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Category: Friedrich Nietzsche

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Friedrich Nietzsche

Crusade

against the Cross, 4

Nietzsche had to argue with his mother over his resolution not to continue his theological studies, i.e., to prepare for the career of parish priest.

In Bonn, Nietzsche finally experienced his first breaths of freedom. He no longer had to comply with the rigorous rules of dress, or the obligation to attend religious services in what had been, de facto, the Schulpforta convent for kids. Moreover, Bonn was so far from his mother’s home that he couldn’t even afford to spend Christmas at home. The difference between Bonn and the sullen family life in Naumburg couldn’t have been greater for the young student who attended parties, something inconceivable in Schulpforta.

Nietzsche, who came to live very close to Beethoven’s birthplace, visited Schumann’s grave. His friend Paul Deussen, who was the same age (but who would outlive him by almost twenty years) told the anecdote that Nietzsche didn’t accept the services of prostitutes when they took him to a brothel during one of his escapades in Cologne. More than adolescent sex, music was his girlfriend. As the teenage Hitler would later do, he attended concerts and the opera despite their financial hardship.

A letter to Deussen opens a psychological window into how the young Nietzsche first discovered the late atavistic effects of pagan festivities:

The entire population of the city lived for three days in total debauchery… There was complete freedom to visit and to receive visitors, even to kiss. Breakfast was ready in every home, accompanied by wine and punch; joking and laughing, drinking a glass, and then the round went on… When they arrived at the house of a slaughterer, the party had passed through the window, which was easy, since in the Rhineland houses have very low windows… The students kissed the splendid girl leaning out of the window and left through the front door. In the meantime, the father objected to the custom of wearing masks and wanted to prevent the parade. That’s why I was called. I carried the rather stout man outside and closed the entrance, then collected up my kiss and the procession moved on.

It was a time when the young Nietzsche already wore a moustache, though by no means the bristling wig with which, after his death, his face became iconic. He was such a gregarious young man that in addition to the opera he attended the theatre with friends. No one could have suspected that he would eventually become a hermit. So little noticed was the normie Nietzsche among lads of his age that, except Deussen, no member of the ‘Franconia’ association to which he belonged remembered anything about him when he was already famous. Nietzsche’s German biographers swim in information and documents about his life, to the extent that even some of his class notebooks have come into the public light for centuries to come.

If, to his mother’s chagrin, Nietzsche had abandoned his theological studies after one semester and started studying classical philology with Professor Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl, the following year, in October 1865, following his teacher Ritschl, he went to the University of Leipzig. Nietzsche’s experiences in Leipzig are recounted in a colourful account, Retrospect of My Two Years in Leipzig. When he enrolled in the faculty of philosophy at the University of Leipzig, a century had already passed since Goethe had done so.

With his mentor Ritschl Nietzsche again showed himself industrious: a model student as he had been at Pforta. Ritschl gave his favourite pupil heavy assignments, such as extracting and collating ancient texts and indexing the issues of the Rheinisches Museum für Philologie. In 1866 Nietzsche gave his first lecture at the Philological Association and befriended the student Erwin Rohde, who was to become his best friend. This was the time of the war between Prussia and Austria, in which Prussia emerged victorious although Nietzsche, a Prussian in Leipzig, objected to the city becoming immediately Prussian. But the young scholar writes about that year: ‘I often longed to be torn away from my monotonous labours’.

On 9 October 1867, Nietzsche began his military service with a cavalry regiment. These were terrible times on the other side of the Atlantic, when the Mexican Indian Benito Juárez had Emperor Maximilian shot in Mexico. (In sharp contrast to today’s traitorous white Mexicans who admire Juárez, my great-great-grandfather José María Tort y Vivó, a Catalan living in Mexico mentioned by José Zorrilla in Recuerdo del Tiempo Viejo, was a staunch supporter of Maximilian of Habsburg.)

In March 1868 Nietzsche suffered a fall from a horse, but the period of convalescence served as an opportunity to approach philosophy and in October he finished his military service. Once again: terrible things were happening on the other side of the Atlantic. Blacks were granted the right to vote in the United States because of the triumphant Christian ethics of the Yankee Puritans (at a time when Jewry hadn’t yet taken over the media). But by then the twenty-three-year-old young man already bears the name of Nietzsche.

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Friedrich Nietzsche Pedagogy

Crusade

against the Cross, 3

When one delves deeply into Nietzsche’s biography, curious anecdotes come to light that would be hard to imagine for those who are only familiar with his late writings.

Much has been said, for example, about the friendship between Richard Wagner and Nietzsche. But few know that Wagner was born in 1813: the year Nietzsche’s father was born. When Nietzsche was a little boy playing with his sister Elisabeth with tin soldiers and the porcelain figure ‘Squirrel King’ was executing rebels, the revolutionary Wagner was in serious trouble with the king and his life was spared because he was a conductor. The still-small Nietzsche was on the side of the rulers in his Christian kingdom. There were to be no revolutions.

When Nietzsche would later write about his life, he didn’t remember his home in Röcken except for the image of the parish priest, the father, whom he continued to idealise even after he had finished The Antichrist. Indeed, since his father had died when Nietzsche was four years old, the memories of Prussian discipline the priest had meted out to him, in which the little boy would furiously retreat to the toilet to rage alone, were left out of his memory (his mother would later tell some anecdotes about her young son’s life). The idealisation of the parish priest was such that, in the words of Werner Ross, ‘Nietzsche was to merge with his father to form a single figure with him’.

In the family it was taken for granted that little Fritz would become a clergyman like his father. His mother, who put him to bed, told him: ‘If you go on like this, I’ll have to carry you to bed in my arms until you study theology’. Fritz was an obedient child who knew several Bible passages and religious songs by heart so that his schoolmates called him ‘the little shepherd’, who was impressed above all by religious music.

But since the pietistic oppression was a thorn his body began to rebel. In 1856, when Fritz was already a dozen years old, he began to suffer from head and eye ailments. Although he received special holidays for this reason, from that age he would always suffer from these psychosomatic complaints (which would only be alleviated thirty-two years later, with the catharsis of writing several books in a few months, including The Antichrist).

The young Fritz would sneak into the cathedral to watch the rehearsals of the Requiem and was shocked to hear the Dies Irae. At the age of fourteen he entered the famous school in Pforta, where he received an excellent humanistic education and his love of music increased, although he continued to suffer from severe headaches.

Schulpforta near Naumburg in Germany, a boarding school system for advantaged pupils.

At Schulpforta he even attempted a Mass for solo, choir and orchestra, and at the age of sixteen, he sketched a Misere for five voices. At seventeen the parson’s son was ready to die to meet Jesus, and when another of his friends trained in Prussian education (broken in like a horse I’d better say!) received the conformation, he wrote: ‘with the earnest promise you enter the line of adult Christians who are held worthy of our Saviour’s most precious legacy’.

Nevertheless, the first signs of rebellion, albeit still unconsciously, began to spontaneously sprout in his seventeenth year. In the Easter holidays of 1862, the student Nietzsche wrote to the union of his friends, under the title Fate and History, a prophetic declaration: ‘But, as soon as it would be possible to overthrow the entire past of the world with a strong will, we would enter the roll of the independent Gods’.

Schulpforta’s severe discipline had been a kind of convent to train not only Nietzsche but also the rest of the inmates, but the adolescent Nietzsche, always at the head of the class and lacking an esprit de corps, was such a good boy that in cases of insubordination he sided with the teachers.

In his thick volume (866 pages in the edition I have) Ross comments that the letters of the pupil Nietzsche are empty of content, in the sense that his inner life was still hermetically sealed off from him. Nevertheless, when the lad Nietzsche left Schulpforta on 7 September 1864, close to his twentieth birthday, and the following month went to study theology and classical philology at the University of Bonn, thanks to his Prussian education he already had the resources for a premature doctorate.

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Friedrich Nietzsche Pedagogy

Crusade

against the Cross, 2

 

Lutheran father (1813-1849).

