Zarathustra washes, with shame, his hands, because they have aided
someone who was suffering. “Nay, I labour to cleanse my very soul” of
the sin of pity, he adds.
“I dream,” he cries, “of an association of men who would be whole and
complete, who would know no compromise, and who would give themselves
the name of destroyers....”
In memorial verses on the death of a friend, killed in France in 1870,
he writes--
“Even in the hour of death he ordered men, and he ordered them to
destroy.”
The three cardinal virtues of the warrior are “pleasure, pride and the
instinct of domination.”
“If I am convinced”--he means, plainly, “Since I am convinced”--he
writes, “that harshness, cruelty, trickery, audacity, and the mood of
battle tend to augment the vitality of man, I shall say Yes! to evil,
and sin....”
And lest any of his defenders should seek to explain away this very
coherent doctrine as “poetry,” let it be remembered that this was a man
who had seen war, much of the war of 1870. During its actual progress
he wrote deliberately a Satanic pæan from which he never receded--
“On the one hand they (the Democrats) conjure up systems of European
equilibrium; on the other hand, they do their best to deprive absolute
sovereigns of the right to declare war.... They feel it incumbent on
them to weaken the monarchical instinct of the masses, and do weaken it
by propagating amongst them the liberal and optimistic conception of
the world which has its roots in the doctrines of French rationalism
and the Revolution; that is, in a philosophy altogether foreign to the
German spirit, a Latin platitude, devoid of any metaphysical meaning.”
We “must have war, and war again.”
“It will not, therefore, be thought that I do ill when I raise here
the pæan of war. The resonance of its silver bow is terrible. It comes
to us sombre as night; nevertheless, Apollo accompanies, Apollo the
rightful leader of states, the god who purifies them.... Let us say it
then; war is necessary to the state, as the slave is to society.”
* * * * *
This transition leads us without a break on to some amiable views
regarding the internal organization of states. To Nietzsche the mass of
humanity is a sweating negligibility--
“The misery of those who live by labour must be made yet more rigorous,
in order that a very few Olympian men may create a world of art.”
(Unnecessary to say that the son of the Pastor of Naumburg was to have
a life membership of Olympus.) “At their expense, by the artifice of
unpaid labour, the privileged classes should be relieved from the
struggle for life, and given such new conditions that they can create,
and satisfy a new order of needs.... And if it is true to say that
the Greeks were destroyed by slavery, this other affirmation is most
certainly even truer; for lack of slavery, we are perishing.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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