12.23.08
Nietzsche’s assault on liberal modernity
I am going to be in trouble for citing this book, discussed already tonight: Nietzsche, Prophet of Nazism: The Cult of the Superman–Unveiling the Nazi Secret Doctrine (Paperback)
by ABIR TAHA
The Nietzsche stacks in university libraries are filled with a whole shelf of books dealing with the issue of Nietzsche and Nazism, and I doubt that Taha’s book will be admitted to the sacred club of Nietzsche veneration. There are various problems with her approach, but, finally, I am getting impatient here: this amateur outsider got something right.
If you were raised from adolescence on Walter Kauffman and never realized you were had, raise your hand.
But with a few corrections, or a slight reformulation, I think Taha’s argument stands, or at least has to be considered.
Not only that, but in one way it doesn’t matter, in the sense that this basic view has emerged in dozens of variants throughout the realm of New Age and occult histories, always trying to get to the bottom of Hitler and Nazism. So we put all such accounts on hold, including those of the academic scholars and Nietzsche worshippers, and take it all as ‘research in progress’, and difficult research it is because noone can get it quite straight.
A book can be of use via its ‘mistakes’ or partial understandings. A good example is the way she brings out the obvious way in which Nietzsche is looking to some putative ‘core’ Aryan ideology in Zarathustra, Dionysus, Manu, et al. (and not finding it). Thus Taha’s possible confusions point to something we would like to get straight (and academic Nietzscheans aren’t much help),
I say this because one could recommend reading this book, it has dozens of good leads, but only with discretion, as with all such books. But the point is that Nietzsche needs to be exposed in his strategy to undermine liberal modernity and freedom. A good example is the way that Nietzsche’s attitude toward Jews (and Wagner) undergoes a change, to say nothing of his rejection of the Reich barbarism. Taha actually answers this, or tries to, but this tricky side to Nietzsche is what has always rescued him in the eyes of the academic Nietzsche promoters.
As Taha shows, in any case, with so many direct quotes from Nietzsche’s books, his words speak against him, most disastrously.
How on earth did this fellow get so many unsuspecting fans?
Nietzsche strains for a complete break with the past, but the result fails, and his originality is completely misjudged by his fans.