's secretary (2)

· "Nobody is bad all their life. Hitler was charming, humoristic, and a very good mimic. He used to do imitations of actresses and King Victor Emmanuel by moving his upper lip like a rabbit's."
· Hitler enjoyed telling jokes about the British. "He particularly liked Colonel Blimp jokes, not sex or political ones. He always talked nicely about England - he never wanted to endanger it."
· Hitler was handsome, particularly in the morning. "His face used to change as the day went on because of the drugs he took to help him sleep. But in the morning his eyes were big and wonderful deep blue."
· Hitler had "beautiful eyes" and was a "perfectly nice person".
- Reinhard Spitzy, who deserted the Nazis to become a member of the German resistance, worked with Hitler in Austria after he had annexed the country in 1938. (1)




· "Sweetest love, favorite of my heart, my one and only, my dearest, my truest and hottest beloved," one of the letters begins. "I could kiss you a thousand times and still not be satisfied. My love for you is endless, so tender, so hot and so complete."
· The letters are addressed to "My beloved Fuhrer," "My darling sugar- sweet AdoIf," or simply, "Dear Adi."
· "I am making you keys to my front door and my room," wrote one woman. "We have to be very careful. So come early, ring my landlady's bell and ask if I'm at home. If everything works out, my parents (they could be your in-laws) say you can come any time, so we can spend the night together at my parents' house!"
- Love Letters to Adolf Hitler from german women, discovered from the destroyed Chancellery (3)

· British prime minister Stanley Baldwin pays tribute to Hitler as "a remarkable man" who made "great achievements".
· "Like you, I acknowledge (Hitler's) great achievements since taking over that troubled country. The German people obviously love him, even if that love puts a burden on them both and is not extended to the Jews who are tormented."
- 1936 Letter of British prime minister Stanley Baldwin (4)



· Hitler's authority was extraordinary. He was always polite and charming. There was really nothing to object to.
· Hitler was fond of (Goebbels) children, and drank hot chocolate with them and allowed them to use his bathtub.
- Erna Flegel, Nurse in Hitler's Bunker 1945 (5)



· "After visiting these two places you can easily see how that within a few years Hitler will emerge from the hatred that surrounds him now as one of the most significant figures who ever lived. He had boundless ambition for his country, which rendered him a menace to the peace of the world, but he had a mystery about him in the way that he lived and in the manner of his death that will live and grow after him. He had in him the stuff of which legends are made."
- John F. Kennedy, in his Post-War diary, as quoted in Prelude to Leadership (pages 73-74, last two paragraphs). (8)



· When Hugh Trevor-Roper was asked: "Do you consider Hitler consciously evil? Did he know what he was doing was wrong?" His answer was an emphatic No: Hitler was convinced of his own rectitude. Although his deeds reached an extreme of awfulness, he committed them in the deluded belief that they were right.
- Historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, who In 1945 was ordered by the British government to investigate Hitler's death (6)




· Hitler wanted only the best for Germany, though he made some mistakes.
- General Heinz Guderian, author of "Achtung - Panzer!", in 1950 (7)



· "Hitler was also an individual of great courage, a soldier's soldier in the Great War, a political organizer of the first rank, a leader steeped in the history of Europe, who possessed oratorical powers that could awe even those who despised him...Hitler's success was not based on his extraordinary gifts alone. His genius was an intuitive sense of the mushiness, the character flaws, the weakness masquerading as morality that was in the hearts of the statesmen who stood in his path."
- Pat Buchanan, in a 1977 column discussing John Toland's biography of Hitler (8)

He was a wirtshaftwunder kid on the block.
The world has built on German technology from his era,till to-date



The bad

He was too impulsive and impatient and not always listened to his generals And he invaded Holland-a country which was neutral at the time.Bloody coward

[Pallantides]

Hitler was just a guy like you and me, trying to live out his dream.

Can I put that in my sig? :D

[Lutiferre]

Apropos the demonisation of Austrians..

Joseph Fritzl was just a guy like you and me, trying to live out his dream!

[Lutiferre]

Apropos the demonisation of Austrians..

Joseph Fritzl was just a guy like you and me, trying to live out his dream!

Correction: Joseph Fritzl was Christ. Now he is crucified, he died for our sins.

[Arrow Cross]

Going batsh*t, are we?

[Jarl]

Correction: Joseph Fritzl was Christ. Now he is crucified, he died for our sins.

Joseph was an old pervertido..

[Lutiferre]

Joseph was an old pervertido..
So was God. An old perv in the sky. He impregnated the wife of another to give birth to himself - specifically, a virgin Mary, who was the wife of Joseph.
Meaning that Joseph must be God, and the Holy Spirit his spiritual penis extension. The new trinity is: Joseph Christ, Joseph the Father and the Spiritual Penis. But they are three in one, don't forget.

[Lulletje Rozewater]

So was God. An old perv in the sky. He impregnated the wife of another to give birth to himself - specifically, a virgin Mary, who was the wife of Joseph.
Meaning that Joseph must be God, and the Holy Spirit his spiritual penis extension. The new trinity is: Joseph Christ, Joseph the Father and the Spiritual Penis. But they are three in one, don't forget.

I am not a RC anymore,but you are wrong
Adultery is the defiling of a married (or engaged) woman with semen other than that of her intended or of her husband. Now all of us human males produce our own unique semen. But God created all of our semen, and is perfectly capable of replicating the semen of Joseph. So we can deduce that God impregnated Mary with the semen of Joseph (she was not allowed any other type!) So Jesus, at conception, was truly a son of Mary and of Joseph and so was truly a son of David..

"Betroth: To promise "by one's truth." Men and women were betrothed when they were engaged to be married. This usually took place a year or more before marriage. From the time of betrothal the woman was regarded as the lawful wife of the man to whom she was betrothed (Deuteronomy 28: 30; Judges 14: 2,8; Matthew 1: 18-21).






Many today are "willfully ignorant" and "speak evil of the things that they understand not" (2 Pet. 3: 5; 2: 12).They are called Fokheads

[poiuytrewq0987]

Heil Hitler Veliki! :P

[Agrippa]

He was too impulsive and impatient and not always listened to his generals And he invaded Holland-a country which was neutral at the time.Bloody coward

He had to, or would have lost the war in the West already, simple as that. And obviously Hitler or the Germans never had any bad feelings for the Dutch, do not forget, the Dutch are Germans with a different dialect and somewhat different history, Germanics of the same stock after all.

Hitler made many mistakes and had bad aspects, yet he tried the best in a honest way.

Also, I don't think Hitler at the start and at the end of the war can be really compared, his qualities and personality changed over time, just consider the stress and responsibility which lasted on him.

If he would have had the same attitude he had at the end of the war from the start, he would have never made it to the top nor would he have been able to come to the great successes under his leadership.

Losing the war and faith really ruined him to such a large degree at least, that he wasn't able to fulfil his role any more. Also consider, that in his environment were a lot of hypocritical or coward people, this also changed over time, so that his advices he got became worse and he himself less reluctant to accept more critical ideas.

So one could say, that overall his good side diminished while is bad aspects grew in the last year in particular.

About his personality many things were said already, but he was just a charismatic person with many great insights into the world and it's structures. He was, like I said, not always right, nor always wrong, but tried to follow what he considered the truth and was in the best interest of his people and mankind.

He was absolutely right about certain principles, this, quoted from "Mein Kampf":



"Wir alle ahnen, daß in ferner Zukunft Probleme an den Menschen herantreten können, zu deren Bewältigung nur eine höchste Rasse als Herrenvolk, gestützt auf die Mittel und Möglichkeiten eines ganzen Erdballs, berufen sein wird."
(MK S. 422)

Rough translation:

"We all sense, that in a distant future mankind might have to face problems, for which handling only the highest race as a master people (race), backed up by all means and possibilities of this globe, will be qualified." (MK p. 422)

In this assertion, he was absolutely right. If you let evil forces ruin your group, any sense of community and higher collective, dysgenic trends ruin the people and biological base, you don't just risk your own people's future, but that of all of mankind. Because one thing is for sure, if it's about saving our species from extinction and secure it's survival and development on a high level, certain people and races are just more qualified to do it than others and these are therefore, from a human perspective, also those which have the No. 1 priority.

Yet he was wrong insofar, as he tried to carry on this truth from a more theoretical to the practical level, even in political matters and in fights between nations, as if a Darwinian rule would be in effect here as well. In fact, he knew very well how the real policy and wars worked out, but he made up a myth here, shared by the Fascists in Italy, that war can be something healthy and logical from a Darwinian point of view, while it isn't, because warfare, especially modern warfare, depends on so many facts and was - like the National Socialists themselves knew very well, in it's essence totally contraselective.

Yet a certain rest of this myth played in and altered an approach which was perfectly rational into something with weaknesses, even if it could have been useful - if winning the war - for the German people, it would have been otherwise false and unnecessary to see things from that perspective. As I said, he went beyond that, but never got completely rid of it it seems, so never completely differentiated between ethnicity, culture and history on the one hand and biology, race on the other. Because while these two aspects which can be summed up as biological (genetic tradition) and cultural (memetic tradition) codes of a people always influence each other, a distinction is necessary and just. But here the last consequence wasn't there in certain respects, leading to suboptimal decisions sometimes.

One of his best traits was, that he never got corrupted, always stood firmly to his principles. Only power seems to have changed him on the longer run and made him unaware of the real situation and somewhat more mercy and temperance would have made him better too at times - like I said, mostly at the end of his reign of course and also because of psycho-physical deterioration and a rather bad, because dishonest, environment - which he had formed by himself too though, because he dismissed most critical voices step by step, even if they meant it well for the German people, his political goals or even for his movement and himself quite often.

Sometimes he should have listened more and talked less probably...

But regardless of what you seem to know about Hitler and National Socialism, always consider that the History being written by the victors.

And if there wouldn't have been so many witnesses, documents etc. even the massacre from Katyn would still being taught as a "German cruelty" - for which innocent German soldiers were executed by the way.

Always consider that, especially if facing stories about unproven statements, quotes and actions of A. Hitler.

[Troll's Puzzle]

thet mustache was pretty good

[Tony]

;) Hitler was more of a politican than an artist.

There's not great difference in my view , both the politician and the artist are visionary and strategic , Hitler had a social project , a painting in his mind of how Germany and Europe would have been in the future and he fought with courage to paint that scene but others came and teared that painting into pieces.
I honestly never understood why he seek to expand Germany at a so fast pace instead to wait and procedin' step by step.

[Agrippa]

There's not great difference in my view , both the politician and the artist are visionary and strategic , Hitler had a social project , a painting in his mind of how Germany and Europe would have been in the future and he fought with courage to paint that scene but others came and teared that painting into pieces.
I honestly never understood why he seek to expand Germany at a so fast pace instead to wait and procedin' step by step.

Because like many great man, he thought that other's might failure is even more likely and his destiny was to achieve the great goals.

Also you have to consider that not everything which happened was planned from the start, but rather dictated by the circumstances. F.e. it is absolutely clear that Hitler didn't wanted a war with the West at any time and gambled about Great Britain and France NOT declaring war after the dispute with Poland, which was backed up and made even more aggressive by the Western powers, escalated.

Essentially everything he did was for a stronger Germany, a better Europe and development in the world, and directed against Bolshevism/Communism.

He thought a lot about destiny and inevitable fights in history, but destiny betrayed him and he made mistakes.

If its f.e. about the Soviet Union, this is considered by many a preventive war - also the conquest of the Netherlands and Belgium was dictated by the military plans, Norway and Denmark a preventive action to secure the iron ressource routes against the British-French attacks - consider the allies occupied various other areas, and with the ressources being so low, he had to secure it.

The most basic problem Germany faced was definitely, which is also the reason for Germany losing this war, a lack of natural ressources necessary for a strong economy and army. After all, almost the same problem as Japan.

The only comparable powers at that time, USA and Soviet Russia, had much better supplies from their own country and with Germany being stripped from its colonies in the 1st World War - which were not as rich as that of Britain anyway - he searched for an alternative way to supply his people and the most sustaining would have been in the East.

I read, that after the conquest of the Western countries the demand for ressources grew even higher, letting even less for the German war machine if not wanting to starve the occupied territories.

The ressources which came from the Soviet Union after the economic treaty were absolutely essential, but the Soviet diplomatic-political demands for became more and more demanding.

Here the absolutely crucial question emerges whether the Soviet Union would have attacked Germany anyway, once having a good strategic position, Germany being distracted by the war in the West and the technology transfer (Germany sent various plans for military equipement to the Soviet Union in exchange) complete and various sources and authors claim that.

[Curtis24]

I've been thinking a bit about Adolf Hitler lately. Not because I'm a fan, but simply because I consider the intensely historistic and moralistic feelings attached to his name in the herd to be surprising: Hitler as inhuman, Hitler as a monster, a pure devil, nothing but an evil tyrant, etc. Hardly even has the consideration arised: Hitler as man.

What was the true nature of Adolf Hitler? Let's think outside the box for a moment.

What were his virtues and vices? What was the good and the bad in him?

During WWII, the OSS(the U.S. intelligence service that preceded the CIA) employed psychoanalysts to analyze Hitler's personality(based on interviews with paid informants who knew Hitler personally) and predict his future behavior. Here is the preface, and afterwards the link:


Preface

This study is not propagandistic in any sense of the term. It represents an attempt to screen the wealth of contradictory, conflicting and unreliable material concerning Hitler into strata which wll be helpful to the policy-makers and those who wish to frame a counter-propaganda. For this reason the first three parts are purely descriptive and deal with the man (1) as he appears to himself, (2) as he has been pictured to the German people, and (3) how he is known to his associates. These sections contain the basic material for the psychological analysis in sections IV and V in which an attempt is made to understand Hitler as a person and the motivations underlying his actions.

The material available for such an analysis is extremely scant and spotty. Fortunately, we have at our disposal a number of informants who knew Hitler well and who have been willing to cooperate to the best of their abilities. The study would have been entirely impossible were it not for the fact that there is a relatively high degree of agreement in the descriptions of Hitler's behavior, sentiments and attitudes given by these several informants. With this as a basis it seemed worthwhile to proceed with the study filling in the lacunae with knowledge gained from clinical experience in dealing with individuals of a similar type. This is not an entirely satisfactory procedure, from a scientific point of view, but it is the only feasible [Page 2] method at the present time. Throughout the study we have tried to be as objective as possible in evaluating his strengths as well as his weaknesses.

All plain numbers in parentheses refer to the page of The Hitler Source Book, a companion volume in which the original material is to be found together with the complete reference. Numbers in parentheses preceded by M.K. or M.N.O. refer to pages in Mein Kampf and My New Order, respectively. A detailed Index to the original material is to be found at the beginning of the Source-Book. A complete bibliography is appended to this study.

It is hoped that the study may be helpful in gaining a deeper insight into Adolf Hitler and the German people and that it may serve as a guide for our propaganda activities as well as our future dealings with them.



http://www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/h/hitler-adolf/oss-papers/text/oss-profile-preface.html

[Liffrea]

Originally Posted by Lutiferre
The good: Hitler as Nietzschean, showing appreciation of a great teacher?

Hmmm, I believe it is generally acknowledged that Hitler didn't read a word of Nietzsche. I’m still studying Nietzsche’s philosophy but I find it hard to imagine he would have had much time for National Socialism pandering as it did to the masses and evoking the sort of extreme “fatherlandishness” that Nietzsche attacks in BGE, Nietzsche had a strong ideal of the European spirit (of course that could come about through the vector of a nation) and his philosophy is, of course, meant for the few not the many. Demagogues like Hitler would probably have smacked too much of democratic movements for Nietzsche, rich in demagogues, and slave morality.

It would also be impossible I think to describe Nietzsche as anti-Semitic, at least not in an accepted sense, I believe he abandoned one publisher over his anti-Semitic views?

I’ve also read that Nietzsche’s sister was an ardent National Socialist, something he mocked.

