Why we love this country

As we all know, the Bush administration has been so innovative in the field of corrupt practices, misprision, and fraud, that it is no longer possible to tell the government apart from a RICO target. So we were amused by the latest incident of malfeasance with the intent to defraud the taxpayer. Also, a few lesser lives without the law, i.e., innocent Iraqi lives, were sacrificed -- but on the plus side, another GOP lobbyist has been rewarded for his inherent love of freedom. Freedom is a good thing. Freedom to mark up your invoices for undelivered goods 400 percent is an even better thing. And having friends in high places in Rumsfeld’s Pentagon is the best thing of all.

A nice little rundown on Custer Battles in Business Week includes the following fun to know and tell facts:

a. Custer Battles is formed in 2002 by “former Army Rangers Mike Battles and Scott Custer … before the Iraq invasion to seek rebuilding contracts. Battles, a GOP campaign contributor and a former CIA case worker, ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 2002 as a Rhode Island Republican.”

b.While a more timid government might be afraid to entrust the lives of soldiers in an occupied territory that is filled with arms dumps and hostile forces to a contractor with approximately six months of experience, the Bush White house is anything but timid. Rather, enriching anything connected to the GOP, especially if it is slightly paramilitary and smells of Soldier of Fortune magazine is jut the thing the Bush White House loves best. So in the ‘bring em on’ fashion so beloved of the American electorate, Custer Battles and its fifteen subsidiaries harvest the bounty of war.
c. In a war that is, to all intents and purposes, an incompetent pirate raid on some of the richest oil fields in the world, it is hard to enforce a sense of integrity among the help. So Custer Battles operates much as if it were a division of Haliburton:

“By itself, Custer Battles is already in a great deal of trouble. It is under investigation by the Pentagon for allegedly cheating the U.S. government out of tens of millions during the chaotic months following the Iraq invasion. In September 2004, the military banned Custer Battles and 15 of its subsidiaries and officials, including Morris, from obtaining government contracts while the criminal probe proceeds.

Custer Battles employees have also been accused of firing on unarmed Iraqi civilians, of using fake offshore companies to pad invoices by as much as 400 percent, and of using forgery and fraud to bilk the American government. Two former associates have filed a federal whistle-blower suit, accusing top managers of swindling at least $50 million.”

d. Failing onward and upward is what the American upper class is all about. So the fun guys at Custer Battles, after being formally banned by the Pentagon, operate out of the Custer Battles hq, but under different nomenclature. Clever, eh? “Rob Roy Trumble, who previously was operations chief for Custer Battles,” resuits up a few operations that are just so necessary to our ongoing effort to spread liberty across the plains of Mesopotamia that the Pentagon has to throw money at the guy again. Flowers give pollen to bees, the male peacock spreads its irresistible tail before the weak kneed female, and GOP businessmen make proposals to the War Department. It’s a nature thing.

e. But so clever, so clever, this Custer Battles company! Here’s what they did. They re-baptized themselves as two other companies, Emergent Business Service and Tarheels Training. They affiliate themselves with a Romanian company which seems to be subsidiary of a killers for hire company out of Britain. And the fleet foots at the Pentagon allow them to bid, once more, on contracts. Astonishing, isn’t it.

America. Ruled by the worst. Elected by the ignorant. Plucked like a dead chicken.

More on Nietzsche, oh my

LI is tempted, at this point, to go ballistically Germanistic and talk about the circle around Stefan George. Lehmann, after dismissing the early wave of Nietzsche interpreters as bunglers who missed the great man’s message, believes that here, finally, with the Aryan brotherhood around George, the proper ecclesia of Nietzsche interpretation finds its footing. Of course, the five hundred thousand printing of Thus Spake Zarathustra, distributed to the troops at the front, planted the seed. One imagines that Elisabeth Nietzsche, finally wealthy, got her revenge in attending the Bayreuth festival in style in the postwar years.

