My own thoughts on Nietzsche:

These are my thoughts on this imporant matter:

There is a traceable line of the development of thought lodged in the philosophical idealist as opposed to the dialectical materialist view of history. The idealist tradition came from God, as the origin of all though, then to Nietzsche, “God is dead” and only the Übermensch can rule and the Untermensch must serve them. And that does ultimately lead to a justification of Nazism, even if that was not the original intention. Elements of the thought of ancient Greece, Plato and Rome, Kant and Hegel which led to the mystical Schopenhauer and thence to the elitist Nietzsche and individualist Wittgenstein and the Nazi Heidegger, the uber Nazi who never abandoned his Nazism and never apologised for his part in promoting and defending the Holocaust.

Of course, elements of ancient Greece, Heraclitus, the 18th century Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, also led to Feuerbach and thence to Marx and Engels and from them to Lenin and Trotsky.

So modern philosophy must explain Heidegger, why this Nazi is regarded as the greatest philosopher of the 20th century by so many liberal intellectuals? Why Jean Paul Sartre and so many other were so strongly influenced by this philosophy of the Übermensch? Why wasn’t Heidegger executed in Nuremburg post war? Why the Jewish liberal Hannah Arendt became his lover after 1923 and post war from 1950. Her piece, Heidegger at 80 is a shocking defence of his philosophy in general. And if it is possible totally to separate his politics, Nazi supremacism, from his philosophy, which is supposedly progressive.

Can human though be bifurcated in this manner? Of course not. The truth is that his philosophy is a defence of capitalism in general against the appalling vista of the socialist revolution as it appeared in Russia in October 1917. In the 1930s Nazism was necessary to prevent socialist revolution in Germany, so it served that purpose. In the 1960s post war it served Sartre, Stalinism and the French philosophers to defend against revolution in France in 1968.

And it served Hannah Arendt to defend Israel ultimately against the Palestinians, albeit now adopted to a liberal democratic form. Still counterrevolutionary but no longer bearing the stigma of Hitler. So ponder the contradictions of liberal men and women forced to rely, like Hannah Arendt, on a Nazi philosopher to defend their privileges against the dreaded socialist revolution.