Nietzsche, Godfather of Fascism?

[jbor]

Well, I'm not so sure about any of this. I think Richard Wagner
(uncompromising anti-Semitism, bombastic Aryan mythologising etc) probably
deserves the mantle much more so than Nietzsche, at least in respect to Nazi
"ideology", and yet Wagner's creative output and reputation haven't suffered
anything like the assaults which have been waged on Nietzsche ever since
1945. I guess Nietzsche's philosophy is just too close to the money for some
to cope with.

In terms of ideology as with politics Mussolini was an opportunist, and the
appeal to Nietzsche was a pretty spurious one on his part, little more than
sloganeering. But the Nazi ideologues did a more thorough hatchet job on
Nietzsche's philosophy whereby they selectively isolated some of his ideas
(most notably from the posthumous, and problematic _Will to Power_ volume)
and totally ignored others (eg. 'The Case of Wagner'). Nietzsche was neither
nationalistic nor anti-Semitic, which are the key ideological ingredients of
Nazism, and which derive directly from people like Gobineau, von Treitschke,
von Schonerer and others.

The point isn't "falsification", except in its very broad connotation of
dishonesty. The process was one of determined appropriation of individual
statements and ideas of Nietzsche's; these were taken out of context by
Hitler and the Nazi intelligentsia in order to support or exemplify
ideological and political initiatives that are actually quite at odds with
basic principles in Nietzsche's thought. A travesty, in other words, much
like the treatment Pynchon's work gets here from some.

best



on 13/10/02 2:59 AM, Dave Monroe at davidmmonroe at yahoo.com wrote:

> This is something I think we've seen often enough in
> the case of Derrida as well.  Not to mention perhaps
> Pynchon.  But back to JD, I believe it's in
> "Otobiographies" (The Ear of the Other) where Derrida
> takes up the question of Nietzsche's (and, presumably,
> Derrida's) own responsibility vis a vis subsequent
> "misreadings."  Oh, wait ....
> 
> "Even Jacques Derrida, despite insisting that
> 'Nietzsche's utterances are not the same as those of
> the Nazi ideologists and not only because the latter
> grossly caricature the former to the point of
> apishness,' cannot refrain from wondering, in
> reference to Nietzsche's case, 'how and why what is so
> naively called a falsification was possible (one can't
> falsify anything).'"
> 
> http://pup.princeton.edu/chapters/i7403.html
> 
> http://pup.princeton.edu/chapters/i7403.pdf
>