The Atheist Obsession with Insulting Christians

[Crossless2.0]

Let me put it this way: Hitler and the National Socialists incorporated Nietzsche in rather the same way that some crackpots in the Christian camp "incorporate" the Bible into their worldviews without bothering to responsibly read the Bible and really understand it.  I'm pretty certain that Nietzsche would have hated Hitler's fucking guts.

And if I may ask a follow up:

How did the Nazis use Nietzsche to their own purposes - or what did they find in his writings that enabled them to justify in their own actions?

I'm just about ready to leave the office and go out with my wife, so I'll simply throw out one example.  Nietzsche was fond of characterizing Judeo/Christian morality as a type of "slave" morality, distinguished from what he called "master" morality which he associated with the old Gemanic/Nordic religions and culture as he imagined it before it was "corrupted" by Christianity.  On the face of things, that seems to fit with certain Nazi tropes. However, "slave" and "master" were not prescriptive terms in Nietzsche's usage; they were simply descriptive types he employed as a kind of shorthand, and he never advocated the enslavement (much less the attempted extermination) of Jews.  In fact, among major 19th Century European intellectuals, Nietzsche stands almost alone in his repeated, even shrill, denunciation of anti-Semitism, and he expressed some qualified respect for Jews and Judaism.  (He also referred to Buddhism as a sort of slave morality/worldview, but it's pretty clear in his writings that he had a qualified respect for Buddhism, especially when contrasted with Christianity.)  Since Nietzsche was a confirmed a-moralist and during a later stage in his career tended to view everything through the prism of will to power, there has been this persistent misunderstanding that when he wrote about Ubermensch he had in mind strongmen such as Napoleon or the Borgias, and that he would have welcomed a Hitler as a sort of "Over Man".  What this leaves out of account are the myriad passages in his work in which he discusses the need to sublimate one's drives for power into life-affirming, creative values.  Again, he cites Goethe as a prime example of what he had in mind.

One of the many problems with Nietzsche is that he was not a rigorous, systematic philosopher (and changed his views a number of times throughout his career) and that he was almost too good a writer for his own good.  He delighted in puns, paradoxical expressions, hyperbole, etc., so he is one of those writers a reader must approach with wariness.  He practically invites misunderstanding, and any Nazi looking for confirmation of his biases and prejudices can certainly find what he wants in Nietzsche, provided he doesn't read the books carefully and completely.

Finally, I should point out that the book most cited by the Nazis was an abomination called "The Will to Power", which was actually just a collection of scattered notes that Nietzsche had compiled for a projected four-volume work he eventually abandoned in favor of other projects.  He never intended these notes for publication (the blame for this publication lies with his sister who became his literary executor after his breakdown), and they should not be seen as representative of his developed thoughts or his work as a whole.  On a side note, prior to his breakdown, he had fallen out with his sister because she had married a virulent anti-Semite and had adopted political views that can fairly be characterized as proto-Nazi. His disgust with this state of affairs is frequently expressed in his letters and alluded to in his books.  Anti-Semitism, incidentally, is also one of the issues that led to his falling out with Richard Wagner years earlier.