Nietzsche

Having surveyed a number of salient introductory topics, I would like to present the assertion that many of the essential elements of the Holocaust can be found in the writings of three men: Wagner, Haeckel, and Nietzsche. This is not to say that Hitler got his ideas from them, although a strong case can be made that he was familiar with their writings. It is to say that they represent the climate or the culture in which National Socialism took root and flourished. And it is beyond dispute that they did influence significant numbers of people with ideas that were fundamental to the later development of Nazi ideology. As was said before, however, these men were men of books, not men of action (though as a young man Wagner may have been active in the revolution of 1848). It was the sweeping away of the old world order in the fiery tempests of the Great War and its aftermath that provided Hitler with his opportunity.    In Wagner we have racism and Aryan supremacy; totalitarianism; rejection of Christianity and an attempt to return to pre-Christian values; extreme nationalism. There is also the typically romantic (speaking of German romanticism) repudiation of arid reason and a reliance instead on the blood, on feeling and primitive instinct. In Nietzsche we have - but the subject is highly complex. It is better to present some of his main ideas first. This will require an examination of one of his books.

Nietzsche's Antichrist: A Curse on Christianity

Nietzsche's book is divided into sections which are all short, so pertinent quotes and passages can be easily located by sections without constant reference to page numbers. There is a vast amount of literature about Nietzsche, and different interpretations of his work. Some directly link him to the Third Reich, others deny that there is any such link and insist that Nietzsche has been taken out of context. Nietzsche himself also changed his mind on occasion - for example, at one time he admired Wagner and later came to despise him. For the present, let us look at what Nietzsche had to say. After a brief review of the book it will be possible to make some comments of a general nature.    Parenthetically, I did wonder if it was appropriate to pay too much attention to a work written shortly before Nietzsche lapsed into complete insanity. I thought perhaps Nietzsche's defenders might argue that the book was the product of a diseased mind, and hence not representative of Nietzsche's real thought. I found however that such a leading Nietzsche expert as Walter Kaufmann comments on the book as if it has a rightful place in the Nietzsche canon, and in no way disparages it because of the author's mental illness.    The opening sections of the book (Sects. 1-4) have some comments that might be worth examining later. More significant is Nietzsche's evaluation of Christianity that starts in section 5. This section contains a hostile and bitter attack on Christianity as something that corrupts life and introduces wholly unnatural values. A detailed response to this is beyond the scope of this essay, but his contention is significant in that his hostility to Christianity is related to his hostility toward Jews (as will be amply demonstrated shortly). He asserts in Sect. 6 that "Life itself is to my mind the instinct for growth, for durability, for an accumulation of forces, for power: where the will to power is lacking, there is decline." Christianity mitigates against this. Pity, charity, mercy, obedience to God's laws - all of these and other (to Nietzsche) wholly false values contradict "the law of development, which is the law of selection. It preserves what is ripe for destruction; it defends those who have been disinherited and condemned by life; and by the abundance of the failures of all kinds which it keeps alive, it gives life itself a gloomy and questionable aspect."    The law of selection, which of course is a reference to Nietzsche's application of Darwinian selection to human ethics, decrees that the strong survive and the weak die. This is the law of nature that is the very foundation of our being, and it is contradicted by charitable concern for the weak and the failures who have been found unfit to live. This is of course related not only to eugenics, but also to the pitilessness of the Nazis. They believed that hardness and cruelty were positive virtues, and that mercy and pity were vices that were contrary to the fundamental law of nature. It is for this reason that Nietzsche calls pity "hostility to life."    In Section 8 Nietzsche condemns any kind of theology or philosophy that posits a higher reality or moral law to which we should be subject. He denies that there is any "higher origin" or "superior and foreign vantage point." He also asserts that "humility, chastity, poverty, or, in a word, holiness" have harmed life "immeasurably more than any horrors or vices." The worst horrors are to Nietzsche better than the false virtues introduced by the Christians, or by the philosophical idealists such as Kant (a "spider," Sect. 11) who Nietzsche asserts were also corrupted by theology. The worst horrors (including Auschwitz and Buchenwald?) are better than such false virtues as kindness, forgiveness, mercy, and pity.    Continuing his attack on those who would subordinate man to a higher reality of any kind, Nietzsche has a rhetorical passage that, while aimed at others, describes himself exactly:

value judgments have been stood on their heads and the concepts of "true" and "false" are of necessity reversed: whatever is most harmful to life is called "true"; whatever elevates it, enhances, affirms, justifies it, and makes it triumphant, is called "false"... It was Nietzsche who completely reversed life's values, calling "good" "evil" and "evil" "good." Nietzsche presents his own idea of virtue in Sect. 11: A virtue must be our own invention, our most necessary self-expression and self-defense: any other kind of virtue is merely a danger. ...The fundamental laws of self-preservation and growth demand the opposite-that everyone invent his own virtue, his own categorical imperative. ...An action demanded by the instinct of life is proved to be right by the pleasure that accompanies it... There is no higher law, no virtue other than that which we decree for ourselves, which gives us pleasure, or which is needed for self preservation. This is why Nietzsche is still so widely admired by people who resolutely refuse to face the implications of his message - he speaks to their deepest desire to be free from any and all restraint.    In Sect. 13 we find Nietzsche's assertion: Let us not underestimate this: we ourselves, we free spirits, are nothing less than a "revaluation of all values," an incarnate declaration of war and triumph over all the traditional conceptions of "true" and "untrue."   All the old ideas of virtue are overturned, and reversed and a new vision of man is posited in Sect. 14: that man is only a beast: We have become more modest in every way. We no longer derive man from "the spirit' or "the deity"; we have placed him back among the animals. We consider him the strongest animal because he is the most cunning; his spirituality is a consequence of this. On the other hand, we oppose the vanity that would raise its head again here too - as if man had been the great hidden purpose of the evolution of the animals. Man is by no means the crown of creation: every living being stands beside him on the same level of perfection...our knowledge of man today goes just as far as we understand him mechanistically. Formerly man was given a "free will" as his dowry from a higher order: today we have taken his will away altogether, in the sense that we no longer admit the will as a faculty. The old word "will" now serves only to denote a resultant, a kind of individual reaction, which follows necessarily upon a number of partly contradictory, partly harmonious stimuli: the will no longer "acts" or "moves." So, in Nietzsche's opinion, man has no will, but only reacts in accordance with external stimuli. A hungry cat seizes a mouse and devours it - there is no will involved, no reasoning, no consideration of the rights and wrongs of the case. The cat does not worry about the mouse's widow and orphans, or philosophize upon the rightness of its act. The cat responds instinctively and takes what it wants, and man should be the same. All moral considerations are to Nietzsche nothing but deceptions and lies, contrary to the fundamental life process.    This might seem very remote from the Holocaust, a philosopher forty years before talking about the non-existence of free will and the animal nature of man: but when we consider the writings of Ernest Haeckel, who had views identical to Nietzsche's on the animal nature of man, we will see that these ideas can have very practical applications.    The same section also reveals a complete ignorance of the Christian doctrine of perfection. When Nietzsche says "To become perfect, he was advised to draw in his sense, turtle fashion, to cease all intercourse with earthly things, to shed his mortal shroud: then his essence would remain, the 'pure spirit," he presents a travesty of the Christian understanding of the emotional and intellectual fulfillment that comes from an awareness of God's eternal truths. A broader examination of the spiritual life is too much of a digression here however.

Sect. 15 repeats the assertion that Christianity is totally false. In Christianity neither morality nor religion has even a single point of contact with reality. Nothing but imaginary causes ("God," "soul," "ego," "spirit," "free will"-for that matter, "unfree will"), nothing but imaginary effects ("sin," "redemption," "grace," "punishment," "forgiveness of sins"). Intercourse between imaginary beings ("God," "spirits," "souls"); an imaginary natural science (anthropocentric; no trace of any concept of natural causes); an imaginary psychology (nothing but self-misunderstandings..."repentance," "pangs of conscience," "temptation by the devil," "the presence of God"); an imaginary teleology ("the kingdom of God," "the Last Judgment," "eternal life").- This world of pure fiction is vastly inferior to the world of dreams insofar as the latter mirrors reality, whereas the former falsifies, devalues, and negates reality. Notice the dismissal of conscience. The cat does not suffer from pangs of conscience after having killed a mouse - conscience is according to Nietzsche not merely a lie but a harmful lie because it inhibits action. Some admirers of Nietzsche will refuse to see a connection between this and the Holocaust - I let them go their way. A thousand books would not suffice. They like Nietzsche's presuppositions, but do not have the honesty and the intellectual integrity and the ruthlessness to follow these presuppositions through to the bitter end. They like to talk of freedom but are still shackled by conscience and moral inhibitions from which they have not yet broken free.    Sect. 16 deals with different conceptions of God - both of them false, because God (according to Nietzsche) is merely an invention of man, but one of the conceptions is "healthy" because it is the projection of a "healthy" consciousness. Therefore it allows God to be wrathful, revengeful, cunning, and violent. The false projection of God shows him to be a sneak, timid and modest; he counsels "peace of soul," hate-no-more, forbearance, even "love" of friend and enemy...Formerly, he represented a people, the strength of a people, everything aggressive and power-thirsty in the soul of a people; now he is merely the good god... The first conception is reflected in certain parts of the Old Testament - which Nietzsche later asserts has been largely corrupted and falsified, as will be seen later.    In Sect. 17 Nietzsche rejects the contention that the New Testament God is an advance up from the Old Testament God, and asserts the contrary - that the progression from the fierce God of battles to the meek and passive Saviour is in fact a degeneration. When the presuppositions of ascending life-when all things strong, brave, masterful, and proud-are eliminated from the conception of God; when he degenerates step by step into a mere symbol, a staff for the weary, a sheet-anchor for the drowning; when he becomes the god of the poor, the sinners, and the sick par excellence, and the attribute "Savior" or "Redeemer" remains in the end as the one essential attribute of divinity-just what does such a transformation signify? what, such a reduction of the divine? Not that Nietzsche admired the Old Testament, which he later asserts to be corrupt and full of lies invented by priests - but he did like the battles and massacres.    Sect. 17 also contains the first of numerous hostile statements about Jews. Asserting that the Jews originally had a healthy concept of God but later perverted it (Sect. 24), Nietzsche referred to the further degeneration of the concept of God in Christianity and asserted: Nevertheless the god of the "great numbers," the democrat among the gods, did not become a proud pagan god: he remained a Jew, he remained a god of nooks, the god of all the dark corners and places, of all the unhealthy quarters the world over!    His world-wide kingdom is, as ever, an underworld kingdom, a hospital, a souterrain kingdom, a ghetto kingdom. And he himself: so pale, so weak, so decadent...

