On anti-Semitism: valid or disgusting?
[This is Section 30 of Nietzsche and the Nazis.]
30. On anti-Semitism: valid or disgusting?
The most repulsive sign of Germany’s decline, Nietzsche writes—and this may be initially surprising—is its hatred of the Jews, its virulent and almost-irrational anti-Semitism.
Nietzsche, we know, has said some harsh things about the Jews—but again, that is a set of issues that is easily misinterpreted, so we must be careful.
In connection with all of the negative things Nietzsche has said about the Jews, we must also note the following.
Nietzsche speaks of “the anti-Jewish stupidity” of the Germans.[92] He speaks of those psychologically disturbed individuals who are most consumed with self-hatred and envy. He uses the French word ressentiment to describe such nauseating individuals and says that such ressentiment is “studied most easily in anarchists and anti-Semites.”[93]
Pathological dishonesty is a symptom of such repulsive characters: “An antisemite certainly is not any more decent because he lies as a matter of principle.”[94]
So, to summarize: Nietzsche saves some of his most condemnatory language for Germans who hate Jews—he considers them to be liars, stupid, disturbed, self-hating pathological cases for psychologists with strong stomachs to study.
So it seems a reasonable inference that Nietzsche would have been disgusted by the Nazis, for the Nazis absorbed into their ideology the worst possible kind of anti-Semitism and pursued their anti-Jew policies almost to the point of self-destruction.[95]
References
[92] BGE 251.
[93] GM 2:11.
[94] A 55.
[95] Connecting here to the fascinating “What-if” history question: What if the Nazis had put the Holocaust on hold and devoted the vast resources used there instead to military purposes where needed in WWII?
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