From: "bonnie a. beal" <alice__screams-AT-email.msn.com>
Subject: Re: How the silence of compact majorities smacks of reaction
Date: Sat, 4 Apr 1998 14:03:06 -0500


lambda c,
you can infer from the silence of the majority on this list that there is a
reaction against intellectual masturbation and endless ad hominen
attacks.were this to end there might be more active,stimulating discussion
of nietzsche's philosophy on this list.

you can not infer from the silence that the majority endorses far-flung
ideas such as that nietzsche was a fascist.any careful reader of nietzsche
understands that fascism repelled him.his sister taking his manuscripts and
twisting them in support of the reich has unfortunately
been understood by many as nietzsche's views being that of the reich.
sloppy readers who do not grasp that he often means the opposite of what he
says and that he uses aphorisms dialectically also contribute to this view.

-----Original Message-----
From: lambdac-AT-globalserve.net <lambdac-AT-globalserve.net>
To: nietzsche-AT-jefferson.village.virginia.edu
<nietzsche-AT-jefferson.village.virginia.edu>
Date: Saturday, April 04, 1998 1:26 PM
Subject: How the silence of compact majorities smacks of reaction


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>Mr. Thacker should not flatter himself with impudent self-admiration -
>"doing harm to stupidity" wasn't directed at him, or *only* at him.
>Would that we were we so lucky that he would be the only, and the first
>and the last (to top it all), on this list to regurgitate the inanities
>that supposedly prove that Nietzsche was a depressive fascist
>monomaniac!
>
>There are 304 subscribers to this list.  Of those, maybe 10 seem not to
>be directly affiliated with the official academia.  Judging by the
>number of those actively intervening on the list, say a generous maximum
>of 30, 90% of the remaining keep their silence practically all of the
>time and form thereby the compact silent majority of spectators.  If we
>discount, say, five or six of the active subscribers which, to various
>degrees, do differ from the Judgement of God passed by Thacker on the
>arraigned Nietzsche - we can expect that he will meet with the silent
>approbation of a majority, and there should be no shortages of Rachels
>to support his McCarthyist indictment of Nietzsche ("he was also
>anti-woman"...by the way Rachel, it wasn't Lisbeth's hubby who messed
>with the manuscripts...).  If half of the list, say, have no opinion on
>the matter (probably they have never even read Nietzsche, so that we
>remain generous), one may, no matter how illegitimately, infer that the
>other half has read Nietzsche with the eyes of dangerous sisters.
>
>Curious though, as all this is about silence - that inquisitorial
>academic censorship, that German dialectical specialty, unbreakable
>silence, walls of silence.  "Silence on the defence of Nietzsche?  Well,
>he must be guilty!  Nevertheless we must search for the value of
>Nietzsche by disregarding his critique of the priest and his diagnosis
>of the nihilist sickness..."
>
>In 1944, during delivery of his commentary on the Battle of the Warsaw
>Ghetto, S. Mendelsohn at the Yiddish Scientific Institute said-
>
>"Unheard were not only the voices of the two small towns of Krynski and
>Nieswiez, about whose struggles we unfortunately know nothing but that
>they took place, but even the great battle of the Warsaw Ghetto did not
>accomplish this purpose [of jolting the public].  That this happened was
>not the guilt of the fighters.  They were guilty only of credulity.  It
>is with great pain of humiliation, that we must admit the call to the
>world remained unheard."
>
>Lambda C, still guilty of credulity (still writing)
>
>For a flat-footed idealist, any volume will sound shrill.  Silence, we
>presume, would have been more accommodating.
>
>
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