View: https://medium.com/situation-nine/white-supremacists-love-nietzsche-but-nietzsche-would-hate-white-supremacists-492e996d0477
Friedrich Nietzsche is without a doubt one of the most misunderstood and misinterpreted philosophers ever, and now white supremacists and neo-Nazis are using his philosophy (wrongly) for their malicious means.
Infamous white supremacist and alt-righter Richard Spencer talked to the Atlantic back in June, in which he said, “You could say I was red-pilled by Nietzsche.” The term “Red-pilled” is common among alt-righters, which basically means that moment of clarity in which one finally sees the reality and truth after being blinded for so long.
Like the Nazis before, white supremacists like Spencer have hijacked Nietzsche’s philosophy, and turned it into the absolute opposite of what Nietzsche intended. Nietzsche did consider the world to be in constant change, in which there is no absolute truth, add to that his hatred of conventional morality and social restrictions, in which he saw them as crippling the individual and his prosperity.
Nietzsche was also a strong critic of Christianity and its values, he calls it a ‘slave morality’ developed by the weak to sway the powerful.
But there’s a lot more to Nietzsche, every person who dedicated his time to study his philosophy would realize this fact. Most people just read Nietzsche quotes on the internet or maybe one or two books without even giving some thought to what the philosopher is saying. And because of that, a lot of people misinterpret Nietzsche and completely transform his philosophy, and in some radical cases, we get people like Spencer.
It is not hard to see why white supremacists would admire Nietzsche, he has an earth-shattering and rebellious philosophy, in which asks people to consider everything they have been taught and reevaluate their entire moral system. These people want to be rebellious, they think individuals in today’s society are completely brainwashed, and are entirely blind to the facts. They find in Nietzsche a rebel, an outcast, and someone who despises political correctness. All that is true, but what usually happens is that some people start reading Nietzsche in search of what they already believe in, in the case of white supremacists they want to find white pride, nationalism, and anti-Semitism.
Nietzsche is a lot of things, but to anyone who truly understands him and his philosophy, he isn’t an anti-Semitic white nationalist, on the contrary, he is the exact opposite.
But misinterpretation isn’t the only reason white nationalists would appreciate Nietzsche, neo-Nazis today see in Nietzsche the philosopher of Nazi Germany, the philosopher that brought Hitler. But that has Nietzsche’s sister, which was a staunch anti-Semite, to blame for. Nietzsche’s sister was in charge of his estate after he died, and she and her husband, both Nazi sympathizers, rearranged Nietzsche’s notes and essays to produce the infamous, The Will to Power, the book that embraced Nazi ideology. This book made Nietzsche’s sister and her husband closer to Hitler.
But now, who was the real Nietzsche? In short he was a philosopher who despised nationalism, white pride, and anti-Semitism.
In his book Ecce Homo Nietzsche declares:
“This most anti-cultural sickness and unreason there is, nationalism, this nervose nationale with which Europe is sick, this perpetuation of European particularism, of petty politics…a dead-end street.”
Nietzsche also denounced “the blood and soil” politics of Otto von Bismarck, the famous Prussian conservative statesman who unified Germany in 1871, for having a nationalistic approach and calling for racial purity.
Nietzsche despised anti-Semitism, in which later on made him end his friendship with the proto-fascist composer and staunch anti-Semite Richard Wagner.
In his famous book, Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche proposes we:
“Expel the anti-Semitic squallers out of the country.”
In a letter to his sister calling out her anti-Semitism he wrote:
“Your association with an anti-Semitic chief expresses a foreignness to my whole way of life which fills me ever again with ire or melancholy.”
And in another draft letter written in the end of December 1887, his sister and her husband Nieztsche wrote:
I’ve seen proof, black on white, that Herr Dr. Förster has not yet severed his connection with the anti-Semitic movement…Since then I’ve had difficulty coming up with any of the tenderness and protectiveness I’ve so long felt toward you. The separation between us is thereby decided in really the most absurd way. Have you grasped nothing of the reason why I am in the world?…Now it has gone so far that I have to defend myself hand and foot against people who confuse me with these anti-Semitic canaille; after my own sister, my former sister, and after Widemann more recently have given the impetus to this most dire of all confusions. After I read the name Zarathustra in the anti-Semitic Correspondence my forbearance came to an end. I am now in a position of emergency defense against your spouse’s Party. These accursed anti-Semite deformities shall not sully my ideal!!
Georges Bataille was one of the first to denounce the deliberate misinterpretation of Nietzsche carried out by Nazis, among them Alfred Baeumler. He dedicated in January 1937 an issue of Acéphale, titled “Reparations to Nietzsche,” to the theme “Nietzsche and the Fascists”. There, he called Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche “Elisabeth Judas-Förster,” recalling Nietzsche’s declaration:
“To never frequent anyone who is involved in this bare-faced fraud concerning races.”
White supremacists and neo-Nazis rejoice for finding terms like ‘Aryan humanity’, but little do they know the true meaning of this phrase. Nietzsche uses this phrase in several books, but Aryan here simply is a contrasted term opposing Christian morality, it means pre-Christian Pagan values. Besides Aryan wasn’t in Nietzsche’s time a term used to describe racial purity, in that time it also included Indo-Iranian peoples.
Nietzsche is one of the greatest philosophers to ever live, he certainly has his flaws, but he certainly isn’t a philosopher of white supremacy. Nietzsche was disgusted by anti-Semitism, he condemned blind nationalism, and criticized the absurdity of racial purity. But white supremacists’ love to Nietzsche shows one thing, their intellectual weakness, the fragility of the ground they stand on, and their brainwashing, ironically the brainwashing of the people who proclaim, they were ‘red-pilled’.
