Replies

In the Russian revolution, Tsarist centralisation and oppression of the peasantry were succeeded by a more powerful Marxist-Leninist centralisation and the physical liquidation of the peasantry under Stalin.
'Nations as well as men', de Tocqueville observed, 'almost always betray the most prominent features of their future destiny in their earliest years." The distinguishing feature of Prussia had always been its Army, the distinguishing feature of the Prussian Army its discipline. In the eighteenth century Prussia was described not as a state supporting an army but as an army supporting a state. As soldiers existed to serve the state. The more the materialist or plainly subversive attitudes were spread with the growth of industry, the more the Prussian ruling class, feeling threatened, exaggerated their state-centred warrior code.

Its expression changed with the changing intellectual world of the nineteenth century. Darwin had the most striking effect. 'The struggle for existence' and 'the survival of the fittest' had obvious resonances in a soldier state. Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton, helped to focus them by applying the principles of selection to human society. Arguing that medicine and civilisation acted against natural selection by protecting the unfit and eroding the pressure to adapt, he proposed that human breeding be guided to favour the better stock. He called his porposals Eugenics.

Nietzsche raised Galton's pseudo-science into moral (or super-moral) philosophy. Assuming that traditional ideas of God were myths and Christian morality a set of myths designed by the weak to protect themselves against the strong, a 'slave morality' that tamed, weakened, emasculated the vigorous natural impulses of man, he maintained that nothing was true, hence everything was permitted - a theory of relativity in values that naturally followed the removal of any fixed points of reference such as God or morality. He destroyed the logic of the argument - not that he valued logic or reason - by assuming that the theory of evolution was true and that, while the laws of morality were a tissue of inventions, the laws of heredity were also true. Thus he defined truth - and in the most unsubtle, unscientific and materialistic manner. However, it permitted him to insert, in place of God, man as evolved into Superman. Put another way, if there was not God - and evidently there was not – there was no will of God, only man’s will.

Schopenhauer had previously identified will as the reality behind all apperances - not individual will, that was an illusion, but a vast universal will which permeated all creation. Man's will was a fraction of this cosmic will, part of the oneness of the universe. Nietzsche defined the universal will - which in Schopenhauer had no end or purpose - in a Darwinistic sense as the will to power: "This world is the will to power - and nothing else.' He defined the Superman who must necessarily result from the will to power when everything is permitted as the antithesis of the masses, whom he called the 'bungled and botched'. The Superman conquered and ruled the masses as he conquered and ruled himself, the world, even destiny, to become master of the world.

It is no coincidence that Nietzsche's hero was Bonaparte. His Superman is little more than the idealisation or fantasy of the warrior-hero and Supermachiavelli combined, employing violence and cunning, cruelty and crime, although there was no conventional 'crime' in Nietzsche's system - only the will to power.

Nietzsche went mad in 1888. He was, of course, mad all the time; his writings were inspired revelations from the deepest subconscious levels of his own pysche which mirrored the culture that produced him. Since that culture was about to burst forth on the world stage they were also extraordinary books of prophecy touched with genius. That he was not a Prussian Junker, but the bourgeois son of a Protestant pastor, or that others from other cultures expressed similar views are beside the point. He was expressing in extreme, grotesque form the masculine, martial code that inspired Bismarck in the Prussian Wars of unification, and by stirring in the new 'laws' of evolutionary biology justified intellectually the compulsions of a warrior caste. Had his visions not corresponded to those of his countrymen he would not have spawned so many in his own image;

Some of the most pernicious of these concerned breeding to produce a race of Supermen. Nietzsche proposed choosing the best racial specimens for breeding, but prohibiting the reproduction of the unfit, sterilising criminals and annihilating misfits. Such a programme of 'race hygiene' was espoused towards the end of the century by Alfred Ploetz, who prefaced his book THE FITNESS OF OUR RACE with a quotation from Nietzsche, 'Upward leads our way from the Species into the Superspecies'. Ploetz followed Galton and his English successors in seeing disease as a positive selecting out of the unfit, hence like them he perceived a fundamental contradiction between mordern medicine and the health of the race. Since the race stood higher in his order of things than the individual, he proposed that the health of the individual be subordinated to race hygiene. In 1904 he founded the Society for Race Hygiene which sought to publicise practical ways in which this principle could be realized; they included new marriage laws and a new concept of sexual morality which would encourage the most fit to propagate the greatest number of children. Combined with the sterilization of the Minderwertigen, or inferior specimens, this would breed in the best, select out the worst and so improve the racial gene pool. The highest race was assumed to be the white race, the highest branch the Aryan. Aryans were to bred like stallions into a Superspecies.

Padfield "Himmler" pg 32-33