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born on 15 October 1844 in the small town of Röcken, near Lützen in Thuringia. Formerly part of the kingdom of Saxony, it was annexed to Prussia in 1815. Nietzsche was the first-born son of the local Protestant pastor, Karl Ludwig Nietzsche (pictured above), who at the age of thirty had married a woman of seventeen. A year after the wedding, Friedrich was born, followed a couple of years later by his sister Elisabeth (Nietzsche’s younger brother was born afterwards, but died at the age of two). What is important to report is that, among the ancestors of the future philosopher, on both the paternal and maternal sides, there were several generations of theologians.

The main biographies on which I will rely for this biographical series are the very voluminous treatises by Curt Paul Janz and Werner Ross. The latter, who unlike Janz writes with humour, mentions that exactly at the moment when Nietzsche was born the bells were ringing for the king’s birthday service. The parson’s eyes filled with tears as he uttered: ‘My son, on this earth you shall be called Friedrich Wilhelm in memory of my royal benefactor, for you were born on his birthday’. He added that his son would be so-called because that is what Luther’s Bible said. Friedrich Wilhelm IV, by the way, was no friend of the ideals of the French Revolution. Although benevolent, through the Holy Alliance he longed for a return to feudal times even with knights, orders and castles.

Little Friedrich Wilhelm was instilled from the outset with the messianic consciousness of being a son of the medieval king and a son of God. To use my language, I would say that Nietzsche was a slave to parental introjects. So much so that, decades later, when he suddenly fell into a state of psychosis and his friend Overbeck came to his rescue in Turin, he realised that only by telling the disturbed man that royal receptions awaited him, did Nietzsche obey to leave Italy. And when somewhat later Langbehn accompanied Nietzsche on his walks in the asylum at Jena in Germany, he said: ‘He is a child and a king; he must be treated as the son of a king that he is. That is the only correct method’.

But in this psychological study I’m getting too far ahead of myself. Let’s go back to his childhood. The thing is that, like Kant, Nietzsche was brought up in pietism. But Kant’s defence mechanism was to shut down all his emotions and he tried to do philosophy as a sort of Mr Spock through pure reason, like a soulless computer. Nietzsche’s defence mechanism against severe pietism would be the diametrical opposite: the mythopoetic explosion of emotions, as we shall see in this series. What we must now tell is that the little Nietzsche was not allowed, in such a Prussian upbringing, to vent his emotions, let alone his anger. Janz’s multi-volume biography informs us of this:

As soon as the eldest son began to talk a little, the father took to spending some of his free time with him. The child did not disturb him in his study cabinet, where, as the mother writes, gazed ‘Silently and thoughtfully’ at the father while he worked. But it was when the father ‘fantasised’ at the piano that the child was most enthusiastic. Already at the age of one year, little Fritz, as everyone called him, would sit in his pram on such occasions and pay attention to his father, completely silent and without taking his eyes off him. However, it cannot be said that during these early years, he was always a good and obedient child. When something did not seem right to him, he would lie on the ground and kick his little legs furiously. The father, it seems, proceeded against this with great energy, despite which the child must have continued for a long time to cling to his stubbornness whenever he was denied anything he wanted; but he no longer rebelled, but, without a word, retired to some quiet corner or to the lavatory, where he bore his anger alone.

Unlike what Alice Miller wrote about little Fritz in The Untouched Key, Janz didn’t suspect that the severe pietistic upbringing might have been abusive.

When Nietzsche was four years old his father died, perhaps of a stroke (it is not clear that the Nietzsche family’s claim that this was due to his falling down the stairs is true). The family moved to Naumburg and Fritz found himself, from then on, as the only male in a household of women: his mother, grandmother, two aunts and younger sister.

The adult women were to teach pious Christian virtues to little Fritz.

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Der Antichrist (book) Friedrich Nietzsche

Crusade

against the Cross, 1

These days I have been rereading many of my books on Friedrich Nietzsche, some passages I haven’t reread for years, if not decades. I did so because I consider Robert Sheaffer’s article on Der Antichrist which I republished a week ago to be important, vital I would say to grasp the POV of this site.

One of the things I’ve complained about post-1945 National Socialism is the lack of a NS textbook. A few days ago when I resumed reading This Time the World I came across a passage in which George Lincoln Rockwell said that in Iceland he re-read Mein Kampf a dozen times. That’s the only material he had in the island! Rockwell, of course, was unaware of the distinction between exoteric Hitlerism, plainly embodied in Mein Kampf, and esoteric Hitlerism: what the Führer confessed to his inner circle of friends about Christianity.

But Hitler didn’t develop these anti-Christian ideas on his own: they were already circulating in Germany. Interestingly, if one looks at American white nationalism today, one notices that it is very similar to exoteric German NS regarding race realism and the Jewish Question. But the esoteric part of NS, what Richard Weikart exposed in his book, is completely absent on the American racial right, at least on the most popular websites.

As I said in my post yesterday, ‘The West’s Darkest Hour is not a news blog. Rather, it is a “crusade against the cross” in that, unlike white nationalists, I am convinced that understanding the CQ is more important than the JQ to save the Aryan man from his current self-loathing and thus future extinction’. In fact, I have just changed the subtitle of this blog from ‘Feinderkennung’ to ‘Crusade against the Cross’.

For, as I have said elsewhere, the Western man, Christian and atheist alike, fanatically worships the Cross: the former with a Jew hanging on it, and the latter without it—though in their twisted minds they replace the crucified rabbi with the new Jesus: be it the marginalised black man or the marginalised trans person. Whoever is the leper of the age is worshipped as the crucified one by contemporary atheists, and my crusade is directed precisely at these Christians and neo-Christian atheists.

Some say that the young Hitler carried a copy of Thus Spake Zarathustra in his knapsack during the First World War. Its author, Nietzsche, hasn’t been understood because it is still a Christian age in the United States, and a neo-Christian age in Europe. If these days I reread what I have read about the German philosopher, it was precisely with the idea of introducing the visitor to this tragic figure. Given that I have voluminous biographies on Nietzsche, I feel like starting a new series by mentioning only the anecdotes that seem relevant to our point of view, culminating with what, unlike the consensus (the Zarathustra), I believe to be his magnum opus: Der Antichrist, completed three months before the notorious philosopher lost his mind.

Axiologically, the Christian Weikart, an American, is our enemy; as is the neo-Christian Tom Holland, an Englishman, even though I have so highly recommended Holland’s book on this site. Anti-NS Holland understood perfectly the implications of what a transvaluation of all Christian values would mean if implemented (e.g., the JP would be solved at once). Sheaffer, another anti-NS, is right to say that Nietzsche’s Der Antichrist is ‘the most devastating and complete philosophical attack on Christian psychology, Christian beliefs and Christian values ever written’.

It is high time to present not these axiological enemies who have served me so well in my little crusade, but the biography of the Röcken-born philosopher that will serve to shed some light on Hitler’s anti-Christianity.

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Axiology Der Antichrist (book) Friedrich Nietzsche Renaissance Richard Wagner

Year 100 P.C.

I read ‘Nietzsche’s Der Antichrist: Looking Back From the Year 100’ in late 1993, in a hard copy issued in the winter of 1988/1989: one of the back copies of Free Inquiry that arrived in the mail when I discovered that organisation of freethinkers.

I met the author, Robert Sheaffer, at the 1994 CSICOP conference. If memory serves, he wore sandals, was dressed casually and had a beard. Last year I exchanged some correspondence with him.

Sheaffer is anything but a Hitlerite. However, the article that I abridge below is perfect for understanding a central part of esoteric Hitlerism. I mean that Uncle Adolf’s anti-Christianity, which wasn’t revealed to the masses of Germans (hence the epithet ‘esoteric’), already had antecedents in Germany.

Sheaffer’s complete article can be read here. Red emphasis is mine:

 

______ 卐 ______

 

Secular humanists have not infrequently criticized the beliefs and practices of the Christian religion, and its harmful effects on civilization and culture. Unfortunately, their voice is seldom heard. The proponents of the Christian world-view vastly outnumber secularists both in number and in activity. While humanists wonder what they they can do to more effectively convey their criticisms of religion, most of them have never read, and indeed have barely even heard of, a book written exactly a century ago containing the most devastating and complete philosophical attack on Christian psychology, Christian beliefs and Christian values ever written: Nietzsche’s Der Antichrist.