Notice the Jews, the people of the dark corners and unhealthy places, which is entirely in keeping with the Volkish concept of the Jews as lacking or even deliberately opposing all that made life worthwhile.    Sect. 18 contains more bitter and hostile attacks on Christianity, which leads to criticism of "the strong races of northern Europe" in Sect. 19. That they "did not reject the Christian God certainly does no credit to their religious genius - not to speak of their taste. There is no excuse whatever for their failure to dispose of such a sickly and senile product of decadence. But a curse lies upon them for this failure: they have absorbed sickness, old age, and contradiction into all their instincts." This of course was a common theme of the Volkish movement - that Christianity had corrupted the proud, fierce, warlike, simple-minded warriors of old. Nietzsche then goes on to complain about the failure of Europeans to invent a new god in almost two thousand years - if only he could have lived a little longer. Parenthetically, since Nietzsche here pronounces a curse on those who accepted Christianity, and at the end of the book curses Christianity itself, one is reminded of some verses of Paul's: "...the poison of asps is under their lips: Whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness: Their feet are swift to shed blood: Destruction and misery are in their ways: And the way of peace they have not known: There is no fear of God before their eyes."    The prophet Nahum also has some pertinent words. Speaking of God, he said "darkness shall pursue his enemies." Nietzsche was an enemy of God, and darkness pursued him, and overcame him. Those who admire Nietzsche and hate God are also being pursued by darkness, and unless God shines light upon them they will perish in their private darkness. Perhaps some more of the passage is appropriate here - one quickly wearies of Nietzsche, and some words of truth, even hard and unpleasant truth, are a needed change: The burden of Nineveh. The book of the vision of Nahum the Elkoshite. God is jealous, and the LORD revenges; the LORD revenges, and is furious; the LORD will take vengeance on his adversaries, and he reserves wrath for his enemies. The LORD is slow to anger, and great in power, and will not at all acquit the wicked: the LORD has his way in the whirlwind and in the storm, and the clouds are the dust of his feet. He rebukes the sea, and makes it dry, and dries up all the rivers: Bashan languishes, and Carmel, and the flower of Lebanon languishes. The mountains quake at him, and the hills melt, and the earth is burned at his presence, yea, the world, and all that dwell therein. Who can stand before his indignation? and who can abide in the fierceness of his anger? his fury is poured out like fire, and the rocks are thrown down by him. The LORD is good, a strong hold in the day of trouble; and he knows them that trust in him. But with an overrunning flood he will make an utter end of the place thereof, and darkness shall pursue his enemies.    The next few sections contain praises of Buddhism and more assaults on Christianity, which he accuses first of being too passive, but now of having hatred and the "will to persecute." He is also angry because the Spanish closed the Moorish baths, as if this had anything to do with Christ and the apostles more than a thousand years before. One passage in Sect. 21 is interesting. Nietzsche says: "Christian, finally, is the hatred of the spirit, of pride, courage, freedom, liberty of the spirit; Christian is the hatred of the senses, of joy in the senses, of joy itself." Nietzsche found a better way to happiness and joy, including the realization that man is only a beast.    One statement in Sect. 22 is significant: "Christianity would become master over beasts of prey: its method is to make them sick; enfeeblement is the Christian recipe for taming, for 'civilizing'." Hitler loved the idea of man as a beast of prey - this was the ideal he deliberately sought to inculcate, in complete agreement with Nietzsche's revelations. Man the beast - and is not this the logical conclusion to be drawn from Darwinism, if that theory is true?    Sect. 23 dismisses love with contempt: Love is the state in which man sees things most decidedly as they are not. The power of illusion is at its peak here, as is the power to sweeten and transfigure. In love man endures more, man bears everything. A religion had to be invented in which one could love: what is worst in life is thus overcome - it is not even seen any more.

Love is seen as an illusion at best, and an escape mechanism at worst. Of course, animals, beasts of prey, and strong men, the elite, do not love - love is an invention of weaklings who need something to console them in their failure. They can also disguise their weakness, decadence, and cowardice, behind a mask of virtue, and pretend that their failure is in fact something meritorious. No, the overmen, the elite few, have no need of love. It is better to dwell alone on the icy mountaintops of their greatness, lashed by the cold winds of bitter reality, than to dwell in the calm and peaceful valleys below with the herd, the weak, the sickly, the degenerate, the cowardly, the loving, and the unfit. Parenthetically, the opposites of love are hate, which Nietzsche nowhere condemns, and cruelty and hardness, which he praises as virtues. Nietzsche would today be looked upon with loathing and disgust by all thinking people except for one thing: his starting point of man being totally free, without God, subject to no higher law. This is music to the ears of modern man - deadly and poisonous music, which causes suffering and misery in this life, and leads to everlasting punishment by a righteous God in the next world that follows this one.

Nietzsche and the Jews

Coming to Sect. 24, we find that Nietzsche brings his philological, hermeneutical, existential, psychological, and philosophical powers to bear on the Jewish problem, and presents his analysis of the Jewish threat to civilization. No one else devoted so much philosophical effort to the Jewish "problem" as Nietzsche did (shortly before he went totally insane).    Nietzsche first attacks Christianity again - I omit many superfluous comments in Sect. 24 for the sake of brevity - and then explores the question of Christianity's origins. Where did this false system come from? From the Jews. Here I merely touch on the problem of the genesis of Christianity. The first principle for its solution is: Christianity can be understood only in terms of the soil out of which it grew - it is not a counter-movement to the Jewish instinct, it is its very consequence, one inference more in its awe-inspiring logic. Thus we are talking about the Jewish origins of something (to Nietzsche) completely false and wholly divorced from reality. "Awe-inspiring" might seem to have positive connotations, but as we read on we see from the analysis of the Jewish character that follows in this same section that nothing positive is meant here: The Jews are the strangest people in world history because, confronted with the question to be or not to be, they chose with a perfectly uncanny deliberateness, to be at any price: this price was the radical falsification of all nature, all naturalness, all reality, of the whole inner world as well as the outer. They defined themselves sharply against all the conditions under which a people had hitherto been able to live, been allowed to live; out of themselves they created a counter-concept to natural conditions: they turned religion, cult, morality, history, psychology, one after the other, into an incurable contradiction to their natural values... ...That precisely is why the Jews are the most catastrophic people of world history: by their aftereffect they have made mankind so thoroughly false that even today the Christian can feel anti-Jewish without realizing that he himself is the ultimate Jewish consequence.    Parenthetically, this explains hostile comments that Nietzsche made about anti-Semites. Their anti-Jewishness was itself the consequence of Jewish values imbibed either through Christianity or through German idealistic "philosophy" which Nietzsche felt was thoroughly contaminated with Christian values (Sections 10, 11).    Thus, Judaeo-Christian morality says "No to everything on earth that represents the ascending tendency of life, to that which has turned out well, to power, to beauty, to self-affirmation." All of these positive qualities are of course represented by Nietzsche himself, who because of his "ascending tendencies" turned out so well, so beautiful, so powerful.

What, however, was the aim of all this? To what end did the Jews invent a false and completely unnatural system of values? Nietzsche explains this as follows: Psychologically considered, the Jewish people are a people endowed with the toughest vital energy, who, placed in impossible circumstances, voluntarily and out of the most profound prudence of self-preservation, take sides with all the instincts of decadence-not as mastered by them, but because they divined a power in these instincts with which one could prevail against "the world." Nietzsche's thought may be somewhat puzzling here, but the next section (Sect.25) sheds some light. There we read that originally the Jews were a healthy people: Originally, especially at the time of the kings, Israel also stood in the right, that is, the natural, relationship to all things. Its Yahweh was the expression of a consciousness of power, of joy in oneself, of hope for oneself: through him victory and welfare were expected... Their concept of God was "healthy," it being realized of course that this god had no real existence, and was only a projection of human consciousness (man creates God in his image). However, due to various problems, "anarchy within, the Assyrian without," the "old god was no longer able to do what he once could do. They should have let him go. What happened? They changed his concept - they denatured his concept: at this price they held on to him" (Sect. 25).    The old concept of god, though "healthy," was inadequate to meet the challenges to Israel's existence (not surprisingly, this god being wholly the creation of man). Instead of abandoning him altogether as they should have done, the Jews reinvented the concept of god to suit their changed conditions. Now God, with his laws and rules and punishments, was merely this: a tool in the hands of priestly agitators, who now interpret all happiness as a reward, all unhappiness as punishment for disobeying God, as "sin": that most mendacious device of interpretation, the alleged "moral world order," with which the natural concepts of "cause" and "effect" are turned upside down once and for all. When, through reward and punishment, one has done away with natural causality, an anti-natural causality is required: now everything else that is unnatural follows (Sect. 25). To sum up, all of the condemnation of Christianity that has gone before is also an attack on the Jews who invented this huge deception. Christianity is not an improvement or an advance, but merely an extension of Judaism. The Jews invented this false system to maintain their own survival by using it to subdue and dominate stronger peoples, as we shall see shortly. They became masters and manipulators "all the instincts of decadence-not as mastered by them, but because they divined a power in these instincts with which one could prevail against 'the world'. " The Jews are on the side of decadence, not because they are decadent or have been mastered by decadence, but because they have found decadence to be an effective means of controlling others.

