From: lambdac-AT-globalserve.net
Date: Mon, 30 Mar 1998 23:30:49 -0500
Subject: A mistake in the analysis, a dangerous sister and a clever falsification


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DOING HARM TO STUPIDITY (6)


6- A mistake in the analysis, a dangerous sister and a clever
falsification

Then why the ready-made equation Nietzsche=Hitler?  Aside, of course,
from the asinine repetition that spreads like contagion, there are three
elements one should consider.

First, there are the obvious problems with Nietzsche's theory of the
Aryans.  We have delved at length on this matter in interchanges with S.
Callihan.  We shall not repeat ourselves here- except to say that the
texts of GM that deal with the foundation of empires still do not go far
enough, as they "tie together two forces that are distinguishable"
(Deleuze), the founding of Asiatic empires or military empires, versus
the destruction of such empires wrought by nomads, including Aryan
nomads, as modern archeology has demonstrated.  But can this
insufficiency doom Nietzsche into siring that Hitlerian  nonsense - "The
Aryans as founders of culture and state"?  They were the slayers of the
State, and the only culture they founded was that of the nomadic war
machine, war against the State.  Given Nietzsche's equivocation on this
matter, it is here that Rosenberg seized an opportunity.

Secondly, there is the problem of "dangerous sisters", sometimes
accidents of birth like Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche, the chosen of God
to pose and dispose, alter, censor, fabricate, and mass-produce the
writings of her brother: as Overbeck put it-

"She is often praised now as a saint among sisters.  But this will
change.  The time may come when she will be considered a prime example
of the type: dangerous sisters."

Saul of Tarsus too was a dangerous sister.  So was Nietzsche's cousin,
Herr Richard Oehler.  Such people turn their object of hatred into a
display for their exhibitionist love.  They are the original
publicitarians.  They invent the caricatural formulas for
mass-consumption.  Easy formulas, simplistic equations, beautiful
reductions.  So Nietzsche would have the emperor shot?   Well, we delete
the Hohenzollern passage.  So he would have the anti-Semites shot? 
Well, that's proof of chloral hydrate psychosis.  As Kerr's poem goes-
"verbal fudge superwoman kaffeeklatsch".  Sell books.  Build memorials. 
Create forums.  Make a manic buck.  She's the one who lauded Hitler as
the German Napoleon: "[Foreigners] cannot understand how we endure these
vast transformations so cheerfully [!].  Well, the reason is that we
have suddenly achieved the *one* Germany which for centuries our poets
have depicted longingly in their poems and which we have all been
waiting for: Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer", she wrote in 1933.  So
Hitler paid his visits and made sure money kept flowing into the
Nietzsche Archives.  Then only then, and retroactively did the myth
arise that "my brother had influenced the whole movement":
Hitler=Nietzsche.  Today, it is an equation either for willingly naive
ignorants or vacuous skinhead bigots.  Should we blame his sister on
Nietzsche?  Seems a tad vile, not to say a hint wicked.  Especially when
most of us only seem to be able to read Nietzsche with the eyes of his
sister, the eyes of *dangerous sisters*.

"We know that the Nazis had the most ambiguous relations with
Nietzsche's work: ambiguous because they liked to appeal to it but could
not do so without mutilating quotations, falsifying editions and banning
important texts" (Deleuze, "Nietzsche and Philosophy", p. 126)

Thirdly, there is the totally illegitimate misinterpretation of
Nietzsche championed by Heidegger: a Nietzsche imprisoned in
Schopenhauer, a Nietzsche who could not overcome Wagner, a mystic
retained by a machine that failed by the recurrence of the same - the
worst and basest of all reactions.  And do so while appearing to be
rehabilitating the only real truth there can be of Nietzsche, a
Nietzsche readily reproachable for having remained prisoner of the
Platonic opposites.  As Laruelle put it- such is Heidegger's "genial
falsification": so to speak, he incarnates the
Nietzsche-that-did-not-become-mad-because-he-became-a-Nazi...  Being
hemmed in by the presence of becoming, always the same.  Well, we can
only guess that you had to be there to see it - how a simple paint job
can turn Nietzsche into Schopenhauer, or even into Hitler:

"Certainly, he who has to live among Germans suffers greatly from the
notorious greyness of their life and thought, from their formlessness,
their stupidity and dull-mindedness, their coarseness in more delicate
affairs, even more from their envy and a certain secretiveness and
uncleanliness in their character; he is pained and offended by their
rooted joy in what is false and ungenuine, in bad imitations, in the
translation of good foreign things into bad native ones: now, however,
that one has in addition, and as the most painful experience of all,
their feverish restlessness, their search for success and profit, their
overestimation of the moment, one is limitlessly indignant to think that
all these maladies and weaknesses are on principle never to be cured but
only painted over- with a 'culture of interesting form'!" ("Schopenhauer
as educator")

And maybe also, at the end of the day, the worst enemy of all is that
modern dallying with forms, the cult of the beautiful and interesting
form (all performance and word play), the politically correct, the
German ideal of life: survival beautified.  

Now to say that to this list is like talking to a wall  but then again
Nietzsche made a profession of talking to walls-

"I tell everyone of my friends to his face that he has never considered
it worth while to *study* any of my writings: I infer from the smallest
signs that they do not even know what is in them" EH

We submit that this list could advantageously be called the German
List.  

Lambda C

"For Nietzsche-
you sleep in the light
of your buried opera;
you absorb the earth's rays while beneath you
posthumous miners are turning your body
into gold"
Daniel Moshenberg


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