1888 was the final productive year of the life of Friedrich Nietzsche, but it was a year of incredible activity. He wrote five books during a six-month period in the latter part of that year. After that, he wrote nothing. Nietzsche’s works of 1888 have not received enough attention, especially given the inclination of many to concentrate primarily on the flamboyant and somewhat confusing Also Spracht Zarathustra, a book of intricate allegories and parables which requires that one already understand the principal elements of Nietzschean thought in order to decipher its hidden relationships and meanings. Zarathustra will be clearer if it is read at the end of a course of study of Nietzsche, not at the beginning.

The first book of 1888 was The Case of Wagner, in which Nietzsche set forth his aesthetic and philosophical objections to the music and the writings of his former close friend Richard Wagner… Next came The Twilight of the Idols (in German, Die Gotzen-dammerung, an obvious parody of Wagner’s Die Gotterdammerung, “The Twilight of the Gods”), in which he criticizes romanticism, Schopenhauer’s pessimism, German culture, Socrates’ acceptance of death as a “healing” of the disease of life, Christianity, and a good many other things. Then, in September of 1888, Nietzsche wrote Der Antichrist.

Unlike Zarathustra, there can be no mistaking the language or the intention of Der Antichrist, a work of exceedingly clear prose and seldom-equalled polemics. Even today, the depth of Nietzsche’s contempt for everything Christianity represents will surprise and shock many people, and not only devout Christians. Unlike other critics of religion, Nietzsche’s attack extends beyond religious theology to Christian-derived concepts that have spread out far beyond their ecclesiastical origins, to the very core of the value-system of Western, Christianized society.

Der Antichrist begins with a warning that “This book belongs to the very few,” perhaps to no one yet living. Nietzsche hints that only those who have already mastered the obscure symbolism of his Zarathustra could appreciate this work. Warnings aside, he begins by sketching the idea of declining vs. ascending life and culture. An animal, a species, or an individual is “depraved” or “decadent” when it loses its instincts for that which sustains its life, and “prefers what is harmful to it.” Life itself presupposes an instinct for growth, for sustinence, for “the will to power”, the striving for some degree of control and mastery of one’s surroundings. Christianity sets itself up in opposition to those instincts, and hence Christianity is an expression of decadence, a negation of the will to life [Antichrist, section 6].

“Pity”, says Nietzsche, is “practical nihilism”, the contagion of suffering. By elevating pity to a value—indeed, the highest value—its depressive effects thwart those instincts which preserve life, establishing the deformed or the sick as the standard of value. [A 7] To Nietzsche, the rejection of pity did not proscribe generosity, magnanimity, or benevolence—indeed, the latter are mandated for “higher” types—; what is rejected is to allow the ill-constituted to define what is good. Nietzsche was not hostile to the sick—Zarathustra bids the sick to “become convalescents”, and expresses sympathetic understanding of their unhappy frame of mind [Z I 3]—but what he opposed was the use of the existence of sickness and other afflications to thereby claim “life is refuted” [Z I 9].

No doubt Nietzsche’s attack on “pity” was triggered in part by his revulsion against Wagner’s blatantly irrational opera Parsifal, in which the formerly irreligious Wagner returned once again to pious Christian themes. In Parsifal, a series of calamities occur because a once-holy knight succumbs to “sins of the flesh,” and it is prophesied that the situation cannot be remedied by any act of self-directed effort, but only by one “through pity made wise, a pure fool.” Nietzsche’s contempt for the limp Christianity in Parsifal and for “the pure fool” knew no bounds. The already-strained bond between the two men, who were once extremely close, was irreparably broken.

Nietzsche explains that the pessimistic philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer is, like Chrisitanity, decadent. Schopenhauer taught that since it is impossible to satisfy the desires of the will, one must ceaselessly renounce striving for what one wants, and become resigned to unhappiness. In the late 19th century Schopenhauer’s doctrines were extremely popular, especially among the Wagnerians. Wagner’s monumental Tristan and Isolde is an expression of Schopenhauerian nihilism, as the lovers sing of the impossibility of earthly happiness, and of their expected mystical union in the realm of “night” after their death. The opera closes with Isolde’s famous liebestod, or “love-death”, as she sings of a vision of her dead lover gloriously and mystically transfigured in the nether-regions, then dies to join him. Schopenhauer was hostile to life, says Nietzsche, “therefore pity became for him a virtue.” [A 7]

Nietzsche charges that Christianity denigrates the world around us as mere “appearance”, a position grounded in the philosophy of Plato and Kant, and hence invents a “completely fabricated” world of pure spirit. However, “pure spirit is pure lie,” and hence the theologian requires one to see the world falsely in order to remain a member in good standing in the religion. The Christian outlook was, he says, immensely bolstered against the attacks of the Enlightenment by Immanuel Kant, whose philosophy renders reality unknowable. (For Kant a virtue is something harmful to one’s life, a view Nietzsche could never accept. If you want to do something, Kant would say your action cannot possibly be virtuous; any action which contains an element of self-interest is by definition not virtuous.) Nietzsche summarizes, “anti-nature as instinct, German decadence as philosophy—that is Kant.” [A 8-11]

Nietzsche praises the skeptic (or “free spirit”) who rejects the priestly inversion of “true” and “untrue”. He says we skeptics no longer think of human life as having its origins in “spirit” or in “divinity”, but recognize the human race as a natural part of the animal kingdom… [A 12-14].

Returning to the theme of Christian doctrine as misrepresentation, Nietzsche charges that “in Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point.” The religion deals with imaginary causes (such as God, soul, spirit) and imaginary effects (sin, grace, etc.), and the relationships between imaginary beings (God, souls, angels, etc.). It also has its own imaginary natural science (wholly anthropormorphic and non-naturalistic), an imaginary human psychology (based on repentance, temptation, etc.), as well as an imaginary teleology (apocalypse, the kingdom of God, etc.). Nietzsche concludes that this “entire fictional world has its roots in the hatred of the natural” world, a hatred which reveals its origin. For “who alone has reason to lie himself out of actuality? He who suffers from it” [A 15]. Here is the proof which convinced Nietzsche that Christianity is not only decadent in its origins, but rotten to its very core: no one reasonably satisfied with his own mind and abilities would wish to see the real world replaced with a lie.

Comparing religions, Nietzsche came to the conclusion that in a healthy society, its gods represent the highest ideals, aspirations, and sense of competence of that people. For example, Zeus and Apollo were obviously powerful ideals for Greek society, an image of the mightiest mortals projected into the heavens. Such gods are fully human, and display human strengths and weaknesses alike. The Christian God, however, shows none of the normal human attributes and appetites. It is unthinkable for this God to desire sex, food, or even openly display revengefulness (as did the Greek gods). Such a God is clearly emaciated, sick, castrated, a reflection of the people who invented him. If a god symbolizes a people’s perceived sense of impotence, he will degenerate into being merely “good” (an idealized image of the kind master, as desired by all slaves), void of all genuinely human attributes. The Christian God represents the “divinity of decadence,” the reduction of the divine into a God who is the contradiction of life. Those impotent people who created such a God in their own image do not wish to call themselves “the weak,” so they call themselves “the good.” [A 16-19].

Nietzsche next compares Christianity to Buddhism. Both, he says, are religions of decadence, but Buddhism is a hundred times wiser and more realistic. Buddha does not demand prayer or aesceticism, demanding instead ideas which produce repose or cheerfulness. Buddhism, he says, is most at home in the higher and learned classes, while Christianity represents the revengeful instincts of the subjugated and the oppressed. Buddhism promotes hygiene, while Christianity repudiates hygiene as sensuality. Buddhism is a religion for mature, older cultures, for persons grown kindly and gentle—Europe is not nearly ripe for Buddhism. Christianity, however, tamed uncivilized barbarians, needing to subjugate wild “beasts of prey,” who cannot control their own “will to power.” The way it did so was to make them sick, making them thereby too weak to follow their destructive instincts. Thus Buddhism is a religion suited to the decadence and fatigue of an ancient civilization, while Christianity was useful in taming barbarians, where no civilization had existed at all. [A 20-22].