Lehmann divides the rightwing school into three divisions, with a cursory glance at what he calls the “inauthentic” school of Nietzsche interpretation, which includes Max Scheler, Ortega y Gasset, Graf Keyslering and Oswald Spengler. About the George circle, the best philosopher in his view was Ludwig Klages. Actually, we have read a little of Klages ourselves. Lehmann’s overview complains that Klages doesn’t quite make the connections that light up the master theme of Nietzsche’s work, the Will to Power. But at least Klages grasps that the Will to Power, and not the dilettantish perspectivism, is the key to Nietzsche. But since, for Klages, a Schopenhauerian, the Will to Power is negative – not the heightening of life but the black spot, the invisible plague – Nietzsche’s work ultimately collapses in self contradiction, of which only some gigantic ruins – the notion of resentment, for instance – remain to be used by the philosopher. With the smug confidence of a man who thinks he has chosen the winning side of history, Lehmann tells us that with [such] an alien metric is the lifework of a thinker measured, whose authentic contemporary meaning has emerged with ever greater clarity.”

Then there is the case of the existentialist interpretation of Nietzsche, and his comparison with Kierkegaard. Who could doubt that Nietzsche’s interpretation of the world comes from his own personal existence, rather than a striving for some cold objectivity? Interestingly – it tells us how low Heidegger’s bid to be the Nazi’s premier philosopher – Lehmann covers the existential/catholic interpretation of Nietzsche with never a word about the master from the Black Forest, instead concentrating on Jaspers.

But finally we come to the authentic interpretation of Nietzsche, the one which places him in the grand vista that leads from the concept of the Ubermensch to the Fuhrer himself. This is how Lehmann makes the rhetorical transition:

“The necessary experience to which the Nietzsche Renaissance of the present owes its origin, the world war, that as a historic experience has not ended in the year 1918, but continues in the midst of our most immediate turns of events – it not only spans the powers of negation, but also the ties of the new order that were forged in struggle. And the philosophy that overlooks that –isn’t it blind before the sheer present? Doesn’t it miss out on our existential situation (existenzielle Situation)?”

("Ein Mann wohnt im Haus der spielt mit den Schlangen der schreibt/
der schreibt wenn es dunkelt nach Deutschland dein goldenes Haar Margarete")

Springtime (for Nietzsche and Germany), in Lehmann’s view, comes about because of Alfred Bäumler, who makes the connection between the Will to Power – again, the backbone of Nietzsche’s thought in the rightwing view – and the “great politics” – what I am translating rather capriciously as macropolitics.

What Bäumler does is give us a very political Nietzsche, the midpoint of whose work was the struggle to counter Bismarck’s politics. Bismarck’s mistake was to found the state on equality, when the state is naturally founded on inequality – those inequalities that are found in the natural order. But “Bismarck’s ears were deaf to philosophy.” Nietzsche’s great counter-political moves were received with indifference. Only by taking account of the fact that Nietzsche, in the period of waiting for the hero to lead his country, do we understand how that impatience at the Bismarckian order led to the part of Nietzsche that might be difficult for a Nazi to accept:

But it made Nietzsche’s judgments over Germany ambiguous: these are not ‘objective’ expressions, but judgments that will attack, sort out, wound, bring attention to. And they encompass not only the decayed characteristics of the German essence: German innerlichkeit, flatness, banality, spiritlessness, but also the counter-images and counter-concepts: the roman culture and French culture (in opposition to German barbarism), the good European (in oppostion to the nationalist), the Renaissance (in opposition to the German reformation), and much else, to which we can add Nietzsche’s prejudice against anti-semitism and his occasional praises of the Jewish race and intelligence. Whoever takes that seriously will completely overlook the point at which Nietzsche is completely serious, the political intention of these very intentional constructions. He will not comprehend, why Nietzsche, in this political situation, had to attack this way and in no other; and even more, why these scenarios, understood correctly, as Nietzsche wished them to be understood, do not stand in contradiction with his fundamental political knowledge.”

