Nietzsche and the Government’s Warmongering over Ukraine

Our government’s belligerence and sabre-rattling over Ukraine brought to my mind a quotation from Friedrich Nietzsche, the 19th century radical German philosopher. Nietzsche hated Christianity and what he called its ‘slave morality’, and instead advocated the philosophy of the ‘Ubermensch’ or ‘superman’, who would live a free and creative life unrestrained by conventional bourgeois morality. I think there’s a line in his best-known work, Thus Spake Zarathustra, which runs

‘They say that a good cause justifies any way. But I say unto you, a good war justifies any cause’. Nietzsche himself was rather less aggressive than his supporters. When his cousin, Elizabeth Forster-Nietzsche, hailed Thus Spake Zarathustra as a work of supreme German nationalism, Nietzsche wrote back to her telling her that she was wrong. ‘It is a book for those who like to sit and think, no more’.

I doubt Bozo or any of the horrors have ever read Nietzsche, and I doubt they’d like him if they did. But they have the same attitude to war, even though I don’t think Nietzsche himself was entirely serious about it when he wrote.

But Bozo and his minions are, and I am afraid they will drag us into dreadful carnage, if not a nuclear war.

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Tags: 'Thus Spake Zarathustra', Boris Johnson, Christianity, Elizabeth Forster-Nietzsche, Freidrich Nietzsche, Nuclear War, War