Nietzsche next emphasises Christianity’s origin in Judaism, and its continuity with Jewish theology. He was fond of pointing out the essential Jewishness of Christianity as a foil to the anti-Semites he so despised, effectively taunting them, “you who hate the Jews so, why did you adopt their religion?”. It was the Jews, he asserts, who first falsified the inner and outer world with a metaphysically complete anti-world, one in which natural causality plays no role. (One might of course object that such a concept considerably predates Old Testament times.) The Jews did this, however, not out of hatred or decadence, but for a good reason: to survive. The Jews’ will for survival is, he asserts, the most powerful “vital energy” in history, and Nietzsche admired those who struggle mightily to survive and prevail. As captives and slaves of more powerful civilizations—the Babylonians and the Egyptians—the Jews shrewdly allied themselves with every “decadence” movement, with everything that weakens a society, not because they were decadent themselves, but in order to weaken their oppressors. Thus, Nietzsche views the Jews as shrewdly inculcating guilt, resentment, and other values hostile to life among their oppressors as a form of ideological germ warfare, taking care not to become fully infected themselves. This technique was ultimately successful in defeating stronger parties—Babylonians, Egyptians, and Romans—by in essence making them “sick,” and hence less powerful. (The Romans, of course, succumbed to the Christian form of Judaism, in this view.) This parallels St. Augustine’s comment, quoting Seneca, that the Jews “have imposed their customs on their conquerors.” [A 23-26; De Civitate Dei VI 11]

“On a soil falsified in this way, where all nature, all natural value, all reality had the profoundest instincts of the ruling class against it, there arose Christianity, a form of mortal hostility to reality as yet unsurpassed.” The revolt led by Jesus was not primarily religious, says Nietzsche, but was instead a secular revolt against the power of the Jewish religious authorities. The very dregs of Jewish society rose up in “revolt against ‘the good and the just’, against ‘the saints of Israel’.” This was the political crime of Jesus, a crime of which he was surely guilty, and for which he was crucified. Nietzsche examines the psychology of Jesus, as is best possible from the Biblical accounts, and detects a profound sense of withdrawl: resist not evil, the kingdom of God is within you, etc. He sees parallels in the psychology of Christ not with some hero, but with Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot. (Dostoyevsky is not mentioned here by name, but we know from other sources that this is the “idiot” Nietzsche had in mind.)

Nietzsche deduces that the earliest Christians sought to retreat into a state of extreme withdrawl from “the world”, undisturbed by reality of any kind. They rejected all strong feelings, favorable or otherwise. Their fear of pain, even in infinitely small amounts, “cannot end otherwise than in a religion of love.” Thus Nietzsche sees early Christianity as promoting an extremely dysfunctional state resembling autism, a defense mechanism for those who cannot deal with reality. Noting Christianity’s claims to deny the world, and its stand in opposition to every active virtue, Nietzsche asks how can any person of dignity and accomplishment not feel ashamed to be called a Christian? [A 27-30; 38]…

By placing the center of life outside of life, in “the beyond”, Nietzsche says we deprive life of any focus or center whatsoever. The invention of the immortal soul automatically levels all rank in society: “‘immortality’ conceded to every Peter and Paul has so far been greatest, the most malignant attempt to assassinate noble humanity”. Thus “little prigs and three-quarter madmen may have the conceit that the laws of nature are constantly broken for their sakes,” thereby obiliterating all distinctions grounded in merit, knowledge or accomplishment. Christianity owes its success to this flattering of the vanity of “all the failures, all the rebellious-minded, all the less favored, the whole scum and refuse of humanity who were thus won over to it.” For Christianity is “a revolt of everything that crawls upon the ground directed against that which is elevated: the gospel of the ‘lowly’ makes low.” Here we clearly see Nietzsche’s repudiation of Christianity’s attitudes as well as its theology: as he pointedly noted in Ecce Homo, “no one hitherto has felt Christian morality beneath him”. All others saw it as an unattainable ideal. [A 43; EH 4 (“Why I Am a Fatality”) 8] Pre-Christian thinkers did not, of course, see poverty as suggestive of virtue, but rather of its absence. One point Nietzsche was unable to either forgive or forget was that the enemies of the early Christians were “the intelligent ones”, persons far more civilized, erudite, and accomplished than themselves, people who Nietzsche felt more fit to rule than the Christians.

Nietzsche sees the Gospels as proof that corruption of Christ’s ideals had already occurred in those early Christian communities. They say “Judge Not!”, then send to Hell anyone who stands in their way. Arrogance poses as modesty. He explains how the Gospel typifies the morality of ressentiment ( a French term Nietzsche used in his German texts), a spirit of vindictiveness and covert revengefulness common among those who are seething with a sense of their own impotence, and hence must hide their desire for vengeance. “Paul was the greatest of all apostles of revenge,” writes Nietzsche [A 44-45]…

At this point, Nietzsche advises the reader to “put on gloves” when reading the New Testament, because one is in proximity to “so much uncleanliness.” It is impossible, he says, to read the New Testament without feeling a partiality for everything it attacks. The Scribes and the Pharisees must have had considerable merit, to have been attacked by the rabble in such a manner. Everything the first Christians hate has value, for theirs is the unthinking hatred of the rabble for everyone who is not a wretched failure like themselves. Nietzsche sees Christianity’s origins in what Marxists would call “class warfare,” and sides with those possessing learning and self-discipline against those having neither. [A 46].

He next turns to a point essential for the understanding of Nietzschean thought: the inevitability of a “warfare” between Christianity and science. Because Christianity is a religion which has no contact with reality at any point, it “must naturally be a mortal enemy of ‘the wisdom of the world,’ that is to say, of science.” Here “science” is not to be understood as merely the physical sciences, but as any rigorous and disciplined field of human knowledge, all of which are potentially threats to Christian dogma. Hence Christianity must calumniate the “disciplining of the intellect” and intellectual freedom, bringing all organized secular knowledge into disrepute; for “Paul understood the need for the lie, for faith.” Nietzsche refers to the Genesis fable of Eve’s temptation, asking whether its significance has really been understood: “God’s mortal terror of science”? The priest perceives only one great danger: the human intellect unfettered. Continuing the metaphor of science as eating from the tree of knowledge:

Science makes godlike—it is all over with priests and gods when man becomes scientific. Moral: science is the forbidden as such—it alone is forbidden. Science is the first sin, the original sin. This alone is morality “Thou shalt not know”—the rest follows.

The priest invents and encourages every kind of suffering and distress so that man may not have the opportunity to become scientific, which requires a considerable degree of free time, health, and an outlook of confident positivism. Thus, the religious authorities work hard to make and keep people feeling sinful, unworthy, and unhappy. [A 47-49]

In previous works, Nietzsche had emphasised the necessity of struggling hard to uncover truth, of preferring an unpleasant truth to an agreeable delusion. [The Gay Science 344; Beyond Good and Evil 39] Consequently, he sees another reason for being suspicious of Christianity in its notion that “faith makes blessed,” that is, creates a state of pleasure in harmony with God. He re-iterates that whether or not a doctrine is comforting tells us nothing about its truth. Nor does the willingness of martyrs to suffer and die for a belief constitute any proof of veracity, suggesting that a visit to a madhouse will suffice to demonstrate the fallaciousness of such arguments. Martyrdoms have, in fact, been a great misfortune throughout history because “they have seduced” us into questionable doctrines. “Blood is the worst witness of truth”. [A 50-51, 53]

Christianity, says Nietzsche, needs sickness as much as Hellenism needed health. (To understand this point, compare a Greek statue of a tall, handsome, naked God with a Christian religious image of an unhygenic, slovenly figure suffering greatly.) One does not “convert” to Christianity, but rather one must be made “sick enough” for it. The Christian movement was, from its beginning, “a collective movement of outcast and refuse elements of every kind,” seeking to come to power through it. “In hoc signo decadence conquered.” Christianity also stands in opposition to intellectual, as well as physical, health. To doubt becomes sin. Nietzsche defines faith as “not wanting to know what is true,” a description which strikes me as stunning, and quite exact. [A 51-52]…