Lehmann’s solution to the Nietzsche problem is, we must admit, formally similar to many philosophical interpretations of Nietzsche – one chooses where Nietzsche is serious and where he is polemical, and builds up from the serious. The Nietzsche that asked if there was room for laughter in science is subordinated to the spirit behind the most violent rhetoric in the Nietzsche canon. And the critical element in Nietzsche, the link to, for instance, the German enlightenment – a link that Nietzsche signaled by dedicating his first book, away from the Wagner circle, to Voltaire – becomes a necessary instrument in his attack on Bismarck. The necessity, here, is a little strained – how, exactly, does it promote a nationalistic, anti-semitic regime to attack nationalism and anti-Semitism? But German philosophers have long learned that the invocation of necessity clears us of many logical sins of omission – especially those having to do with the connecting middle terms.

Lehmann’s next two paragraphs make a sustained case for Nietzsche as a fascist. I’ll translate them, and then, tomorrow or tomorrow or tomorrow, I will return with the third episode in our philosophical cliffhanger, who’s screwing Nietzsche? (and by the way, translating the next two paragraphs – translating all of the Lehmann so far – is like watching someone suffocate my brother. It gives me an excruciating pain.)

Then what are these political insights [Erkenntnisse]? – That life is neither a vale of tears or an hedonistic playground for Nietzsche, but struggle and domination – a domination of those who are naturally, as the Greeks might say, mightier (who first control themselves and can rid themselves of God – “spirit, strictness of the head, independence and hardness, decisiveness, no whining”). As the state rests not on equality, but inequality, so does the culture, being a power-will and a bound (Bändigung), self-control: not an affair for the many, and not an affair of consumers, of happiness, of satisfaction. Nietzsche’s macro-politics is directed against the democratic “ideals”: against the ideology of liberalism, against the socialism of the masses, against bourgeois society and the ‘industrial culture’ – against the increasing assimilation, averaging and shrinking of the European man” (Bauemler). Nietzsche’s political will is the will to the type, to breeding and discipline, to the soldierly leadership, to strong races and healthy bodies. These are Germanic-northern and greek values, that determine even his “anti-stateism, his dislike of the machine state, the state as the goal in itself and as “ethical organism”.

In all of this is Nietzsche a predecessor of National Socialism.”

So – this is the strongest case for Nietzsche’s macropolitics leading directly to National Socialism. In my next post about Nietzsche, I’ll ask about the interpretative moves that are applied here, to Nietzsche’s work; ask whether the left Nietzschians don’t similarly carve out their own Nietzsche; and make the case for a reading of Nietzsche that respects the internal clues in Nietzsche’s work – instead of looking for a master theme – that complies with what he writes in The Case of Wagner:


“What is the characteristic sign of every literary decadence? This: that life no longer lives in the whole. The word becomes sovereign and leaps out of the sentence, the sentence usurps and darkens the sense of the page, the page gains live at the expense of the whole – the whole is no longer a whole. But that is the likeness for every style of decadence: every time an anarchy of atoms, disaggregation of the will, “freedom of the individual”, morally speaking – expanded to a political theory, the “same right for all.” Life, the equal liveliness, the vibration and exuberance of live compressed in the smallest images; the remnant poor on life. Overall: paralysis, weariness, stiffening or hostility and chaos: both leaping to the eye ever more insistently the higher one climbs in the forms of the organization. The whole no longer lives in general: it is all pieced together, calculated, artificial, an artifact.”

Or maybe I won't. That sounds like an awful lot of work.

Some links. Klages, who ended up writing the world's longest defense of the philosophy of graphology, is the prophet without honor at this site.