Returning to Sect. 24 with this in mind, it is easier to understand Nietzsche's assertion that the Jew was to be found behind every form of decadence: the stock exchange, the worker's movement, capitalism, communism, modern art, bad music, democracy, liberalism, a free press - everything bad, the Jew was behind it all. It is explained thus: The Jews are the antithesis of all decadents: they have had to represent decadents to the point of illusion; with a non plus ultra of histrionic genius they have known how to place themselves at the head of all movements of decadence (-as the Christianity of Paul-) in order to create something out of them which is stronger than any Yes-saying party of life. decadence is only a means for the type of man who demands power in Judaism and Christianity, the priestly type: this type of man has a life interest in making mankind sick; and in so twisting the concepts of "good" and "evil," "true" and "false," as to imperil life and slander the world.    The Jews have (according to Sect. 27) "the toughest life-will which has ever existed in any people on earth." Thus, they are "the antithesis of all decadents." Not decadent themselves, but very "tough-willed," they use decadence as a means to control others, and thus are "at the head of all movements of decadence." By decadence they can enervate and manipulate stronger peoples. Whether or not Hitler actually read Nietzsche can be discussed later, but this concept of Nietzsche's certainly agrees with that expressed by Hitler in the second chapter of Mein Kampf: ...Was there any form of filth or profligacy, particularly in cultural life, without at least one Jew involved in it?    If you cut even cautiously into such an abscess, you found, like a maggot in a rotting body, often dazzled by the sudden light - a kike! This is not to say that Hitler got any of his ideas from Nietzsche, though he may have (to a greater or a lesser extent) - it is to say that they were kindred spirits.    In Sect. 26 we read more about the Old Testament according to Nietzsche: These priests accomplished a miracle of falsification, and a good part of the Bible now lies before us as documentary proof. With matchless scorn for every tradition, for every historical reality, they translated the past of their own people into religious terms; that is, they turned it into a stupid salvation mechanism of guilt before Yahweh, and punishment; of piety before Yahweh, and reward. He goes on to explain that the whole concept of moral order in the universe, a key idea in the Old Testament, is nothing but a lie. There is no moral order. ...the lie of the "moral world order" runs through the whole development of modern philosophy. What does "moral world order" mean? That there is a will of God, once and for all, as to what man is to do and what he is not to do; that the value of a people, of an individual, is to be measured according to how much or how little the will of God is obeyed; that the will of God manifests itself in the destinies of a people, of an individual, as the ruling factor, that is to say, as punishing and rewarding according to the degree of obedience. The reality behind this pitiful lie is this: a parasitical type of man, thriving only at the expense of all healthy forms of life, the priest, uses the name of God in vain: he calls a state of affairs in which the priest determines the value of things "the kingdom of God"; he calls the means by which such a state is attained or maintained "the will of God"; with cold-blooded cynicism he measures peoples, ages, individuals, according to whether they profited or resisted the overlordship of the priests.

In the same Section, the Old Testament is then condemned as a great forgery: One step further: the "will of God," that is, the conditions for the preservation of priestly power, must be known-to this end a "revelation" is required. In plain language: a great literary forgery becomes necessary, a "holy scripture" is discovered-it is made public with full hieratic pomp, with days of repentance and cries of lamentation over the long "sin." When Walter Kaufmann says (in the Editor's Preface to the edition of Nietzsche cited in the bibliography) that "Nietzsche's sharply divergent attitudes toward the Old and New Testaments furnish another clue. For the Old Testament was one of his great loves..." one can only speculate as to his motives.    In Sect. 27 Nietzsche gets back to his assertion that Christianity emerged from this "utterly false soil, where everything natural, every natural value, every reality was opposed" - but the Jews are not out of the woods yet. He continues exposing Christianity as merely a manifestation of Judaism, after digressing for a while (Sections 27-41) on Christianity and Christ. There is nothing there of any relevance to this discussion (or any other serious discussion for that matter), except for a passage in Sect. 38 which reveals Nietzsche's contempt for unclean people who make him feel nauseous. At this point I do not suppress a sigh. There are days when I am afflicted with a feeling blacker than the blackest melancholy-contempt of man. And to leave no doubt concerning what I despise, whom I despise: it is the man of today, the man with whom I am fatefully contemporaneous. The man of today-I suffocate from his unclean breath ... My attitude to the past, like that of all lovers of knowledge, is one of great tolerance, that is, magnanimous self-mastery: with gloomy caution I go through the madhouse world of whole millennia, whether it be called "Christianity," "Christian faith," or "Christian church"-I am careful not to hold mankind responsible for its mental disorders. But my feeling changes, breaks out, as soon as I enter modern times, our time. Our time knows better ... What was formerly just sick is today indecent-it is indecent to be a Christian today. And here begins my nausea. "Sigh. People are so contemptible and despicable. I suffocate from their uncleanness, but I tolerate it with magnanimous self-mastery. Those Christians are nauseating though. I am perfectly sane, the rest of the world is a madhouse...." This obsession with cleanliness is echoed by another passage in the opening chapters of Mein Kampf: The cleanliness of this people, moral and otherwise, I must say, is a point in itself. By their very exterior you could tell that these were no lovers of water, and, to your distress, you often knew it with your eyes closed. Later I often grew sick to my stomach from the smell of these caftan-wearers. Added to this, there was their unclean dress and their generally unheroic appearance. It will be objected that Hitler was talking about Jews, while Nietzsche was talking about Christians - but all of Christianity, as has been said, was to Nietzsche in his peculiar state nothing more than a manifestation of Judaism. He will continue on this lofty philosophical theme of Christianity being only a form of Judaism shortly, and in Sect. 46 he specifically refers to bad smelling Jews and Christians together.    One is tempted to pour scorn and ridicule on Nietzsche, but that would be uncharitable, unchristian. It is not good to gloat over a fallen foe - not that Nietzsche should get any of the pity he so detested. He deserved everything he got - but it is sad to see the pathetic ruin of what might otherwise have been a truly great mind. Perhaps his having been raised in such feminine surroundings made him try to prove that he was a real man by being as ferocious and cruel as possible. Whatever the case, his descriptions of Christianity as being totally divorced from reality apply more to his own ramblings. Just as the Nazis accused the Jews of wanting to dominate the world when it was the Nazis themselves who were guilty of the very things they accused others of unjustly, so in the same way Nietzsche accused Christianity of distorting life and reality when it was he who was guilty of that himself. It is exaltation of self and despising of God that diminishes the self and leads to ever-increasing separation from reality, and it is submission to God and to his laws as revealed in scripture that leads to real life, both in this world and in this to come. This is not to deny that there is much that is false in the church, but this comes not from the teachings of the bible, but from the failure to follow the teachings of Christ and the bible sufficiently. In the Spirit of Christ there is abundance of life. As Jesus said: "Whosoever drinks of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life." This all too often, unfortunately, has little to do with contemporary churchianity, which both now is and in Nietzsche's time was far removed from the teachings of Christ and the apostles.

Returning to the subject of Nietzsche's book, in Section 42 we get back to the Jews again. It starts with an attack on Paul: On the heels of the "glad tidings" came the very worst: those of Paul. In Paul was embodied the opposite type to that of the "bringer of glad tidings": the genius in hatred, in the vision of hatred, in the inexorable logic of hatred. Paul was an apostle of hatred! Here I insert Paul's famous passage on love from his letter to the Corinthians and leave it to the reader to decide if the phrase "apostle of hatred" applies more to Paul or to Nietzsche. "Charity" is an archaic translation of the Greek agape, meaning "love." Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profits me nothing. Charity suffers long, and is kind; charity envies not; charity does not vaunt itself, is not puffed up, Does not behave itself unseemly, seeks not her own, is not easily provoked, thinks no evil; Rejoices not in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; Bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Here again, like the Nazis accusing the Jews of being deceitful and cruel and wanting to dominate the world, Nietzsche criticizes Paul of the very sins that Nietzsche was guilty of himself - completely distorting the realities of life and being an apostle of hate. True, the bible does say, "Hate what is evil," and there is a place for hatred.    Of course, we should not forget that Paul was - a Jew! This is elaborated on in the same section: And once more the priestly instinct of the Jew committed the same great crime against history-he simply crossed out the yesterday of Christianity and its day before yesterday; he invented his own history of earliest Christianity. Still further: he falsified the history of Israel once more so that it might appear as the prehistory of his deed... And what was Paul's motive? Nietzsche explained it thusly: What he himself did not believe, the idiots among whom he threw his doctrine believed. His need was for power; in Paul the priest wanted power once again-he could use only concepts, doctrines, symbols with which one tyrannizes masses and forms herds. This describes Hitler well, though of course Hitler used not only concepts, doctrines, and symbols but also brute force and fear.    More attacks on Christianity follow, but what is significant here is the Jewish angle - though the comment in Sect. 43 that Christianity is to blame for democracy is revealing: The poison of the doctrine of "equal rights for all"-it was Christianity that spread it most fundamentally. Out of the most secret nooks of bad instincts, Christianity has waged war unto death against all sense of respect and feeling of distance between man and man, that is to say, against the presupposition of every elevation, of every growth of culture-out of the ressentiment of the masses it forged its chief weapon against us, against all that is noble, gay, high-minded on earth, against our happiness on earth.