Nietzsche now turns to consider why the lie is told. Once again, Christian teachings are compared to those of another religion, that of Manu, “an incomparably spiritual and superior work.” Unlike the Bible, the Law-Book of Manu is a means for the “noble orders” to keep the mob under control. Here, human love, sensuality, and procreation are treated not with revulsion, but with reverence and respect. After a people acquires a certain experience and success in life, its most “enlightened,” most “reflective and far-sighted class” sets down a law summarizing its formula for success in life, which is represented as a revelation from a deity, for it to be accepted unquestioningly. Such a set of rules is a formula for obtaining “happiness, beauty, benevolence on earth.” This aristocratic group considers “the hard task a privilege… life becomes harder and harder as it approaches the heights—the coldness increases, the responsibility increases.” All ugly manners and pessimism are below such leaders: “indignation is the privilege of the Chandala” (Indian untouchable). What is bad? “Everything that proceeds from weakness, from revengefulness.” [A 57]

Thus Nietzsche holds that the purpose for the lie of “faith” makes a great difference in the effect it will have on society. Do the priests lie in order to preserve (as in the book of Manu, and presumably Greek myth), or to destroy (as in Christianity)? Thus Christians and socialist Anarchists are identical in their instincts: both seek solely to destroy. The Roman civilization was a magnificent edifice for the prosperity and advancement of life, “the most magnificent form of organization under difficult circumstances which has yet been achieved”, which Christianity sought to destroy because life prospered within it. These “holy anarchists” made it a religious duty to “destroy the world”, which actually meant, “destroy the Roman Empire”. They weakened the Empire so much that even “Teutons and other louts” could conquer it. Christianity was the “vampire” of the Roman Empire. These “stealthy vermin,” shrouded in night and fog, crept up and “sucked out” from everyone “the seriousness for true things and any instinct for reality.” Christianity moved truth into “the beyond”, and “with the beyond one kills life.”

Before charging Nietzsche with possibly irresponsible invective, compare the above with Gibbon’s summary of the role of Christianity in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:

The clergy successfully preached the doctrines of patience and pusillanimity; the active virtues of society were discouraged; and the last remains of a military spirit were buried in the cloister: a large portion of public and private wealth was consecrated to the specious demands of charity and devotion; and the soldiers’ pay was lavished on the useless multitudes of both sexes who could only plead the merits of abstinence and chastity.

On the positive side, Gibbon notes that even though Christianity clearly hastened the demise of Rome, it “mollified the ferocious temper of the conquerors”. This would seem to parallel Nietzsche’s view that Christianity seeks to control the uncivilized not by teaching them the self-discipline needed to control their own impulses, but by making them too “sick” to do a great deal of harm. [A 58; Gibbon, Chapter 38 ]

“The whole labor of the Ancient World in vain!”: thus does Nietzsche overstate the magnitude of the calamity. (Our civilization’s heritage from classical antiquity is obviously far from nothing!). Nonetheless, no one who prefers civilization to barbarism can be indifferent to the point here raised. Nietzsche emphasises that the foundations for a scholarly culture, for science, medicine, philosophy, and art, had all been magnificently laid in antiquity, only to be destroyed by the advent of Christianity. Today, he says, we have certainly made great progress, but each of us still retains bad Christian habits and instincts which we must work hard to overcome. Two thousand years ago, we had acquired that clear eye for reality, patience, attention to detail, seriousness in even small matters—and it was not obtained by “drill” or from habit, but flowed naturally from a civilized instinct. All this was lost! And it was not lost to some natural disaster or destroyed by “Teutons and other buffalos” (Nietzsche’s contempt for German nationalism and militarism knew no bounds!) but it was “ruined by cunning, stealthy, invisible, anemic vampires. Not vanquished-merely drained. Hidden vengefulness, petty envy become master.” Everything that was miserable and filled with bad feelings about itself came to the top at once. [A 59]…

The meaning and significance of the Renaissance is considered in this next-to-last section of Der Antichrist. “The Germans have cheated Europe out of the last great cultural harvest which Europe could still have brought home—that of the Renaissance.” Nietzsche views the Renaissance as “the revaluation of Christian values,” that is, the repudiation of life-denying Christian values and their replacement with secular values which emphasise art, culture, learning, and so on. With the Renaissance in Italy, Christianity was being repudiated at its very seat. “Christianity no longer sat on the Papal throne! Life sat there instead!”

Nietzsche envisions the immortal roar of laughter that would have risen up from the gods on Mount Olympus had Cesare Borgia actually succeeded in his ruthless quest to become Pope. (The notorious murderer and poisoner Borgia, the son of Pope Alexander VI, spread his power ruthlessly across Italy. Father and son appointed or poisoned Cardinals as needed to position the son for election as the next Pope. However, the plan went awry when they accidentally tasted some wine that had been “prepared” to rid themselves of a wealthy cardinal! The father died, and the son became gravely ill, and was hence in no position to coerce the selection of his father’s successor.)

Nietzsche laments that this great world-historical event—life returning to Western culture—was ultimately undone by the work of “a German monk,” Martin Luther, who harbored the vengeful instincts of “a failed priest.” Through Luther’s Reformation, and Catholicism’s answer to it, the Counter-Reformation, Christianity was restored. [A 60] One might be tempted to dismiss Nietzsche’s dramatic interpretation of the Renaissance, except that his view meshes with that of Jacob Burckhardt, the single most influential historian of Renaissance civilization who ever lived. Burckhardt’s monumental work, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), has influenced the study of that period as much as Gibbon’s Decline and Fall did that of ancient Rome. Neitzsche and Burckhardt were colleagues at the University of Basle, and friends as well. In the first section of his Civilization, Burchkardt writes that the greatest danger ever faced by the Papacy was its secularization during the Renaissance.

The danger that came from within, from the Popes themselves and their nipoti (relativies, “nepotism”), was set aside for centuries by the German Reformation… The moral salvation of the papacy was due to its mortal enemies… Without the Reformation—if indeed it is possible to think it away—the whole ecclesiastical state would have passed into secular hands long ago.

Pope Julius II, powerfully anti-Borgia, was “the savior of the Papacy,” who put an end to the practice of the buying and selling of Church positions. However, the Counter-Reformation “annihlated the higher spiritual life of the people,” according to Burckhardt. Nietzsche would have said this was because they had become Christian once again.

The final section of Der Antichrist contains “the most terrible charge” against the Christian Church that “any prosecutor has ever uttered… I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct for revenge for which no expedient is sufficiently poisonous, secret, subterranean, petty—I call it the one immortal blemish of mankind.” Nietzsche suggests that instead of calculating time from the “unlucky day” on which this “fatality” arose, time should be measured instead from its last day: “from today.” [A 62].

Needless to say, Nietzsche’s Der Antichrist did not prove to be the dagger in the heart of Christianity he hoped it would. After finishing this work (which was not actually published until 1895), Nietzsche wrote Ecce Homo, a philosophical autobiography, in which we first see signs of the self-aggrandizing delusions which were to characterize his incipient mental collapse. The final major work of 1888 was Nietzsche Contra Wagner, containing more polemics against the “decadence” and anti-Semetism of Wagner’s followers, much of which was taken from his earlier published works. Nietzsche’s philosophical writings end there, in the closing weeks of 1888. No doubt the breakdown which followed was hastened by the frantic pace of work during that period. Living in Turin, Italy, alone as was his habit, he continued to send letters to his family and friends.