As for Hitler, a complex personality, unless one lives in a world of simple either/or it is probably impossible to entirely disagree or agree with anyone, some parts of NS appeal to me, other aspects repulse me.

[Crossbow]

Hmmm, I believe it is generally acknowledged that Hitler didn't read a word of Nietzsche. I’m still studying Nietzsche’s philosophy but I find it hard to imagine he would have had much time for National Socialism pandering as it did to the masses and evoking the sort of extreme “fatherlandishness” that Nietzsche attacks in BGE, Nietzsche had a strong ideal of the European spirit (of course that could come about through the vector of a nation) and his philosophy is, of course, meant for the few not the many. Demagogues like Hitler would probably have smacked too much of democratic movements for Nietzsche, rich in demagogues, and slave morality.

It would also be impossible I think to describe Nietzsche as anti-Semitic, at least not in an accepted sense, I believe he abandoned one publisher over his anti-Semitic views?

I’ve also read that Nietzsche’s sister was an ardent National Socialist, something he mocked.

Didn't know National Socialism was already existent in Nietzsches lifetime.


As for Hitler, a complex personality, unless one lives in a world of simple either/or it is probably impossible to entirely disagree or agree with anyone, some parts of NS appeal to me, other aspects repulse me.

[Lutiferre]

Hmmm, I believe it is generally acknowledged that Hitler didn't read a word of Nietzsche. I’m still studying Nietzsche’s philosophy but I find it hard to imagine he would have had much time for National Socialism pandering as it did to the masses and evoking the sort of extreme “fatherlandishness” that Nietzsche attacks in BGE, Nietzsche had a strong ideal of the European spirit (of course that could come about through the vector of a nation) and his philosophy is, of course, meant for the few not the many. Demagogues like Hitler would probably have smacked too much of democratic movements for Nietzsche, rich in demagogues, and slave morality.

It would also be impossible I think to describe Nietzsche as anti-Semitic, at least not in an accepted sense, I believe he abandoned one publisher over his anti-Semitic views?
Yes, but if you make the exception of Hitlers populist National Socialist politics of which the anti-semitism forms just a part, all of which might be simply a device of popular appeal/domination to gain power and not deeply held beliefs (like NS in general - that is perhaps what NS was more than anything about, and that is the only great thing about it, that it achieved: an extreme power through persusive force, through a nationally assembling force, and eventually, military force) and look at the man's fundamental stance towards existence, that is where I find some possibly Nietzschean elements.

And letting Jews, Poles, and captives of every ethnicity, suffer and die miserably in work camps that were actually of utillity to the war, is not a problem in a world beyond good and evil in which the many (slaves) must die and suffer so the few (nobles) can live in excess.

Hitlers impulsive and bombastic expansion and eventual utter failure is not unlike Napoleon(whom Nietzsche adored and considered to be almost personifying of the Übermensch)'s rule, albeit in a modern and more extreme situation - it's intensive and explosive, it's characterised by Nietzsche's mask ("I am dynamite"), and anything intensive must burn out faster than something less intensive, dynamite must blow up and tear history apart into two, but it's death is not a permanent one as it sets traces in the world.

Nietzsche's stance at politics doesn't take politics seriously in the moralistic and emotional sense that the masses do; this is in common language "antipolitical" because that is what politics is about for most people: high ideals, goodness, justice. But he is not antipolitical to the exclusion of any politics - not politics "in the Grand Style" (in his own phrase), which is about - increasing power and is beyond good and evil. But it may without a problem use the categories of good and evil for it's own utillity, as lies to persuade; it may perfectly fine employ slave-morality to fool the slave.

This stance means that if Nietzsche were to make any attempt at politics (which actually he did in Torino, before his insanity - he sent out a letter to European monarchs and people in positions of power making a world-historical appeal), it would be about power, and not exempt from using deception to that end - much like National Socialism. The Will to Power doctrine and ideal isn't limited to political or brute power, but it certainly includes it. The deception part of National Socialism isn't disagreeable here either: Nietzsche didn't believe in the truth for the masses, or in an inherent universal sacredness of truth: untruth is a condition of life and of power, in his phrase.

[Lutiferre]

Didn't know National Socialism was already existent in Nietzsches lifetime.

He meant she was an anti-Semite I am sure, which is correct.

[Liffrea]

Originally Posted by Crossbow
Didn't know National Socialism was already existent in Nietzsches lifetime.

Hence:

I find it hard to imagine he would have had much time for National Socialism

[Crossbow]

He meant she was an anti-Semite I am sure, which is correct.


Hence:

I find it hard to imagine he would have had much time for National Socialism

Of course you're right. Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche revealed herself as an ardent supporter of National-Socialism and an anti-Semite. Her convictions dated from her younger years. It was no surprise that later in her life she joined the ranks of the National-Socialist movement.

http://anonym.to/?http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisabeth_F%C3%B6rster-Nietzsche

[Liffrea]

Originally Posted by Lutiferre
Yes, but if you make the exception of Hitlers populist National Socialist politics of which the anti-semitism forms just a part, all of which might be simply a device of popular appeal/domination to gain power and not deeply held beliefs (like NS in general - that is perhaps what NS was more than anything about, and that is the only great thing about it, that it achieved: an extreme power through persusive force, through a nationally assembling force, and eventually, military force) and look at the man's fundamental stance towards existence, that is where I find some possibly Nietzschean elements.

Perhaps it is the emphasis that is different. It is undeniable that Hitler’s outlook was grounded within Aryan-Germanism, a master race and the promotion of a racial ideal. As I say I’m still studying Nietzsche myself so I claim no expertise in his philosophy but Nietzsche’s superman strikes me as a spiritual creation an outlook based within life affirmation, this isn't a type of man as much as the fulfilment of man. True within this Nietzsche describes life for what it is struggle, dominance of the stronger over the weaker, whether he actually promotes this course is an open question to describing it as fact. Nietzsche’s noble man is one who is self tyrannical, self controlled and willingly to be “cruel” to himself, one not bounded by principles of right/wrong, good/evil, he is the controlled contradiction, one who rejects simplification and revels in the warring principles within him, which he governs and not vice versa, he is forged upon the anvil of suffering.

Where as Hitler saw the master race as a genetic type, Nietzsche saw the master individual, the superman, as a spiritual type.

At least that is my reading.


And letting Jews, Poles, and captives of every ethnicity, suffer and die miserably in work camps that were actually of utillity to the war, is not a problem in a world beyond good and evil in which the many (slaves) must die and suffer so the few (nobles) can live in excess.

“A morality of the ruling group, however, is most alien and embarrassing to the present taste in the severity of its principle that one has duties only to one’s peers; that against beings of a lower rank, against everything alien, one may behave as one pleases or as the heart desires and in any case beyond good and evil-here pity and like feelings may find their place”.

The above is from BGE but in The Antichrist Nietzsche writes “When the exceptional human being treats the mediocre more tenderly than himself and his peers, this is not mere courtesy of the heart-it is his simple duty.”

I think Nietzsche’s noble is closer to the ancient Greek arête or the Germanic heroism of the north, men who though “hardened of heart” and who cared little at all for “lesser peoples” didn’t actively set out to harm them, they just didn’t care that much if they were crushed along the way, it was a passive unconcern vs an active enslavement.

Yet:

“Let us admit to ourselves, without trying to be considerate, how every higher culture on earth has begun. Human beings whose nature was still natural, barbarians in every terrible sense of the word, men of prey who were still in possession of unbroken strength of will and lust for power, hurled themselves upon weaker, more civilised, more peaceful races.”

Nietzsche does go onto write:

“The essential characteristic of a good and healthy aristocracy, however, is that it experiences itself not as a function but as their meaning and higher justification-that it therefore accepts with a good conscience the sacrifice of untold human beings who, for its sake, must be reduced and lowered to incomplete human beings, to slaves, to instruments. Their fundamental faith simply has to be that society must not exist for society’s sake but only as the foundation and scaffolding on which a choice type of human being is able to raise itself higher and to a higher state of being.”

I wonder about this, though, because Nietzsche also writes that the democratisation of Europe will lead to a lowering of society to the level of the masses yet from this very process will arise the master morality of a few who will be all the more powerful because of the adverse conditions they rise in. The masses are slaves and are enslaved in so far as they are weak and unable to become anything other but not as a direct act of the master few.:mmmm:


Nietzsche's stance at politics doesn't take politics seriously in the moralistic and emotional sense that the masses do; this is in common language "antipolitical" because that is what politics is about for most people: high ideals, goodness, justice. But he is not antipolitical to the exclusion of any politics - not politics "in the Grand Style" (in his own phrase), which is about - increasing power and is beyond good and evil. But it may without a problem use the categories of good and evil for it's own utillity, as lies to persuade; it may perfectly fine employ slave-morality to fool the slave.

I think there does need to be a qualifier, though, in my opinion Nietzsche was not necessarily for or against master morality nor slave morality, I believe he sees the necessity in both. Was Nietzsche anti-Christian or was he anti what he considered an over abundance of “slave” morality at that time? As he writes in BGE slave morality or promotion of popular ideology was necessary in the religious wars of the 16th century, here Nietzsche seems to be hinting that things had gone to far the other way.


This stance means that if Nietzsche were to make any attempt at politics (which actually he did in Torino, before his insanity - he sent out a letter to European monarchs and people in positions of power making a world-historical appeal), it would be about power, and not exempt from using deception to that end - much like National Socialism. The Will to Power doctrine and ideal isn't limited to political or brute power, but it certainly includes it. The deception part of National Socialism isn't disagreeable here either: Nietzsche didn't believe in the truth for the masses, or in an inherent universal sacredness of truth: untruth is a condition of life and of power, in his phrase.

Again, perhaps it is one of emphasis, would Nietzsche have considered Hitler to embody the soul of Europe as he saw Napoleon, Mozart and Beethoven (not to mention Wagner) or would he have seen him just as a tyrant?

[Lutiferre]

Perhaps it is the emphasis that is different. It is undeniable that Hitler’s outlook was grounded within Aryan-Germanism, a master race and the promotion of a racial ideal.
Nietzsche himself believed in an Aryan race which was responsible for the greatness of Europeans as well as other cultures; he called Christianity the "anti-Aryan relligion par excellence", and referred to master values as "Aryan values" (Twilight of the Idols).

True within this Nietzsche describes life for what it is struggle, dominance of the stronger over the weaker, whether he actually promotes this course is an open question to describing it as fact.
You know less of Nietzsche than I thought apparently. Nietzsche makes it his main mission to affirm nature, to promote it; affirmation of life as it is is the core of his philosophical discourse. Hitler seems to agree here.


Where as Hitler saw the master race as a genetic type, Nietzsche saw the master individual, the superman, as a spiritual type.
Nietzsche saw no opposition between spiritual and biological (genetic) which is a Platonic mistake you are making. He didnt hesitate to reduce all psychological states to physiological facts, and yet he didnt devalue the "spiritualisation" of brute physiological states.


I think Nietzsche’s noble is closer to the ancient Greek arête or the Germanic heroism of the north, men who though “hardened of heart” and who cared little at all for “lesser peoples” didn’t actively set out to harm them, they just didn’t care that much if they were crushed along the way, it was a passive unconcern vs an active enslavement.
That is untrue. Not only did he affirm active enslavement, he affirmed involutary euthanization (that is to say, social darwinism) many times across his authroship.

Did you read the aphorism "Morality for physicians"?.

"The highest interest of life, of ascending life, demands the most ruthless suppression and sequestration of degenerating life — for example in determining the right to reproduce, the right to be born, the right to live" Elsewhere he says that not only must we "let the weak die of their own", we must also "help them".

Here's a quote by Adolf Hitler:

"Victory is to the strong and the weak must go to the wall. She (nature) teaches us that what may seem cruel to us, because it affects us personally or because we have been brought up in ignorance of her laws, is nevertheless often essential if a higher way of life is to be attained. Nature knows nothing of the notion of humanitarianism which signifies that the weak must at all costs be surrounded and preserved even at the expense of the strong."

And here is one by Nietzsche:

"Pity on the whole thwarts the law of evolution, which is the law of selection. It preserves what is ripe for destruction; it defends life's disinherited and condemned."

Another quote by Nietzsche:

"Europe would have to resolve to become equally threatening, namely to acquire a single will by means of a new caste dominating all Europe, a protracted terrible will of its own which could set its objectives thousands of years ahead...

The time for petty politics is past: the very next century will bring with it the struggle for mastery over the whole earth - the compulsion to grand politics."

Which is more or less a prediction of what actually happened. Including with Hitler. He doesn't condemn this megalomania; rather he idealises it as "Grand Politics".

"What I mean to say is that the democratisation of Europe is at the same time an involuntary arrangement for the breeding of tyrants - in every sense of the word, including the most spiritual."
Hitler, being an artist, would certainly qualify for a "spiritual" tyrant.

[Liffrea]

Originally Posted by Lutiferre
Nietzsche himself believed in an Aryan race which was responsible for the greatness of Europeans as well as other cultures; he called Christianity the "anti-Aryan relligion par excellence", and referred to master values as "Aryan values" (Twilight of the Idols).

Yet Nietzsche also wrote:

The purification of the race.— There are probably no pure races but only races that have become pure, even these being extremely rare. What is normal is crossed races, in which, together with a disharmony of physical features (when eye and mouth do not correspond with one another, for example), there must always go a disharmony of habits and value-concepts. (Livingstone heard someone say: "God created white and black men but the Devil created the half-breeds.") Crossed races always mean at the same time crossed cultures, crossed moralities: they are usually more evil, crueller, more restless. Purity is the final result of countless adaptations, absorptions and secretions, and progress towards purity is evidenced in the fact that the energy available to a race is increasingly restricted to individual selected functions, while previously it was applied to too many and often contradictory things: such a restriction will always seem to be an impoverishment and should be assessed with consideration and caution. In the end, however, if the process of purification is successful, all that energy formerly expended in the struggle of the dissonant qualities with one another will stand at the command of the total organism: which is why races that have become pure have always also become stronger and more beautiful. The Greeks offer us the model of a race and culture that has become pure: and hopefully we shall one day also achieve a pure European race and culture.
Nietzsche, Daybreak

There is some similarity with Hitler’s belief in Aryanism but I don't believe it quite the same thing:

The result of all racial crossing is therefore in brief always the following, lowering of the level of the higher races, physical and intellectual regression and hence the beginning of a slowly but surely progressing sickness. To bring about such a development is, then, nothing else but to sin against the will of the eternal creator.
Mein Kampf


You know less of Nietzsche than I thought apparently.

This is, undoubtedly correct, as I have wrote I claim no expertise, but I think I may have remembered a couple more things than you?, first Nietzsche was often contradictory, second he often played devil’s advocate.


Nietzsche makes it his main mission to affirm nature, to promote it; affirmation of life as it is is the core of his philosophical discourse.

I don’t disagree at all.


Hitler seems to agree here.

Does he?

And so the Folkish philosophy of life corresponds to the innermost will of nature, since it restores that free play of forces which must lead to a continuous mutual higher breeding, until at last the best of humanity, having achieved possession of this earth, will have a free path for activity in domains which will lie partly above it and partly outside it. We all sense that in the distant future humanity must be faced by problems which only a highest race, become master people and supported by the means and possibilities of an entire globe, will be equipped to overcome.
Mein Kampf

Every enhancement of the type "man" has so far been the work of an aristocratic society-and it will be so again and again- asociety that believes in the long ladder of an order of rank and differences in value between man and man, and that needs slavery in some sense or other.
Nietzsche, BGE

and again:

The essential characteristic of a good and healthy aristocracy, however, is that it experiences itself not as a function but as their meaning and higher justification-that it therefore accepts with a good conscience the sacrifice of untold human beings who, for its sake, must be reduced and lowered to incomplete human beings, to slaves, to instruments. Their fundamental faith simply has to be that society must not exist for society’s sake but only as the foundation and scaffolding on which a choice type of human being is able to raise itself higher and to a higher state of being.

The emphasis couldn't be more different. I would also add that where as Hitler's vision was a messianic view of a final order, Nietzsche believed that the "last man" would eternally recur.


