How do you do this? Do you just sit down with a copy of On the Genealogy of Morals, or a transcript of the Nixon Tapes, with a pencil in your hand, underlining the good bits? Does someone send you this stuff? Is there a service you subscribe to, like the Incredibly Relevant Historical Quote of the Month Club?

It's really just amazing how you do this, time after time.

He probably educated himself somehow. I mean, really, there's no excuse for it.

I second SteveB's question. Also, I was present for at least some of Jon's education, and the only guess I can offer is that all of this information is somehow contained in songs by They Might Be Giants.

I dunno. Does this work? Nietzsche in the end was a fascistoid character but at the same time he was also a brilliant thinker and writer, together giving him the typical multifarious, controversial reputation he has. Bush, Limbaugh and Ledeen can hardly be seen to qualify for the "noble" as Nietzsche understood it, can they?

For full disclosure: Nietzschw was a frat boy himself. He overcame; W did not.
Nietzsche was no precursor to fascism or NS.

Donescobar, from what I've read autobiographically by the very early Nietzsche I would say he was way too serious for being characterized as a frat boy. I agree that characterising him as a precursor to German fascism is incorrect but a link there still is. This praising of the blond beast for instance and his militarist snobism. Incidentally, Nietzsche's famous prophecies - (Musil, who was level-headedness incarnate, actully called him "a great prophet") - overlap considerably with what Heinrich Heine has to say in his earlier Zur Geschichte der Reilgion und Philosophie in Deutschland. All of this of course goes into the mercurial, both brilliant and (I think) repulsive personality he was.

Paul, of course,I was kidding about his membership in a university Burschenchaft.
The link to fascism or National Socialism would have repulsed Nietzsche. More than most critics of Western (Christian) culture, he understood the meaning of bourgeois resentment at the root of fascism. The blond beast is more a Northern version of the Greek or Dyonisian warrior, but not the butcher of dark-haired women and children.

Did anyone here pick up the word "Innocence"? I actually think Nietzsche was wrong on that...at least this category does not apply to anyone we are trying to describe.

'How do you do this? Do you just sit down with a copy of On the Genealogy of Morals, or a transcript of the Nixon Tapes, with a pencil in your hand, underlining the good bits?'

My theory is that Jon has engaged the late Billmon to assist with the time-warp goodies - remember his series of telling juxtapositions between Bush's USA and Stalin's Russia, Hitler's Germany, Mao's China?

The other blogger who came to mind reading this is Rigorous Intuition's Jeff Wells, who does it's true wander off to la-la land on a regular basis but who has also written some chillingly plausible speculations about organised elite perversions (ritual child abuse and animal slaughter primarily) which all turn on the notion that 'deep within these noble races there lurks the beast of prey', with particular emphasis on the occasional need to satisfy the beast, and to signal their pride in this primal behaviour via some subtle sign or other (the countles pics of Bush giving some acknowledged devil's hand-signal at lots of solemn events etc etc).

Well OK, they weren't that plausible, but they were chilling. Anyway, who nowadays would be truly surprised by such revelations?

that's a brilliant post.

Glenn,

As a history major at college, there are few iron rules for studying history that you cannot go wrong assuming. I will name just two. The first is that Mankind is often the most prideful of creatures, who thinks that wisdom can be made up for with knowledge. It is to this false view that nearly all of human folly can be traced. The second is that all the works of wise men are quickly lauded and then forgotten, only to be lauded again later, and similarly forgotten. With these two rules in studying human history, you cannot go wrong.

It's been a long time since I read any Nietzsche. I think we were still using Walter Kaufman's translation of that work during my undergrad days. Looks like I should see where I stored that one.

En Ming, I believe "innocence" reflects a lack of self-awareness, not a lack of guilt. I rarely read Nietzsche so I may get this wrong, but given the context, that's what it would have to mean.

I'm reading Nietzsche's use of the term "innocence" similarly to No One of Consequence. Here was Walter Kaufmann's translation of that passage:

"they go back to the innocent conscience of the beast of prey"

I read that within the surrounding context to suggest a more animal-like sense of awareness, a sort of lacking of the sense of self that we humans take for granted.

About that blond beast:

"Moral intolerance is an expression of weakness in a man: he is afraid of his own 'immorality,' he must deny his strongest drives because he does not yet know how to employ them."
The Will to Power

donescobar: Yes, but it is the act of a coward that makes a man a coward, and the act of bravery that makes him a hero. NONE are born either coward or hero but the ACT defines the morality of a man. Not even the thought police can tell one from the other BEFORE the act.

A spendid blond beast of prey lives at my house - my cat, who naps beside me as I write. (My other splendid beast of prey, my black and white cat, is somewhere else in the house). He is innocent in a way that I cannot be, because he lacks the capacity to examine whether his actions are moral by either consequentialist or deontological standards.

A school of psychological thought, "Moral Foundations Theory", argues that

The current American culture war can be seen as arising from the fact that liberals try to create a morality relying almost exclusively on the Harm/Care [consequentialist] and Fairness/Reciprocity [deontological] foundations; conservatives, especially religious conservatives, use all five foundations, including Ingroup/Loyalty, Authority/Respect, and Purity/Sanctity. In every sample we have examined (including samples in the US, UK and Western Europe), political conservatism correlates negatively with endorsement of the Harm and Fairness foundations, and positively with endorsement of the Ingroup, Authority, and Purity foundations.

http://faculty.virginia.edu/haidtlab/mf.html

I suggest - and this is just me talking, without doing any further looking into the topic - that Ingroup, Authority, and Purity foundations for moral action would be a lot more comfortable with mass murder. But I could be wrong.