Elisabeth Nietzsche was a case. I can't help but find her life and triumph, as the "heir" of her helpless brother, screamingly funny. This essay by Jenny Diska is nice. Also, I'd recommend John Gimlette's book about Paraguay, At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig. Among other things, he pokes around in the memories left of Elisabeth and her hubby's attempt to found an Aryan utopia in Paraguay. Elisabeth and her husband eventually fleeced the anti-semitic gulls and left them to the tropical heat -- never were criminal and victim so evenly matched.

nine American soldiers dead since Tuesday

I read an old column of Alexander Cockburn’s yesterday, from 1999. The substance of the column was that the left in the U.S. was a joke, led by phonies like Jesse Jackson and Michael Moore, and the only progressive political energy was, bizarrely, on the right, where there was a healthy hatred of the government.

Now, as is the case with many Cockburn columns, this was too clever by half. But lopping off the too clever half, he had a point – the only people who were truly, actively against U.S. intervention in Kosovo were rightwingers like Jack Kemp.

Given that politics is mostly positioning, that opposition to war has melted on the right with the Republicans in power. But I do think it could come back. In fact, I think it has, among the grassroots. Save for those who are swayed by the logic of Suttee, which posits that sacrifice demands, in itself, further blind sacrifice (thus the soldiers killed in Iraq are not killed in vain if further soldiers are killed in Iraq), the American will to continue the madness there is crumbling. There is, unfortunately, a lot of anger on the left about this with no forum – the Democrats have long been a coalition of the cowardly, and the irritant of their presence on the scene is mitigated only by their almost total irrelevance and impotence. What LI thinks should be happening is some reaching out to the paleoconservatives. The paleos are really hostile to the wasting of American lives in the service of the great Moloch, Washington D.C. And the wasting of these lives is becoming, increasingly, a vanity project, as the courtiers around King George refuse to confront him about his madness. What one would like to see is an alliance of convenience. The recent discussion about Harry’s Place in LI’s comments was interesting insofar as the writers of that blog present themselves as leftists. So do many who support the mad war. Unfortunately, anti-war people have not yet exploited the opening given by the left-symp war supporters.

These kinds of people – their lifestyles, their vocabulary, their gestures -- evoke blind rage among rightwingers, even as they grudgingly rally to them. It would seem an eminently fair step, in terms of propaganda, to exploit that rage – to present the war as what it is, a faux Leninist project. LI has always thought that the most consistent anti-war position is derived from Burkean conservatism. Yet the antiwar left continually drives away their allies by pulling in extraneous domestic matters. Allies don’t have to be converts – in fact, every ally, in strategic terms, is a potential enemy. The fact that the left doesn’t use the enormous, pent up hostility to D.C. is a historic relic from the time that the liberals controlled D.C. That time is gone, and the D.C. centric gesture ossifies a self defeating politics.

Nietzsche, again

LI received a letter the other day wishing us good luck on our Nietzsche postings, but warning us that we were probably on a fool’s errand. Maybe so. Still, it does seem to us that the controversy about Nietzsche and fascism makes a strange detour around the arguments of the fascists themselves, and this is something we’d like to correct. And we’d like to correct it using one of Nietzsche’s own habitual methods: the question, for us, is what problems faced a philosopher who wanted to make Nietzsche into a proto-Nazi? And, a companion question, what benefit did Nietzsche bring to Nazism?

In Lehmann’s intro, one of the problems that has to be dealt with is that Nietzsche happens to have been multiply claimed between 1890 and 1933. Here’s the way Lehnmann states the problem:

It is not the year 1900, the year of Nietzsche’s death, that is decisive in bringing to a close the mental reality that we call the 19th century. It was only 1914 that decisively pushed that reality into the past. And if we say that we are closest to Nietzsche not only of all his contemporaries, but among all German thinkers of the past, we meant that his will and his greatness only became visible through the experience of the first world war.

This is how we understand the curious fact that more than a quarter century of Nietzsche scholarship has not succeeded in bringing the philosophy of this thinker out into the open. A writer of such wonderful clarity and transparency of language, who has spoken so often and so extensively about his intentions and tasks – does it require a particular interpretation and the instrument of interpretation, “philology”, in order to grasp his fundamental concepts? Just this, that each person who reads Nietzsche thinks that he is the master of his thought, was the cause of the misunderstanding of his philosophy.”

