Category: Twilight of the idols (book)

by Evropa Soberana

 
Ernst Kretschmann (1897-1941 on the Eastern Front) was a German soldier, painter, war illustrator, troop commander of the Sturmabteilung and Lieutenant of the Wehrmacht. He always signed his pictures with “EK” and provided a year. This one depicts a member of a tank-crew of war.

 
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was a German philosopher who does not need introduction. He is mostly known for his affirmation of the ascending life with Thus Spake Zarathustra and his annihilation of the chandala morals in The Antichrist. Some of his phrases referring to the races are interesting, of which the least publicised are precisely those that allude to the Nordic type.

[The nobles] call themselves ‘the truthful’: led by the Greek aristocracy… In the Latin word malusthe common man could be characterized as the dark-skinned and especially the dark-haired man (‘hic niger est’ – ‘this is black’), as the pre-Aryan occupant of Italian soil who could most easily be distinguished from the blond race which had become dominant, namely the Aryan conquering race, by its colour; at any rate, I have found exactly the same with Gaelic peoples, – fin(for example in Fin-gal), the word designating the aristocracy and finally the good, noble, pure, was originally a blond person in contrast to the dark-skinned, dark-haired native inhabitants. [Evropa Soberana compares this phenomenon with that of the English word fair, which meant ‘clear’, ‘ruddy’, ‘of luminous complexion’, and which ended up meaning ‘just’, ‘good’, ‘desirable’.] 

By the way, the Celts were a completely blond race; it is wrong to connect those traces of an essentially dark-haired population, which can be seen on carefully prepared ethnological maps in Germany, with any Celtic descent and mixing of blood in such a connection, as Virchow does: it is more a case of the pre-Aryan population of Germany emerging at these points. (The same holds good for virtually the whole of Europe: to all intents and purposes the subject race has ended up by regaining the upper hand in skin colour, shortness of forehead and perhaps even in intellectual and social instincts: who can give any guarantee that modern democracy, the even more modern anarchism, and indeed that predilection for the ‘commune’, the most primitive form of social structure which is common to all Europe’s socialists, are not in essence a huge throw-back – and that the conquering master race, that of the Aryans, is not physiologically being defeated as well?…) I think I can interpret the Latin bonusas ‘the “warrior” ’: providing I am correct in tracing bonus back to an older duonus (compare bellum= duellum = duen-lum, which seems to me to contain that duonus). Therefore bonus as a man of war, of division (duo), as warrior: one can see what made up a man’s ‘goodness’ in ancient Rome. 

Take our German ‘gut’: does it not mean ‘the godlike man’, the man ‘of godlike race’? And is it not identical with the popular (originally noble), name of the Goths? The grounds for this supposition will not be gone into here. –

On the Genealogy of Morality: A Polemic, 1887, First Essay, §5 (speaking about the aristocracy in Europe).

At the centre of all these noble races we cannot fail to see the beast of prey, the magnificent blond beast avidly prowling round for spoil and victory; this hidden centre needs release from time to time, the beast must out again, must return to the wild: – Roman, Arabian, Germanic, Japanese nobility, Homeric heroes, Scandinavian Vikings – in this requirement they are all alike. 

It was the noble races which left the concept of ‘barbarian’ in their traces wherever they went; even their highest culture betrays the fact that they were conscious of this and indeed proud of it (for example, when Pericles, in that famous funeral oration, tells his Athenians: ‘Our daring has forced a path to every land and sea, erecting timeless memorials to itself everywhere for good and ill’). 

This ‘daring’ of the noble races, mad, absurd and sudden in the way it manifests itself, the unpredictability and even the improbability of their undertakings – Pericles singles out the ράΰυμία [carelessness] of the Athenians for praise – their unconcern and scorn for safety, body, life, comfort, their shocking cheerfulness and depth of delight in all destruction, in all the debauches of victory and cruelty – all this, for those who suffered under it, was summed up in the image of the ‘barbarian’, the ‘evil enemy’, perhaps the ‘Goth’ or the ‘Vandal’. 

The deep and icy mistrust that the German arouses as soon as he comes to power, which we see again even today – is still the aftermath of that inextinguishable horror with which Europe viewed the raging of the blond Germanic beast for centuries (although between the old Germanic peoples and us Germans there is scarcely an idea in common, let alone a blood relationship)… Assuming that what is at any rate believed as ‘truth’ were indeed true, that it is the meaning of all culture to breed a tame and civilized animal, a household pet, out of the beast of prey ‘man’, then one would undoubtedly have to view all instinctive reaction and instinctive ressentiment, by means of which the noble races and their ideals were finally wrecked and overpowered, as the actual instruments of culture; which, however, is not to say that the bearers of these instincts were themselves representatives of the culture. Instead, the opposite would be not only probable – no! it is visible today! These bearers of oppressive, vindictive instincts, the descendants of all European and non-European slavery, in particular of all pre-Aryan population – represent the decline of mankind!

These ‘instruments of culture’ are a disgrace to man, more a grounds for suspicion of, or an argument against, ‘culture’ in general! We may be quite justified in retaining our fear of the blond beast at the centre of every noble race and remain on our guard: but who would not, a hundred times over, prefer to fear if he can admire at the same time, rather than not fear, but thereby permanently retain the disgusting spectacle of the failed, the stunted, the wasted away and the poisoned? And is that not our fate? What constitutes our aversion to ‘man’ today? – for we suffer from man, no doubt about that. – Not fear; rather, the fact that we have nothing to fear from man; that ‘man’ is first and foremost a teeming mass of worms; that the ‘tame man’, who is incurably mediocre and unedifying, has already learnt to view himself as the aim and pinnacle, the meaning of history, the ‘higher man’; – yes, the fact that he has a certain right to feel like that in so far as he feels distanced from the superabundance of failed, sickly, tired and exhausted people of whom today’s Europe is beginning to reek, and in so far as he is at least relatively successful, at least still capable of living, at least saying ‘yes’ to life…

On the Genealogy of Morality: A Polemic, 1887, First Essay, §11.

I used the word ‘state’: it is obvious who is meant by this – some pack of blond beasts of prey, a conqueror and master race, which, organized on a war footing, and with the power to organize, unscrupulously lays its dreadful paws on a populace which, though it might be vastly greater in number, is still shapeless and shifting. 

On the Genealogy of Morality: A Polemic, 1887, Second Essay, §17.

In the early Middle Ages, when the church was basically a zoo, the choicest specimens of the ‘blond beast’ were hunted down everywhere, – people like the Teuton nobles were subjected to ‘improvement’. But what did an ‘improved’ Teuton look like after being seduced into a cloister? He looked like a caricature of a human being, like a miscarriage: he had turned into a ‘sinner’, he was stuck in a cage, locked up inside all sorts of horrible ideas… There he lay, sick, miserable, full of malice against himself, hating the drive for life, suspicious of everything that was still strong and happy. In short, a ‘Christian’…

Twilight of the Idols, or, How to Philosophize with a Hammer, 1889, ‘Improving Humanity’ § 2.