Nietzsche saw no opposition between spiritual and biological (genetic) which is a Platonic mistake you are making.

Yet it would be difficult to argue, I believe, that Nietzsche had the same view of race as Hilter did or that Nietzsche's philosophy was based upon a belief in racial superiority.


That is untrue.

I don't know, I think Walter Kauffman has a point that if we want to see the ideal of master morality read the Iliad, for slave morality read the New Testament. Given Nietzsche's philological background and his own confession as a "man of the south" I believe it reasonable.


"The highest interest of life, of ascending life, demands the most ruthless suppression and sequestration of degenerating life — for example in determining the right to reproduce, the right to be born, the right to live" Elsewhere he says that not only must we "let the weak die of their own", we must also "help them".

Yet Nietzsche affirms the need for some state of slavery or other and, indeed, the vital role of the “herd”……how would one square this with the above statement?

Modest, industriousness, benevolent, temperate: is that how you would have men?—good men? But to me that seems only the ideal slave, the slave of the future.
Nietzsche, Will To Power


Here's a quote by Adolf Hitler:

"Victory is to the strong and the weak must go to the wall. She (nature) teaches us that what may seem cruel to us, because it affects us personally or because we have been brought up in ignorance of her laws, is nevertheless often essential if a higher way of life is to be attained. Nature knows nothing of the notion of humanitarianism which signifies that the weak must at all costs be surrounded and preserved even at the expense of the strong."

And here is one by Nietzsche:

"Pity on the whole thwarts the law of evolution, which is the law of selection. It preserves what is ripe for destruction; it defends life's disinherited and condemned."

Again I wonder if we are emphasising different things:

"The discipline of suffering, of great suffering-do you not know that only this discipline has created all enhancements of man so far? In man creature and creator are united; in man there is material, fragment, excess, clay, dirt, nonsense, chaos; but in man there is also creator, form giver, hammer hardness, spectator divinity, and seventh day, do you understand the contrast? And that your pity is for the creature in man, for what must be formed, broken, forged, torn, burnt, made incandescent, and purified-that which necessarily must and should suffer?"
Nietzsche, BGE

Hitler speaks of Folk, Nietzsche speaks of Man, how Greek certainly but Nietzsche was a lover of the Greek, a cultural womb like France in his estimation.


The time for petty politics is past: the very next century will bring with it the struggle for mastery over the whole earth - the compulsion to grand politics."

Which is more or less a prediction of what actually happened.

Our faith that Europe will become more virile.— We owe it to Napoleon (and not by any means to the French Revolution, which aimed at the "brotherhood" of nations and a blooming universal exchange of hearts that we now confront a succession of a few warlike centuries that have no parallel in history; in short, that we have entered the classical age of war, of scientific and at the same time popular war on the largest scale (in weapons, talents, and discipline). All coming centuries will look back on it with envy and awe for its perfection. For the national movement out of which this war glory is growing is only the counter-shock against Napoleon and would not exist except for Napoleon. He should receive credit some day for the fact that in Europe the man has again become master over the businessman and the philistine—and perhaps even over "woman" who has been pampered by Christianity and the enthusiastic spirit of the eighteenth century, and even more by "modern ideas." Napoleon, who considered modern ideas and civilization itself almost as a personal enemy, proved himself through this enmity as one of the greatest continuators of the Renaissance; he brought back again a whole slab of antiquity, perhaps even the decisive piece, the piece of granite. And who knows whether over the national movement, and whether it must not become the heir and continuator of Napoleon in an affirmative sense; for what he wanted was one unified Europe, as is known—as mistress of the earth.
Nietzsche, The Gay Science

I don’t think it can be in any real doubt that in BGE Nietzsche is opposed to what he called the “fatherlandishness” the militant nationalism arising in the Europe of the late 19th century (and that Hitler was a later product of). One gets the impression from the above that Nietzsche saw Napoleon as a missed opportunity.

Would Hitler would have met with similar praise?

The word "German" is constantly being used nowadays to advocate nationalism and race hatred and to be able to take pleasure in the national scabies of the heart and blood poisoning that now leads the nations of Europe to delimit and barricade themselves against each other as if it were a matter of quarantine. For that we are too openminded, too malicious, too spoiled, also too well informed, too "travelled": we far prefer to live on mountains, apart, "untimely," in past or future centuries, merely in order to keep ourselves from experiencing the silent rage to which we know we should be condemned as eyewitnesses of politics that are desolating the German spirit by making it vain and that is, moreover, petty politics: to keep its own creation from immediately falling apart again, is it not finding it necessary to plant it between two deadly hatreds?—must it not desire the eternalization of the European system of a lot of petty states?
We who are homeless are too manifold and mixed racially and in our descent, being "modern men," and consequently do not feel tempted to participate in the mendacious racial self-admiration and racial indecency that parades in Germany today as a sign of a German way of thinking and that is doubly false and obscene among the people of the "historical sense."

Owing to the pathological estrangement which the insanity of nationality has induced, and still induces, among the peoples of Europe; owing also to the short sighted and quick-handed politicians who are at the top today with the help of this insanity, without any inkling that their separatist policies can of necessity only be entr’ acte policies; owing to all this and much else that today simply cannot be said, the most unequivocal portents are now being overlooked, or arbitrarily and mendaciously reinterpreted-that Europe wants to become one…….In all the more profound and comprehensive men of this century, the over-all direction of the mysterious workings of their soul as to prepare the way for this new synthesis and to anticipate experimentally the European of the future: only in their foregrounds or in weaker hours, say in old age, did they belong to the “fatherlandishness”-they were merely taking a rest for themselves when they became “patriots”.
Nietzsche, BGE

The Germans—once they were called the people of thinkers: do they think at all today? The Germans are now bored with the spirit, the Germans now mistrust the spirit; politics swallows up all serious concern for really spiritual matters. Deutschland, Deutschland über alles—I fear that was the end of German philosophy.
Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols?


"What I mean to say is that the democratisation of Europe is at the same time an involuntary arrangement for the breeding of tyrants - in every sense of the word, including the most spiritual."
Hitler, being an artist, would certainly qualify for a "spiritual" tyrant.

He probably would, yet is Nietzsche revelling in this or warning of it? From the same passage BGE, People’s and Fatherlands 242:

“But this process (democratisation) will probably lead to results which would seem least expected by those who naively promote and praise it, the apostles of “modern ideas”. The very same conditions that will on the average lead to the levelling and mediocritization of man-to a useful, industrious, handy, multi-purpose herd animal-are likely in the highest degree to give birth to exceptional human beings of the most dangerous and attractive quality”.

These tyrants may arise, did if we take Hitler and Stalin but are these the types of souls “hardened of heart” that Nietzsche valued?

Edit:

To clarify what I mean by this point is that Nietzsche saw democracy and the spirit behind it as a removal of suffering, inequality etc, but that's it's very nature would lead to the exceptional arising anyway but in ways that Nietzsche, perhaps, didn't value.

[Lutiferre]

The purification of the race.— There are probably no pure races but only races that have become pure, even these being extremely rare. What is normal is crossed races, in which, together with a disharmony of physical features (when eye and mouth do not correspond with one another, for example), there must always go a disharmony of habits and value-concepts. (Livingstone heard someone say: "God created white and black men but the Devil created the half-breeds.") Crossed races always mean at the same time crossed cultures, crossed moralities: they are usually more evil, crueller, more restless. Purity is the final result of countless adaptations, absorptions and secretions, and progress towards purity is evidenced in the fact that the energy available to a race is increasingly restricted to individual selected functions, while previously it was applied to too many and often contradictory things: such a restriction will always seem to be an impoverishment and should be assessed with consideration and caution. In the end, however, if the process of purification is successful, all that energy formerly expended in the struggle of the dissonant qualities with one another will stand at the command of the total organism: which is why races that have become pure have always also become stronger and more beautiful. The Greeks offer us the model of a race and culture that has become pure: and hopefully we shall one day also achieve a pure European race and culture.
Nietzsche, Daybreak
Hitler and National Socialists of that time certainly didn't believe Germans or Europeans were a pure race, either: that is why they wanted to breed a pure race, to purify, as Nietzsche says, in a European scope.


There is some similarity with Hitler’s belief in Aryanism but I don't believe it quite the same thing:

The result of all racial crossing is therefore in brief always the following, lowering of the level of the higher races, physical and intellectual regression and hence the beginning of a slowly but surely progressing sickness. To bring about such a development is, then, nothing else but to sin against the will of the eternal creator.
Mein Kampf
That seems to be rhetoric, like much of Mein Kampf, intended to talk to the reader using the kind of justifications that are accepted. It is comparable to what Nietzsche called the "holy lie" in The Twilight of the Idols; when he talks of something almost exactly similar, namely, the Law of Manu invoking divine will to advocate the separation of the casts/races. That is a lie because such a divine will is merely a human invention, but it serves a purpose and so is justified.

I would say we get a clue here by the fact that "the will of the eternal creator" is rather arbitrary in relation to the rest; it's not what Hitlers philosophy is built up around. It's built up rather around something like the will of nature, or rather, the natural order of things, like in Nietzsche, which is Social Darwinist rather than theological; it doesn't really care what the eternal creator might be, except an entity that authoritates the order of nature which is what is really being affirmed.



This is, undoubtedly correct, as I have wrote I claim no expertise, but I think I may have remembered a couple more things than you?, first Nietzsche was often contradictory, second he often played devil’s advocate.
As everyone, he is contradictory over time. In his mature period however, I would say he seems contradictory, and on the surface he is. On a deeper level however, I believe he is beyond being contradictory; it is rather that he deals with questions that are of an extremely complex and paradoxical nature.



And so the Folkish philosophy of life corresponds to the innermost will of nature, since it restores that free play of forces which must lead to a continuous mutual higher breeding, until at last the best of humanity, having achieved possession of this earth, will have a free path for activity in domains which will lie partly above it and partly outside it. We all sense that in the distant future humanity must be faced by problems which only a highest race, become master people and supported by the means and possibilities of an entire globe, will be equipped to overcome.
Mein Kampf

Every enhancement of the type "man" has so far been the work of an aristocratic society-and it will be so again and again- asociety that believes in the long ladder of an order of rank and differences in value between man and man, and that needs slavery in some sense or other.
Nietzsche, BGE

and again:

The essential characteristic of a good and healthy aristocracy, however, is that it experiences itself not as a function but as their meaning and higher justification-that it therefore accepts with a good conscience the sacrifice of untold human beings who, for its sake, must be reduced and lowered to incomplete human beings, to slaves, to instruments. Their fundamental faith simply has to be that society must not exist for society’s sake but only as the foundation and scaffolding on which a choice type of human being is able to raise itself higher and to a higher state of being.

The emphasis couldn't be more different. I would also add that where as Hitler's vision was a messianic view of a final order, Nietzsche believed that the "last man" would eternally recur.
I agree Hitler seems to speak of the "race" and the "folk" whereas Nietzsche is focused on the individual overman, but even Nietzsche did value entire races, like his glorification of the Greeks and their purity as race, and as such Nietzsche doesn't ignore the race of the plurality. He does ascribe importance to it, just not the importance he does to Great Men. One could say that since the plurality, the race, are the condition for Great Men, the root from which they spring, the folk - the plurality - the society, thereby has importance in relation to producing Great Men (which Nietzsche described as the "only purpose and duty" of history and of societies).

The question also returns; what part of Hitlers speech of Folk and Race is just populism, and what part is really about what he values? He didn't seem like a man who actually valued the large masses; he seemed rather to be indifferent to them, spiritually and idealistically minded as he was, focused instead on his real goals which were beyond the Folk, and hence, beyond good and evil. He would and did let the people of Germany rot, die and be humilliated in every way, for his own higher purposes of attempting to realize a plan of gaining power to construct a society with a culture that was able to produce superior individuals of the future.


Yet Nietzsche affirms the need for some state of slavery or other and, indeed, the vital role of the “herd”……how would one square this with the above statement?
Actually, I made a mistake, I meant he said that about the sick, not the weak. There is a difference there, although Nietzsche himself seems to treat the sick and the weak with the same contempt, and not with much differentiation in the order of things.

Another issue is that for slaves to remain slaves, they must be weak in some sense - and weakness being of the "de"scending line of life, that would make them subject to this "euthanisation". But since Nietzsche believes in the necessity of slaves, that must mean the aphorism is only about those indviduals who are of no possible utillity - e.g. the actually sick/degenerated weaklings who produce nothing and are only a burden. More or less: Nietzsche in his last 10 years of life.



I don’t think it can be in any real doubt that in BGE Nietzsche is opposed to what he called the “fatherlandishness” the militant nationalism arising in the Europe of the late 19th century (and that Hitler was a later product of). One gets the impression from the above that Nietzsche saw Napoleon as a missed opportunity.
But Hitlers Aryanist "National Socialism" seems to transcend the merely national and the folkish, in scope; that seems just to be the beginning, the point of entry, for a National Socialist Europe, which is Aryan and not merely German. The nationalism may just have been a lie or tool (more or less) to realise this European ideal.



The word "German" is constantly being used nowadays to advocate nationalism and race hatred and to be able to take pleasure in the national scabies of the heart and blood poisoning that now leads the nations of Europe to delimit and barricade themselves against each other as if it were a matter of quarantine. For that we are too openminded, too malicious, too spoiled, also too well informed, too "travelled": we far prefer to live on mountains, apart, "untimely," in past or future centuries, merely in order to keep ourselves from experiencing the silent rage to which we know we should be condemned as eyewitnesses of politics that are desolating the German spirit by making it vain and that is, moreover, petty politics: to keep its own creation from immediately falling apart again, is it not finding it necessary to plant it between two deadly hatreds?—must it not desire the eternalization of the European system of a lot of petty states?
We who are homeless are too manifold and mixed racially and in our descent, being "modern men," and consequently do not feel tempted to participate in the mendacious racial self-admiration and racial indecency that parades in Germany today as a sign of a German way of thinking and that is doubly false and obscene among the people of the "historical sense."
But if Nietzsche could observe this nationalism/racism already in his time, doesn't that tell you that this was latent in the German people (and other peoples) long before Hitler, and so, it provided the opportunity Hitler needed to gain power through National Socialism?

In any case, I am myself at doubt about this question about to what extent Nietzsche and Hitler are "compatible" or akin in mind. So I find this discussion very interesting.

Edit:

Here's a further quote on the issue of eugenics and euthanasia by extension:

"Society as the trustee of life is responsible to life for every botched life that comes into existence; and as it has to atone for such lives, it ought consequently to make it impossible for them ever to see the light of day: it should in many cases actually prevent the act of procreation, and may, without any regard for rank, descent, or intellect, hold in readiness the most rigorous forms of compulsion and restriction, and, under certain circumstances, have recourse to castration ... 'Thou shalt do no murder,' is a piece of ingenuous puerility compared with 'Thou shalt not beget!!!' ... The [unhealthy] must at all costs be eliminated, lest the whole fall to pieces." WtP

Castrations, euthansations: the elimination of the "unhealthy". Not far away from National Socialist practice.

Also, not unlike NS in it's collectivism; it puts the priority and authority of the condition of the whole of society above all else of any spiritual kind (again because Nietzsche believes body and soul are one, so "healthiness" is of absolute significance), trumphing thereby any other authority, putting the general state of life collectively above any subordinate, individual circumstances:


.. Moreover, Nietzsche's bestowal of primacy upon the social "whole" betrays his collectivist proclivities. Hitler shared such propensities, as is evidenced by his virtual deification of the collective in Mein Kampf: "The sacrifice of personal existence is necessary to secure the preservation of the species" (no pagination).

[Lutiferre]

Insights on Nietzsches view of what was to become Nazi ideology thru Gobineau: http://books.google.dk/books?id=hJNtOYaF74sC&pg=PA42&lpg=PA42&dq=Nietzsche+on+Gobineau&source=bl&ots=9aCbHy_HXI&sig=7WyLP7RNkw_zGFzvcwrG-AdcUh4&hl=da&ei=zShCTIHQHY6aOKm1gdQM&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CCgQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=Nietzsche%20on%20Gobineau&f=false

This has convinced me in the opposite direction of what I was arguing earlier.