What is behind Lehmann’s time scheme?

We are all familiar with the pictures and trivia – the picture of Hitler at Nietzsche’s house, posing with a simpering, aged Elizabeth; Hitler sending Nietzsche’s collected works to Mussolini as a present sealing the Axis pact; etc., etc. Those scenes, and their precedent in the work of people like Lehmann, succeeded in one crucial aspect: they pretty much sealed the relation between Nietzsche and fascism, driving out rival claims. But it gives us a very skewed picture of Nietzsche’s reception to think that only the fascists claimed Nietzsche at this time. In fact, the Goethe-kultur of the German speaking countries had absorbed Nietzsche as the last German classic long before then. We know about the effect Nietzsche had on the modernist generation between 1890 and 1914 (which Lehmann denigrates, following, in this, Nazi policy): the influence on Gide, on Svevo, on Shaw, on Barres, on Hamsum, on Hesse, on Mann, on Musil – it is hard to find a writer from that time who hadn’t some opinion of Nietzsche. Or several, over the course of a lifetime – Musil and Mann are notable in this respect. There was also the influence on Jewish culture – in this period, Nietzsche was considered, as Otto Weiniger puts it somewhere, a “philo-Semite.” Martin Buber translated Zarathustra into Polish. The greatest Jewish philosopher, perhaps, of the twentieth century, Franz Rosenzweig, built Der Stern der Erloesung partly out of his struggle with N. But less noted is the political claiming of Nietzsche. The liberal-social democratic party in Germany was particularly attracted to Nietzsche. The German politician who first declared himself Nietzsche’s follower was not Hitler, but Hitler’s antithesis, Walter Rathenau, who was assassinated in 1922, after Rapello. In Nazi eyes, Rathenau was an ideal devil: a rich, liberal, Jewish industrialist associated with that government party that surrendered in 1918 – which is surely not the effect Lehmann wants to emphasize. In a polemic with Sloterdjik over Nietzsche, (the Right Nietzsche in the belly of a left Trojan Horse) Detlef Hartman claims that Nietzsche work was the “most radical driver’ behind the Taylor-Fordist regime advocated by Rathenau, Weber and Schumpeter – that indeed, the idea of ‘creative destruction” has a Nietzschian geneology.

Tucholsky made fun of the overuse of Nietzsche, in this period. Like a lot of the Vienna spirits, Tucholsky went from admiring Nietzsche to comparing him, unfavorably, with Schopenhauer:

“Tell me what you need, and I will find a Nietzsche quote for you. With Schopenhauer, this isn’t so easy. With Nietzsche? Pro Germany and anti-German. For peace and against peace. For literature and against literature. Whatever you like.”

In that atmosphere, the first and most successful Nazi move was to clear out rivals.

I am not, by the way, making an exculpatory argument – or not yet. There is a newspaper logic that goes like this: x says that the world is round, and y says that the world is flat. So the truth must be in the middle – the world is shaped like a Frisbee. That’s the very definition, to me, of what Nietzsche called herd thinking. Because many sides claimed Nietzsche doesn’t mean one side was not correct. While I think Nietzsche’s thinking contains a good many themes that allow one to see the belligerance, nationalism, and worship of power of the fascists as symptoms of nihilism, I also think there are plenty of footholds in Nietzsche lending themselves to a rightwing reading. There is a line of thought that says, the Nazis misunderstood Nietzsche – and fundamentally I agree with that. But they also understood things about Nietzsche. The hagiographic approach to Nietzsche, criticized by T.V., is all about avoiding those things. So the question is, pace Tucholsky, – did the Nazi editing of Nietzsche have internal textual and conceptual support from the man who wrote, in the Antichrist: ‘The weak and misbegotten shall be driven to extinction. This is the first law of our love of humanity. And one should give them a helping hand”? A sentence over which, as Nietzsche might have put it, a Verhaengniss hangs.