Christianity is to blame for democracy, and the Jews are to blame for Christianity; therefore, the Jews are to blame for democracy. This democracy of course is a weapon against "us," the elite few like Nietzsche who are now forced to associate on a basis of equality with the nauseating rabble.    In Sect. 44 Nietzsche gets back to one of his favorite topics - Jews - and presents some vital aspects of anti-Semitic theory that are overlooked by those who try to explain the Holocaust in terms of Roman Palestine or 16th-century Germany, but seem never to have considered the 19th century. Paul, according to Nietzsche at any rate, operated "with the logician's cynicism of a rabbi" - notice the cynical rabbis plotting to dominate healthier people with clever schemes like Christianity and democracy. If Nietzsche had lived longer he could have attributed rock and roll music, movies, and TV to the Jews, part of their plot to undermine the young generations and render them more fit for domination.    More to the point, Sect. 44 goes on to reveal that the most important aspect of this problem is race, and that the Christian is only a Jew in disguise: The Gospels stand apart. The Bible in general suffers no comparison. One is among Jews: first consideration to keep from losing the thread completely. The simulation of "holiness" which has really become genius here, never even approximated elsewhere in books or among men, this counterfeit of words and gestures as an art, is not the accident of some individual talent or other or of some exceptional character. This requires race. In Christianity all of Judaism, a several-century-old Jewish preparatory training and technique of the most serious kind, attains its ultimate mastery as the art of lying in a holy manner. The Christian, this ultima ratio of the lie, is the Jew once more-even three times more... This should not be passed over too lightly. The whole thing is based on race. The Jews as a race have a special propensity for deceit, hypocrisy, and lying as they weave their schemes and tricky plots to dominate and control, and have a "genius" and an "exceptional character" when it comes to lying.    Christianity is thus a Jewish lie, a massive swindle, a tactic in a racial struggle - and this theological instinct of the Jew is, as was explained by Nietzsche in Sect. 9, "the most wide-spread, really subterranean, form of falsehood found on earth." And what is the motive of the Jews here? That the weak, the inferior, the sickly, might lord it over their masters. "Christianity would become master over beasts of prey: its method is to make them sick; enfeeblement is the Christian recipe for taming, for 'civilizing' " (Sect. 22).    Thus, attacks on Christianity are also attacks on Jews. A repetition of something from Sect. 17 is useful here: Nevertheless, the god of "the great numbers," the democrat among the gods, did not become a proud pagan god: he remained a Jew, he remained a god of nooks, the god of all the dark corners and places, of all the unhealthy quarters the world over! ... His world-wide kingdom is, as ever, an underworld kingdom, a hospital, a souterrain kingdom, a ghetto kingdom. Christians are thus, getting back to Sect. 44, "little superlative Jews, ripe for every kind of madhouse," who have "turned all values around in their own image, just as if 'the Christian' alone were the meaning, the salt, the measure, also the Last Judgment, of all the rest." Once again, this problem is due to race: "The whole calamity became possible only because a related, racially related, kind of megalomania already existed in this world, the Jewish one." It is Jewish megalomania that is to blame for all of these problems - once again, Nietzsche's megalomania being well attested, he blames the Jews for the faults in himself. The same can be said about his comment that Christians were ripe for the madhouse. A great percentage of Nietzsche's negative comments in this book can be applied directly to him.    This same section explains some negative comments Nietzsche made about antisemites. These have been used to show that Nietzsche was not opposed to Jews at all, when in fact Nietzsche was condemning not antisemitism, but only the wrong kind of it. Christian opposition to Judaism (and he includes in this all of German idealistic philosophy which asserted the existence of some higher spiritual reality - see Sect. 10) is itself infected with Jewish ideals. Even the Volkish movement, which asserted German racial supremacy and warned against the danger of racial pollution, was infected (according to Nietzsche) with the theological instinct (derived from the Jews) if it posited the existence (as it did) of some higher reality, some "World Spirit," that was at work elevating the German people. Nietzsche thought it was absurd for Christians, or people influenced by Christianity, to be antisemitic. After all, "The Christian is merely a Jew of 'more liberal' persuasion" (Sect. 44), and Christians and Polish Jews both smell bad (Sect. 46).

Sect. 47 asserts that Judaeo-Christian values are a crime against life, and that Paul's concepts are "thoroughly Jewish." Sect. 48 has some ridicule of Torah, good reading for Jews who enjoy Nietzsche's attacks on Paul and Christianity. Sect. 49 makes the significant statement (with reference to Genesis) that "The beginning of the Bible contains the whole psychology of the priest." Guilt, sin, punishment, a moral world order, are "against science-against the emancipation of man from the priest." The concept of guilt and punishment, including the doctrine of "grace," of "redemption," of "forgiveness"-lies through and through, and without any psychological reality-were invented to destroy man's causal sense... This explains why the Jews are such deadly enemies of the human race - in fact (if one is to believe Nietzsche that is) they are vampires, "pale, subterranean bloodsuckers." That being so, it is easy to see why they should all be killed.  Let us not forget Sect. 2 of this profound expose of the Jewish threat, where it is asserted that the weak and the failures should perish, with "every possible assistance." If there is no sin, no guilt, no moral order, then what may not be done? Anything and everything are possible.    In Sect. 51 Nietzsche says "We others who have the courage to be healthy and also to despise..." - an odd statement for one with his many serious health problems. It also contains the statement "Christianity has been the greatest misfortune of mankind so far," which is identical to one of Hitler's statements in the Table Talk, if I recall correctly.     Sect. 52 asserts that "sickness is the essence of Christianity" - but Christianity is Jewish, and since the Jews have introduced this sickness, does it not follow logically that they are germs, bacteria? And isn't the removal of germs and bacteria essential not only to personal but also to national and racial hygiene?    Sect. 53 contains a striking statement: Truth is not something which one person might have and another not have: only peasants and peasant apostles like Luther can think that way about truth. One may be sure that modesty, moderation in this matter becomes greater in proportion to the degree of conscientiousness in matters of the spirit. After all of his talk about the lie of Christianity, and boasting that he was free from nineteen centuries of error (Sect. 36), Nietzsche now objects to someone claiming to have truth! In fact, for Nietzsche to talk of "modesty" and "moderation," and then in the very same section to claim that "about all these things, only one man has said the word which was needed for thousands of  years - Zarathustra" is more than ludicrous and worse than pathetic. It is also a fundamental paradox that lies deep in the heart of the modern rejection of Christianity.    Secularists object to the Christian claim to truth, and assert that there is no final truth. They know this for a fact because it is the truth. And whence did they obtain this revelation? From their finite and fallible selves. Moreover, they claim that for many centuries the entire human race lay in ignorance of the higher truth that they have discovered. Only the grace of God can pierce through the darkness of this error. One could argue with such people for years and years and never get anywhere, unless God himself should grant them a measure of understanding.    Sect. 53 also contains the very essence of Hitler's policy toward the church in Germany once he came to power. It was his belief (this is documented adequately by Conway) that as long as the pastors, theologians, and Christians did not oppose him directly, they could be left alone. He was confident that Christianity would eventually die out, and shared the sentiments expressed here by Nietzsche: "...do you believe, my dear theologians, that we would give you an occasion to become martyrs for your lie?- One refutes a matter by laying it respectfully on ice-that is how one also refutes theologians..."    Sections 54 and 55 have some of Nietzsche's convictions on convictions. At first glance this might seem to have little to do with the Holocaust, but since the Holocaust was born of convictions, it might be possible to find some useful material here. Nietzsche was after all so much closer to Hitler in time and in spirit than were Christ or the early Christians or Luther. One can only marvel at the blindness of those who search diligently  for clues to the Holocaust so far afield, and ignore more valuable fields of research that are much closer to home.

