Dubious wrote: ↑Fri Apr 08, 2022 10:25 am
When a quote starts with "this is precisely why...", the precisely why needs to be stated. If it were, you'd notice that your interpretation doesn't blend with Nietzsche's intent or meaning in terms of fateful or disastrous in describing the effect of Jewish history upon the Western World.
I believe I grasp your point which seems to be that it the Jews were *disastrous* it is because perverse Christianity arose out of that matrix. You take the emphasis off of the Judaic core of influence in itself and place it uniquely on the bastard child of Judaism.
This seems to me a naive and simplistic reading. However, I do get the sense that you are trying to *apologize* for Nietzsche as-against what you believe me to be doing: unfairly attacking him. But I am not
attacking him. My effort is to locate him within a larger cultural movement of rejection and redefinition.
I don't agree. There may have been a small vestige of the Wotan spirit remaining in the Germanic psyche but their total surrender to the Christian faith is what caused them and the Europeans generally to become so dangerous to the Jews.
This statement I find interesting and also multi-leveled and complex. First, both 'systems', as it were are religious-based and also (for the sake of a philosophical approach) myth-based. I am assuming here that you know very little about Jewish history and (Orthodox) Jewish religion. I also assume that when you think of Jews you likely think of so-called emancipated Jews not of religious Jews or, as I understand it, Jews as a historical force. Therefore, if you are to talk realistically about both religiously committed Christianity and religiously committed Judaism, and their conflict, you would then get to the heart of the long-standing cultural conflict.
Now in your case, I also assume, you approach this entire question as a non-believer. That is to say that you do not and could not believe in *the Jewish historical project* as Orthodox Jews understand that project. The reason being is that Jews believe that they have been assigned a historical mission that has a beginning and also an end. You would as a result of this understanding have to understand and take into consideration that in modern Israel, which in Orthodox Jewish minds is one sign of culminating history, there is now talk of *rebuilding the temple*. The 'belief system' of Orthodox Jews (I suggest) is likely
way outside your purview and this is because you do not believe in any part of it.
Similarly, or relatedly, you surely cannot believe in any of the core and necessary beliefs of orthodox Christianity. So the entire *belief system* is based on absurd fantasies, projections and what has been 'made up'. So the question: On what basis do Orthodox Judaism and orthodox Christianity conflict with each other? is not one that you can even consider. But you can consider the social and cultural conflict between emancipated Jewish culture and general Christian culture in the European world. And it was on this basis, if my understanding is correct, that the German project (and a general germanic project, that is of the general European world, especially Central Europe) began to conceive of the expulsion of the Jews as a *necessary act* to (as they would say) preserve themselves. When one studies the events of Germany (for example in Raul Hilberg's
The Destruction of the European Jews) it is laid out quite plainly that the original efforts were not elimination (that is killing) of Jews but the
expulsion of the Jews. Now, in this connection this particular expulsion took place within the ultra-modern world (as opposed to that of Spain, the last major one).
So the way I look at this issue is to examine it -- somewhat dryly I admit -- from what I guess is a 'dispassionate' perspective. And that is why I present Nietzsche as
part-and-parcel of a larger cultural and also ideological movement in which the germanic world chose to undertake a project of *ridding itself* of Jewish, Judaic and also of Christian influence. You can put a gentle spin on Nietzsche if you wish but this would be a false presentation. Nietzsche was radically Right-leaning and thoroughly anti-Liberal (and anti-democratic) and his ideas, when enacted, result in radicalism. I would submit for your perusal Ronald Beiner's recent book
Dangerous Minds: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Return of the Far Right. The reason I reference Beiner is not because I support his positions (his base concern I gather is that the Right (radical Right and *Alt-Right*) that is now manifesting so strongly has a dangerous Jewish-critical (he would call it anti-Semitic) element. There is general alarm in the Jewish world of the rise of these movements and ideas. And Beiner explores this, credibly in my view, in his book.
Here
Beiner is discussed by Michael Millerman in the context of Alexandr Dugan, which places it, again, in an immediate cultural context.
What is the purpose of bringing all this up? Simple: to contextualize our present conversation with the real world of real and actual events. The anti-Christian movement, of which you and many others here are a part of, has a long historical trajectory and this trajectory can be examined.
I can assure you that the National Socialist Christian apologists made it their project to attempt to redefine Christianity as a Gentile and not a Jewish religion. But then here the word *religion* has to be revisited and plumbed. The Germanic project, historically, and beginning in the 13th century (according to some scholars who study the question) was one in which received Christianity was modified to suit a specific Northern European people.
So here again we can speak of a larger trend and I will try to define what that trend is. The present zeitgeist -- I mean of culture as a whole and also you and I and how we see things -- is to a significant degree one that veers away from *otherworldly* metaphysics and 'escapism' and back
into the body, back into the world as the unique field of endeavor and activity. If this trend is real, and I think it is, it has origins in the Germanic reception and modification of the Christian ideal. I won't belabor the point except to refer to it (because I have determined it is true).
