05.02.10
More on Luther and Nietzsche
Moved from Darwiniana
Comment on Nietzsche and Luther
James said,
February 5, 2010 at 3:40 pm ·John,
I was subtly mocking the effort to blame National Socialism on one person. The point is that these analyses are usually always too one-dimensional and linear to fully capture the complexity of the phenomenon. Look at this page and it becomes obvious that nobody can quite figure out what was going on with the intellectual commitments of the Nazis:http://www.shoaheducation.com/peoplenazitheo.html
You are worried that the unsavory views of figures associated with modernity will discredit it. I don’t think we should hide the fact that their notions of liberty, equality, etc. were rather limited (no doubt, we should be thankful that they set the stage for our present views). Anyway, conservatives have already initiated this critique (David Berlinski, for example, attacks the Reformation and blames the atrocities of the 20th century on the Enlightenment).
Good points. I wasn’t citing the book on Nietzsche as a blame/game issue for Nietzsche. But the denial of an influence on the Nazis is, I think, a paradigm in failure.
It is a question of his real views, which tend to be suppressed by the academic cult surrounding him. And then a series of questions about the two-layer discussion in the book. This purports to explain the fact that some of the public statements of Nazis were really for public consumption, while their real views were close to theose of Nietzsche. You will have to read the book to get the point. But the Nazis were the final stage of the hidden game that has never been clarified. If you can, behind the scenes, take control of an asset like Hitler you are in a position to do some serious mischief. So who were the perps?
Something very disturbing and unknown happened at the end of the nineteenth century, and I have always thought, and Rajneesh hinted at the same, that some occult factor is involved. Conventional thought won’t credit that.
That puts the blame game as conventionally played into the absurd zone, since the culprits usually pointed to are mostly innnocent.
Rajneesh, btw, directly upset the blame game by directly blaming the Buddhist Sangha. I don’t know.
But you can see the dark clouds coming as you examine Blavatsky and the gray zone behind her. Then there are bad omens, like Nietzsche himself, and Wagner, etc… Then there is the occult cloud of ‘german theosophy’, etc, etc… We never get to close the case. All you see in public are idiot occultists.
But we should be wary of accusing figures earlier than Blavatsky.
Berlinski is such an asshole as to be ‘un-relevant’ to the discussion. He’s good on Darwinism, but his conservative neo-can-fake is total idiocy.
Attempts by conservatives to discredit modernity (to say nothing of postmodern leftists) always fail because they can’t grasp the phenomenon.
Luther triggers the Protestant Reformation which leads into the Enlightenment (over three centuries) but his sins are a very poor argument against the modern secular world that came into being.