Anyway, examining Sect. 54 we find Nietzsche confidently expressing the convictions that "Convictions are prisons" and "Men of conviction are not worthy of the least consideration in fundamental questions of value and disvalue." He goes on to pontificate with great conviction: "Freedom from all kinds of convictions, to be able to see freely, is part of strength." What Nietzsche values above all is freedom for the self to do whatever it wants, without limit or restraint, in pursuit of the happiness which comes from anything that "heightens the feeling of power" (Sect. 2). This is why Nietzsche is so admired today. His emphasis on complete and total "freedom" is pleasing to the ears of those who imagine that happiness is found only in the exaltation of self, self without limit or restraint, and regardless of others. Thus, if a middle-aged man wants to have an affair with a younger woman and leave the fat dumpy mother of his children; if a swindler wants to cheat someone out of their life's savings; if a man wants to seduce a naive and trusting young woman and then abandon her; if a woman wants to neglect her husband and children while she pursues a career of reading trivial and ephemeral news stories in front of a TV camera - they must be allowed to do whatever they like. Any conviction that tells them what they are doing is wrong is a "prison."    Whatever leads to self satisfaction is good, and any moral laws based on a higher spiritual reality that require us to deny ourselves are bad, according to Nietzsche. The idea that sometimes the things we want to do are wrong, and that we get greater happiness by doing good than by doing evil, even if that means denying ourselves, is wholly foreign to this man - and this exaltation of self to the highest possible degree is an integral part of the Holocaust. Anyone who does not see this might just as well stop reading this essay immediately, go turn on the TV set, have a snack, and doze off in front of the football game.    Nietzsche was, as usual, completely wrong here. It is not freedom from all convictions and moral obligations that makes one happy. It is not the complete freedom to do whatever we want without considering others that makes us happy. Although Nietzsche, or even the entire world, should try to deny it, there is a system of moral laws, of right and wrong, which is determined by God. Within the framework of these laws we can live properly, though of course there is more to life than just following rules. Outside of faith in and love toward God, which brings with it obedience, there is the cold emptiness of egotism. At its best, this leads to shallow and complacent lives of short-sighted and petty conceit. At its worst, it inflicts pain and misery on others - and in the end it culminates in a final reckoning on the day of judgement.    But, Nietzsche was convinced otherwise. He thought that faith was born of weakness - and he was strong. Hitler was strong also, and so were Himmler and Eichmann - until their world of lies came crashing down around them, and the higher moral authority of the universe plunged them into ruin, suicide, and (in Nietzsche's case) insanity. Faith, if it is true and living faith, and not merely an intellectual concept, is a clearer way of seeing the self, others, and the world around us. It does require self-abnegation, but it is a healthy and liberating self-abnegation. God is great, and we are small; he is wise, and we are sinful and foolish. Self-abnegation before the eternal truths of God allows us to escape from the prison of self - and self-assertion in defiance of God and his holy and just laws is error and folly.    Many people who admire Nietzsche are too superficial, or too cowardly, to follow his presuppositions through to the end. They cherish the idea of relying only on the self, free from all obligations and restraint - but they do not see where this leads. Nietzsche claimed that those who had faith, and who believed in the concepts of "true" and "untrue" were "fanatics." They are "sick," "the opposition-type of the strong spirit who has become free." How quintessentially modern this is, how relevant to us today. People who believe in Jesus and the bible are "fanatics," and those on the opposite side are the embodiments of calm and dispassionate reason even as they viciously and brutally slaughter millions of unborn babies; even as they use the power of the government to stifle dissenting religious views that are disagreeable to them and make them feel "uncomfortable"; even as they seek to eliminate the slightest public trace of any view they happen to dislike; even as they claim that science has revealed the infallible truth that life is nothing but struggle in which the strong survive and the weak perish, making hardness and pitilessness and cruelty to be virtues, and mercy and pity and forgiveness and concern for others to be vices. Purveyors of sex, pornography, and vice can luridly display the most blatant vice for commercial purposes, and those who object to this on moral grounds are "fanatics."    The fanatical proponents of "reason" cannot tolerate the slightest hint that they might be wrong. This is because their guilty consciences trouble them, and they hate and fear the God they claim to disbelieve in. Nietzsche's freedom from all convictions (except from his own), does not lead to calm, benevolent, open-minded people. It leads to greater intolerance, and in the end to greater oppression, as societies that abandon their old convictions proceed to invent new ones. As has been said, people who reject God do not believe in nothing - they believe in anything. They stumble blindly in the foul-smelling swamp of modernist delusions: Communism, Naziism, Freudianism, Darwinism, hedonism, feminism, immorality, homosexuality, vice, depravity, cruelty, blindness, madness, or (at best) shallow complacency.

As to the alleged fanaticism of Christianity, it has already been said that the Crusades and the Inquisition were limited in time and place, the products of unique social and historical circumstances that have never been repeated. It is the modern enemies of Christianity who have erected colossal totalitarian regimes that make the Inquisition and the Crusades seem minor by comparison - but we are constantly warned of the dangers of religious fanaticism and not of atheist fanaticism. Luther was a fanatic, because he believed in God, though he never harmed anyone - and Stalin? Mao? They embody the modernist dream of man erecting a better world for himself based on reason and logic alone, without God, so the relationship between their disastrous policies and their godlessness is never examined by people who lack intellectual and moral integrity.    Returning to Sect. 55 we see that all convictions are lies, in Nietzsche's fallible (extremely fallible) opinion. Nietzsche's conviction that God did not exist, and that man was henceforth free to pursue his lust for self-magnification was a lie. Nietzsche was too imprisoned in himself to step back and question the belief that "All convictions are lies except for mine, as I am the first to have found the truth in thousands of years." He also objects to some anti-Semites because they have "Respect for all who have convictions," and says "An anti-Semite certainly is not any more decent because he lies as a matter of principle." This is not an objection to anti-Semitism per se, but an objection to anti-Semites who claim to be against Jews but have been infected with Jewish principles (belief in convictions and objective truth, and higher spiritual reality) but do not even know it.    Sect. 56 contains nothing of interest except for a description of the bible as "an ill-smelling Judaine of rabbinism and superstition." The translator's footnote explains that "Judaine" means "Judaism conceived as a poison." Nietzsche then praises "the law of Manu" as being far superior to Christianity, and quotes this passage approvingly: "There is nothing purer than the light of the sun, the shadow of a cow, the air, water, fire, and the breath of a girl." As a Christian, I fail to see the purity of a cow's shadow. Perhaps Nietzsche scholars, or maybe anyone who has rejected belief in God, can see the wisdom of this. Then Nietzsche quotes the law of Manu again, asserting that "The mouth of a woman is always pure" - a strikingly foolish statement that refutes itself. The mouth of no human being, man or woman, is always pure. Parenthetically, an editorial insertion in the online edition of this work referred to in the bibliography says concerning the law of Manu: "From Louis Jacolliot's Les Lgislateurs Religieux, p. 225ff. For the quotes from the 'Law Code of Manu,' Nietzsche used the 'translations' by Jacolliot-who was essentially a crackpot. Jacolliot's work has been discredited...."    Sect. 57 has Nietzsche's praises of elitism: The order of castes, the supreme, the dominant law, is merely the sanction of a natural order, a natural lawfulness of the first rank, over which no arbitrariness, no "modern idea" has any power. In every healthy society there are three types which condition each other and gravitate differently physiologically; each has its own hygiene, its own field of work, its own sense of perfection and mastery. Nature, not Manu, distinguishes the pre- eminently spiritual ones, those who are preeminently strong in muscle and temperament, and those, the third type, who excel neither in one respect nor in the other, the mediocre ones-the last as the great majority, the first as the elite. The highest caste-I call them the fewest-being perfect, also has the privileges of the fewest: among them, to represent happiness, beauty, and graciousness on earth. Only to the most spiritual human beings is beauty permitted: among them alone is graciousness not weakness.

The members of the highest caste are happy, gracious, beautiful, and perfect - like Nietzsche. Notice that they are not "weak." Beneath them we have the warriors, then the common people - a conviction of Nietzsche's which imprisoned him and prevented him from understanding the biblical truth that every individual has spiritual worth because of the divine origin of the human soul. This attitude is repeated elsewhere in Nietzsche's approval of slavery as a social system - after all, as he preaches with firm and self-confident conviction in this same section, "The inequality of rights is the first condition for the existence of any rights at all."    The spiritual elite are also "the strongest" (italics are Nietzsche's): "The most spiritual men, as the strongest, find their happiness where others would find their destruction: in the labyrinth, in hardness against themselves and others, in experiments" - medical experiments? Medical experiments on the weak, the failures, the unfit? Moreover, "As one climbs higher, life becomes ever harder-the coldness increases, responsibility increases." That describes Hitler well, one of the happiest men on earth according to Nietzsche, because happiness increases as the feeling of power increases (Sect. 2). But, this "does not preclude their being the most cheerful and the kindliest." Thus, Hitler could be hard, but also cheerful and kindly with dogs and little blond children and close associates who never contradicted him. Heinrich Himmler could also be cheerful and kindly - with certain people. As Nietzsche asserts in this section, "When the exceptional human being treats the mediocre more tenderly than himself and his peers, this is not mere politeness of the heart-it is simply his duty...." But with the fourth category of people, not mentioned in this section but referred to in Sect. 2, with "the weak and the failures," then it is necessary to be hard: "The weak and the failures shall perish: first principle of our love of man. And they shall even be given every possible assistance. What is more harmful than any vice?- Active pity for all the failures and all the weak-Christianity."    In Sect. 58 Nietzsche asserts that "One may posit a perfect equation between Christian and anarchist: their aim, their instinct, are directed only toward destruction." As is so often the case with Nietzsche, the reverse is true. It is his views that lead to destruction, and Christianity that has contributed to the most stable, prosperous, and free societies the world has ever known (although of course in this sinful and evil world, those societies were and have been very far from ideal).    This section also has a slighting reference to the Teuton "louts" who overthrew the Roman Empire. Aryan supremacy is not mentioned in this work. He has been quoted by others as stating (in the Genealogy of Morals) his preference for the blond Teuton beast. Perhaps in his mentally confused state he was annoyed at the Germans, or at the German nationalists, who  failed to honor him as the greatest genius and truth-teller to come along in two thousand years. Or maybe he was angry at the Germans because after destroying the empire they allowed themselves to be infected by the Jewish-Christian poison and converted to Christianity.    We also find yet more attacks on the Jews, which shed light on some of Hitler's comments in his previously quoted speech of 1922. Hitler said, "I have the duty to see to it that human society does not suffer the same catastrophic collapse as did the civilization of the ancient world some two thousand years ago - a civilization which was driven to its ruin through this same Jewish people." Nietzsche says (still in Sect. 58) that "Christianity was the vampire of the imperium Romanum-overnight it undid the tremendous deed of the Romans" and describes Christianity as "disintegrating, poisoning, withering, bloodsucking." It was Christianity, according to Nietzsche, which destroyed the Roman Empire; the Romans were not firm enough against the most corrupt kind of corruption, against the Christians...This stealthy vermin which sneaked up to every single one in the night, in fog and ambiguity, and sucked out of each single one the seriousness for true things and any instinct for realities-this cowardly, effeminate, and saccharine pack alienated "souls" step by step from that tremendous structure-those valuable, those virile, noble natures who found their own cause, their own seriousness, their own pride in the cause of Rome.