[Lutiferre]

Insights on Nietzsches view of what was to become Nazi ideology thru Gobineau: http://books.google.dk/books?id=hJNtOYaF74sC&pg=PA42&lpg=PA42&dq=Nietzsche+on+Gobineau&source=bl&ots=9aCbHy_HXI&sig=7WyLP7RNkw_zGFzvcwrG-AdcUh4&hl=da&ei=zShCTIHQHY6aOKm1gdQM&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CCgQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=Nietzsche%20on%20Gobineau&f=false

This has convinced me in the opposite direction of what I was arguing earlier.

In fact I would say, Nietzsches insights into race and culture and their hierarchy are wholly beyond and much deeper than anything conceived by the NS or by for instance, egalitarianists.

[Liffrea]

Originally Posted by Lutiferre
As everyone, he is contradictory over time. In his mature period however, I would say he seems contradictory, and on the surface he is. On a deeper level however, I believe he is beyond being contradictory; it is rather that he deals with questions that are of an extremely complex and paradoxical nature.

I think there is also the problem that his material was released in a some what haphazard manner (by his sister) and probably not in the order he intended it to be, but you are right the complexity of his thought can lead to misunderstanding.


I agree Hitler seems to speak of the "race" and the "folk" whereas Nietzsche is focused on the individual overman, but even Nietzsche did value entire races, like his glorification of the Greeks and their purity as race, and as such Nietzsche doesn't ignore the race of the plurality.

In BGE 268 Nietzsche does write of the importance of commonality of concepts and views within people of the same race (which sort of mirrors Spengler’s thought on the uniqueness of a cultures own direction in time). I’m sure that Nietzsche did not have an outlook that would simplify race as an either/or, he does warn of commonality of outlook leading to the common i.e. herd man, but he also warns earlier on of the danger of the rootless masses of Europeans arising in the wake of democratisation. In part I think this is his “fear” if you like of a certain type of mediocre tyrant arising in the Europe of mediocre tendencies.


In any case, I am myself at doubt about this question about to what extent Nietzsche and Hitler are "compatible" or akin in mind.

It is an interesting one to ponder and no doubt worthy of an in depth study in itself. Personally I lean towards Nietzsche certainly being appalled at the anti-Semiticism of the Nazis, I have not studied his relationship with Wagner in any detail but I wonder if the latter's well known hatred of the Jews may have played a part in their split?


In fact I would say, Nietzsches insights into race and culture and their hierarchy are wholly beyond and much deeper than anything conceived by the NS or by for instance, egalitarianists.

Indeed.

[Knut]

His policy in Norway wasn't the best one, to put it mildly.

[Lutiferre]

Interesting article on the subject - entitled "Persuasion in Hitler, Wagner and Nietzsche".

Wagner could be key to understanding the distance between Hitlers and Nietzschean thinking, considering Hitler was more influenced by Wagner (and by extension Schopenhauer) and his post-Christian-redemptionist/nonaffirmative aspects than by Nietzsche.



This paper was presented to the third annual conference of the Friedrich Nietzsche Society in 1993.

PERSUASION IN HITLER WAGNER AND NIETZSCHE


I must disclaim at the outset any attempt to contribute to any contemporary debate on the nature of persuasion, or to pursue the concept into such fields as the new rhetoric or deconstruction. This paper is limited to trying to understand Nietzsche's objection to Wagner in some of its further implications.

In August 1869, over two years before the publication of the 'Birth of Tragedy', Nietzsche read an unpublished pamphlet Wagner had given him¹, written for King Ludwig II of Bavaria, 'On State and Religion‘². In it Wagner expressed his innermost philosophy, explaining his disillusion with the socialism he had supported in 1848. Then he had favoured "an organisation of public life in common, as also of domestic life, such as must lead of itself to a beauteous fashioning of the human race"³. Now he had lost all faith in the masses, including all hope in their ever rising above gross appetite. He now saw that "Blindness is the world's true essence, and not knowledge prompts its movements, but merely a headlong impulse, a blind impetus of unique weight and violence, which procures itself just so much light and knowledge as will suffice to still the pressing need experienced at the moment"_. He now held that the people must be ruled by deliberately fostered illusions (Wahn) of patriotism and religious dogma, aimed at promoting unity and universal love. Without the protection of such illusion they would commit suicide in despair. The sorrow of true insight is only to be borne by the courageous few, the elite, the King and his counsellors, those who propagate the illusions. "The great, the exceptional man, finds himself each day, in a certain measure, in the situation in which the ordinary man forthwith despairs of life"_. The value of art, which the common man can only understand as entertainment and amusement, is to console and alleviate the unhappiness of the nobles and sustain their courage.
This 'tragic pessimism' which the young Nietzsche found so uplifting, he eventually came to reject completely. Persuasion, seduction, erotics, actor, magician, with such terms he directs in 'The Case of Wagner', an attack on Wagnerism as the heart of modern decadence, the triumph of a persuasive,yet degraded and servile ideal of life, with malign implications for the future of culture.

"Ah this old magician, how much he imposed upon us!"_

"The actor Wagner is a tyrant; his pathos topples every taste, every resistance. Who equals the persuasive power of those gestures?"_


Nietzsche too was naturally concerned to persuade people of the truth of his own ideas, an objective which, on his own philosophy, can be interpreted as a conscious development of his personal will to power. This way of thinking is sometimes seen as reaching fruition in the personality of Adolf Hitler_. Hitler cultivated the image of an exceptionally persuasive force, much in the mould of Rasputin. He was often compared to a hypnotist and a black magician. Although Hermann Rauschning has been criticised for claiming to have been closer to Hitler than was actually the case, his book 'Hitler Speaks', is a useful study of this aspect. Far more than by Nietzsche, Hitler was deeply and fundamentally inspired by Wagner. Nietzsche had much to say about the danger of Wagner, but even he could not foresee the full extent of it, as developed in Hitler's interpretation. Hitler's idea is that the holy grail means racially pure blood.

"We must interpret 'Parsifal' in a totally different way to the general conception....Behind the absurd externals of the story, with its Christian embroidery and its Good Friday mystification, something altogether different is revealed as the true content of this most profound drama. It is not the Christian-Schopenhauerist religion of compassion that is acclaimed, but pure, noble blood, in the protection and glorification of whose purity the brotherhood of the initiated have come together. The king is suffering from the incurable ailment of corrupted blood. The uninitiated but pure man is tempted to abandon himself in Klingsor's magic garden to the lusts and excesses of corrupt civilisation, instead of joining the elite of knights who guard the secret of life, pure blood...For myself I have the most intimate familiarity with Wagner's mental processes. At every stage in my life I come back to him"¹_.



Insofar as this differs from Nietzsche's interpretation of the composer's intentions, a bridge is to be found in the concept of redemption¹¹. Wagner promoted an ideal of redemption, the objective of which can be taken as an erotic pleasure in the whole of present experience, notably including reconciliation with national identity. The purport of Wagner's myths of redemption, his craving for unity, is that everything that causes a sense of unease, dissatisfaction or alienation, is an evil which can and ought to be overcome. Nietzsche wrote of the strange mix of Icelandic master morality and the Christian need for redemption to be found in Wagner¹². This comes out in the concept of the hero politician saviour. All the unease with where and what one is, as a member of a nation, this is all something that shows imperfection, and the need for a better order to be created, wherein, for example, classes, sexes, generations, are no longer in conflict with each other, but experience the harmony sometimes felt at funerals. Such harmony involves overcoming disagreeable feelings, which so become the basis for experiences of great exhilaration and well being. The sexual parallel is obvious, with the suggestions of tension and release, tumescence and detumescence.

In 'The Case of Wagner' Nietzsche treats Wagner's concept of redemption with considerable irony, seeing in his plots nothing more profound than the sexual preoccupations of the contemporary French novel.



"The problem of redemption is certainly a venerable problem. There is nothing about which Wagner has thought more deeply than about redemption, his opera is the opera of redemption".¹³



Wagner advocated a musically inspired society, in which emotions are guided. The musical society is feminine and erotic, an ideal very far from the kind of discontent promoted by consciousness of a will to power. Expressed intellectually Wagnerism may not be easy to grasp, but all kinds of people listen to Wagner and seem to understand him, or at least they get something from him. Nietzsche said that Wagner gave his name to the ruin of music as Bernini did for sculpture¹_. Even a liking for Bernini, on Nietzsche's view might indicate a coarseness of taste.

Nietzsche's taste in music actually seems to have become increasingly intolerant. Most would admit he had a deep understanding and appreciation of it, but to the modern educational ideal of a music based culture, he was seemingly unsympathetic. Wagner he opposes. Brahms he dismisses as below Wagner's standard¹_ Bizet he praises highly, but not seriously¹_. Beethoven and Mozart he admires enormously, but regards as the expressions of historical eras that are increasingly incomprehensible, therefore they shall soon no longer be understood.¹_ Already in the 'Birth of Tragedy' he disdains classic Italian opera¹_. Nearly all nineteenth century music he comes to dismiss as mere romanticism¹_. As for his hopes for twentieth century music, they were not high, unless we except what he says about his friend, Peter Gast.

None of this is to say that he ever ceased to enjoy Wagner's music²_, only that he refused to accept it on its own terms. Nietzsche perhaps used music as others use painting and architecture. He could formulate it as idea, and think about it. Perhaps this is not a usual approach. He traces Hegel in Wagner. Evidently he opposes Hegel and Wagner on much the same grounds. He describes Wagner as using "the very same means by which Hegel formerly seduced and lured..."²¹



"Hegel is a taste.- And not merely a German but a European taste.- a taste Wagner comprehended- to which he felt equal- which he immortalised.- He merely applied it to music- he invented a style for himself charged with 'infinite meaning'- he became the heir of Hegel. Music as 'idea'".²²



Wagner appears as magician and seducer, as was Hegel before him. Hegel's dialectic had been applied to the end of leading even the most reluctant into an enthusiastic conformity to his own idea of progress, treating the meaning of any dissent as that of a stage in understanding, deeply satisfying to overcome.

Nietzsche reminds us that Wagner was once a revolutionary socialist, passionate for the 1848 revolutions. Later he combined myth and music like a political ideologist, putting his music to the service of some crude myths. Hitler's interpretation of Klingsor's garden is not altogether implausible. He made much use of Wagner's myth, seeing heroes like Siegfried and Parsifal as himself. There are clearly different ideals of persuasion between Nietzsche on the one hand, Wagner, Hitler (and probably Hegel) on the other. Yet both Wagner and Hitler were leaders, and Nietzscheans in the sense of setting themselves heroic tasks and destinies in which roles they revel. Hitler's idealism expressed itself through concepts like triumph of the will and the heroic Siegfried. Hitler the seducer, the hypnotist, was to use his power of persuasion, and his capacity for heroic action to overcome decadence. Nazi Germany may be considered a musically inspired society in Wagner's sense. It took to a sensational extreme the not uncommon²³ political ideal of erotic unity, that of a society in which there is meant to be no disharmony of feeling.

If one feels one understands where Wagner leads, while refusing to be overwhelmed, it can be depressing to remember how many admirable writers and artists have idolised him. It is said that the symbolists such as Mallarme aspired to write poetry that reaches the level of Wagner's music, however much their work may strike us as quite different in kind. Anyone now who allowed Wagner to lead him into the kind of ecstasies people used to permit themselves would not be very highly thought of for it. It is not that Wagner does not still have that potential but one does not have to allow oneself to be seduced. One is in the position of a woman who may choose the man she goes to bed with. Another analogy is with journalism. Like a newspaper, Wagner carried a package of opinions. To find a newspaper completely satisfying is to be misled by it. The best of newspapers is all the more harmful, if like Nietzsche's early obsession with Wagner's music, it promotes the illusion that a solution has been found, and that there are no serious unanswered questions.

Nietzsche's views of the function of art underwent profound change. If ever we speak of his saving cult of art, we should always make clear whether his earlier or his later view is meant. With his attachment to Wagner in The "Birth of Tragedy" he expressed a Schopenhauerian view of art as metaphysical revelation. His original view of Dionysus was as the Schopenhauerian will, the metaphysical reality. It is natural to speculate how much the Dionysian thesis could be made to fit some of the responses aroused by modern popular music from jazz to rock or rap. Nevertheless, Nietzsche insists that it is only a framework of myth, that makes the Dionysian bearable. As a Wagnerite he saw Wagner's music as an exemplification of Schopenhauer's true thesis. Later he would see almost inescapable decadence throughout the culture of his time²_. When, for intellectual reasons, the Schopenhauerian thesis no longer appears to be true, Wagnerism does not vanish, but manifests instead as a corrupting force, its coercive qualities glaringly apparent. It is a seducer into false views and opinions, one of which is that of Wagner's own supreme and incomparable genius²_. Against this the Nietzschean artist should resist conformist pressure, however alluring it may be. Popular applause and the flattery of women, for all their promise of enjoyment, are dangers to be resisted. He reinterprets Wagner's redemption myth:-



"Translated into reality: the danger for artists, for geniuses......is woman: adoring women confront them with corruption. Hardly any of them have character enough not to be corrupted, or 'redeemed'- when they find themselves treated like gods: soon they condescend to the level of the the woman."²_



The mature Nietzschean view of art is quite different from Wagner's. Nietzschean art is a subclass of affirmationist, or celebratory art²_, identified with Nietzsche's own will and ambition, that is, premised on acceptance of his own psychological ideas. While expressing the sexuality of the artist, it resists erotic invitation, and is the way of the dissident, from Stirner to Solzhenitsyn. Aesthetic pleasure when it comes is experienced as the satisfaction of this dissident impulse, and not as release from it.²_ This is a view much more favourable to rationalism than was the romantic Schopenhauerian outlook he took so long to discard completely. "Mechanistic world idiotising", in a phrase from "Beyond Good and Evil"²_, is one way of looking at rationalism. On a different view, to have a rational scheme, and keep to it no matter what, may admirably exemplify the "capacity of sticking to his guns" which Nietzsche concluded was "the only thing which today proves whether a man has any value or not"³_. Suffering from certain manifestations of the erotic, one emphasises the anti erotic. Art as will to power³¹, can be seen as the expression of a thought held in the face of emotional pressure to conform. Such an idea is anti Hitlerian, allowing for a rational philosophy to be held as a basic presupposition. However it is not easy to see what helpful or positive implications it might have for music. Arguably in Nietzsche's mature aesthetics music must lose the central place it has for the Schopenhauerian³², and we should seek his immediate heirs less among musicians than among painters, such as the German expressionists, denounced by Hitler as degenerate.

Nietzsche set himself in opposition to German culture as expressed in Hegel and Wagner, putting forward a contrary view of art and its significance. In being anti Wagner he was very deeply opposed to the whole way of thought and feeling that culminated in fascism and Hitler. Taking fascism as a type of which nazism is a subspecies, fascism involves the idea of getting a better world by using the full coercive powers of the state to eliminate those things that are disliked. There is a trick whereby people are persuaded to surrender their liberty. Through the myth of nation comes the trust that one will oneself be all right. Its appeal is particularly to the splenetic sort of person, and the contempt he feels for what he sees as "liberal" or Christian moral scruples, stopping the creation of something really valuable through softness and misplaced pity.

It is not hard to identify the errors in the fascist idea. "What is offensive" is not a descriptive phrase. To treat it as such is a logical mistake belonging to an infantile mode of thought. What is offensive to splenetic man is not necessarily so to the rest of us. Identifying this as an error in thinking, the usual moralistic criticism of fascism, advocating the value of Christian inhibition, seems less appropriate.