More, hopefully, tomorrow.

a short and not so sweet post

LI has been terrible lately. We know it. Exhaustion on this end. And also – there is a strange cycle in trying to write posts daily. Sometimes, what comes out of my fingers seems like gold – and then sometimes it seems like fool’s gold. I am rather fascinated by that volatility, even if LI's poor readers might find it less than engrossing. It isn’t connected to the quality of ideas – writing isn’t a command and control process, in which the concepts come first and tell the language, or one’s share of it, how to get to work. The concepts are vaguely there, a sort of drape fluttering and room hum, and one’s share of the language is sprawled on the floor, grinding up crayons and picking their noses. And then some cognitive throat clearing occurs, and the language either jumps up and starts spontaneously doing the dance of the bumble bee back from the pollen laden flowers – which is good -- or it bucks and whinnies like a dying mule – which is bad.

Our recommend for your reading pleasure this morning is this Knight Ridder article about the freedom loving Iraqi government our boys and gals are dying for. Those boys and gals are probably proud as punch that the Iraqi gov has discovered such creative uses for the electric drill as an instrument of information gathering. Gee, it is almost as if our boys and gals are dying to reincarnate the very forms and ceremonies of the last Iraq government, Saddam Hussein’s. But that can’t be – can one imagine Donald Rumsfeld, for instance, supporting that kind of thing?

Your neighbors. Their blood. Your hands. The virtuous circle rides again, and it is mornin’ in Bush’s America.

Our other recommend is a much longer and lasting read. Santayana's philosophical masterpiece, the Life of Reason, has been put up in all five volumes at the Gutenberg site. We think Santayana was the most important conservative philosopher of the twentieth century, and maybe the sole original American contribution to conservative thought. Plus, he is an excellent writer (too excellent, many philosophers claim -- he liked writing a little bit too much). He makes the Strausses and Kirks look like amateur pikers.

too much blog talk

Mr Turbulent Velvet replied to our post about Nietzsche, sort of preemptively killing us in the windup. But we are still determined to trace out one of Nietzsche's posthumous "becomings" -- how N. became a Nazi -- in order to demonstrate that the selective reading of Nietzsche that made him acceptable to the nazis is picked up and reproduced by those who criticize him for being a protofascist without questioning the history of that image. Unfortunately, I’m doing some heavy lifting in another part of my life right now – the editing part – so that I just don’t have the energy today.

So, instead of Nietzsche, a little short post about a funny blog thing. A couple of days ago, at one of our favorite blogs, Charlotte Street, there was a post about “bruschetta brigade” – which I guess is the equivalent, in the U.K., of limousine liberals. It was a nice riff that ended like this:

“Here is ‘mere talk’; meanwhile others must make tough decisions etc. ‘Bruschetta’ has the added advantage of sounding foreign – there is always something somehow foreign and unpatriotic about these intellectuals, non? Thus, the phrase glides along grooves ideologically pre-prepared. It is little more than a Barthesian mytheme.”

We made a few comments in the comments section about luxury and its ambiguity in both the classical economic tradition and in Marx.

Well, these comments were seized upon as the quintessence of po-mo nonsense by another blog, Harry’s Place. And, in order to add a little of the necessary irony to the mix, the comments were then attributed to the guy who writes Charlotte Street. Who then writes about the HP people coming to his site and making pissy comments on the post. Thus completing the circle, which is either a vicious circle or a circle jerk – or both. First, you get the drift of the signature. Second, the politics of citation. Third is the blissful repetition of the gesture I was criticizing in my thesis without any consciousness that the gesture was being repeated. The unconsciousness is not my subjective interpretation -- several remarks showed that commentors had inversed the sense of the thesis I was making. And it wasn't a difficult thesis. The scorn poured on the meaningless phrases, all with words of more than two syllables, all obviously “unnecessary” when common sense would tell you all about luxury – how could this be anything other than the reactivation of the very trope I was pointing to? And finally, to put the icing on the eclair, I believe that some commenters on the HP blog must have read earlier posts of mine, stuff I’ve written over the years about my habitual destitution, and transferred the sense of that to the writer of the Charlotte Street blog – there was some discussion about whether the writer of the latter was unemployed.

