A conversation about Nazis, Nietzche, and social Darwinism
From a Facebook conversation...
(If you're wondering why I'm doing Me: and then Me: without any Lilla: between them,1 it's because I'm marking the beginnings of individual Facebook comments.)
Lilla's original post: Read through all the optionses, there are some that are very specific *to* tolerance even though they are open to the option of *not* tolerating certain groups. Take a look. (Nazis etc.)
Me, commenting: Being a Nazi is not a religion.
Lilla: Actually, yes it is. The Neo-Nazi movement members worship Hitler as their God.
Me: I find this amusing, seeing as Adolf "Uniball" Hitler was basically the Polish equivalent of the "inbred Appalachian hick" stereotype, with the worst case of daddy issues ever. Freud would have gotten several dozen books out of psychoanalyzing Uniball's obsession with wiping out his daddy's whole race.
(Hitler's father was also his uncle; Hitler Senior married his niece and the result was little Adolf. Little Adolf was beat mercilessly but was always not quite right in the head. As an artist, he was mediocre. He would have died a mediocre artist, but he just HAD to get into politics.)
Me: The fact that the Nazis actually worship him is thus faintly amusing. But if Nazism has mutated into a religion, then this is one religion I wouldn't mind watching its practitioners being rounded up and locked away forevermore in Gitmo.
Lilla: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCXApAp9XGg&skipcontrinter=1
"The ideological origins of Nazism derive from Romanticism, nineteenth-century idealism, and a eugenic interpretation of Friedrich Nietzsche's concepts of "breeding upwards" - towards the Übermensch ("Superman"). Such ideas, as espoused by the Ariosophical Germanenorden (German Order) and the Thule Society much influenced Adolf Hitler's world-view."
Me: NEANDERTHAL PRIDE! We are Neanderthals and damned proud of it! All you Homo Sapiens Sapiens can go back to Africa where you came from!
(I apologize for any insult to real Neanderthals.)
Me: Yes, and Nietzsche would be fucking PISSED AS FUCK and rolling in his grave at that fact, if he isn't already. Because he HATED racists. Here, I'll quote Cracked.com's article about it:
"If Nietzsche wasn't too busy being dead, he would probably have had a few words with Hitler about the fuehrer's liberal interpretation of his work, due mainly to the fact that Nietzsche hung around with entirely the wrong crowd. His sister, Elisabeth, and good friend, composer Richard Wagner, were both as Nazi as the goose-step.
After Nietzsche died, Elisabeth inherited the rights to his works and went about diligently re-editing them with a "kill all the Jews" subtext. It didn't help that Nietzsche's thought-baton was then picked up by the philosopher Martin Heidegger -- you guessed it: Nazi.
Nietzsche actually hated anti-Semites, having refused to attend his sister's wedding because she was marrying a Nazi, and even wrote that "anti-Semites should be shot." We have his sister to thank for the "blond beast" confusion. She, Hitler and decades of disapproving philosophy students interpret this as an allusion to the Aryan race. In fact, Nietzsche was just describing lions.
And as for the "superman" thing, rather than referring to some genetically pure German dictator, Nietzsche was just making a generic statement about people who believe in the subjectivity of morals and seek to find their own values in the world -- a concept wholly incompatible with just following the whim of some guy with a hate-boner for some specific race. Interpreting Zarathustra's message as a call to raise an army and purge the world of undesirables is something akin to believing that Animal Farm was really a warning about farm animals taking over the world."
http://www.cracked.com/article_18787_6-books-everyone-including-your-english-teacher-got-wrong_p2.html
Lilla: For those of the Romantic movement of philosophers, there were two things more revered than anything: The original pure state, as it was thought, of man's natural and innocent pre-urban days (artists during that period include the pre-Raphaelite artists like Gabrielli, cite it in a bit, lol) and of nature's pre-urban, pure state. The NAZI party was (and the Neo-Nazi party is) partly socialistic, (a political *and* social school of thought) partly social Darwinism, and the same idealism much nicer people during the Romantic period than the Nazis or Neo-Nazis ever were as a whole.
Me: Gods, I hate social Darwinism. Whoever thought of that shit completely missed the point of Darwinism. True social Darwinism would focus on cooperation and helping thy fellow man, because "survival of the fittest" means "survival of those who are best equipped in a particular environment to survive," and in humanity's case, it was cooperation, compassion, and our social networking skills that got us to the top of the food chain. Anyone who thinks humans are better off competing "dog eat dog" is a complete waste of oxygen.
Lilla: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtS1G0F7wT4
Me: Hitler as a Nazi made no fucking sense anyway, since he was more than half Jew himself (due to his mother being his father's niece) and looked about as Aryan as Osama Bin Laden did. Furthermore, the whole "Aryans are white" business is complete rubbish, seeing as the Aryans came from India.
As to my earlier "Neanderthal pride" comment... I was only partly joking. There is strong evidence that Caucasian humans only came to be from the black Cro-magnons mating with the "white"-skinned Neanderthals. But if the racists ever think of using this to say non-whites are another species, well, the bad news for them is that all modern humans are related to both Neanderthals and Cro Magnon, to some degree. And the fact still remains that, due to a genetic bottleneck 10,000 years ago, there is less genetic diversity separating the blackest African from the whitest European than there is between short-haired Chihuahuas and long-haired Chihuahuas.
1 = For example...
Me: Blah blah blah
Me: Blorch glarb fnorch
as opposed to...