The fascist utopia, involves a primitive division of humanity and the world. The feeling that "what offends me" is a basic category dividing existence comes when this is experienced as something outside personal control, that is when one is a follower. As when some people are persuaded of Wagner's enormous and incomparable greatness, a normally subjective judgement appears as an objective perception, so that marvellous solutions seem to be possible. When your values depend on the will of another person, your consequent likes and aversions take on a fixed character like qualities of nature. Accordingly that person has the power to accomplish what is of all things the most desirable. In his own triumph and success he is able to transform the world, create happiness, where before there was evil and despair.

As an original Wagnerite, Nietzsche begins from something close to a fascist position and then repudiates it with great thoroughness. The fascist position is contained in Wagner, who, says Nietzsche, makes eyes at master morality, while speaking to an essentially servile need for redemption and salvation. There is illusion created through being a follower, especially not realising that one is such. Nietzscheanism is an explicit rejection of Wagnerism (and by extension Hitlerism), as essentially a doctrine of subjection. The hero ideal of Hitler and Siegfried is a different heroism from that advocated by Nietzsche. It promotes neither knowledge nor master morality. The illusion that it does comes from submissiveness.

Though fascism is a meretricious deception, anti fascism can sometimes seem to be a doctrine in need of refutation. It can express itself in anti Nietzschean terms, suggesting that what is required to combat fascism is inhibition, self restraint, guilt and pity. Anti fascism takes an anti Nietzschean tinge.



"J'ai eu pitie aux autres.

"Pas assez! Pas assez!"³³



wrote the repentant Ezra Pound, seemingly confessing to a lack of compassion, rather than a weakness in understanding. Some people mean to strike hard against Nietzsche in aiming to oppose fascism by means of a morality of the weak, maintaining that only by a complete rejection of Nietzsche and an open acceptance of such moral restriction, is something like fascism to be avoided.

Nietzsche's message of master morality intrinsically opposes the deception that it sees in Wagnerism. On the will to power theory, values are mutable. Accepting it, one frankly interprets the persuasion motive as the desire that one‘s own values should prevail, rather than as a virtuous urge towards some future state of shared harmony. The oppression one opposes is the experience of hostile judgement, irksome subjection to alien and obnoxious values. This is neither unavoidable nor especially difficult to overcome. As soon as the question of basic values is open, the essential victory has almost been won. Given such a context, concepts like personal ambition and destiny may become more appropriate. That basic questions of value be open is the vital difference between Nietzsche and Hitler.

Nietzsche has in common with a Wittgenstein a questioning of prevailing assumptions, a call on them to justify themselves, for a rational principle to underlie judgement. This is only feasible insofar as there is some common ground of agreement. It is different from what Hitler was doing, a different type of persuasion. It might be described as the difference between the cold and the hot.

We might imagine a conversation between a Nietzschean and a Hitlerite. The latter explains his ideal of creating a better world by using the full coercive power of the state to eliminate the obnoxious, ugly and distasteful. He presents this in Nietzschean terms as a lack of slavish inhibition. Through fascism, he says, he can realise his will. The Nietzschean shows him that in supposing he can realise his will in that way, his will must be that of a follower, a slavish will. He is looking for a redeemer, like a Christian, aspiring after an ecstasy of subjection.

The Nietzschean might address him as follows:

"You claim to despise the liberal for not fulfilling his will, being restrained by servile inhibitions, but that is not how the liberal sees himself. He does not feel frustrated by the continued existence of what at times may annoy him. He may well feel that he lives by values which he believes to be true, and that he is achieving what he wants. You think you are fulfilling your own will through your support of certain political policies. In the same way this feeling of yours depends upon your acceptance of certain beliefs, beliefs you hold very strongly, certainly, but which if undermined in a cold way would cease to inspire you. A real belief in the will to power is not compatible with fascism. The fulfilment offered through fascist belief is that of being a follower. If you believe your own will can find full satisfaction through someone else exercising absolute power, then you must be a follower of that person".

To undermine these beliefs in a cold way, we may perform a thought experiment on the concept of revolutionary fascism, isolating it as an abstract idea. It seems to involve the ideal of a redeemed society, a certain kind of paradise or heaven. "The Aryan neglected to maintain his own racial stock unmixed, and therewith lost the right to live in the paradise which he himself had created", wrote Hitler in "Mein Kampf"³_. Fascism holds out the hope of recreating paradise through political revolution. This is not simply a question of practical measures which may or may not have desirable contingent effects. There is a belief that a Nietzschean happiness would be widely available in the fascist society, with heroic action part of everyday life, and decadent and degenerate forces eliminated. Society would have been redeemed by the hero, who has the strength, and has been given the power, to do what right thinking people want. The illusion is in failing to see that only faith could make this seem a reality. Only if you have total faith in the hero, or implausibly know you will always just happen to share all his aims and judgements, can conformity to his will be compatible with self affirmation. We are dealing with true believers. It is belief that creates feeling. This is far from a Nietzschean contempt for the gregarious herd. To express disagreement is to live in terror of the police.³_ "The greatness of the Aryan" Hitler continues, "is not based on his intellectual powers; but rather on his willingness to devote all his faculties to the service of the community. By serving the common weal he receives his reward in return"³_. What could be more remote even from a popular understanding of Nietzsche's immoralism?

The strong erotic content of fascism must be borne in mind. The ideal of complete conformism and harmony is a submissive, what is traditionally seen as a feminine, ideal. In such a society the fascist would like to live. We can try to put the finger on what he aspires to. In the first instance, he wants to get rid of everything obnoxious. But that is imprecise. We have to ask what he finds obnoxious. Is it whatever obstructs his will, as he might claim? Or whatever obstructs a feeling of harmony, which is a different question? What is his will? The will determined by cold reason and to that extent clear, is something very different from a mere feeling of antipathy, which is what fascism appeals to. Yet to achieve the fascist utopia a great effort of clear minded will is required. This is the will of the hero, the redeemer, the man on behalf of the woman.

Conscious of a will to power, and identifying with it, one would not be happy to live in a society based on such conformism. One would despise its orthodox scale of values, because such orthodoxy denies the struggle and competition one takes to be reality. Where that struggle is not explicit one takes it to be suppressed. Fascism therefore appears as a form of slavery, which is precisely how it was widely experienced.

Given a will that is cold and dry, how does one feel about opposition? What sort of society does the Nietzschean will? Can one say that he wills opposition, enemies? He has his own ambition, and he wishes to overcome resistance. Whatever the kind of society imagined, for him the path of erotic unity is not the right one. He would wish to be able to assert a separateness and superiority. To be one of a crowd would normally repel him. He would want to be able to oppose the will of others. He might like to imagine himself as dictator, with the people as female to his maleness, but he could not honestly advocate being one of the people. Not many fascists could actually expect to become the dictator.

If one desires power as Nietzsche understands it, one is not content simply to be erotically happy. One wants to set the terms, insisting on the principle "I will not serve", like the Christian Devil. Social erotic happiness, goes with a suppressing of such a motive. Nietzsche is teaching the power urge, not simply practising it like Hitler and Wagner. His own will expresses itself in sharing his concept of power and describing the motives of those who dominate³_. He is not after females to himself as male.

Looking at the exhilaration and excitement of the Wagnerite and the Hitlerite we can fully acknowledge the great sense of power these people might have, their overwhelmingly enjoyable feeling. In this there is no sense of Ialdabaoth, the false oppressor God that embodies conventional doctrine. Acceptance of the will to power theory involves dissipating mental fog. Anyone who really accepted the will to power doctrine would interpret the conformist society in a way that would probably make it unacceptable to him, conscious of the massive suppression that it seems to require.








NOTES





1 The Life of Friedrich Nietzsche, by Daniel Halevy tr. J.M. Hone. T. Fisher Unwin, London 1911, pp.75-8.



2 On State and Religion, Vol IV of Richard Wagner's Prose Works, tr. William Ashton Ellis, London 1895.



3 Ibid pp.6-7.



4 Ibid p.10.



5 Ibid p.32.



6 Will to Power II tr. Ludovici, T.N.Foulis, Edinburgh & London 1910, §1005 p.389:- "Towards 1876 I experienced a fright; for I saw that everything I had most wished for up to that time was being compromised. I realised this when I perceived what Wagner was actually driving at.."



7 The Case of Wagner, translated Walter Kaufmann, Vintage books New York 1967. p.160.



8 Ibid p.172.



9 Nietzsche, by J.P. Stern, Fontana, Glasgow 1978 p.83:- "If there is anything in the recent 'Nietzschean era that comes close to an embodiment of 'the will to power', it is Hitler's life and political career".



10 Hitler Speaks, by Herrmann Rauschning, Thornton Butterworth Ltd, London 1939. p.227.



11 A historical bridge was through the Wagner movement led by Wagner's widow Cosima, which continued Wagner's own move away from Schopenhauer into a nationalist and racist direction. Prominent in this was the racist historian Houston Stuart Chamberlain, who once wrote:- "I must confess I doubt whether humanity ever produced a greater, perhaps as great a genius as Richard Wagner". quoted p. 15 "Evangelist of Race, The Germanic Vision of Houston Stuart Chamberlain", by Geoffrey G. Field, Columbia University Press 1981.



12 The Case of Wagner, translated Walter Kaufmann, Vintage books New York 1967. Epilogue p. 191



13 Ibid p.160



14 Ibid p.186



15 Ibid pp.187 -8



16 Nietzsche, a self portrait from his letters, ed. & tr. Peter Fuss and Henry Shapiro, Harvard 1971, Nietzsche's letter to Carl Fuchs, Turin 27 Dec 1888 p.140:- "'Nietzsche Contra Wagner'" will appear first- in French too if all goes well....You mustn't take too seriously what I say about Bizet. For someone like me he is completely out of the question. But he provides a very effective ironic antithesis to Wagner. After all, it would have been incomparably tasteless on my part had I begun with, let us say, a eulogy of Beethoven".



17 Beyond Good and Evil, tr. Marianne Cowan, Gateway, Chicago 1955, § 245 p.179:-

"Alas some day it [the taste for Mozart] will all be gone- but who can doubt that our understanding and taste for Beethoven will go even sooner!"



18 The Birth of Tragedy, tr. Francis Golffing Doubleday Anchor New York 1956, §19 P115:-

" ....the peculiar attraction and thus the success of this new art form must be attributed to its satisfaction of a wholly unaesthetic need: it was optimistic; it glorified man in himself; it conceived of man as originally good and full of talent. This principle of opera has by degrees become a menacing and appalling claim, against which we who are faced with present day socialist demands cannot stop our ears. The 'noble savage' demands his rights: what a paradisical prospect!"



19 Beyond Good and Evil, tr. Marianne Cowan, Gateway, Chicago 1955, §254 p.180:-

"Whatever German music came after him [Beethoven] belongs to Romanticism; historically speaking, that is, to an even shorter, even more fleeting and superficial movement than that great entr'acte, that transition of Europe from Rousseau to Napoleon to the advent of democracy".



20 Ecce Homo, tr. Kaufmann, Vintage Books, New York 1969, Why I am so Clever §6 p.250:-

"But to this day I am still looking for a work that equals the dangerous fascination and the gruesome and sweet infinity of Tristan- and look in all the arts in vain.....I think I know better than anyone else of what tremendous things Wagner is capable- the fifty worlds of alien ecstasies for which no one beside him had wings; and given the way I am, strong enough to turn even what is most questionable and dangerous to my advantage and thus to become stronger, I call Wagner the great benefactor of my life".



21 The Case of Wagner, translated Walter Kaufmann, Vintage books New York 1967, §10 p.177-8.



22 Ibid §10 p.178.



23 Take for example the words of Mussolini, talking to Emil Ludwig:- "Music and women allure the crowd and make it more pliable...Here as in Russia, we are advocates of the collective significance of life, and we wish to develop this at the cost of individualism.....We want the humanity and beauty of a communal life".- Talks with Mussolini by Emil Ludwig, tr. Eden and Cedar Paul London 1932 pp.123, 125, 126.



24 Will to Power II tr. Ludovici T.N. Foulis, Edinburgh & London 1910, §794 p.239:-

"Our religion, morality and philosophy are decadent human institutions. The counter agent: Art".



25 For example, H.L. Mencken, who hailed in Nietzsche the "the most salient and original personality seen in the groves of learning since Goethe" (p.ix), nevertheless wrote of Wagner:-

"I believe that his music dramas are, by long odds, the most stupendous works of art ever contrived by man - that it took more downright genius to imagine them and fashion them than it took to build the Parthenon, or to write 'Faust', or 'Hamlet', or to paint the Sistine frescoes, or even to write the Ninth symphony". -The Nietzsche Wagner Correspondence, ed. Elizabeth Foerster Nietzsche, Liveright publishing corporation New York 1949. p.xii, Mencken's introduction.



26 The Case of Wagner, translated Walter Kaufmann, Vintage books New York 1967 p.161.



27 Will to Power II tr. Ludovici T.N.Foulis Edinburgh & London 1910, §844 p.279:-

"Is art the result of dissatisfaction with reality? or is it the expression of gratitude for happiness experienced? In the first case it is romanticism; in the second it is glorification and dithyramb (in short, apotheosis art)....Homer as an apotheosis artist; Rubens also. Music has not yet had such an artist".



28 Twilight of the Idols tr. Hollingdale Penguin Books Harmondsworth 1968 p.82:-

"Schopenhauer taught that the great object of art was to 'liberate from the will', and he revered tragedy because its greatest function was to 'dispose one to resignation'. - But this, as I have already intimated, is pessimist's perspective and 'evil eye'.-: one must appeal to the artists themselves. What does the tragic artist communicate of himself? Does he not display precisely the condition of fearlessness in the face of the fearsome and questionable? The condition itself is a high desideratum: he who knows it bestows on it the highest honours. He communicates it, he has to communicate it if he is an artist, a genius of communication. Bravery and composure in the face of a powerful enemy, great hardship, a problem that arouses aversion- it is this victorious condition which the tragic artist singles out, which he glorifies".



29 Beyond Good and Evil, tr. Marianne Cowan, Gateway Chicago 1955 §252 p.188.



30 Will to Power II tr. Ludovici T.N. Foulis Edinburgh & London 1910 §910 p.333.



31 Ibid §803 p.245:-

"...in beauty contrasts are overcome, the highest sign of power thus manifesting itself in the conquest of opposites; and achieved without a feeling of tension: violence being no longer necessary, everything submitting and obeying so easily, and doing so with good grace; this is what delights the powerful will of the artist".



32 Ibid §842, p278:-

"Does music really belong to that culture in which the reign of powerful men of various types is already at an end?....Is not music, modern music, already decadence?"



33 'The Cantos' by Ezra Pound, 4th edition 1987 Faber and Faber London, Canto 93, p.642.



34 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler, tr. James Murphy, Hurst and Blackett Ltd 1939 London, p.248.





35 Writers sympathetic to fascism saw no objection to this, for example Wyndham Lewis, who wrote approvingly of Mussolini's Italy:-

"In ten years a state will have been built in which at last no trace of european 'liberalism', or its accompanying democratic 'liberty' exists. This will have been the creation of a tyrant, or dictator, with virtual powers of life and death: for with his highly disciplined, implicitly obedient, fascist bands, no person anywhere will be able to escape assassination if he causes trouble to the central government, or holds too loudly, opinions that displease it":- The Art of Being Ruled, by P.B. Wyndham Lewis, Chatto and Windus, London 1926 pp.370-371.



36 Op cit p.249.



37 This interpretation of the "will to power" differs from the fashionable view of Nietzsche as a radical relativist and sceptic. To argue this out would require a separate paper. My position is basically that he regarded the concept of the will to power as the keystone of his philosophy, believing he had here discovered something both supremely significant, and in a quite ordinary sense true, to do with the universal conflict that exists between different ideals and values.




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[Psychonaut]

In fact I would say, Nietzsches insights into race and culture and their hierarchy are wholly beyond and much deeper than anything conceived by the NS or by for instance, egalitarianists.

Like I said in the rep, I can't source it at the moment, but I think the reason this is the case is because of Nietzsche's holism. While the Nazi's compartmentalized excellence and hierarchy into purely biological terms, and strict egalitarians into behavioral, Nietzsche successfully bridged the gaps between body, mind and behavior in the best spirit of panpsychism. His anthropology is radically hierarchical, but is so in that it treats both individuals and organic groups as wholes, not hypertrophying aspects.

