Randy wrote: "Or is it more likely that having been influenced by Nietzsche, Hitler had no qualms about murdering anyone who stood in his way? Natural selection and all that."
There just aren't enough face palms in the world for this. Hitler was "influenced" by Nietzsche precisely to the extent that Hitler didn't understand a damn thing about Nietzsche and cherry picked passages from Nietzsche's works to suit his own prejudices, as did most of the Nazi hacks who claimed kinship with Nietzsche. Whatever the problems with Nietzsche's thoughts on myriad subjects (I disagree with him often), he was certainly not an anti-Semite or a fan of the State (especially the German State as he knew it under Bismarck), he considered Herbert Spencer a joke, and the thought that Nietzsche had in mind someone like Hitler when he wrote of the Ubermensch is laughable. He would have loathed the Third Reich with every fiber of his being and would have been outraged and heartbroken at the Holocaust.
Pro-tip: In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche provides a clear example of someone he considers a model of Ubermensch: Goethe.
There just aren't enough face palms in the world for this. Hitler was "influenced" by Nietzsche precisely to the extent that Hitler didn't understand a damn thing about Nietzsche and cherry picked passages from Nietzsche's works to suit his own prejudices, as did most of the Nazi hacks who claimed kinship with Nietzsche. Whatever the problems with Nietzsche's thoughts on myriad subjects (I disagree with him often), he was certainly not an anti-Semite or a fan of the State (especially the German State as he knew it under Bismarck), he considered Herbert Spencer a joke, and the thought that Nietzsche had in mind someone like Hitler when he wrote of the Ubermensch is laughable. He would have loathed the Third Reich with every fiber of his being and would have been outraged and heartbroken at the Holocaust.
Pro-tip: In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche provides a clear example of someone he considers a model of Ubermensch: Goethe.