cite from "War and the People of War," in "Also Sprach Zarathustra,"
(Pages 67-68,) the magnum opus of Nietzsche:
You should love peace as a means to new war and brief peace
more than a long one. Do you say, "It is a good cause by which
a war is hallowed"? I say unto you, It is a good war which
hallows every cause. War and courage have done greater things
than the love of one's neighbor. "What, then, is good?" you
ask. To be brave is good. Let young maidens say, "Good is to
be pretty and touching." But you are hateful? Well, so be it,
my brethren! Cast about you a mantle of the sublimely hateful.
And when your soul has become great it will become wanton; in
your greatness there will be malice, I know, and in malice the
proud heart will meet the weakling.
This, we are told, is not to be taken literally--all is symbolism and
has a meaning other than the more direct one. But the fact remains, as
can be testified by the present writer from three years' residence as a
university student in Germany, that the rank and file as well as the
aristocracy--from laborers and small shopkeepers, petty officials, and
students to Judges of the Supreme Court and university professors who
have become "secret councilors" (Geheimrat)--not only in Berlin and Bonn
but in Munich and Heidelberg, all have become ominously full of the
doctrine of the survival of the fittest and the consequent expediency of
power, not only in intellectual rivalry but in Krupps and high
explosives.
The Nietzsche fire may, perhaps, serve a purpose on the hearthstone of
our inmost life if it be to rescue us from complacency and secure
inanity, but in the form of electrically connected lyddite stores and
gasoline bombs it drives those who believe in a supernation to a
literal interpretation of the above widely popular philosophy. And, as
demonstrated at Louvain and Rheims, it goes far to obliterate the
memorials of a past which Nietzsche thought so contemptible a check upon
the prowess of the "blonde Bestie" as he progressed toward--toward the
superman.
It was wide of the mark, therefore, to attribute that which bears the
stamp "made in Germany" to England. Bernhardi and the Crown Prince with
their thousands of officers and the multitudes in the ranks to whom
Nietzsche has become an inspiring motive are not to be construed as
English surely. Nor does the English "culture," so far as the present
writer is
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