[Lutiferre]

An excerpt from the article which shows with striking acuteness how Nietzsche fundamentally differed from fascist thinking but also why one might confuse them, namely due to the slave-morals involved in much of the oppostion against fascism, which thereby positions itself against Nietzscheanism as well. And also, the fundamental Nietzschean grounds for rejecting fascism is underlined in the last bolded paragraph. Very interesting.


The mature Nietzschean view of art is quite different from Wagner's. Nietzschean art is a subclass of affirmationist, or celebratory art²_, identified with Nietzsche's own will and ambition, that is, premised on acceptance of his own psychological ideas. While expressing the sexuality of the artist, it resists erotic invitation, and is the way of the dissident, from Stirner to Solzhenitsyn. Aesthetic pleasure when it comes is experienced as the satisfaction of this dissident impulse, and not as release from it.²_ This is a view much more favourable to rationalism than was the romantic Schopenhauerian outlook he took so long to discard completely. "Mechanistic world idiotising", in a phrase from "Beyond Good and Evil"²_, is one way of looking at rationalism. On a different view, to have a rational scheme, and keep to it no matter what, may admirably exemplify the "capacity of sticking to his guns" which Nietzsche concluded was "the only thing which today proves whether a man has any value or not"³_. Suffering from certain manifestations of the erotic, one emphasises the anti erotic. Art as will to power³¹, can be seen as the expression of a thought held in the face of emotional pressure to conform. Such an idea is anti Hitlerian, allowing for a rational philosophy to be held as a basic presupposition. However it is not easy to see what helpful or positive implications it might have for music. Arguably in Nietzsche's mature aesthetics music must lose the central place it has for the Schopenhauerian³², and we should seek his immediate heirs less among musicians than among painters, such as the German expressionists, denounced by Hitler as degenerate.

Nietzsche set himself in opposition to German culture as expressed in Hegel and Wagner, putting forward a contrary view of art and its significance. In being anti Wagner he was very deeply opposed to the whole way of thought and feeling that culminated in fascism and Hitler. Taking fascism as a type of which nazism is a subspecies, fascism involves the idea of getting a better world by using the full coercive powers of the state to eliminate those things that are disliked. There is a trick whereby people are persuaded to surrender their liberty. Through the myth of nation comes the trust that one will oneself be all right. Its appeal is particularly to the splenetic sort of person, and the contempt he feels for what he sees as "liberal" or Christian moral scruples, stopping the creation of something really valuable through softness and misplaced pity.

It is not hard to identify the errors in the fascist idea. "What is offensive" is not a descriptive phrase. To treat it as such is a logical mistake belonging to an infantile mode of thought. What is offensive to splenetic man is not necessarily so to the rest of us. Identifying this as an error in thinking, the usual moralistic criticism of fascism, advocating the value of Christian inhibition, seems less appropriate.

The fascist utopia, involves a primitive division of humanity and the world. The feeling that "what offends me" is a basic category dividing existence comes when this is experienced as something outside personal control, that is when one is a follower. As when some people are persuaded of Wagner's enormous and incomparable greatness, a normally subjective judgement appears as an objective perception, so that marvellous solutions seem to be possible. When your values depend on the will of another person, your consequent likes and aversions take on a fixed character like qualities of nature. Accordingly that person has the power to accomplish what is of all things the most desirable. In his own triumph and success he is able to transform the world, create happiness, where before there was evil and despair.

As an original Wagnerite, Nietzsche begins from something close to a fascist position and then repudiates it with great thoroughness. The fascist position is contained in Wagner, who, says Nietzsche, makes eyes at master morality, while speaking to an essentially servile need for redemption and salvation. There is illusion created through being a follower, especially not realising that one is such. Nietzscheanism is an explicit rejection of Wagnerism (and by extension Hitlerism), as essentially a doctrine of subjection. The hero ideal of Hitler and Siegfried is a different heroism from that advocated by Nietzsche. It promotes neither knowledge nor master morality. The illusion that it does comes from submissiveness.

Though fascism is a meretricious deception, anti fascism can sometimes seem to be a doctrine in need of refutation. It can express itself in anti Nietzschean terms, suggesting that what is required to combat fascism is inhibition, self restraint, guilt and pity. Anti fascism takes an anti Nietzschean tinge.

[Liffrea]

That was an interesting article but something puzzles me.

Nietzsche promotes in his new philosophers the ability to think outside of prevailing social norms in society, they are meant to be contradictory to social rules, not out of obstinence but as the necessary foundation for new growth and insight. All well and good, Nietzsche’s Will to Power and master morality is one of dominance of one’s own will. Yet does this not conflict with Nietzsche’s own aristocratic principle? He contends that one can only submit one’s will to those of the same “rank” the will becomes part of a mutually interested group and, like all social groups, deflects all inherent conflicts in the group outwards onto “enemies”. As a consequence he writes that all aristocratic morality is intolerant, it cannot tolerate variation (here, perhaps, we see some of his issues with Darwinists, where Darwinism states that organisms adapt to prevailing conditions, Nietzsche’s aristocrats overcome them and draw strength from them), this intolerance of variation is essential for the focus of the group on survival and over coming, yet does it not conflict with the ideals of the new philosopher in being a singular force of contradiction to the prevailing rules?

Perhaps I’m focusing too narrowly?

[Liffrea]

Another thing is Nietzsche's Will to Power teleological or is it, like Darwinism, just an observation of reality, as far as Nietzsche saw it?

[Lutiferre]

A thought on Hitler versus Hitlerism:

I think we must distinguish between Hitler as a man, and the doctrine and ideology and cult he built up (or, which was built up around him).

There is nothing un-Nietzschean (perhaps to the contrary?) in creating a doctrine of submission to oneself - that is simply Hitlers Will To Power, and in Hitlers case, sucessfully so. There is only something un-Nietszchean in accepting and submitting to this doctrine, as it seemed Hitler even did himself - that is, he seemed to believe in it himself due to his Wagnerian mindset which posits the necessity of a "reedemer" leader-hero-type which he found in himself.

That was an interesting article but something puzzles me.

Nietzsche promotes in his new philosophers the ability to think outside of prevailing social norms in society, they are meant to be contradictory to social rules, not out of obstinence but as the necessary foundation for new growth and insight. All well and good, Nietzsche’s Will to Power and master morality is one of dominance of one’s own will. Yet does this not conflict with Nietzsche’s own aristocratic principle? He contends that one can only submit one’s will to those of the same “rank” the will becomes part of a mutually interested group and, like all social groups, deflects all inherent conflicts in the group outwards onto “enemies”. As a consequence he writes that all aristocratic morality is intolerant, it cannot tolerate variation (here, perhaps, we see some of his issues with Darwinists, where Darwinism states that organisms adapt to prevailing conditions, Nietzsche’s aristocrats overcome them and draw strength from them), this intolerance of variation is essential for the focus of the group on survival and over coming, yet does it not conflict with the ideals of the new philosopher in being a singular force of contradiction to the prevailing rules?
The philosopher being a singular force of contradiction to the prevailing rule describes a philosopher who is still fighting an already established structure of Will to Power, why? to instate his own - which, in Nietzsches case, is built up around fostering an aristocracy, which if established, would not be "fighting a prevailing rule" - but rather, would be the prevailing rule.

[Lutiferre]

Another thing is Nietzsche's Will to Power teleological or is it, like Darwinism, just an observation of reality, as far as Nietzsche saw it?

Very complicated discussion. I've wondered this myself. There are several questions and several necessary answers.

Questions: is the WTP doctrine a form of animism? and, s the WTP doctrine in contradiction to neo-Darwinian evolutionary explanations for the coming about of organisms? since Darwinian science uses merely "external pressures" to explain lifes coming about and disregards the kind of "unfolding from an internal principle of Will to Power" which Nietzsche thought of.

The problem is that the doctrine is in fact more esoteric and hard to understand than one might think. It challenges everything you have assumed about the world before; it is quite simply a reevaluation of all values which precedes any theory or knowledge which might come thereafter. It goes before anything else, and so cannot be justified by anything external to it. It starts from a point of human psychology, from where all statements about reality issue from. Which makes it more basic than any academical theory of truth.

I think to answer this question, we must first understand the epistemological framework Nietzsches ontology(*) is framed within. *: we cannot really call WTP an ontology, as it is itself anti-ontological. It is a contradiction of ontology.

That framework is one which limits us to the perspective, and in which nothing can be taken for granted.

We are used to thinking within a representational-ontology account of truth: e.g. sense-objects and concepts represent some "actually existing object in external reality": we immediately and blindly hypostasize our perspectives as representing "an external, 'real' world".

To understand Nietzsches approach, we must go back to Schopenhauer. What do we know about the world, or what is the world to us, in Nietzsches understanding? It is a central question in Schopenhauers philosophy. "The World as Will and Representation".

I found some basic conclusions from Schopenhauer which gives a lead there:

I) Events appear to us in space and time.

II) The world of objects I perceive depends for its existence--as an organized, perceived system--on my consciousness.

In other words, "the world", meaning everything, everything meaning what we sense, feel, think, in its totality, is something we have many assumptions about normally, which we need to reevaluate. We need to take a step back. Nietzsche does this, and concludes that the world, when the whole "ontological" fallacy and other assumptions are removed, is simply this: the Will to Power. Space, time, object, concept, sensation, feeling, anything, are simply illusions taken on their own; and as such, simply instances of Will to Power: they are all the product of a chaotic flux of power relations from which those concepts and categories and sensations are totally absent as metaphysical realities; we create the illusion of such a metaphysical ontology. This all, is driven by Will; if it was not for will, nothing would happen, and none of these power relations would even exist. "Will" is simply equal to the fact of "force"; that is, it is the fact that anything moves rather than not, from the most elemental particle to human willing - and it issues from a "pathos", an urge, a rudimentary "impulse" - the human emotional system is used by Nietzsche as a metaphor for a more primitive, rudimentary "drive" of what we see (effectually) as "forces" - that "drive" is "will", specifically, "will to power". Humanity is just a more complex constellation of power which thereby has a more complex emotional system and mode of willing.

So to answer whether WTP is an animism or whether it contradicts Darwinian science, I will say NO; animism and even its categorization is built up around a concept of reality and epistemology which simply assumes an ontology that cannot be reconciled with WTP, namely that a hypostatic ("externally real") reality exists which produced us, and we then thought up a will and projected it unto nature; WTP denies the first assumption as a valid starting point for any insight into the world - it has a different concept of the "world": the world is beyond any categories of matter or "actual reality"; there is just will to power before there is "indifferent matter" or anything of the sort; the very concept of "animism" is itself produced out of a psychology of WTP. And Darwinian science, like all science, also holds up to the objectivist fallacy; WTP denies this, but can easily explain the external pressures as part of a flux of power relations which all issue from WTP, and unlike science, it explains why anything moves at all.

I asked someone who is a lot wiser than me what the WTP doctrine is, if not a metaphysical doctrine. He described it as "a kind of 'naturalised' psychology, without any beyond or meta, as there really is no arche in Nietzsche's system, the will to power is life and is reality and is almost a metaphysical world principle and substance but always seems to veer away from being that, and just encapsulates any statement about reality".

On the question of whether it's teleological, the answer is no, as the WTP has no goal and no justification and no cause. Those words are all themselves instances of WTP, given the interpretation of the world as WTP.

[Liffrea]

An excellent post Lutiferre.:thumb001:

An article I read not long back, again on the question of Nietzsche and Darwin, asked whether WTP could even be ascribed to the Selfish Gene theory popularised by Dawkins. To me this would seem to be taking WTP more towards the question of instinct. Yet Will is a conscious act, is there, perhaps, a descriptive fallacy in Nietzsche's phrase?

[Lutiferre]

An article I read not long back, again on the question of Nietzsche and Darwin, asked whether WTP could even be ascribed to the Selfish Gene theory popularised by Dawkins. To me this would seem to be taking WTP more towards the question of instinct. Yet Will is a conscious act, is there, perhaps, a descriptive fallacy in Nietzsche's phrase?

In Nietzsches (and Schopenhauers, notably) use of "will", it is not a "conscious act", but rather something that existed long before the consciousness of it did; it is what drives our subconscious. It can be described with other words than "will", as "desire," "striving," "wanting," "effort," and "urging." The world with Scopenhauer is variously will and idea (or "representation"), "the world" being only a set/system of perceptions and concepts of ours (not a hypostatised external entity), and where representation (the rational) falsifies reality, there's a part of the world which is non-rational, and which is "will": this is our window to "the world" beyond idea. The basis for the WTP doctrine therefore transcends rationality; it sees reality through the perspective and window which beyond which "reality" simply is a mistaken extrapolation; reality consists of a rudimentary form of "will", of which the human experience is simply a complex consciousness ("bevidstgørelse" in Danish) which creates goals and seeks purposes, it has "Vorstellung" (der Welt as Wille und Vorstellung) or 'forestilling' in Danish, which is the conscious the WTP doesn't have apart form humanity: the WTP is the more fundamental part of reality and life, to which vorstellung and consciousness is simply a slave - the "act of will" is not a conscious one, the experience is.

[Psychonaut]

Questions: is the WTP doctrine a form of animism?

Not so much animism as it is panpsychism (of which animism is a prehistoric precursor). The conception of Will as ontologically primary has lain at the foundation of many panpsychist philosophers, from Nietzsche and Schopenhauer all the way back to Empedocles. I would take issue with this, though. While I am certainly in favor of monistic panpsychism, I would have to posit Will as ontologically secondary and elevate the event/process/experience as prime.

[Lutiferre]

Not so much animism as it is panpsychism (of which animism is a prehistoric precursor). The conception of Will as ontologically primary has lain at the foundation of many panpsychist philosophers, from Nietzsche and Schopenhauer all the way back to Empedocles.
Perhaps so, depending on what is involved in the "psyche" implied by 'panpsychism'.

Another fitting term could be metaphysical voluntarism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntarism_%28metaphysics%29#Metaphysical_volunta rism). One could also call it "conatism" by Monoliths suggestion of Conatus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conatus) being similar to what is meant by will in Schopenhauer/Nietzsche.


I would take issue with this, though. While I am certainly in favor of monistic panpsychism, I would have to posit Will as ontologically secondary and elevate the event/process/experience as prime.
What great is there in that doctrine? I know a little of process philosophy, but really, how does this view of the world enhance life or my power? It seems to disagree with will to power on what epistemology, truth and life should be founded on: is process philosophy an ascetical mere will to truth? The will to power view of the world is built on action, on expression, on the discharging of one's energy - power - into the world.

Positing experience/event as a metaphysics of the world, a view of the world, seems to be a passive, highly effeminate ontology: a passivity is implied in "event/experience" because to even think of the world primarily with that angle, one is simply an observer, not an active willer or actor as Nietzsches view of the world immediately posites to be the primary element in any philosophical doctrine: in any individals wanting to make a metaphysical world statement. And that, even process philosophy is, before it's a truth. It would thus be negating of the true primary force involved in making such an active statement to consider process to be ontologically primary, which is will to power.

Now, I don't deny that the world occurs in processes/events/experiences, but that is simply our experience of time and change: what really drives it, what makes anything move rather than just sit still? That with which one can answer, should be what one sees the world as: will, and will to power, seems to explain that.

[Curtis24]

I also think you all may be overestimating Hitler's effect on Germany. Germany had fought a war very similar to WWII only 20 years earlier, and had an entrenched anti-semitic tradition for centuries.

[Agrippa]

I also think you all may be overestimating Hitler's effect on Germany. Germany had fought a war very similar to WWII only 20 years earlier, and had an entrenched anti-semitic tradition for centuries.

Every European nation had antisemitic tendencies, probably the least the nation which came early on under heavier Jewish influence, namely Great Britain.