Early in January, 1889, Nietzsche collapsed on the street in Turin. Some local people helped him back to his room, and he was soon alone again. On January 6 he sent letters to Burckhardt and to Franz Overbeck, another friend and colleague at the University of Basle, displaying obvious signs of insanity. Burckhardt, quite concerned, consulted Overbeck, who was soon on a train headed for Turin to assist his friend. Overbeck brought Nietzsche back to his mother in Germany. He was placed in an institution for a few months, and was then released to the care of his family, where he lived another eleven years as an invalid. Nietzsche actually died twice: his mind died in 1889, while his body lived on helplessly until 1900…

If Nietzsche’s polemically effective suggestion had been adopted—to begin counting time from the start of Christianity’s presumed demise, the writing of Der Antichrist—then I would now be writing these words in the year 100 P.C., the hundredth year of the post-Christian era. It would obviously be premature to expect such a calendar to gain widespread acceptance today! Yet the failure of Nietzsche’s impossibly high expectations should not cause us to overlook the significance of this monumental work, with its searing insights into the psychology of Christian belief. All those who wish not to renounce life but to affirm it, all who seek to proclaim a triumphant “yes” to human prosperity, knowledge, and happiness, will find in Der Antichrist invaluable insights on how those goals can be achieved—and on what stands on the way of them.
 

Notes:

There are two excellent English translations of Der Antichrist readily available, one by R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin Classics, 1968), the other by Walter Kaufmann (in Kaufmann’s The Portable Nietzsche, Penguin Books, 1978).

Categories
Friedrich Nietzsche George Lincoln Rockwell Jesus Martin Kerr

Hitler made us holy again

Address given at the 2016
JdF 127 Hitler Festival
in Detroit, Michigan
by NEW ORDER Chief of Staff
Martin Kerr

In the Table Talk, Adolf Hitler accepts as a matter of course that the figure commonly known as Jesus Christ was an actual historical person. He describes him as the leader of a popular revolt against the Jews of his time. Savitiri Devi, one of the best known and most eloquent of Hitler’s post-war disciples, felt otherwise. In her essay, Saul of Tarsus, she writes that based on her own extensive research, she believed that Jesus (whose name would have been Yeshua bin-Yusef al-Nazarini or something similar in his native Semitic tongue of Aramaic) was merely a fictional character from Christian mythology; that is, he was not an historical person.

It matters little to us today whether or not Yeshua was real, or whether he was as imaginary as Bilbo Baggins and Huckleberry Finn. But, of course, it does matter to the Christians, who have built up an elaborate if perverse theology based on his putative teachings. In fact, so important has he been to the Christian world that all historical dates are routinely calculated from the year that he was supposed to have been born. That practice started around the year 525 by a Christian monk named Dionysis Exiguus. Years after his birth were counted forwards and those before his birth were counted backwards. Traditionally, these designations have been known as AD for Anno Domini (or “Year of our Lord”) and BC or “Before Christ.” For reasons of Political Correctness, these old terms have now been replaced by CE (for “Common Era”) and BCE (“Before Common Era”).

But regardless of what initials are used, the basic method of calculating and enumerating the years of the calendar has remained unchanged, because Jesus—real or not—is held to be someone who “broke history in half.” In the Christian conception of things, there is an absolute rift between what came before him and what came after. In the conventional wisdom, Jesus changed everything.

 

______ 卐 ______

 

In the 1880s, a towering intellectual figure arose in Germany to challenge the accepted dispensation: the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. In his autobiography, Ecce Homo, Nietzsche suggested that it was he, Nietzsche, who was the one who would break history in half. Through a process which he called the “transvaluation of all values,” Nietzsche sought not just to supersede Christianity, but to reverse it. Thereby he would lay the foundations for a new European super-civilization. I imagine that in Nietzsche’s scheme of things, future historians would date all history from his, Nietzsche’s coming, and not from the advent of the one whom our Norse ancestors called the “Pale Christ.”

Nietzsche, we note, was completely ignored during his lifetime, except for some cursory interest that he aroused in philosophical circles, which had a negative, dismissive view of his work. That he grandiosely described himself as the man who would break history in half is widely viewed either as sarcasm on Nietzsche’s part, or else as a psychological defensive mechanism to protect his ego from the rejection he suffered from his colleagues.

Perhaps there is a modicum of truth to both of these explanations, but I feel at the heart of things, Nietzsche was being fiercely serious. He recognized the full import and significance of his teachings, even if his contemporaries did not. Today, we National Socialists recognize him as one of the earliest “fragments of the future,” someone who was not the “last of yesterday,” but rather was one of the “first of tomorrow.”

 

______ 卐 ______

 

As it turned out, neither the Christian savior nor Nietzsche was the one who broke history in half. The theology espoused by Jesus was merely a reshuffling of the older Semitic worldview, a prime feature of which was the belief that there is a dichotomy between spirit and matter. Spirit is pure and good, it tells us, while the flesh is impure and corrupt. Nietzsche, for all his genius, was unable to articulate a realistic, systematic alternative to the Christian worldview.

No, it remained to Adolf Hitler to be the man to shatter the dispensation that had held Aryan man in thrall for 2,000 years or more.

I do not know when the realization first entered the Führer’s mind that there is no division between soul and matter, but rather that our flesh is infused with and animated by our spirit, while spirit is given form by our bodies. It must have been at a very young age. Probably, it did not dawn on him all at once, but instead only emerged gradually as he matured intellectually. In any event, by the time that he sat down to write Mein Kampf, his basic worldview was already well-formed and complete.

Adolf Hitler believed that the universe was governed by natural laws, and that for man to be happy and successful, he must first acknowledge that these laws exist; secondly, he must discover what they are; and thirdly, he must live in accordance with them.

This is another way of saying that the universe runs according to the principles of Causality—that is, of cause-and-effect relationships—and that it does not operate on the basis of supernatural forces, or on the mental constructions and wishful thinking of intellectuals and ideologues, or on the religious fantasies of theologians.

But at the same time, he knew that the human soul or spirit was a reality. His consistent use of religious language and imagery, plus specific comments recorded in Table Talk, reveal the Führer to be a deeply religious man, even if his spiritual outlook was diametrically opposed to that of Christianity.

Rather than believing that Man is born as a sinful being who can only be rescued from eternal hellfire and damnation by accepting the good lord Jesus as his personal savior, Adolf Hitler believed that Man was born into a state of grace with the Natural Order. In the Hitlerian worldview, we are all holy beings at birth. It is through being raised with false beliefs, and thrown into a society out of synch with the Natural Order, that we lose our state of natural grace and holiness.

Matt Koehl once discussed the Christian conception of original sin with me, contrasting it to the Hitlerian outlook. “If you look at a newborn baby in its cradle, what do you see?” he asked. “The Christians see an evil being born in sin, and doomed to Hell and torment without the intervention of their savior. But as a National Socialist, I see an innocent and holy being, born into a state of harmony and grace with the Natural world.”

This is the Führer’s great gift to Aryan man—and, indeed, to the whole world: he has restored us to a state of grace with the Natural Order. Hitler made us holy again, and only the Gods have the power to sanctify.

 

______ 卐 ______

 

As Aryans, we may be endlessly, sincerely, and profoundly thankful on a personal level for such insights. But unlike the Christians, as National Socialists, we are committed not just to our own personal salvation, but to the salvation and resurrection of our Race.

How do we incorporate our fundamentally religious perception of National Socialism into the practical work of building Adolf Hitler’s earthly movement? We struggle with these issues today—but we are not the first to have raised such questions.

Our great forbearer, George Lincoln Rockwell, wrestled with this question as well. During the final year of his life he prepared to transform his tiny, noisy band of political dissidents into a mighty mass movement. In a passage from his book, White Power, he gives us his thoughts on the future religious or spiritual orientation of the movement:

National Socialism, as a PHILOSOPHY, embodies the eternal urge found in all living things—indeed in all creation—toward a higher level of existence—toward perfection—toward God.

This “aristocratic” idea of National Socialism—the idea of a constant striving in all Nature toward a higher and higher, more and more complex, and more and more perfect existence—is the metaphysical, supernatural aspect of our ideal.

In other words, concepts of social justice and natural order are the organs and nerves of National Socialism, but its PERSONALITY, its “religious” aspect—the thing that lifts it above any strictly political philosophy—is its worshipful attitude toward Nature and a religious love of the Great gifs of an Unknown Creator.