All of which is pretty funny. If I’d set up a psych experiment on Derrida’s notion of the effects of a text, I couldn’t have come up with a set of more validating inputs. Plus, to me, the luxury of watching my original tracing of the psychopathology of luxury create responses that blindly repeat that psychopathology in another domain (that of rhetoric). I wonder if this is how Pavlov felt when walking through the kennel?

Nietzsche and fascinating fascism

A busy schedule has made LI haphazard and sloppy about posting, lately. We hoped to have up a post about Nietzsche, today, but instead we have this galimatias.

Nietzsche is surely the writer we have studied most closely, and who has had the greatest impact on our life. Consequently, we don’t really like to write about the man. Arguing about Nietzsche is much less fun, in our view, than applying Nietzsche’s m.o. Still, we’ve been following UFO Breakfast’s intermittent series of posts attacking the Big N. and, in particular, his status right now on the left. LI is, if anything, a lefty Nietzschian, so we are going to take a crack at replying to this charge:

“I do think that even if Nietzsche was an innocent reactionary aphorist, there is something peculiar about his work that, when appropriated by progressives, leads not so much to fascism as fecklessness.”

The writer of the blog, Turbulent Velvet, is very good. He employs those methods approved of by the legendary Mike Fink, who always began his fights with:

I'm a Salt River roarer! I'm a ring-tailed squealer! I'm a reg'lar screamer from
the ol' Massassip'i WHOOP! . . . I'm half wild horse and half cock-eyed alligator and the rest o' me is crooked snags an' red-hot snappin' turkle. I can hit like fourth-proof lightnin' an' every lick I make in the woods lets in an acre o' sunshine. I can out-run, out-jump, out-shoot, out-brag, out-drink, an' out-fight, rough-an'-tumble, no holts barred, ary man on both sides the river from Pittsburgh to New Orleans an' back ag'in to St. Louiee. Come on, you flatters, you bargers, you milk-white mechanics, an' see how tough I am to chaw!

The no holts barred polemic he launches on Nietzsche chaws right through him, using a reading of Geoff Waite’s Nietzsche’s Corpse to make the milk white followers of the zeitgeist, the fans, the causuists, the excusers, tremble in their boots:

“It's popular & common to forgive fascists because they invent funny one-liners at the expense of the weak and helpless. It's the main reason Clear Channel has taken over our culture. "He's just an entertainer."

Nietzsche hagiography is simply the tweed/punk sublation of that formation with a lacuna as big as the fuckin' sun.

2.
There's not much point in reading a dusty biography of Alexander Pope organized around the argument that "he was more sinned against than sinning." Why? Because a critic who derives all of his primary categories for evaluating an author directly from that author himself is doomed not just to write a hagiography but the precise hagiography that the author programmed him to write.

For the same reason there is no point in reading an approach to Nietzsche which takes him to be a "buffoon" or that his work should be divided into three stages because that's what he told us to think about him. Nietzsche fans are such good little boys and girls: they always do what they're told. (Granted, it's hard for Nietzsche fans to think for themselves because he makes them feel like such courageous naughty little rebels if they think like him instead. Rebel against me, said Zarathustra! And the fans quote him, even as they don't!)

Nietzsche is unique in his ability to inspire universal hagiographic abjection. And along with the hagiography comes an even more bizarre suspension of any suspicion about its obvious universality. For all other major philosophers one can find shelves of books written polemically against their work, often with no quarter given. The "anti" gesture is part of the tradition: Marx writes the anti-Hegel, Nietzsche the anti-Christ, D&G the anti-Freud. But there is no tradition of anti-Nietzsche to speak of, not even a tepid desire there should be one--especially on the Left where one would expect to find little else.”

