Nietzsche on the Jews

From The Occidental Observer, September 28, 2009

Philosophers, as a rule, are a rather low-key bunch. They generally discuss mundane, technical, or utterly abstract topics that cause little concern among society at large. Of course there were exceptions, primarily during the Renaissance when the early humanists incurred the wrath of the Church (think of Bruno or Spinoza); this required some to publish their works either pseudonymously or posthumously. And Marx and Engels have certainly garnered their fair share of enmity. But by and large philosophers throughout the ages have raised few serious hackles.

A major exception is the case of Friedrich Nietzsche, certainly one of the most controversial philosophers in history. The epitome of non-political-correctness, Nietzsche clearly did not give a damn about whom he might offend. He was on a mission to uncover the fundamental flaws in Western society, to expose hypocrisy and moral corruption, and to undermine every aspect of degenerate modern society. Only by getting to the root of the problem, he thought, could we find our way forward—a path to the greatness that is human destiny.

The sad state of modern life, he said, is a consequence of the overturning of classical values that occurred in the early post-Christian world. These classic values—originating in ancient Greece and embraced by the Romans—emphasized strength, robustness, nobility, self-determination, and personal excellence. These life-affirming values, the ‘master’ or ‘aristocratic’ values, were the foundation upon which the great civilizations of Athens and Rome were built.

One consequence of this development was the powerful and expansive Roman Empire. It reached Palestine by the year 60 b.c., and held that territory for over five hundred years, until the fall of the Western Empire in 476 (though the Eastern, or Byzantine, Empire continued on much longer). During this time, Nietzsche claimed, the oppression felt by the Jews and early Christians grew to the point at which a new value system—the Judeo-Christian value system—came into being, as a kind of religious and ethical response to Roman domination. Though a single unified system, it carried different emphases for the two groups. For Jews the focus was on self-pity, ethnic cohesion, a thirst for revenge, an obsession with freedom, a hatred of the strong and powerful, and a desire to recover lost wealth. The Christians—through the figure of Jesus—preferred to emphasize the value of the down-trodden (“blessed are the meek”), faith in God to bring justice (“the meek shall inherit the earth”), salvation in the afterlife, and a fixation on love as a means for ameliorating suffering. Arising as it did out of the quasi-slavery imposed by the Romans, Nietzsche deemed this collective Judeo-Christian response a ‘slave’ or ‘priestly’ morality.

When the Western Empire, based in Rome, collapsed in the 5th century a.d., the master morality collapsed with it. As the only real competitor, slave morality rose to take its place as the dominant ethical system of the West. And there it has remained for nearly two thousand years. In this sense, Nietzsche says, the slave has defeated the master, and become the new master.

But the actual outcome has been far from positive. Quite the contrary: it has been an absolute disaster for humanity. When combined with booming populations and advancing technology, there now exists a distinctly modern form of the priestly mindset, one based on subservience, conformity, equality, pity, guilt, suffering, revenge, and self-hatred: the herd morality. One could scarcely devise a lower conception of man.

Which brings us to the question of the Jews. . . . Read the whole article.