"Johny" said:
As you said, Nietzche couldn't have been a Nazi himself since he died long before WW2. Nevertheless, his concept of the "superhuman" (ubermensch in German) inspired the idea of the superior race. He became the favorite philosopher of Nazi Germany and his sister was a known Nazi supporter. Interesting, huh?
I am responding to your comments because I believe that you must be looking in the mirror when/if you take offense to my comments.
As you stated, it is wrong to generalize a group of people based on limited exposure to the group. If my comments offended anyone on this topic, then it must be true that the entire forum is offending. To hold Nietzche responsible for or even connected to the Holocaust because he had the "concept" of a superhuman or the claim that he had a sister who was a Nazi supporter further erodes any possibility of making a valid point.... One person speaks out against the error of the mass and instead of focusing on the point, you chose to focus on the person who spoke up. Your line of thinking is reminiscent of both McCarthyism and the Third Reich combined. Not one person has addressed the fact that Henry Ford had far more influence on Hitler's anti-Jewish sentiment than Nietzche concept of ubermensch, (an extraordinary individual who
transcends the limits of traditional morality
to live purely by the will to power. No connection to Nazi Death Camps!)
To educate your the group about Henry Ford's War on the Jews, please review the following: http://www.orange-papers.org/orange-rroot540.html
"Henry Ford Sr. was a long-time supporter of Frank Buchman.
He was also a long-time supporter of Adolf Hitler.
Ford had quite a
history of involvement with ultra-conservative and fascist causes himself.
During World War I, Ford wrote a series of viciously anti-Semitic articles for
The Dearborn Independent, which he then
published in book form as a hate-filled diatribe against Jews called
"The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem",
which basically blamed Jews for all of the problems of the world.
The International Jew is still reprinted and used and much
admired by neo-Nazis and White Supremacists even today.In the early 1920s, this book was published in Germany under the
title The Eternal Jew.
It reportedly had a major influence on Adolf Hitler, and he almost
certainly plagiarized parts of it in Mein Kampf.
The admiration was mutual. Following Hitler's assumption of power,
Ford sent Hitler 50,000 Deutsch Marks every year on Hitler's birthday.
Ford's anti-Semitic views were well known during the period that
the Buchmanites bragged of Ford's support of their movement.
For more information on Ford's Nazi connections, see Who Financed
Hitler?, by James and Suzanne Pool. New York: Dial Press, 1978.
What happened was, at the end of 1918,
Henry Ford Sr. bought the small independent
country newspaper The Dearborn Independent
and, at great expense, turned it into a nation-wide newspaper
that was devoted to spreading his message.Suddenly on May 22, 1920, the Independent lashed forth with a
violent attack on the Jews. The boldface headline on the front page
was a blunt and concise summation of the editorial's thesis:
"The International Jew: The World's Problem."
The first paragraph began: "There is a race, a part of humanity
which has never yet been received as a welcome part."
This people, the article continued, has ever been fouling the earth
and plotting to dominate it. In order to eventually rule the Gentiles,
the Jews have long been conspiring to form an "international
super-capitalist government." This racial problem, the Independent
said, was the "prime" question confronting all society.The following ninety-one articles covered a wide field of topics
related to the international Jew. ...In subsequent articles, Ford frequently accused the Jews of causing
a decline in American culture, values, products, entertainment, and even
worse, of being the instigators of World War I."Who Financed Hitler; The Secret Funding of Hitler's
Rise to Power 1919-1933, James Pool and Suzanne Pool, page 87.