So -- I am not going to take on Waite. Rather, I’d like to take the case of Nietzsche as fascist or Nazi from the mouth of the people who first made that case: the Nazis themselves. Luckily, Lehmann’s 1939 preface to Nietzsche’s works, which was produced in Nazi Germany, is up on the web. I often find it puzzling that the case for Nietzsche’s fascism is discussed as if it were a matter of Nietzsche and Heidegger and contemporary American and European philosophers, none of whom openly espouse fascism. As Husserl said to the blind man, go to the things themselves. What is left out of the equation are those who did espouse fascism, and thought Nietzsche was its prophet.

My argument that N. leads neither to fascism nor fecklessness is that: a., the fascist interpretation begins by seriously distorting Nietzsche’s reception, which is part of the general fascist reaction against modernism; b, that the reading of Nietzsche as a fascist systematically segregates and diminishes the critical dimension in Nietzsche; c, that the fascist interpretation, while rightly seeing the Will to Power as essential to Nietzsche’s philosophy, conflates it with “Macro Politics” (grosse Politik); and d, that the conflict in Nietzsche’s own politics, in the latter part of the work, has to do with finding the scale at which his models of power work. C. was the whole point of Bäumler’s work, which was key to the Nazi interpretation of Nietzsche. As Lehmann puts it:

“He has further shown, that Nietzsche, the political thinker, was the only one among his contemporaries to set the demands of the future and the making of Macro-Politics (“grosse” Politik zu treiben) in opposition to the Christian-nationalist state, the Second Reich, the bourgeois mass and class state, whose downfall he forsaw.”

This finds the right locus in Nietzsche, for it is his opposition to Bismarck and the Germany of his time that, to the fascists, skews Nietzsche to the right – and to me, skews Nietzsche to the critical. I wouldn’t say to the left, which was worker based and for which Nietzsche had no feel and only a distant appreciation. Nietzsche was no socialist. His own sense was that he had no political faction in Germany. His politics as a practical matter were hopelessly out of date -- he was a Frondeur, a supporter of the nobility against the monarchy, an impossible political position in the late 19th century, although a lively one in 17th century France.

But the obsolescence of his politics, his dandyism, freed him from being a partisan -- gave him the "fecklessness" to be critical. What I would say is that Nietzsche’s own political thinking picked out the totalitarian seed in the democratic state. I would say this is why, contra Mr. TV, Nietzsche's shock effect is not comfortably contained within an academic s/m fan club. The reigning myth is that democracy is opposed to totalitarianism – that totalitarianism comes from outside democracy, infests it like a disease, sickens it, overthrows it. Churchill's image of Lenin being conveyed into Russia on a sealed train like a bacillus picks up on this myth. Nietzsche, on the contrary, claims that the organizational form to which democracies tend – the party form – prefigures a new kind of tyranny. He saw that the party organization flourished in the democratic culture of the nineteenth century, and he saw how that organization reproduced itself by coordinating ideology and party interest. He saw how the tie between those two tends, inevitably, to advance party interest and hollow out ideology, insofar as the representatives of ideology becomes the party's ruling clique. He was certainly right that all of the significant tyrannies of the twentieth century in the West have come through parties, and have ruled through parties. This isn't true of tyrannies in the past.

This makes things interesting. The fascist claim on Nietzsche, here, and the left Nietzschian claim, both rely on constructing Nietzsche’s response to German statebuilding (even if that theme has been undercontextualized among contemporary Nietzschians) which of course happened while he was alive. That is probably where I will go after doing a post on Lehmann. I’m not sure if I am going to go into the d. too much. And I’m not sure if I will have time for too much of any of this. And, as I say, I find arguing about Nietzsche oftentimes besides the point. But as I am myself wondering about American politics in the age of Bush – and especially the debilitating lock of the parties on political alternatives – it fits with my present preoccupations.