It was the Christian vermin who destroyed Rome - and it must be remembered that Nietzsche considered Christianity to be the direct expression of Judaism. Thus, it was really the Jews who in Nietzsche's opinion were corrupt, poisoning, bloodsucking vermin; Hitler's speech about the Jews having destroyed ancient civilization fits with this perfectly, and should not be dismissed as nothing more than eccentric paranoia. It was, according to Nietzsche anyway, the Jews who destroyed the glories of ancient Rome through the medium of Christianity - but Hitler referred only to the Jews because, as has been said earlier, he was careful not to alienate large numbers of potential voters (not that these potential voters were all serious Christians who believed in dying to self, taking up the cross, and walking in the straight and narrow way of Jesus Christ according to the leading of the Holy Spirit, but they had in varying degrees at least some respect for a residual cultural or theoretical Christianity). Still in the same section, Nietzsche again draws attention to the Jewish nature of Christianity, asserting that Paul was a "Jew, the eternal wandering Jew par excellence." Nietzsche and Hitler are in complete agreement on a significant point - it was the Christian-Jewish bloodsuckers who destroyed the Roman Empire. This must not be allowed to happen again - and what is the best way to deal with vermin? This also explains Hitler's statements that the victory of the Jews in the racial struggle would mean the end of civilization. This book of Nietzsche's contains the theoretical and philosophical base for Hitler's pronouncements against the Jews as enemies of civilization. Nietzsche's ideas were dynamite, as he said - but dynamite does not build, it only destroys.    Sect. 59 has some comments about the Greeks and Romans that are of no importance, as Nietzsche was fundamentally alienated from the deepest spiritual qualities of the ancient world and had no real understanding of ancient culture (though he liked the sound of his own voice and babbled freely about tragedy, Plato, Dionysius, and whatnot). Sect. 60 can also be passed over, except for a comment about the Germans. Nietzsche voices his opinion that the Germans lacked nobility because they had been corrupted by Christianity - but if he could have seen the Germans purified from the corruptions of Christianity, rising up free from guilt, morality, ethics, and conscience, fierce, warlike, hard, pitiless, cruel, he would have had something different to say. He also says "I do not understand how a German could ever have Christian feelings," showing that he felt Christianity to be incompatible with the German character - one of the key tenets of the Volkists.    Sect. 61 contains more criticism of the Germans: "The Germans have cheated Europe out of the last great cultural harvest which Europe could still have brought home-that of the Renaissance." This has to do with Luther. Instead of objecting to the corruption of the papacy, Luther should have rejoiced in it: Luther saw the corruption of the papacy when precisely the opposite was more than obvious: the old corruption, the peccatum originale, Christianity no longer sat on the papal throne! But life! But the triumph of life! But the great Yes to all high, beautiful, audacious things! ... And Luther restored the church: he attacked it ... By reforming the church Luther gave it new life, in Nietzsche's eyes, whereas if the corruption of the church had continued unchecked, "that would have been the victory which alone I crave today-: with that, Christianity would have been abolished!" Thus his hostility to the Germans was due to their having revived Christianity when it was on the point of disappearing amid the corruptions of the papacy, and then persisting in following Christianity (however imperfectly, it was still too much for Nietzsche). Thus his hostility to the Germans was due to their having succumbed to Jewish corruption. This was in no way inconsistent with the Nazi agenda - and quotes from Nietzsche that are critical of Germans because of their submission to Christianity are often used to show that Nietzsche had nothing to do with the doctrine of German superiority, when in fact Nietzsche's ideas as expressed in the Antichrist  present many of Naziism's core spiritual values, and give us deep insights into the mind of Hitler.    Sect. 62, the final section, offers a lot of opportunity for comment. The puny little mortal Nietzsche stamps his foot and angrily shakes his fist at God, the maker of heaven and earth. He says "I pronounce my judgement. I condemn Christianity. I raise against the Christian church the most terrible of all accusations that any accuser ever uttered. It is to me the highest of all conceivable corruptions." It should be remembered that the Jews are to blame for this - to Nietzsche, the Jews were the enemy of humanity. The Jewish instinct was, in Nietzsche's twilight world, "against life itself" [italics Nietzsche's]. Thus the failure to defeat the Jewish threat would lead to the destruction of mankind and civilization, which of course is exactly what Hitler believed. My view is that this book of Nietzsche's gives us the philosophical basis for Hitler's anti-Semitism, but instead of a lengthy refutation, I am content to raise against Nietzsche the worst accusation that can ever be raised against a philosopher - he was mistaken. His premisses are false, his conclusions are wrong, and his entire book is void of significance except as it sheds light on Hitler and on the follies of the modern age. The prophet Isaiah has some fitting words here:

Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter! Woe unto them that are wise in their own eyes, and prudent in their own sight... Therefore as the fire devours the stubble, and the flame consumes the chaff, so their root shall be as rottenness, and their blossom shall go up as dust: because they have cast away the law of the Lord of hosts, and despised the word of the Holy One of Israel.     Malachi, another Old Testament prophet, has some applicable words: For, behold, the day comes, that shall burn as an oven; and all the proud, yea, and all that do wickedly, shall be stubble: and the day that comes shall burn them up, says the Lord of hosts, that it shall leave them neither root nor branch.    Yet, Nietzsche has his defenders. As was said earlier, they share his presuppositions, and agree with his idea of man as totally free to pursue his own egotistical desires without restraint. They do not see the logical consequences of this "philosophy," and blithely explain away or ignore the darkly cruel and evil aspects of Nietzsche's work. They lack either the intelligence or the integrity to live consistently with their presuppositions - and this is one of the truly unique aspects of Hitler that has been insignificantly commented upon. He was able to put into practice ideas that others had previously only discussed in theory - and thus he was, as Nietzsche said in Sect. 3, a "higher type," "dreaded" and "dreadful."    It might be possible to stop here, but attempts to clear Nietzsche of the charge of anti-Semitism call for some comment. The Antichrist drips with venom and malice toward Jews - but, say some, Nietzsche's brother-in-law was an anti-Semite and Nietzsche didn't like him. Therefore, Nietzsche wasn't an anti-Semite. But what if Nietzsche didn't like his brother-in-law for some other reason? Even people who agree in theory on religious, political, or philosophical principles can come to dislike each other intensely for personal reasons.    Nietzsche's comment about anti-Semitism in his essay Nietzsche Contra Wagner seems definitive at first: "Wagner had moved to Germany, he had condescended step by step to everything I despise-even to anti-Semitism . . . It was indeed high time to say farewell"  [http://www.geocities.com/thenietzschechannel/ncw.htm], but for those who are familiar with Nietzsche's ideas as expressed in The Antichrist the question is not as simple as it seems.    In Sect. 8 of that essay, Nietzsche expressed his hostility not only to theologians, but to "whatever has theologian's blood in its veins - and that includes our whole philosophy." This can be found "wherever a right is assumed, on the basis of some higher origin, to look at reality from a superior and foreign vantage point." This was one of the main ideas of the Volkish movement, derived from German romantic idealist philosophy - that there was a higher spiritual reality at work in the world. Even if this philosophy led as we have seen to hostility toward Jews, it was itself infected with Judaism according to Nietzsche, superficial and inconsistent. This explains his rejection of traditional German antisemitism in spite of his own deep hatred of Jews. Hence his statement in Sect. 10 about philosophy having been corrupted by theology - "Kant's success was merely a theologians' success." It is with this in mind that we have to understand Nietzsche's criticism of Wagner's antisemitism.    The main thrust of Nietzsche's objection to Wagner as expressed in the essay has to do with what Viereck calls Wagner's " 'collapse before the Cross' in Parsifal" [p. 185]. Wagner's "apostasy and reversion to sickly Christian and obscurantist ideals," his "self-abnegation," his "self-crossing out" were what provoked Nietzsche's anger most extensively in the essay. "Did the hatred against life become dominant in him, as in Flaubert? . . . For Parsifal is a work of perfidy, of vindictiveness, of a secret attempt to poison the presuppositions of life-a bad work. The preaching of chastity remains an incitement to anti-nature." Hatred against life was what Nietzsche had accused Jews and Christians of - that Wagner should in theory be opposed to the Jews while himself being infected with Jewish values provoked Nietzsche's comment. The fragmentary nature of the essay did not allow for an extended explanation on Nietzsche's part, but from The Antichrist it is clear what Nietzsche felt about Jews; hence his condemnation of the prevalent antisemitism of his day, which he saw as being itself influenced by Judaism. Trotsky and Stalin both objected to capitalism, but were bitterly opposed to each other nonetheless. Wagner and Nietzsche both hated Jews, but Wagner's traditional anti-Semitism was ludicrous to Nietzsche since Wagner was, like other German anti-Semites (in Nietzsche's view), espousing Jewish values at the same time.

