Sedition Act

[S.R. Prozak]

> Thank you for the post. I didn't know that.  I wonder if we'd be as
> horrified by sections of the PATRIOT Act?

PATRIOT act, Patriot missiles. They emphasize patriotism instead of nationalism.

Sick dogs they are.

We "good Europeans": we too have our hours when we permit ourselves a warm-hearted patriotism, a lapse and regression into old loves and narrownesses—I have just given an example of it—hours of national ebullition, of patriotic palpitations and floods of various outmoded feelings. More ponderous spirits than we may have done with what in our case is confined to a few hours and is then over only after a longer period: one takes half a year, another half a life, according to the speed and power with which he digests it and of his "metabolism." Indeed, I can imagine dull, sluggish races which, even in our fast-moving Europe, would need half a century to overcome such atavistic attacks of patriotism and cleaving to one's native soil and to be restored to reason, I mean to "good Europeanism." And, while digressing on this possibility, I chanced to become the ear-witness of a conversation between two old "patriots"—it is clear they were both hard of hearing and thus spoke all the louder. "He has and knows as much philosophy as a peasant or a fraternity student," said one of them: "he is still innocent. But what does that matter nowadays! It is the age of the masses: they fall on their faces before anything massive. And in politics likewise. A statesman who builds for them another Tower of Babel, some monstrosity of empire and power, they call "great"—what does it matter if we, more cautious and reserved than they, persist in the old belief that it is the great idea alone which can bestow greatness on a deed or a cause. Suppose a statesman were to put his nation in the position of having henceforth to pursue "grand politics," for which it was ill equipped and badly prepared by nature, so that it had to sacrifice its old and sure virtues for the sake of a new and doubtful mediocrity—suppose a statesman were to condemn his nation to "politicizing" at all, while that nation had hitherto had something better to do and think about and in the depths of its soul still retained a cautious disgust for the restlessness, !
emptiness and noisy wrangling of those nations which actually do practice politics—suppose such a statesman were to goad the slum­bearing passions and desires of his nation, turn its former diffidence and desire to stand aside into a stigma and its predilection for foreign things and its secret infiniteness into a fault, devalue its most heartfelt inclinations in its own eyes, reverse its conscience, make its mind narrow and its taste "national"—what! a statesman who did all this, a statesman for whom his nation would have to atone for all future time, assuming it had a future—would such a statesman be great?" "Undoubtedly!" the other patriot replied vehemently: "otherwise he would not have been able to do it! Perhaps you may say it was mad to want to do such a thing? But perhaps everything great has been merely mad to begin with!"—"Misuse of words!" cried the other:—"strong! strong! strong and mad! Not great!"—The old men had obviously grown heated as they thus shouted their "truths" in one another's faces; I, however, in my happiness and beyond, considered how soon a stronger will become master of the strong; and also that when one nation becomes spiritually shallower there is a compensation for it: another nation becomes deeper.—

http://www.geocities.com/thenietzschechannel/bge9.htm

(Warning: this work is "anti-Semitic"!)



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