Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Mon Jan 24, 2022 5:39 pm
What I mean is that all states and nations, and definitely the nations that opposed Hitler and the German enterprise, all employ exactly the same tactics as did the Germans. It is not even a question of 'degree' really, though the German effort to expel the entire Jewish population of the region is unprecedented.
Who *did* this though? Let's be really really truthful: Europe did this. All the people of Europe did it. It was something like a general social will. Some part of the impetus for oppression of Jews in Europe, under those conditions, derives
directly from the Christian Gospels. And if anything is *true* God Himself is a terrifying anti-Semite. (See
here).
Will-to-Power
The
meaning of the entire question -- these sets of assertions -- about
Will to Power applies to modernity across the board. How it came about that action and movement, assertion, dominance and
winning ground (the powerful
will that stands behind these impulses) have come to be central as a fundamental ethic in our present, is not a doctrine invented by Nietzsche that Hitler, or anyone, could admire and emulate. The doctrine of Will to Power is really a doctrine about action in this world. That Nietzsche invented this is an absurd misunderstanding. In a certain sense what Nietzsche *saw* pulled his psyche apart. It exploded him. Nietzsche, like a biblical seer in a strange way, saw right into the depth of the issue and the problem. He saw, he prophesied, a veritable sea-change that had come to the *world*.
It is also a fact that what he saw coming is still
on its way.
The Nazi Project
The Nazi project (according to Raul Hilberg in
The Destruction of the European Jews) began as a
banishment, not genocide. It is a false assertion that industrial gas chambers were designed and built for mass-elimination of Jews in a pre-planned project. This seems to have been Soviet propaganda. That millions of Jews were assassinated, mostly in the East, as the war deepened, this is true and even revisionists like David Irving admit this. But he also asserts (I do not know if it is true or not) that it was Nazi underlings that did most of the open, intentional killing (ie. bullet in the head). The deaths in the camps were often from starvation and disease, a *natural* result of war-conditions. Some millions died under those conditions (if my understanding is correct).
And the desire, if I can call it that, to be rid of Jews in Europe, throughout Europe, is quite literally as European as Apple Pie is to the Americans. Jewish fate is tied up in Jewish identity. Jewish identity leads, like the roads of Rome, to Jewish
tragedy. Jews are in a terrible fix: God tells them of the evil that He will bring on them if the disobey and are contaminated by 'false religion' ("a snare for you") but Christianity is that snare. That is, in the minds of traditional, strict Jews (and this is as true today as in the past). Jewish fate is *in the hands of God* until Jews decide to act against that imposed Fate. Then they become Israelis . . .
There is no 'happy end' in Jewish history. And Jews seem to know this (thus *Jewish depression*). How Jews wound up in Europe, why they wound up in Europe, and not in their own lands -- now that is a complex question. If you are theist: God did this to His people. The Exile fits into the horrifying predictions in Deuteronomy. We need to speak truthfully here: there is no one that wanted the Jews and in some senses today there is still no one that wants them. But here is a really curious thing: To dislike Jews has been turned into the worst possible moral sin any human being can commit. Just think it through. But we all know that dislike of Jews has appeared historically without cease, everywhere. But what happens today is that because this dislike is not tolerated and is vilified, it can do nothing but *go underground*. It is turned into a false-love, a false-respect, a false-toleration. But the underpinning dislike (or contempt, or hatred) builds up in an invisible dam. Then, the dam bursts.
No one wants the Jews
I mean this in the sense of having such a powerful minority, with such developed
historical will, gain as much power as Jews have traditionally, and historically, shown themselves interested in gaining. There was a certain equilibrium attained in the Sephardic world though. But the Emancipation of Jews in Europe opened up the whole problem. The "Jewish Problem" arose then. Within Judaism this phenomenon (sets of phenomena) is knows as
diaspora pathology. Meaning that the Exile that forced Jews to take up residence in Europe, and to build their networks, derived from a pathology-producing event. The question is What is the cure for this pathology? Assimilation?
This all points back, once again and in a way that will not end, to core problems within Judaism itself. Or to put it another way it is Jewish identity, in combination with historical and cultural and social factors, that lead time and again to the same recurrent problem. If you think that Jewish history is over you are likely wrong. That tragedy arrives is part-and-parcel of the system. In any case that is how it has seemed to me.
God only knows what the solution is (and that was a very bad, or a very good, joke!)
The interesting question that I often asked myself was Could a mass expulsion of a given ethnic group within a generally homogenous culture ever be *justified*? Haven't issues of this sort been the basis of civil wars and inter-national conflicts? My question of course abstract or it takes place in a domain outside of the *real*. Can you imagine a 'movement' within America (for example) to expel, say, the more or less 20 million Mesoamericans that entered the US illegally, as part of a project to *protect* American culture? What if France expelled its Muslim population? What if things get to that point? (And these tensions are developing).
Does it matter if Nietzsche simply broke down, or had syphilis, of cancer of the brain? Do we retrospect a man's work and achievement by considering how he died and through that to invalidate his work? I do not see how Nietzsche can be got around. To dismiss him as someone not serious, and even as someone who misunderstood Christianity (or his own Christian self) seems a substantial error. It seems to me that one either confronts Nietzsche and chooses to resolve him, in one way or another, or one can do nothing else but put him aside without consideration.
These are just some thoughts that I have had as I have (tried to) examine these issues, but also tried to see things truthfully, not through contrived lenses.
I apply it, however, to all interpretations... rather than using it to justify/bolster a certain storyline.