Christianity, for instance, is a far higher thing than its rituals, the words of its prayers, or any of its creeds. It is a SPIRITUAL STRIVING toward the believer’s ideals of spiritual perfection.

National Socialism is the same sort of striving toward even higher and higher levels here on this earth, while Christianity is striving toward a future and later life not of this earth.
For the ordinary “soldier” in our “army”, building and fighting for Natural Order—National Socialism—it is sufficient that they respect and obey the laws and doctrines established by the lofty ideals of our philosophy with merely an instinctive love of those ideals, perhaps not with the complete understanding of the highest forms of our philosophy.

But just as the greatest Christian leaders have been those not preoccupied with details and rules but rather those who were “God intoxicated” with the highest ideals of the religion, the leaders among our National Socialist elite must share this fundamentally religious approach. For them the true meaning of our racial doctrine must be part of their idealistic “striving toward God.” [1]

Through total identification of ourselves with our great race, we partake of its past and future glories. When we contribute in any way, especially by self-sacrifice, toward helping our race along the path toward higher existence, we reach toward God—the Creator of the Master Race.

In short, while the mechanics and rules of National Socialism, as codified and set forth here, are sufficient for most of us, for the few idealists ready and willing to sacrifice their very lives in the cause of their people, National Socialism must be a very real religious ideal—a striving toward God.

We should all keep Commander Rockwell’s words in mind as we go forth into the world in the coming Jahre des Führers 127. We should endeavor to bring every single racially conscious White person into our Movement. But at the same time, we must maintain the ideological purity of our Cause by seeing to it that only those with a clear understanding of the spiritual, religious character of our worldview become Movement officers. And this is especially true with members of the senior leadership corps.

In this way, we will guarantee that we, too, are “breaking history in half,” in keeping with the Führer’s mission.

HEIL HITLER!

_____________

[1] From White Power, chapter XV, pp. 455-457.

Categories
Dominion (book) Friedrich Nietzsche Tom Holland

Dominion, 32

It was not the front, but the journey to the front that was the worst. ‘There was some shit in people’s pants, I tell you.’ Two years into the war, Otto Dix had seen it all. In 1914, he had unhesitatingly signed up to the field artillery. Back then, people had assumed that victory would be swift in coming. Germany was the greatest military power in Europe. [page 459]

In the next pages Tom Holland describes the horrors Dix witnessed in the First World War. He then adds:

It was not the Bible that had brought Dix to this conviction. In his determination to spurn the mindset of a slave, to revel in all the qualities that made for a master, there was a conscious repudiation of Christian morality, with its concern for the weak, and the poor, and the oppressed. A trench in the midst of the most terrible battlescape in history seemed to Dix a fitting vantage point from which to observe what was, so he had come to believe, the collapse of a 1900-year-old order. Alongside his Bible, he had a second book. So stirred was he by its philosophy that in 1912, while still an art student in Dresden, he had made a life-size plaster bust of its author. Not just his first sculpture, it had also been his first work to be bought by a gallery. Discerning critics, inspecting the bust’s drooping moustache, its thrusting neck, its stare shadowed by bristling eyebrows, had proclaimed it the very image of Friedrich Nietzsche.

‘After a terrible earthquake, a tremendous reflection,
with new questions.’ Otto Dix’s life-size bust of Nietzsche.
[Tom Holland himself took this photo—Ed.]

‘Do we not hear the noise of the grave-diggers who are burying God? Do we not smell the divine putrefaction?—for even gods putrefy! God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.’ To read these words beside the Somme, amid a landscape turned to mud and ash, and littered with the mangled bodies of men, was to shiver before the possibility that there might not be, after all, any redemption in sacrifice. Nietzsche had written them back in 1882: the parable of a madman who one bright morning lit a lantern and ran to the marketplace, where no one among his listeners would believe his news that God had bled to death beneath their knives.

Little in Nietzsche’s upbringing seemed to have prefigured such blasphemy. The son of a Lutheran pastor, and named after Friedrich Wilhelm IV, his background had been one of pious provincialism. Precocious and brilliant, he had obtained a professorship when he was only twenty-four; but then, only a decade later, had resigned it to become a shabbily genteel bum. Finally, seeming to confirm the sense of a squandered career, he had suffered a terrible mental breakdown. For the last eleven years of his life, he had been confined to a succession of clinics.

True, he was briefly institutionalised, but for most of the years following the psychotic crisis of January 1889, Nietzsche spent most of his time at home with his mother, and later with his sister.

Few, when he finally died in 1900, had read the books that, in an escalating frenzy of production, he had written before his collapse into madness. Posthumously, though, his fame had grown with startling rapidity. By 1914, when Dix marched to war with his writings in his knapsack, Nietzsche’s name had emerged to become one of the most controversial in Europe. Condemned by many as the most dangerous thinker who had ever lived, others hailed him as a prophet. There were many who considered him both.

Nietzsche was not the first to have become a byword for atheism, of course. No one, though—not Spinoza, not Darwin, not Marx—had ever before dared to gaze quite so unblinkingly at what the murder of its god might mean for a civilisation. ‘When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet.’

Nietzsche’s loathing for those who imagined otherwise was intense. Philosophers he scorned as secret priests. Socialists, communists, democrats: all were equally deluded. ‘Naiveté: as if morality could survive when the God who sanctions it is missing!’ Enthusiasts for the Enlightenment, self-proclaimed rationalists who imagined that men and women possessed inherent rights, Nietzsche regarded with contempt. It was not from reason that their doctrine of human dignity derived, but rather from the very faith that they believed themselves—in their conceit—to have banished. Proclamations of rights were nothing but flotsam and jetsam left behind by the retreating tide of Christianity: bleached and stranded relics. God was dead—but in the great cave that once had been Christendom his shadow still fell, an immense and frightful shadow.

The title of this chapter is precisely ‘Shadow’.

For centuries, perhaps, it would linger. Christianity had reigned for two millennia. It could not easily be banished. Its myths would long endure. They were certainly no less mythical for casting themselves as secular. ‘Such phantoms as the dignity of man, the dignity of labour’: these were Christian through and through.

Nietzsche did not mean this as a compliment. It was not just as frauds that he despised those who clung to Christian morality, even as their knives were dripping with the blood of God; he loathed them as well for believing in it. Concern for the lowly and the suffering, far from serving the cause of justice, was a form of poison. Nietzsche, more radically than many a theologian, had penetrated to the heart of everything that was most shocking about the Christian faith. ‘To devise something which could even approach the seductive, intoxicating, anaesthetising, and corrupting power of that symbol of the “holy cross”, that horrific paradox of the “crucified God”, that mystery of an inconceivably ultimate, most extreme cruelty and self-crucifixion undertaken for the salvation of mankind?’

Like Paul, Nietzsche knew it to be a scandal. Unlike Paul, he found it repellent. The spectacle of Christ being tortured to death had been bait for the powerful. It had persuaded them—the strong and the healthy, the beautiful and the brave, the powerful and the self-assured—that it was their natural inferiors, the hungry and the humble, who deserved to inherit the earth. ‘Helping and caring for others, being of use to others, constantly excites a sense of power.’ Charity, in Christendom, had become a means to dominate. Yet Christianity, by taking the side of everything ill-constituted, and weak, and feeble, had made all of humanity sick. Its ideals of compassion and equality before God were bred not of love, but of hatred: a hatred of the deepest and most sublime order, one that had transformed the very character of morality, a hatred the like of which had never before been seen on earth. This was the revolution that Paul—‘that hate-obsessed false-coiner’—had set in motion. The weak had conquered the strong; the slaves had vanquished their masters.

‘Ruined by cunning, secret, invisible, anaemic vampires! Not conquered —only sucked dry! Covert revengefulness, petty envy become master!’ Nietzsche, when he mourned antiquity’s beasts of prey, did so with the passion of a scholar who had devoted his life to the study of their civilisation…

That Nietzsche himself was a short-sighted invalid prone to violent migraines had done nothing to inhibit his admiration for the aristocracies of antiquity, and their heedlessness towards the sick and the weak. A society focused on the feeble was a society enfeebled itself. This it was that had rendered Christians such malevolent blood-suckers. If it was the taming of the Romans that Nietzsche chiefly rued, then he regretted as well how they had battened onto other nations.