Me: Blah blah blah
Lilla: Blah blah blah
Me: Blorch glarb fnorch
Cross-posted from http://alex-antonin.dreamwidth.org
(If you're wondering why I'm doing Me: and then Me: without any Lilla: between them,1 it's because I'm marking the beginnings of individual Facebook comments.)
Lilla's original post: Read through all the optionses, there are some that are very specific *to* tolerance even though they are open to the option of *not* tolerating certain groups. Take a look. (Nazis etc.)
Me, commenting: Being a Nazi is not a religion.
Lilla: Actually, yes it is. The Neo-Nazi movement members worship Hitler as their God.
Me: I find this amusing, seeing as Adolf "Uniball" Hitler was basically the Polish equivalent of the "inbred Appalachian hick" stereotype, with the worst case of daddy issues ever. Freud would have gotten several dozen books out of psychoanalyzing Uniball's obsession with wiping out his daddy's whole race.
(Hitler's father was also his uncle; Hitler Senior married his niece and the result was little Adolf. Little Adolf was beat mercilessly but was always not quite right in the head. As an artist, he was mediocre. He would have died a mediocre artist, but he just HAD to get into politics.)
Me: The fact that the Nazis actually worship him is thus faintly amusing. But if Nazism has mutated into a religion, then this is one religion I wouldn't mind watching its practitioners being rounded up and locked away forevermore in Gitmo.
Lilla: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCXApAp9XGg&skipcontrinter=1
"The ideological origins of Nazism derive from Romanticism, nineteenth-century idealism, and a eugenic interpretation of Friedrich Nietzsche's concepts of "breeding upwards" - towards the Übermensch ("Superman"). Such ideas, as espoused by the Ariosophical Germanenorden (German Order) and the Thule Society much influenced Adolf Hitler's world-view."
Me: NEANDERTHAL PRIDE! We are Neanderthals and damned proud of it! All you Homo Sapiens Sapiens can go back to Africa where you came from!
(I apologize for any insult to real Neanderthals.)
Me: Yes, and Nietzsche would be fucking PISSED AS FUCK and rolling in his grave at that fact, if he isn't already. Because he HATED racists. Here, I'll quote Cracked.com's article about it:
"If Nietzsche wasn't too busy being dead, he would probably have had a few words with Hitler about the fuehrer's liberal interpretation of his work, due mainly to the fact that Nietzsche hung around with entirely the wrong crowd. His sister, Elisabeth, and good friend, composer Richard Wagner, were both as Nazi as the goose-step.
After Nietzsche died, Elisabeth inherited the rights to his works and went about diligently re-editing them with a "kill all the Jews" subtext. It didn't help that Nietzsche's thought-baton was then picked up by the philosopher Martin Heidegger -- you guessed it: Nazi.
Nietzsche actually hated anti-Semites, having refused to attend his sister's wedding because she was marrying a Nazi, and even wrote that "anti-Semites should be shot." We have his sister to thank for the "blond beast" confusion. She, Hitler and decades of disapproving philosophy students interpret this as an allusion to the Aryan race. In fact, Nietzsche was just describing lions.
And as for the "superman" thing, rather than referring to some genetically pure German dictator, Nietzsche was just making a generic statement about people who believe in the subjectivity of morals and seek to find their own values in the world -- a concept wholly incompatible with just following the whim of some guy with a hate-boner for some specific race. Interpreting Zarathustra's message as a call to raise an army and purge the world of undesirables is something akin to believing that Animal Farm was really a warning about farm animals taking over the world."
http://www.cracked.com/article_18787_6-books-everyone-including-your-english-teacher-got-wrong_p2.html
Lilla: For those of the Romantic movement of philosophers, there were two things more revered than anything: The original pure state, as it was thought, of man's natural and innocent pre-urban days (artists during that period include the pre-Raphaelite artists like Gabrielli, cite it in a bit, lol) and of nature's pre-urban, pure state. The NAZI party was (and the Neo-Nazi party is) partly socialistic, (a political *and* social school of thought) partly social Darwinism, and the same idealism much nicer people during the Romantic period than the Nazis or Neo-Nazis ever were as a whole.
Me: Gods, I hate social Darwinism. Whoever thought of that shit completely missed the point of Darwinism. True social Darwinism would focus on cooperation and helping thy fellow man, because "survival of the fittest" means "survival of those who are best equipped in a particular environment to survive," and in humanity's case, it was cooperation, compassion, and our social networking skills that got us to the top of the food chain. Anyone who thinks humans are better off competing "dog eat dog" is a complete waste of oxygen.
Lilla: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtS1G0F7wT4
Me: Hitler as a Nazi made no fucking sense anyway, since he was more than half Jew himself (due to his mother being his father's niece) and looked about as Aryan as Osama Bin Laden did. Furthermore, the whole "Aryans are white" business is complete rubbish, seeing as the Aryans came from India.
As to my earlier "Neanderthal pride" comment... I was only partly joking. There is strong evidence that Caucasian humans only came to be from the black Cro-magnons mating with the "white"-skinned Neanderthals. But if the racists ever think of using this to say non-whites are another species, well, the bad news for them is that all modern humans are related to both Neanderthals and Cro Magnon, to some degree. And the fact still remains that, due to a genetic bottleneck 10,000 years ago, there is less genetic diversity separating the blackest African from the whitest European than there is between short-haired Chihuahuas and long-haired Chihuahuas.
1 = For example...
Me: Blah blah blah
Me: Blorch glarb fnorch
as opposed to...
Me: Blah blah blah
Lilla: Blah blah blah
Me: Blorch glarb fnorch
Cross-posted from http://alex-antonin.dreamwidth.org