Naturally, some will object to this analysis of Nietzsche's comment and insist on taking it at face value - but an entire book in which the Jewish "problem" is one of the main themes should not be cancelled out by a single sentence; especially when that sentence can easily be understood to be a condemnation not of all anti-Semitism, but only of the accepted variety of it. But Nietzsche wrote after his breakdown that "all anti-Semites should be shot"! It is impossible to say if that was merely the ravings of a lunatic, having nothing to do with his more considered opinions, or if he had a rare moment of lucidity in which he realized too late the contemptible nature of his foolish ideas and wasted life, or if he was referring to anti-Semites that held to such Jewish ideas as the existence of a higher spiritual reality (even if that spiritual reality were only of the Volkish variety, it was Jewish in Nietzsche's eyes). Did Nietzsche in the same essay against Wagner refer to the "Jewish heroic trait" in Handel's music, though? His appreciation for the warlike Old Testament Hebrews with their imaginary god that was nevertheless the projection of a "healthy" consciousness has already been referred to.    Someone might protest that Nietzsche made negative comments about the Germans, so therefore he had nothing to do with Hitler. The Nazis also made negative comments about the Germans. What was their slogan "Germany, awake!" if not a statement that Germany and the Germans were sleeping? Hitler had many negative things to say about Germans who failed to agree with him or who represented the despised status quo that he had dedicated himself to destroying. He also had negative things to say about the Germans toward the end of his life when he considered them to have failed in the struggle for survival. Wagner also had a low opinion of bourgeois Wilhelmine Germany. He and Nietzsche objected to what the Germans had become since the introduction of Christianity, and advocated not the worthlessness of the Germans but rather a reawakening of the old pre-Christian German ethic of joyous plundering and pillaging. Nietzsche was also contemptuous of those who clung to traditional values and failed to acknowledge his genius.    One curious feature of the essay against Wagner is Nietzsche's praise of Heine. This is not as important as it might seem, since Heine had abandoned the Jewish-Christian values that were such an anathema to Nietzsche. Also, Heine was hostile to the reactionary forces dominant in Germany. If Nietzsche wanted to express his contempt for the status quo that failed to appreciate him, speaking well of Heine would have been a good way to do it. Moreover, Nietzsche was not always entirely consistent in his thought, and in a number of instances appears to have been motivated more by personal and emotional than by objective intellectual considerations.     But, there is the tactic of arguing that any unfavorable comments of Nietzsche's are being taken "out of context," and then giving a strained and contrived example of "de-contextualization" that has nothing to do with any of the real issues. Many such arguments are nothing but clever evasions. Nietzsche's basic positions are clear on all key points relating to this essay. But, maybe his sister altered his works after his death? They certainly must have lent themselves to such doctoring - and there is rich irony in a man who boasted of his unique philosophical brilliance, and who moreover despised women, having his work rewritten by his sister. If his sister had not to some unknown and unknowable extent changed his works, would we read Nietzsche saying "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," or "Love your neighbor as you love yourself," or quoting Paul to the effect that love is patient, love is kind?    Other arguments have been made in support of the idea that Nietzsche was opposed to at least some of Hitler's ideas; for example, one individual argued that Nietzsche was opposed to socialism but Hitler was in favor of socialism. Someone who is unaware of the difference between the two completely different kinds of socialism on the left and on the right - Hitler's right-wing version being a euphemism designed to appeal to the masses and meaning only total state control - is badly informed at best, and deliberately deceptive at worst. The same person argued that Nietzsche was an atheist while Hitler made numerous references to religion. Hitler's religion has already been partially examined - more will be said about it in the discussion of Ernst Haeckel's religion of science and nature. It was a sort of religion that Nietzsche would have had no difficulty with, allowing as it did the complete indulgence of that "will to power" which Nietzsche thought was the highest reality and secret of happiness.    This concludes the brief overview of The Antichrist, except for the first few sections which, it may be recalled, were omitted. Glancing at them, we are confronted at the very outset with elitism. In the Preface we find that the book is written for the very few. Those who reverence only themselves, and love themselves, and seek freedom for themselves, who have contempt for the rest of mankind (that lacks strength and "loftiness of soul"),  who know no other law beyond the self - these are Nietzsche's predestined readers.

In Section 1 Nietzsche informs us that he has found the way to happiness. It is to reject the "lazy peace, cowardly compromise," and "virtuous uncleanliness" of the weak and decadent modern age. It is better to "live in the ice" than among modern virtues, in the cold winds of harsh and uncompromising reality than in the comforts of false virtues. It is not hard here to imagine Hitler on the icy pinnacle of his greatness, in the cold winds of harsh reality, looking down with supreme contempt on the common people far below with their comfortable and comforting delusions of morals and ethics. There is also a thirst "for lightning and deeds," the gratification of which was one of Hitler's chief appeals to his spiritually starved followers.    In Sect. 2 Nietzsche informs us what is good: What is good?- Everything that heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to power, power itself... ...What is happiness?- The feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome. Not contentedness but more power; not peace but war... Thus, as Hitler's power increased, his happiness increased, and he gained more and more happiness for himself as he rose higher and higher in lofty contempt and icy indifference for the rabble beneath the heights of his greatness. The Nazi death camp guards must also have been supremely happy, with the extraordinary degree of power they had. No doubt it made them feel like demi-gods, to have such authority over the lesser and inferior beings beneath them. This is why Nietzsche here praises war - to conquer and destroy was the ultimate assertion of power in those days, and therefore good, death camps being too far out of view down the road of progress for Nietzsche to praise them as the ultimate in happiness (for the guards at any rate).    Nietzsche also reveals the opposite of happiness - weakness. "What is bad?- Everything that is born of weakness...What is more harmful than any vice?- Active pity for all the failures and all the weak-Christianity." Furthermore, "The weak and the failures shall perish: first principle of our love of man. And they shall even be given every possible assistance." This is full of deep meaning for those who want to understand the Holocaust. The weak and the unfit shall perish, and this is done out of love for humanity. It is a positive good to eliminate the weak, the unfit, the failures, and "they shall be given every possible assistance" - including Zyklon B?    In Sect. 3 Nietzsche speaks of breeding a higher type of man: "but what type of man shall be bred, shall be willed, for being higher in value, worthier of life, more certain of a future"? This is a deep question for the philosopher to ponder. We are also informed that this higher type is "dreaded," "dreadful" to the weak, the passive, the herd, the inferior. And were not Hitler and his legions dreadful? This is elaborated on in Sect. 4 where we are informed that the higher type may be an individual, but "even whole families, tribes, or peoples may occasionally represent such a bull's-eye." This section also contains that repudiation of progress that has often been remarked upon as a striking feature of National Socialism.    In his already referred to book on the persecution of the churches, J.S. Conway cites a contemporary report: "As a general principle all priests and Jews in concentration camps are assigned to the so-called penal platoons, which have to do the worst work and are subjected to the worst treatment, so that they provide the largest percentage of deaths..." [p.298]. Nietzsche's Antichrist explains as no other book why the priests should have been assigned to work with the Jews.

Nietzsche and Hitler

Turning to the different subject of a direct link between Hitler and Nietzsche, there is credible evidence that as a young man Hitler read widely, if haphazardly. One example of this is found in Frank's biography. Referring to Hitler's lifestyle after he moved to Munich before 1914, Franks refers to the Popps, the couple from whom Hitler rented a room. Citing another historian (Werner Maser) he writes: For a young man, Hitler surprised the Popps by his aloofness. Whenever they offered him the advantage of joining them for supper or conversation he often found an excuse to refuse. As in Vienna he never became overly friendly and could not be induced to talk about himself. Mrs. Popp noticed that he seldom received mail from Austria and when he did it was usually from his "sister." There were times when he would just stay in his room for days painting or "with his nose buried in heavy books"* he obtained from the Bavarian State Library which was a fifteen minute walk from his room. Mrs. Popp noted that he often "read and studied from morning to night." She noticed that the books covered a wide variety of subjects including politics, and once asked Hitler what he expected to gain by all that reading. Hitler, she said, smiled and took her by the arm and while walking beside her said: "Dear Frau Popp, does anyone know what is, or what isn't, likely to be of use to him in the future?" [II.7]      Hitler's practice of reading Schopenhauer during the war has been referred to. Any soldier who could take an interest in a ponderous German pseudo-philosopher while serving in the trenches was of an intellectual bent. Furthermore, the following passage from Mein Kampf reveals something of Hitler's attitude toward books and toward reading. These are clearly not the reflections of an illiterate man. A man who possesses the art of correct reading will, in studying any book, magazine, or pamphlet, instinctively and immediately perceive everything which in his opinion is worth permanently remembering, either because it is suited to his purpose or generally worth knowing ... Then, if life suddenly sets some question before us for examination or answer, the memory, if this method of reading is observed ... will derive all the individual items regarding these questions, assembled in the course of decades, [and] submit them to the mind for examination and reconsideration, until the question is clarified or answered [www.fpp.co.uk/Hitler/library/Atlantic_Monthly.html].

