Lots of people are trying to redeem Nietzsche today. And they need him for a lot of their special pleading, so that's easy to understand.Dubious wrote:Your understanding of Nietzsche truly belongs in the first half of the twentieth century. It’s long been revised!
But Nietzsche was a proto-Nazi, in that he was clearing the deck for them to use and providing them with the stock of concepts they needed for their Final Solution. When the concept of "übermensch" was taken up by Hitler, you know very well where he got it from. And his hatred of Jewish and Christian morality, again, you know where he got it from. And the idea of "will to power" -- straight out of Nietzsche. But even when he was not explicitly borrowing from Nietzsche, which he clearly did frequently, he was benefitting from the "beyond good and evil" (Nietzsche again) which he created with his "God is dead" (Nietzsche) wiping away of morality.
Hitler had the (bad) courage to be all that Nietzsche gave him the chance to be. To say, then, that Nietzsche isn't responsible philosophically is wrong, and to imagine that philosophy doesn't shape how people actually think and act is naive. Yes, Marx bears significant blame for the Communist atrocities, though he specified none: he gave the rationale necessary to justify what ensued. And Nietzsche is forever the progenitor of Nazism; like Lady Macbeth, he can never get that blood off his hands.
And that should warn us to be careful what we advocate.