When the Germans entered the Eastern territories during World War One, many Jews celebrated this as some sort of liberation and told stories about how good they were treated by "the correct Germans".

Also the Jews in Germany were among the "best integrated Jews" in all of Europe. It was just a certain portion of Jews which acted very destructive and of course, new waves of non-integrated and more problematic Jews came from the East rather recently. Some German Jews even criticised that immigration, saying that this low level Jewish immigrants from the East harm the good reputation of German Jews, because this new immigrants and radical Communist/Socialist Jews or reckless Capitalists drew a new image of "the Jew in Germany", which was no longer the nice professor or doctor from the neighbourhood...

The Austro-Hungarian Monarchy under the Habsburg-dynasty was a very Jew-friendly regime, with a German dominance, just compare what National Socialists said about the late Habsburgian Empire.

So any sort of Antisemitism in Germany before the end of the First World War was in no way stronger than in most other European nations and a certain Antisemitic-Antijudaic/Anti-Jewish tendency was present in practically all European nations, it was part of a natural condition and reaction towards the foreign Jewish elements.

Just look to Poland, Russia etc.

Very low Antisemitism being usually related to an extreme Jewish influence, like in Great Britain and/or low absolute numbers of Jews, which meant, even if they had great powers, the majority of the population didn't cared for it or just didn't noticed.

Where many Jews lived or the heavy influenced the public, politics, especially through Capitalism or Marxism, they were usually always seen in a negative way and Antisemitic tendencies were the natural result.

[Psychonaut]

Positing experience/event as a metaphysics of the world, a view of the world, seems to be a passive, highly effeminate ontology: a passivity is implied in "event/experience" because to even think of the world primarily with that angle, one is simply an observer, not an active willer

It is only a passive ontology if you, like Heidegger, stop at the halfway point and consider yourself thrown into being. If you, like Whitehead, work out the ontology to its logical conclusion, then there is no you that is separate from the quality of thrownness itself. If all is process, then there can be no passive experiencer—for we are ourselves events.

[esaima]

Hitler talked too much.Stalin for instance was a quiet, taciturn Asian and was much more successful.
Hitler was a low context culture (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_context_culture)dictator, Stalin was a high context culture dictator.

[Agrippa]

Hitler talked too much.Stalin for instance was a quiet, taciturn Asian and was much more successful.
Hitler was a low context culture (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_context_culture)dictator, Stalin was a high context culture dictator.

In which world? Hitler cared for ideals and people, at least those he appreciated, Stalin cared for nobody, even if the situation was not desperate.

Also there were personal descriptions of both which say the opposite. Stalin had for sure not "more culture" than Hitler and Hitler at least fought for his power and rule, while Stalin was just an intriguer.

Hitler tried to spread "a message" and "truth", obviously he talked more, Stalin always remained the intriguer in the background, much more of a coward and unfair personally too...

Again, many people look at Hitler's last two years of his reign in a steadily deteriorating, desperate situation, with heavy blows for his psychological and physical health.

If you want to get a more complete and probably realistic picture, you have to look at him for more than just these two last years, especially when he became more successful politically...

[Curtis24]

Every European nation had antisemitic tendencies, probably the least the nation which came early on under heavier Jewish influence, namely Great Britain.

When the Germans entered the Eastern territories during World War One, many Jews celebrated this as some sort of liberation and told stories about how good they were treated by "the correct Germans".

Also the Jews in Germany were among the "best integrated Jews" in all of Europe. It was just a certain portion of Jews which acted very destructive and of course, new waves of non-integrated and more problematic Jews came from the East rather recently. Some German Jews even criticised that immigration, saying that this low level Jewish immigrants from the East harm the good reputation of German Jews, because this new immigrants and radical Communist/Socialist Jews or reckless Capitalists drew a new image of "the Jew in Germany", which was no longer the nice professor or doctor from the neighbourhood...

The Austro-Hungarian Monarchy under the Habsburg-dynasty was a very Jew-friendly regime, with a German dominance, just compare what National Socialists said about the late Habsburgian Empire.

So any sort of Antisemitism in Germany before the end of the First World War was in no way stronger than in most other European nations and a certain Antisemitic-Antijudaic/Anti-Jewish tendency was present in practically all European nations, it was part of a natural condition and reaction towards the foreign Jewish elements.

Just look to Poland, Russia etc.

Very low Antisemitism being usually related to an extreme Jewish influence, like in Great Britain and/or low absolute numbers of Jews, which meant, even if they had great powers, the majority of the population didn't cared for it or just didn't noticed.

Where many Jews lived or the heavy influenced the public, politics, especially through Capitalism or Marxism, they were usually always seen in a negative way and Antisemitic tendencies were the natural result.

Do you then believe the Holocaust was uniquely tied to Hitler?

[Agrippa]

Do you then believe the Holocaust was uniquely tied to Hitler?

"The Holocaust" is a more complicated topic probably, but generally speaking: Definitely. Yes definitely.

Obviously there could have been another German politician which was a staunch Anti-Semite, but the events taking place would have needed Hitler or a person like him.

Also "the Holocaust" was tied to the circumstances too, since even the official history tells us that there was a decision about the "Endlösung", namely with the so called "Wannsee-Konferenz":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wannsee_Conference

But this is a topic on its own, for which I'm no expert and don't care too much, for various, including legal reasons, yet you could say, without the First World War, the massive immigration of Eastern Jews, the Capitalist crisis and plutocratic power, the rise of Bolshevism (including Communist uprisings and policy in Germany) and later National Socialism and Hitler, a strong Antisemitism in Germany would have been unthinkable.

Everything which happened was directly related to the events taking place, to say there was a strong Antisemitism in Germany even long before that - especially in the context of Europe and the time then, is just ridiculous.

If you, your kin, people and ideals have no problem with Jews, you usually are not Antisemite, yet if such problems appear or you recognise them, you have to become at least "Jew-critical" or even a full blown Antisemite to defend your interests and position.

What many "researchers" currently try to ignore or at least play down, is the fact, that usually ethnic/racial/cultural/religious/social tensions have a real cause, a reason, usually with AT LEAST a certain completely rational core.

This is even particularly true for Anti-Jewish tendencies, which could be noted at many times and many places and should be seen, almost as a rule, as a reaction to concrete events.

Germans were not strongly Antisemitic when they had no serious troubles with "their", mostly relatively well integrated Jews, but it became worse over time and the reaction followed and had one huge expression and catalysator in the person of Hitler.

Think of a similar leader in Russia fighting down Bolshevism in the civil war, what would his logical conclusion been, after the Jewish Bolshevists tried to completely annihilate the Russian upper class and independent intellectuals, even all gentile people which didn't submit to their rule?

For sure not to say, if he was no complete idiot, "let's forget everything, Jews are citizens like all others..."

Jews just favoured egalitarian ideologies for their own purposes, including more chances and better acceptance, also on a honest and subconscious level in many cases, but also in a dishonest and completely destructive way, especially if the Plutocratic Oligarchy was involved.

However, that doesn't change the fact that they were highly overrepresented in the Bolshevist revolution and Communist parties throughout Europe, like they were in certain segments of Financial Capitalism and political Liberalism, the early mass media (Hollywood) and the like, so both of the worst creatures of modernity which threatened any higher values and order.

This attracted a stronger attention and new Antisemitic attacks, which was just logical under the given circumstances, like it would be now in a way, just that the Europeans don't think for themselves any longer...

[BiałaZemsta]

The Good: He, and the 3rd Reich collapsed before my German Father, and Polish mother decided to have kids.

The Bad: Being of mixed race (Polish and German), I would not have fit into his idea of the "Master Race."

[Loddfafner]

BAD: his haircut.
GOOD: his taste in uniforms.

[Agrippa]

The Good: He, and the 3rd Reich collapsed before my German Father, and Polish mother decided to have kids.

The Bad: Being of mixed race (Polish and German), I would not have fit into his idea of the "Master Race."

That's not necessarily true, it would have depended on various factors, though it was forbidden/shunned in a certain context. F.e. on the Eindeutschungsfähigkeit of the Polish mother (racial criteria included, possible German ancestry considered etc.).

[MagnaLaurentia]

That's not necessarily true, it would have depended on various factors, though it was forbidden/shunned in a certain context. F.e. on the Eindeutschungsfähigkeit of the Polish mother (racial criteria included, possible German ancestry considered etc.).

I'm not an expert on Nazism but...

"races to educate" (Latins and Japaneses)
"races to enslave" (Slavs, Asians and blacks)
"races to exterminate" (Jewish descent and gypsies)

What kind of Slavs are we talking about? East-Baltid, Gorid, Dinaroid/Armenoid (Georgian Stalinoid), Mongoloid-Slavs...?

Oh btw... i'm a "race to educate"... But I never understood what the Nazis wanted to teach to us the "Latin".. lol

[BiałaZemsta]

That's not necessarily true, it would have depended on various factors, though it was forbidden/shunned in a certain context. F.e. on the Eindeutschungsfähigkeit of the Polish mother (racial criteria included, possible German ancestry considered etc.).

Well, my mother has no German ancestry. The problem is that I ended up looking Polish instead of German (being a Baltid-Nordid blend). I am proud to be Polish though and that is how I identify (mainly because I am phenotypicaly a Pole and only partially genetically German).

[Agrippa]

I'm not an expert on Nazism but...

"races to educate" (Latins and Japaneses)
"races to enslave" (Slavs, Asians and blacks)
"races to exterminate" (Jewish descent and gypsies)

What kind of Slavs are we talking about? East-Baltid, Gorid, Dinaroid/Armenoid (Georgian Stalinoid), Mongoloid-Slavs...?

Oh btw... i'm a "race to educate"... But I never understood what the Nazis wanted to teach to us the "Latin".. lol

I think you were too much influenced by the Anti-propaganda.

As for "the Slavs", the German position to the Slavs was, like to other people, to a large degree determined by the circumstances and interests, no general outlook on them.

F.e. if the Poles would have agreed upon an alliance and fair compromise, would be trustworthy allies then, you can be sure they would have had their independent state and probably even gaining something in the East.

When the Italians were allies, even though they didn't fulfilled what they promised, they were considered friends and Mussolini was helped to the end, even though he caused troubles too...

Slovaks, Croatians and Bulgarians were friends, so they were treated, treated well Ukrainians etc., which were friendly etc., etc.

If you are in a war and the foe goes on you with all means, you can't expect friendly relations...


Well, my mother has no German ancestry. The problem is that I ended up looking Polish instead of German (being a Baltid-Nordid blend). I am proud to be Polish though and that is how I identify (mainly because I am phenotypicaly a Pole and only partially genetically German).

There are, obviously, Baltid Germans around too and of course, you don't live in Poland, but in a "Germanic country" in the widest sense. Also "partially" is a little bit of an understatement if you are half German...

[Harcos]

I'm not an expert on Nazism but...

"races to educate" (Latins and Japaneses)
"races to enslave" (Slavs, Asians and blacks)
"races to exterminate" (Jewish descent and gypsies)

What kind of Slavs are we talking about? East-Baltid, Gorid, Dinaroid/Armenoid (Georgian Stalinoid), Mongoloid-Slavs...?

Oh btw... i'm a "race to educate"... But I never understood what the Nazis wanted to teach to us the "Latin".. lol

Don't trust everything you hear or read. History is written by the victors and is accepted as truth wether it is or not, to question it wouldn't be pc. One must learn to think outside the box of brainwash.

But yes, the NSDAP did demonise some Slavic people. Czechs, Poles and East Slavs etc. But this I believe was due to bolster German ambitions in the east. South Slavs for example weren't demonised or seen as 'inferior' simply because they weren't in the German geographical sphere of interest.

[esaima]

In which world? Hitler cared for ideals and people, at least those he appreciated, Stalin cared for nobody, even if the situation was not desperate.

Indeed, Hitler was an idealist, Stalin was a cynic.Hitler declared "I hate Jews" etc., Stalin did not declare it.But did Stalin love Jews?
They had different styles.

[Agrippa]

Indeed, Hitler was an idealist, Stalin was a cynic.Hitler declared "I hate Jews" etc., Stalin did not declare it.But did Stalin love Jews?
They had different styles.

Hate is a strong word, but rather it came out of a view of things, being a conclusion. Stalin really decided out of his stomach about things of great consequences, what Hitler did too more and more, the more desperate the situation became.

But overall he had what we can call principles. What principles had Stalin? What love for ANY people had Stalin?

[BiałaZemsta]

I think you were too much influenced by the Anti-propaganda.

As for "the Slavs", the German position to the Slavs was, like to other people, to a large degree determined by the circumstances and interests, no general outlook on them.

F.e. if the Poles would have agreed upon an alliance and fair compromise, would be trustworthy allies then, you can be sure they would have had their independent state and probably even gaining something in the East.

When the Italians were allies, even though they didn't fulfilled what they promised, they were considered friends and Mussolini was helped to the end, even though he caused troubles too...

Slovaks, Croatians and Bulgarians were friends, so they were treated, treated well Ukrainians etc., which were friendly etc., etc.

If you are in a war and the foe goes on you with all means, you can't expect friendly relations...



There are, obviously, Baltid Germans around too and of course, you don't live in Poland, but in a "Germanic country" in the widest sense. Also "partially" is a little bit of an understatement if you are half German...

I understand now. If the Italians for example made life difficult for, or stood against the Germans, the Germans would have acted towards them the way they treated Poles. The reason the Germans hated the Poles was because of territorial claims, old conflict regarding those claims, and straight out defiance etc. (When I refer to Poles, I refer to the ones who held power and made decisions.)

On "partially," I should have written half. Also, the Baltid Germans look Germanic, is this correct? I would not want to go to say England or Germany and be identified as "being Polish." If I am wrong about Baltid Germans looking Germanic I would not need to worry, but if there is a difference, then I do look "Polish."

(*edit: I would not wanted to be viewed as Polish while in a country that does not think nicely on Poles.)

[Peasant]

The way the Germans treat the Poles in occupied Poland depended on who controlled the district and the individuals. They where given a lot of free reign. Hitler liked to give vague instructions and leave people to think for themselves.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNXp8t6X_Mw

[Agrippa]

I understand now. If the Italians for example made life difficult for, or stood against the Germans, the Germans would have acted towards them the way they treated Poles. The reason the Germans hated the Poles was because of territorial claims, old conflict regarding those claims, and straight out defiance etc. (When I refer to Poles, I refer to the ones who held power and made decisions.)

Well, that "Slavic" aspect and long disputes played in too, but obviously, the political circumstances made things much worse, I mean just consider Pilsudski would have still lived and made the deal with the Germans, probably not even a 2nd World War, but even if, a totally different course overall.

Just think about what happened after the Italian government changed sides and Germans had to occupy a large part of Italy to fight the Allied attacks, when then more Partisan attacks came, similar problems appeared as in the East and many Italians which were no active Fascists were "downgraded" in Germany because they were no longer allies...


On "partially," I should have written half. Also, the Baltid Germans look Germanic, is this correct?

Many do, because usually there is what we can call "background admixture" and regional variants, which are more region-specific, even if falling in the same general category - but that's not always the case, since neither do look all Poles "Polish" in the narrower (typical) sense, many look German, Russian, Baltic, Slovakian or the like...


I would not want to go to say England or Germany and be identified as "being Polish." If I am wrong about Baltid Germans looking Germanic I would not need to worry, but if there is a difference, then I do look "Polish."

Actually, Baltid is not the most typical Polish appearance, unless being rather extreme, in my opinion, but Baltid-Norid/Dinaroid is. Because one thing many Germans say and I can see quite often too is, that Poles have much more often a straighter to absent and somewhat broader back of the head than the German average. Even if they are not THAT brachycephalic, they have, especially in the male sex, so the experience at least with those which come, a much weaker occiput, even if the facial features are more progressive and Dinaro-Nordoid like (Norid most of the time).


The way the Germans treat the Poles in occupied Poland depended on who controlled the district and the individuals. They where given a lot of free reign. Hitler liked to give vague instructions and leave people to think for themselves.

and of course the situation with the Partisans/resistance groups...