Nietzsche himself, whose contempt for the Germans was exceeded only by his disdain for the English, had so little time for nationalism that he had renounced his Prussian citizenship when he was only twenty-four, and died stateless; and yet, for all that, he had always lamented the fate of his forebears. Once, before the coming of Boniface, the forests had sheltered Saxons who, in their ferocity and their hunger for everything that was richest and most intense in life, had been predators no less glorious than lions: ‘blond beasts’. But then the missionaries had arrived. The blond beast had been tempted into a monastery. ‘There he now lay, sick, wretched, malevolent toward himself; filled with hatred of the vital drives, filled with suspicion towards all that was still strong and happy. In short, a “Christian”.’ Dix, enduring the extremes of the Western Front, did not have to be a worshipper of Woden to feel that he was free at last.

‘Even war,’ he recorded in his notebook, ‘must be regarded as a natural occurrence.’ That it was an abyss, across which, like a rope, a man might be suspended, fastened between beast and Übermensch: here was a philosophy that Dix felt no cause to abandon at the Somme…

The unprecedented scale of the violence that had bled Europe white did not shock most of its peoples into atheism. On the contrary: it served to confirm them in their faith. How otherwise to make sense of all the horror? As so often before, when Christians had found themselves enmired in misery and slaughter, the veil that lay between earth and heaven could appear to many hauntingly thin. As the war ground on, and 1916 turned to 1917, so the end times seemed to be drawing near. In Portugal, in the village of Fatima, the Virgin made repeated appearances, until at last, before huge crowds, the sun danced, as though in fulfilment of the prophecy recorded in Revelation that a great and wondrous sign would appear in heaven: ‘a woman clothed with the sun’. In Palestine, the British won a crushing victory at Armageddon and took Jerusalem from the Turks. In London, the Foreign Secretary issued a declaration supporting the establishment in the Holy Land of a Jewish homeland—a development that many Christians believed was bound to herald the return of Christ…

Meanwhile, in basements stale with beer and sweat, men with strident voices were talking about Jews. [pages 462-467]

Categories
Friedrich Nietzsche

Postscript

I would like to add to what I said yesterday.

While it is true that suppressing the errors of both Wagner’s and Nietzsche’s worldviews, while assimilating their insights, produces a Hitlerian synthesis (by which I mean the critical view of Judeo-Christianity that the Führer confessed to his closest friends), the Wagner/Nietzsche thesis-antithesis was, and remains, extremely asymmetrical.

In my post yesterday I mentioned two German biographers of Nietzsche. I was referring to Curt Paul Janz and Werner Ross, whose voluminous treatises on the German philosopher’s life I own and are boring as hell, unless the reader has a passionate interest in Nietzsche’s tragic life (as I have). So, for those new to the subject, I recommend the more lyrical prose of an Austrian biographer of Nietzsche I have already linked to several times on this site. The Spanish translation of Werner Ross’ book, by the way, I read it all in 1995:

If there is one thing that emerges from all these biographies that I have read and conscientiously weighed up, it is the revelation that Christianity condemned Nietzsche, to use the poet-philosopher’s words, to a seventh solitude: absolute solitude that over the years annihilated him psychologically. That’s the tremendous asymmetry I was talking about, compared to the much famed and incredibly beloved Wagner by Europeans in general and Germans in particular. See for example this video about the famed composer:

One German gets all the glory and the other is condemned to the extent that nobody wants to listen to him, to the point of losing his mind. And it all has to do, of course, with the fact that the Aryans were Christians in the 19th century. And even in the 21st century the racial right loves those who echo Wagner’s anti-Semitism, but those who also blame Christianity are ignored.

As only a Hitlerian synthesis between Wagner and Nietzsche would save the white race, the Aryan man, still clinging to Christian ethics, is lost. He is like Siegfried whose potion made him lose his ancestral memory to the extent of betraying Brunhild, as we will see in my post tomorrow.

The dialectical synthesis I was talking about yesterday could only be realised if a substantial percentage of JQ-conscious Aryans were also conscious of the Christian Question. But there aren’t, and on the racial right I see no willingness whatsoever to put the religion of our parents in the dock.

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Friedrich Nietzsche Richard Wagner

Dialectic synthesis

On the eleventh of this month, I said that what moved me to present the story of Richard Wagner’s tetralogy was to try to elucidate a little more of Savitri Devi’s point of view, insofar as I consider her book, together with my footnotes, to be a kind of manifesto of The West’s Darkest Hour.

I’m still four entries short of completing the tetralogy’s story (the penultimate, which deals with Siegfried’s death, will be the longest in the series) according to the Argentine publisher who summarised the story when I was a child. I’ve already taken several images from those illustrated booklets, as can be seen here, here, here and here. But I would like, at once, to put down in writing some of my conclusions even before I finish translating the series.

I have just reviewed my thick biographical volumes on Friedrich Nietzsche, written by two German scholars. Nietzsche apparently lost his sanity on the last day of 1888. It is fascinating to note that his last essay before losing his mind was ‘Nietzsche contra Wagner’. Recall that, years before, Wagner and Nietzsche had been great friends. These are my conclusions:

Wagner was absolutely right to consider Jewry a parasite; and the later Nietzsche, i.e. the Nietzsche of the last months of 1888, was absolutely wrong to hate anti-Semites. But Wagner was completely wrong in believing that it was enough to baptise the Jews to make them good. For example, when for his last opera, Parsifal, he was assigned a Jewish conductor, Wagner rebelled and said that he would only accept him if he was first baptised. Such a stance reminds me of the American E. Michael Jones, although Jones is a Catholic and Wagner was a Protestant.

On the other hand, Nietzsche was right to condemn Judeo-Christianity as the key factor in the decline of Aryan culture, as we can see in this quote written before his upheaval. Precisely because of this, Nietzsche began to distance himself from Wagner when he began to see that the composer was making concessions to Christian morality.

The dialectic synthesis, so to speak, between the grave rights and grave wrongs of both Wagner and Nietzsche, provides a picture in which the contradictions of both are resolved. Resolving the contradictions of both positions is what I attempt on this site: unlike the latter Nietzsche we must be aware of the JQ, but, also, unlike Wagner we must be aware of the CQ.

All this has to do with Savitri’s book because, if our understanding of the cause of the dark hour isn’t perfect (Savitri wasn’t as anti-Christian as Nietzsche), we won’t be able to save the Aryan man. We will end up deceived by unscrupulous rascals like those who deceived Siegfried and eventually killed him. There is more I would like to say about the Wagnerian tetralogy but for tonight the above is enough.

(Incidentally, this image also appears in one of the booklets I used to leaf through as a child, which I still have in my library after so many decades of leafing through them for the first time.)

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Eduardo Velasco Friedrich Nietzsche

Evropa Soberana, backup 6

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English translation of Soberana’s last quote (from The Greek State by Friedrich Nietzsche, preface to an unwritten book, 1871):

He who contemplates war and its uniformed possibility, the soldiers profession, with respect to the hitherto described nature of the State, must arrive at the conviction, that through war and in the profession of arms is placed before our eyes an image, or even perhaps the prototype of the State. Here we see as the most general effect of the war-tendency, an immediate decomposition and division of the chaotic mass into military castes, out of which rises, pyramid shaped, on an exceedingly broad base of slaves, the edifice of the “martial society.” The unconscious purpose of the whole movement constrains every individual under its yoke, and produces also in heterogeneous natures as it were a chemical transformation of their qualities until they are brought into affinity with that purpose. In the highest castes one perceives already a little more of what in this internal process is involved at the bottom, namely the creation of the military genius […] I should like to think the warlike man to be a means of the military genius and his labor again only a tool in the hands of that same genius; and not to him, as absolute man and non-genius, but to him as a means of the genius—whose pleasure also can be to choose his tool’s destruction as a mere pawn sacrificed on the strategist’s chessboard—is due a degree of dignity, of that dignity namely, to have been deemed worthy of being a means of the genius.