re: #577 Nimed

Well, that was a fine post (and I had no idea that Mein Kampf was used in civil weddings).

I agree with the assertion that a large share of believers and ideologues commit atrocities in the name of texts they have never read or understood. You have made a similar, and in my view correct, point regarding Nietzsche the other day — perhaps it should have occurred to me that was what you meant when I read your comment.

Don’t get me started on Nietzsche and the abuse of him by everyone from the Nazis to Ayn Rand (who was not intellectually worthy to tie his shoelaces).

Are you aware that one of his most famous books, Der Wille zur Macht (“The Will to Power”) was never written by him?

His sister Elisabeth, who was a certified proto-Nazi, cobbled it together from scraps, odds and ends, and bits taken from his notebooks, after he went silent.

That book is as much “by Nietzsche” as the apocrypha are “by Jesus”.

Nietzsche despised European anti-Semitism from his deepest soul. Elisabeth went off and married another proto-Nazi, Bernhard Frster, and tried to found an Aryan utopia in Paraguay - the inbred results of which can still be seen today.

Nietzsche himself, while still lucid, condemned his sister and her fraudulent husband in terms that will not bear repeating.

Once he was safely non compos mentis she pieced together “Wille” and later became a favorite Nazi pet. He is still cursing her from his grave to hers.

Nietzsche was not a philosopher so much as a prophet. He did not shrink from the evil that he saw on its way to confound and destroy humanity. But neither did he embrace it.

An analogous case of misconstrual and loss of credibility can be seen in what Capt. Sir Richard Burton’s Catholic wife did with his papers after he died.

How do I know all this? In my long career as translator, I have more than once been called upon to render into English some of his more obscure works. And I am heir (through a Nietzsche scholar whose work surpasses mine as the son does a candle) to the complete works in the critical edition published by de Gruyter. Let no one (not even Mr. Noone) take up the cudgels with me over Nietzsche. I merely flick my little finger, the one with the long nail.