[Lutiferre]

It is only a passive ontology if you, like Heidegger, stop at the halfway point and consider yourself thrown into being. If you, like Whitehead, work out the ontology to its logical conclusion, then there is no you that is separate from the quality of thrownness itself. If all is process, then there can be no passive experiencer—for we are ourselves events.
But that is post-valuation, indeed logically consequential, that is to say, accepting the premise and taking the consequence of this relegative-to-the-passive ontology. What I wanted to do was rather analyse the valuation itself, that is to say, the interpretation: what lies behind it is a passive role which is played and placed beyond all else, or rather, beneath all else, as all.

The will to power, similarly, is analysed by Nietzsche himself as an interpretation, before or in this case also after it is taken to it's logical consequence (e.g. that we are ourselves the will to power and nothing besides). The pre-interpretative valuative force in the will to power is the will to power in the sense that it is an active, out-reaching, expanding, self-stating, expressing desire or conatus which is felt and seen in everything, but also expressly stated itself with the doctrine so that it's not merely observed or willed but even self-described as both the particular force that interprets the world as such (even if the doctrine is false as a universal hypothesis) and the doctrine itself; the observing place accepted by this process/experience-ontology is a weak and inhibited form of will to power.

The will to power is a psychological and logical ring.

[Lutiferre]

But that is post-valuation, indeed logically consequential, that is to say, accepting the premise and taking the consequence of this relegative-to-the-passive ontology. What I wanted to do was rather analyse the valuation itself, that is to say, the interpretation: what lies behind it is a passive role which is played and placed beyond all else, or rather, beneath all else, as all.

The will to power, similarly, is analysed by Nietzsche himself as an interpretation, before or in this case also after it is taken to it's logical consequence (e.g. that we are ourselves the will to power and nothing besides). The pre-interpretative valuative force in the will to power is the will to power in the sense that it is an active, out-reaching, expanding, self-stating, expressing desire or conatus which is felt and seen in everything, but also expressly stated itself with the doctrine so that it's not merely observed or willed but even self-described as both the particular force that interprets the world as such (even if the doctrine is false as a universal hypothesis) and the doctrine itself; the observing place accepted by this process/experience-ontology is a weak and inhibited form of will to power.

The will to power is a psychological and logical ring.

I don't deny all of the philosophical points of process ontology though: I just deny that it can trumph will to power in terms of ontological (or rather, valuative) priority.

There's nothing to say that there could not be a more unprioritizing compatibility between a fundamental process-view of the world and a will to power view of the world. It is like the will to power and the eternal recurrence: the will to power is the fundamental drive behind the mode of time, which is the eternal recurrence. And then, the mode of unfolding of this will to power in an eternal recurrence of everything can be described as processes and event, which is even what Nietzsche intended with his Heraclitian focus on ceaseless becoming; but he nevertheless placed more importance on will to power as beyond both being and becoming, the fundamental drive which unfolds in a becoming that creates an illusion of being. (an almost Hegelian logical structure here)

[Polski]

The Good: He, and the 3rd Reich collapsed before my German Father, and Polish mother decided to have kids.

The Bad: Being of mixed race (Polish and German), I would not have fit into his idea of the "Master Race."

Yes you would have been part of the 'master race', all Europeans would have been. Despite the anti-Polish and anti-Slavic slogans and boards during the occupation of Poland, Poles and other Slavs were still regarded as Aryan by the Nazis, in fact after the Nazis invaded Poland they was an "Aryan District" which included thousands of Poles. The hatred was all political, they did not want us Polish to have a national identity but our blood was not considered "racially inferior" it was just that they wanted to have living space (lebensraum in Eastern Europe and they wanted to destroy Communism and Bolshevism.

Hitler even organised a funeral memorial for the Polish First Marshall Jozef Pilsudski in Berlin, 1935.

[Polski]

Good:

Great charismatic speaker that could get millions behind him and under his 'spell' simply through a speech, if you watch any of his speeches you can clearly see why many were on his side and voted for him.

Volkswagen - the "family car".

Rebuilding the German economy in a fast time, crushing the unemployment and getting millions of people into work. Hitler turned Germany around for starvation and poverty to superpower.

Autobahn.

Anti-public smoking laws.

Anti-animal cruelty laws.

Great views on women, unfortunately the world is not like that now.

The Olympic torch was his idea for the Berlin games.

Welfare programs.

National pride for the Germans, many were so proud of being a German.

V2 rocket.

Medical advances.


Bad:

Very aggressive foreign policy, caused harm to many white countries and nations.

Too much anti-Slavic propaganda not just by Hitler but in general of Nazi Germany, now whilst you can why they did this as to them they considered the Slavs as being ruled by Jewish masters so obviously they wanted to consider them inferior to but despite the Slavs still being considered Aryan they were treated very harshly by some Nazis during the occupations. Although later on in the war many Slavs fought against Bolshevism on the Nazis side.

Refused to listen to his generals during the war and ran before he could walk, it cost him the war.

[aherne]

In a way, a lot of artisans are very creative and also living beyond reality. Think about Van Gogh, Degas, Picasso, or just the above average art student.
I think the "art" you are referring was aptly called by the evil Nazis: "Entartete Kunst". More like a brew of madness and complete absence of talent as far as art is concerned. This is art:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/66/Johannes_Vermeer_(1632-1675)_-_The_Girl_With_The_Pearl_Earring_(1665).jpg/300px-Johannes_Vermeer_(1632-1675)_-_The_Girl_With_The_Pearl_Earring_(1665).jpg
This is filth:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/74/PicassoGuernica.jpg


At the downside a 'frustrated' artisan given the powers of control on a similar frustrated industrious juggernaut (read Germany in the 1930's) is a monstrous combination.
The memory of Hitler stands beautifully in face of the quality of his critics, generally people not able to think for themselves, quite content regurgitating Jewish hateful lies directed against him (which in time honored Jewish fashion goes against the person rather than against his words or his deeds).

[Sultan Suleiman]

Yes you would have been part of the 'master race', all Europeans would have been. Despite the anti-Polish and anti-Slavic slogans and boards during the occupation of Poland, Poles and other Slavs were still regarded as Aryan by the Nazis, in fact after the Nazis invaded Poland they was an "Aryan District" which included thousands of Poles.

So that was the reason they startved out millions of Poles and Belorussians?

[Kiyant]

[QUOTE=Polski;1763548]Yes you would have been part of the 'master race', all Europeans would have been. Despite the anti-Polish and anti-Slavic slogans and boards during the occupation of Poland, Poles and other Slavs were still regarded as Aryan by the Nazis, in fact after the Nazis invaded Poland they was an "Aryan District" which included thousands of Poles. QUOTE]

So that was the reason they startved out millions of Poles and Belorussians?
Because of Aryan BROTHERHOOD which means to kill as many Aryans as possible.

[Polski]

So that was the reason they startved out millions of Poles and Belorussians?

Soviet propaganda.


Because of Aryan BROTHERHOOD which means to kill as many Aryans as possible.

Troll.

[Sultan Suleiman]

Soviet propaganda.


German plans, is an answer more grounded in reality. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drang_nach_Osten)

[Sultan Suleiman]

German plans, is an answer more grounded in reality. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drang_nach_Osten)

Some more good read :) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalplan_Ost)

[Polski]

German plans, is an answer more grounded in reality. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drang_nach_Osten)

The Drang nach Osten policy was of course for German expansion and to destroy Communism. It pre-dates Hitler and Nazism and I do not deny this.

But the Nazis did not seek out for 'extermination' of Slavs, neither did they are of Jews - they wanted to force the Jews out of Europe.



Some more good read :) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalplan_Ost)

The Generalplan Ost is a myth.

Nearly all the wartime documentation on Generalplan Ost was deliberately destroyed shortly before Germany's defeat in May 1945. Thus, no copies of the plan were found after the war among the documents in German archives. Apart from Ehlich's testimony, there are several documents which refer to this plan or are supplements to it. Although no copies of the actual document have survived, most of the plan's essential elements have been reconstructed from related memos, abstracts and other ancillary documents.

Soviet propaganda.

[aherne]

The Drang nach Osten policy was of course for German expansion and to destroy Communism. It pre-dates Hitler and Nazism and I do not deny this.

But the Nazis did not seek out for 'extermination' of Slavs, neither did they are of Jews - they wanted to force the Jews out of Europe.




The Generalplan Ost is a myth.

Nearly all the wartime documentation on Generalplan Ost was deliberately destroyed shortly before Germany's defeat in May 1945. Thus, no copies of the plan were found after the war among the documents in German archives. Apart from Ehlich's testimony, there are several documents which refer to this plan or are supplements to it. Although no copies of the actual document have survived, most of the plan's essential elements have been reconstructed from related memos, abstracts and other ancillary documents.

Soviet propaganda.

Interesting that a Pole writes about this with such neutrality:thumb001: It's interesting, for those not accustomed to Jewish double-standards, that Poles are still expected to hate Germans for the five years of occupation, but on the same time stay silent for TEN TIMES MORE Soviet (Russian/Jewish) occupation, otherwise they are right wing crypto-Nazis...

[Polski]

Interesting that a Pole writes about this with such neutrality:thumb001: It's interesting, for those not accustomed to Jewish double-standards, that Poles are still expected to hate Germans for the five years of occupation, but on the same time stay silent for TEN TIMES MORE Soviet (Russian/Jewish) occupation, otherwise they are right wing crypto-Nazis...

Of course I despise the treatment many Poles received by the Nazis it is still nothing to do actually do with Nazism as a political ideology only a very small part of it the foreign policy (lebensraum/living space). Many Poles fought on Hitler's side and many of his close companies were actually of Polish descent. The main anti-sentiment for the Poles was a combination of Communism in Eastern Europe and Slavs as a whole were said to be being ruled by Jewish leaders and expansion, despite all of this they were still considered Aryan.

We hate Russians more, just remember how long the Katyn Massacre was blamed on the Germans when it was actually the Russians. Just remember how many parents second language was Russian not English because of the forced rules from Communism. I hate Communism.

Listen to a Polish RAC band called Honor... some great music against Communism!

[Sultan Suleiman]

The Drang nach Osten policy was of course for German expansion and to destroy Communism. It pre-dates Hitler and Nazism and I do not deny this.

It predates Communism as well, it is the "eternal" terrirotial ambition of Germans.


But the Nazis did not seek out for 'extermination' of Slavs, neither did they are of Jews - they wanted to force the Jews out of Europe.

I really don't care for you convoluted reasons for ignoring the obvious.

But you should never judge people by their intentions, only by their actions and their effects on you. That will spare you a lot of time and nerves IRL.



The Generalplan Ost is a myth.
Nearly all the wartime documentation on Generalplan Ost was deliberately destroyed shortly before Germany's defeat in May 1945. Thus, no copies of the plan were found after the war among the documents in German archives. Apart from Ehlich's testimony, there are several documents which refer to this plan or are supplements to it. Although no copies of the actual document have survived, most of the plan's essential elements have been reconstructed from related memos, abstracts and other ancillary documents.


You do realize that they tried to eradicate the non-blonde/blue eyed Poles while Germanizing the rest?

So if your wet dream realized in a hyper realistic Chrisopher Nolan way, you would probably be dead with only Veneda being alive out of all the Polish members here, and even then she would be speaking Njemački...

But then again you are a migrant in a land which wants to rid itself of all non-natives, so I can understand your willing ignorance of "they-slaughtered-millions-of-my-people" incident and try to worm your way in to depths of Anglo-Germanic rectums known as the "nationalist's good grace" like a pathetic treasonous worm you are.

[Polski]

It predates Communism as well, it is the "eternal" terrirotial ambition of Germans.

Yes it pre-dates Hitler even before his birth German expansion into the East but the main reason they did was to destroy Communism and to gain land for Germanic peoples.


I really don't care for you convoluted reasons for ignoring the obvious.

But you should never judge people by their intentions, only by their actions and their effects on you. That will spare you a lot of time and nerves IRL.

That's a rather broad thing to say.


You do realize that they tried to eradicate the non-blonde/blue eyed Poles while Germanizing the rest?

Source?

The whole blonde hair and blue eyed is a myth.


So if your wet dream realized in a hyper realistic Chrisopher Nolan way, you would probably be dead with only Veneda being alive out of all the Polish members here, and even then she would be speaking Njemački...

Not true.


But then again you are a migrant in a land which wants to rid itself of all non-natives, so I can understand your willing ignorance of "they-slaughtered-millions-of-my-people" incident and try to worm your way in to depths of Anglo-Germanic rectums known as the "nationalist's good grace" like a pathetic treasonous worm you are.

Now you are just shooting off target.

[Sultan Suleiman]

Yes it pre-dates Hitler even before his birth German expansion into the East but the main reason they did was to destroy Communism and to gain land for Germanic peoples.

First: I didn't realize that there was Communism in the time of the Teutonic Campaigns?

Second: Who's country is the first nation the Germans border to in the east and who's expense would it "be gaining land for the Germanic peoples"?



Source?

The whole blonde hair and blue eyed is a myth.

Any high school Polish history book. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidnapping_of_children_by_Nazi_Germany)




Not true.


Once again, here you have German made plans (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalplan_Ost) which advocate the eradication of the Polish nation!

Approved by your very idol. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQXfQ1ovN-E)



Now you are just shooting off target.

You are evading the point that Hitler considered your people to be worse than Gypsies, Africans, Jews, Arabs and had he won the WWII you would be either in a reservation settlement like the Indians in the NA or you would be dead.

While those "Aryan districts" of yours, would have their population Germanized or relocated then resettled with German settlers you dense shit.

[Polski]

First: I didn't realize that there was Communism in the time of the Teutonic Campaigns?

We are talking about Hitler's Germany not the Teutonic Knights expansions in the Middle Ages.


Second: Who's country is the first nation the Germans border to in the east and who's expense would it "be gaining land for the Germanic peoples"?

Poland and the Czech Republic.


Any high school Polish history book. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidnapping_of_children_by_Nazi_Germany)

This was not so much anti-Polish but rather to bring back Germans to Germany.


Once again, here you have German made plans (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalplan_Ost) which advocate the eradication of the Polish nation!

GeneralPlan Ost is a myth, there is no documented evidence or testimonies to even suggest such a thing, it is Soviet propaganda and even in accordance to this it says 85% Poles not 100%.


Approved by your very idol. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQXfQ1ovN-E)

I'm well aware Hitler said some anti-Polish statements but this was right in the late 1930's, earlier when he came to power he begged and begged to come to peace with Poland. You have to remember that the Treaty of Versailles was very harsh on Germany and the Germans, for example Gdansk/Danzig although originally Polish after the Teutonic Knights it became primarily German and was part of the German Empire but after the war it got separated and the Germans lost their citizenship and the Poles had the rights over it which is what Hitler wanted back first and foremost.


You are evading the point that Hitler considered your people to be worse than Gypsies, Africans, Jews, Arabs and had he won the WWII you would be either in a reservation settlement like the Indians in the NA or you would be dead.

Slavs were not considered to be worse than Gypsies, Africans, Jews and Arabs... the actual opposite, despite the anti-Slavic propaganda we were still viewed as 'Aryan'.


While those "Aryan districts" of yours, would have their population Germanized or relocated then resettled with German settlers you dense shit.

Not quite. This had nothing to do with Germanisation it was to distinguish Aryans and non-Aryans (mostly Jews as Poland had a high Jewish population):

"Ziemie zajęte przez Niemcy zostały częściowo włączone do III Rzeszy, z pozostałej części utworzono Generalne Gubernatorstwo (GG). Władze niem. wprowadziły podział ludności na Żydów i tzw. aryjczyków (m.in. Polaków), odmiennie traktując obie grupy (Żydów pozbawiły elementarnych praw ludzkich);" what means: "Terrains which were taken by the Germans were being gradually incorporated to the Reich, from the other parts General Government (GG) was created. German authorities introduced a segregation of people on Jews and so-called Aryans (mainly Poles), and both groups were treaten differently (Jews were deprived of basic human rights);"