Appendix 2: Quotations on Nazi socialism and fascism [Nietzsche and the Nazis]
Quotations on Nazi socialism and fascism. Excerpt from Nietzsche and the Nazis.
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Collectivism
Burckhardt quotation on the birth of individualism in the Italian Renaissance
A favorite from Jacob Burckhardt’s great The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860): In the Middle Ages, “Man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation — only through some general category. In Italy this veil first melted into air; an objective treatment and consideration of
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Mussolini and Kant on war and the sacrifice of individuals
In his 1932 The Doctrine of Fascism, Benito Mussolini quotes approvingly historian Ernst Renan for his “pre-fascist intuitions”: “The maxim that society exists only for the well-being and freedom of the individuals composing it does not seem to be in conformity with nature’s plans, which care only for the species and seem ready to sacrifice
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Zarathustra’s predatory collectivism
Nietzsche is usually labelled an individualist. One of the more controversy-generating claims of my Nietzsche and the Nazis appears in Section 34, where I argue that Nietzsche is more collectivist than individualist.[1] Re-reading Zarathustra I came across two more relevant quotations. In both cases, Zarathustra is speaking: “A thousand goals there have been until now,
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Yukio Mishima’s sacrificial collectivism, nationalist version
“Only through the group, I realised — through sharing the suffering of the group — could the body reach that height of existence that the individual alone could never attain. And for the body to reach that level at which the divine might be glimpsed, a dissolution of individuality was necessary. The tragic quality of
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Stephen Hicks, “Your Sex Life Under Socialism” [Atlas Intellectuals]
This unit on Socialism features Stephen Hicks’s “Your Sex Life Under Socialism.” Here’s the logic: “If human beings are the most important means of production and socialism means collective ownership of the means of production, then socialism means collective ownership of human beings. And if human beings are produced by sexual reproduction and socialism is
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Is Racial Tolerance the Best We Can Do? [Good Life series]
Racist attitudes are a holdover from primitive times. There is still plenty of racism, but we have made progress in some parts of the world, as this Washington Post graphic of most and least racist nations shows. In much of Europe, North and South America, Australia and New Zealand, and a few other places, racism
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A tolerância racial é o melhor que podemos conseguir? [Portuguese translation]
Atitudes racistas são remanescentes de um passado primitivo. Existe ainda muito racismo, contudo, progredimos em algumas partes do mundo, como mostra o gráfico dos países mais e menos racistas do mundo, publicado pelo The Washington Post. Em grande parte da Europa, América do Sul, América do Norte, Oceania e em alguns outros lugares, o racismo recuou significativamente.
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