On 12-30-97 Friedrich Engels wrote to Richard Meic... 
 FE>  FE> "God is dead" said Nietszche... first man to see man as the 
 FE>  FE> superman, unguided by a god... "Democracy and Christianity weaken 
 FE>  FE> man" he would say 
 FE> RM> One can say that it is because of the belief in "God" that man is  
 FE> RM> thought of as the superior being on this world. 
 FE>  
 FE>All the same without the belief in god too, coincidentally enough. 
In one of his early works, the Genealogy of Morals, he makes the  
point that man, unendowed with the word of God, has no excuse 
for using *any means necessary* to promote that word.  The point 
is not that God is *dead*, but that he cannot be blamed nor 
praised for what happens to man, or what he does about what it 
is that happens. 
 
God has made man, and now it is up to man to make something more 
of himself- ubermench.  I think that Neitzsche forsaw that the day  
would come when man would understand the forces of the world, take  
his place as one of them, and be *responsible* for decisions made, 
*and the unintended consequences* of those decisions, accept the 
guilt rather than passing it off as *God's will*, or asking for 
His forgiveness, and likewise, take credit where credit is due. 
 
This was the message of Oedipus, who did not suffer because of 
the laws of God, but because they were the rules that men, like 
himself, had made.  Even though his transgressions weren't made  
intentionall, since they were not God's laws, but *his*  he could  
not ask for forgiveness, and would not forgive himself. 
 
Compare him with Job; I will take the nobility of Oedipus over the  
submission of Job any day of the week.  It is the crux of the  
difference between the Aryan and the Levantine, or any other  
cultural tradition that I know of. 
 
To cite the Nazi application of Ubermench shows the same lack of  
understanding and scholarship twards Neitzsche.  For example, in 
the above work: "...histrionic agitators who wear magic hoods on  
their straw heads, with ambitious artists who try to pass for  
ascetics and preists yet are, at bottom, only tragic buffoons.  And 
I am equally out of patience with those newest speculators in  
idealism called anti-Semites, who parade as Christian-Aryan  
worthies and endeavor to stir up all the asinine elements of the  
nation by that cheapest of propaganda tricks, a moral attitude." 
 
Shall I go on?... "The ease with which any wretched imposture  
succeeds in present-day Germany may be attributed to the  
progressive stultification of the German mind. The reason for this  
general spread of inanity may be found in a diet composed entirely  
of newspapers, politics, beer, and Wagner's music." 
 
So those tragic buffoons seized on Zarathustra, and without having 
read his early works, have him out of context.  Nobody would have 
dreamed that the Nazis were so goddam lazy as to have him wrong; so 
their stupidity passes among the rest of us for his message. 
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 * OFFLINE 1.58 
--- Maximus 3.01
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