It wasn't Judaism which had to be resisted but its degenerate offspring. Judaism belonged wholly to the Jews who never offered it as a catholicon of universal salvation.
I would guess that you have *absorbed* Nietzsche's ideas about Christian degeneracy. So at this point I also gather that you are attempting and will attempt to defend and explain a movement against that degeneracy. And the way that takes shape is, as we all know, through undermining the possibility of *believing in* Christian metaphysics. That is, you work to utterly undermine it.
Now that is all well and good. But what you fail to consider is that this manoeuvre, which is one in which you yourself turn against you and yourself as a 'cultural outcome', ultimately undermines your very self. (I do really mean this in a plural sense -- ourselves). It becomes necessary, in this your activism, to turn against everything that was created by Europe which, following Nietzsche, you can only define as degenerate in precisely the sense that you use the term. Whatever *Europe* is it is not the stuff of the Ubermench.
But what you are left with is defining *the Jews* as the survivors of Christian degeneracy and infinite levels of error, as representatives, in a way, of Ubermenchen. Not Christianity and Catholicism as things to be defended but the Jews who resisted and were in opposition to both of these.
This is a very strange, I suggest, ideological and cultural stance that I believe needs to be carefully examined. I do not propose having a solution to it and as I say I am interested only in getting all these questions out on the table for examination.
If there is one thing Nietzsche, as the ultimate iconoclast, was never tied to and criticized in the extreme, especially as regarding Germans, it would have been larger social and national endeavors.
Here of course is evidence of a sort of one aspect of your adopted and chosen project. Where do you take this? What does this mean for you? No national identity? No cultural identity? A Pan-Identity? The ending of all identity postures?
The questions need to be explored in greater depth.
I'm sorry, but this is a little too simplified. If true that Christianity became too Judaic to the Germans it may have been due to a William Wilson complex, re an Edgar Allen Poe story, once mentioned in a history of the Germans. When the religious prejudice against Jews as Christ killers unaccepting of Christianity started to wane during the Enlightenment -- causing belief itself to decline -- the historical prejudice against Jews mutated into a form even more virulent as racially motivated, reaching a crescendo in the first half of the 20th century which still hasn't wholly disappeared!
Yet *the Jews* would remain dedicated to their 'general cultural and historical project' would they not? Or do you understand the traditional Jewish belief in Jewish destiny and fate as simply evaporating with he Enlightenment?
Here, of course, foundational beliefs about 'purpose' and 'reason' come to the fore. Who can hold to *purpose* and to the will to enact purpose through history?
You see these are the larger questions that are being considered, even if dimly and semi-consciously, in our present by those who resist what they call globalism and counter-nationalism. They seek someone to blame. Or they seek to understand who and what is behind these world-scale movements that, as they see it, diminish their identities and reduce them to cogs.
And on what is 'cultural identity' built? One element of this is metaphysics. And here I refer to Christian and if I can put it this way European metaphysics. That is, the fundamental and underlying beleif and understanding about why a people exists. To what end? For what purpose?
The other thing I want to talk about (not here) is that Christian belief is in Europe today not about *otherwordly* salvation but about concrete issues of identity
on the ground. But if you cannot discover a solid ground you cannot build identity. You will surrender identity (and destiny) to larger powers and forces who will define it for you.
It was the great sin of the Jews to have survived and even thrived through all the Diaspora years and by surviving being a reminder to Christians and Muslims, but mostly the former, of the falsity of Christianity that knew very well where it derived from. Combine that to how Nietzsche describes the Jews as a group, tantamount to almost being Übermenschen in their acceptance and surmounting of whatever fate threw at them and any surrender to oblivion, wherever or whenever it threatened, was never an option. The admiration Nietzsche expresses for Jews comes across as a working example of the Übermensch concept in the ability to withstand fate, no matter how corrosive it may be.
If what you say is true then it makes sense if, say, part of the Jewish project is to disrupt and undermine the re-coalescing of 'identity postures' that are threatening to whatever they conceive and state their own project to be.
I point this out because it flows out of what you yourself are asserting. I suggest that it will be advantageous -- if we really are interested in underdstanding our present -- to understand how these ideas and conflicts are playing out today,
right in front of us.
Nietzsche's expression what doesn't kill you makes you stronger doesn't leave much to the imagination as to who best exemplifies that idea.
However, I again will state, because it looks plain to me, that you support and stand behind what you yourself must describe as not 'getting stronger' as a result of ingesting a poison, but succumbing to the poison and dying. What you are saying is that the Jews survived the *Christian terror* and got stronger, overcame the Christian assault, and became Ubermenchen.
The reason I bring out all these contradictions is because I honestly (with emphasis on honesty) believe that you Dubious are deeply invested in a range of 'projects' that (this I would assert) you have not fully examined. But it is not just you-singular it is all of us.