The same source gives other evidence of Hitler's tendency to read widely: BOOKS, books, always books!" August Kubizek once wrote. "I just can't imagine Adolf without books. He had them piled up around him at home. He always had a book with him wherever he went." Kubizek, Hitler's only real friend in his teenage years, recalled after the war that Hitler had been registered with three libraries in Linz, where he attended school, and had passed endless days in the baroque splendor of the Hofbibliothek, the former court library of the Hapsburgs, during his time in Vienna. "Bcher waren seine Welt," Kubizek wrote. "Books were his world." Though Kubizek's reminiscences, first published in the 1950s, are in many ways suspect, his depiction of the future Fhrer as a bibliophile has been amply corroborated. One of Hitler's first cousins, Johann Schmidt, recounted for a Nazi Party history of the Fhrer that when Hitler spent summers with relatives in the tiny Waldviertel hamlet of Spital, he invariably arrived with "lots of books in which he was constantly busy reading and working." Hans Frank, Hitler's personal lawyer and the "governor" of Nazi-occupied Poland, recalled before his 1946 execution at Nuremberg that Hitler carried a copy of Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation with him throughout World War I. During his incarceration after the failed 1923 Munich putsch, Hitler was regularly supplied with reading materials by friends and associates. He once referred to his time in Landsberg Prison as his "university paid for by the state."    Given the fact that Hitler openly expressed his admiration for Nietzsche, it is hard to believe that he never read any of his books. It is also clear that Nietzsche and Hitler were kindred spirits, vicious, evil, and brutal men with disgusting pseudo-philosophies of lies and hatred. Nietzsche's Zarathustra was according to one source issued in large quantities to German troops in WWI - along, paradoxically, with the bible. The one was meant to instill the soldiers with Nietzsche's hardness, cruelty, and love of war. The bible was meant to instill them with loyalty and obedience to the Kaiser, one of the main emphases of the state-controlled Lutheran Church. Frank has an interesting passage in connection with this: During quiet times in his sector, Hitler, one of his comrades noted, "always had a book spread out in front of him,"* which he carried in his back pack. He still refused to read popular novels or short stories, since he considered them frivolous, and he had nothing but contempt for seedy works. "I hated nothing more than trash literature,"* Hitler would later tell an acquaintance. As in all wars, young men who had never seriously thought about God, and even those who had claimed earlier to be atheists, turned to God for comfort. Hitler was no exception. In an early letter to Mr. Popp, Hitler ask him to "please save the newspaper" that noted his Iron Cross award because he wanted to "have it as a keepsake if the Lord should spare my life."* He also turned to the Bible for comfort and read the "Gospels." Finding little comfort ("turning of both cheeks is not a very good recipe for the front" he would later write), he abandoned the Bible and because as he said, "war forces one to think deeply about human nature,"* turned to philosophy [III.9]. At any rate, if Zarathustra was issued in large numbers to German troops, Hitler would certainly have come across it, given his interest in reading, the frequent periods of tedium of a soldier's life, and the shortage of other reading material. Reading it, he must have been deeply attracted to (if not inspired by) its ugliness and brutality. However, even if it could be proven (which it cannot) that Hitler never read a line of Nietzsche, the deep parallels in their thinking show them to have derived their basic approach to life from the same source - the devil himself.    Fortunately, there is no need for Christians to be too perturbed by such things. God's celestial throne remains unshaken, and untouched by any taint of human imperfection.

A brief overview

It will be recalled that the purpose of this essay was not to explain the origins of National Socialism. The purpose was to demonstrate the assertion that the Holocaust had nothing to do with the teachings of Christ and the apostles. The first two sections of this study might perhaps have been sufficient for that, but the question naturally arises: if the Holocaust did not come out of Christianity even partially, then where did it come from - or, more precisely, where did the beliefs that led to the Holocaust come from?    This essay attempts in the third part to point (not exhaustively, but it is hoped substantively) to the secular roots of National Socialist ideology. National Socialism is a result of the modern rejection of Christianity, as this manifested itself in the unique context of modern Germany. This qualification is obvious but necessary, since rejecting Christianity and accepting the key principles of modernism do not of course automatically lead to National Socialism.    It was also asserted that key elements of the Holocaust can be found in the writings of three men: Wagner, Nietzsche, and Haeckel. Wagner's contribution was not unique to himself, but rather representative of a broad social movement, the Volkish movement,  which Mosse considers to be the chief source of National Socialism. Nietzsche's thought has some important elements in common with the Volkish movement: overt repudiation of Christianity; hostility to Jews ("hostility" being an understatement in Nietzsche's case); a desire to return to the imagined virtues of pre-Christian paganism; and rejection of modern western civilization (including such Jewish plots as democracy, a free press, and individual liberty).    Nietzsche also added other vital ingredients to the poisonous mixture that was to have such a potent effect on the German mind - naked viciousness and brutality, hatred of good, and love of evil. In Nietzsche, everything that makes for a decent and meaningful life is trampled underfoot and rejected with snarling malice, while cruelty, selfishness, and the most unbridled megalomania are exalted as virtues. There are numerous examples of this in Nietzsche's other works. They can always be explained away by those who accept Nietzsche's fundamental premiss of man's total freedom from any higher authority, control or obligation, but the negative aspects of his work are clear to see. One could write a great deal on the darker aspects of Nietzsche's books, but that would require reading more of his works, which tedium and disgust prevent me from doing. Others who have waded through Nietzsche's works have made summaries - I quote a few comments from one such summary by Stefan Steinberg below. The names sounds Jewish - hopefully no disciples of Nietzsche will dismiss it as a clever Semitic trick:

The impact of Gobineau's ideas is almost certainly apparent in Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals (1887) . Beginning with the claim that the genealogical method is the correct one, Nietzsche states: "In Latin malus ... could indicate the common man as the dark one, especially as the black-haired one, as the pre-Aryan dweller of the Italian soil which distinguished itself most clearly through his colour from blonds who became their masters, namely the Aryan conquering race"... ...Nietzsche continues: "These carriers of the most humiliating and vengeance-seeking instincts, the descendants of all European and non-European slavery, especially of the pre-Aryan people-they represent mankind's regression!" And finally Nietzsche concludes with a hymn of praise to the "blond Germanic beast": "At heart in these predominant races we cannot mistake the bird of prey, the blond beast who lusts after booty and victory.... The deep, icy mistrust the German brings forth when he comes to power, even today, is an echo of the indelible outrage with which Europe looked on the rage of the blond Germanic beast for hundreds of years." Let us be absolutely clear about what Nietzsche is saying in these passages. According to his thesis socialists, democrats and the broad masses of society are the products of the most primitive form of pre-Aryan society. Their very existence threatens the purity of the Aryan master race, the blond beast. In Zarathustra, Nietzsche has already declared that the preservation of the over-man (Ubermensch) is the highest good and justifies: "the greatest evil"[www.wsws.org/articles/2000/oct2000/niet-o21.shtml]. The basic ideas of The Antichrist, which some might be inclined to dismiss as the ramblings of a diseased mind, are consistent with Nietzsche's earlier works, and represent the most thorough and complete possible rejection of the Judaeo-Christian heritage that used to underlie so much of European civilization. A few more excerpts from the same source are illustrative: "Life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, overpowering of what is alien and weaker; suppression, hardness, imposition of one's own forms, incorporation and at least, at its mildest, exploitation" ( Beyond Good and Evil, 1886)[6]... For Nietzsche communism and the dissemination of culture amongst the broad masses meant the end of culture. His preferred social order for the preservation of art was a slave-type of society: "In order that there may be a broad, deep and fruitful soil for the development of art, the enormous majority must, in the service of a minority, be slavishly subjected to life's struggle, to a greater degree than their own wants necessitate" ( Writings on the Greek State)... ...In notes for one of his last works Nietzsche articulates his alternative to the threat of socialism on the one hand and a society based on the mere acquisition of wealth on the other. He calls for the introduction of a strict order of rank to ensure the domination of a governing aristocratic elite-his favoured social order: slavery. "In this age of suffrage universel, i.e., when everyone may sit in judgement on everyone and everything, I feel impelled to re-establish order of rank .... Though it is true that the Greeks perished through slavery, it is even more certain that we shall perish from no longer having slavery.... What a comfort it is to think upon the serf of the Middle Ages, with the vigorous and delicate legal and moral relations that united him with his lord, in the narrowness so rich with sense of his limited existence" (notes to The Will to Power 1888). And in the same vein: "Slavery must not be abolished; it is necessity. We only need to see to it that the men emerge for whom one will work."[4] The essays written by Nietzsche in the last five years of his sane life are suffused with contempt for the broad masses of humanity, Malthusian diatribes against equality and "inferior" humanity, hymns of praise to militarism and the merits of war together with his advocacy of the "new man"-the Ubermensch (the over-man or superman). According to Nietzsche, slavery and exploitation corresponded to the natural state of affairs: "Hatred, the mischievous delight in the misfortune of others, the lust to rob and dominate and whatever else is called evil belongs to the most amazing economy of the preservation of the species" ( The Gay Science, 1882). Nietzsche has only contempt for broad masses of the population which he denotes as mere "rabble". A chapter of his Thus Spake Zarathustra is dedicated to "the rabble", and he writes: "Life is a fountain of delight, but where the rabble also drinks all wells are poisoned" ( Of the Rabble) [www.wsws.org/articles/2000/oct2000/niet-o20.shtml].    There is much of the Holocaust here, but some other elements that are lacking can be found in 19th-century pseudo-science. This gave National Socialism a depth and a driving power, a certainty born of an all-encompassing "scientific" world view, which could never have come from the trends represented by Nietzsche's and Wagner's philosophies alone. To understand how science could be corrupted and put to the service of unscientific ideals, it is necessary to examine the writings of one of Germany's leading scientific authorities of the time.

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