Might and Wrong: A Botched Revolt?
Through the lenses of Thucydides and Nietzsche, after millennia of Western fetishization of victimhood, how does the US ruling class convince their youth to worship the might of Israel?
Many saw this tweet by Elon Musk as an apology for Israeli genocide. While this reading helps cover him from counterattacks from AIPAC-financed politicians, nonetheless, Musk’s critique is far more subversive. It’s even possible that Musk is boosting angry, pro-Palestinian responses. When binary exhortations insist everyone take a side, no space exists for free spirits to analyse the action from above the fray.
Musk is overtly attacking the woke education curriculum which sanctify the weak and demonize the strong. To do so Musk is explicitly deploying the might-makes-right realism dramatized in Ancient Greek historian Thucydides’ Melian dialogue. In addition, Musk is implicitly referencing Prussian philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s concepts of master/slave morality.
Musk’s point is that if the woke education complex casts power and strength as diabolical—while simultaneously idealizing weakness and wretchedness as sacred virtues—then of course the student herds will see Israel as demonic. As the IDF pummels hapless Palestinian civilians, to the programmed students, the Gazans very weakness bathes them in the halo of holiness. But none of this is anything new. Wokeness is simply a contemporary and secularized version of Christianity.
Top players in both American political parties, flush with AIPAC campaign cash yet ravenous for even more Israeli lobby funding, are joining hands to demand an end to these demonstrations. Such political interventions come at the risk of destroying America’s cult of victimhood. During the riots in the summer of 2020, politicians of both parties fell to their knees in celebration of the powerless masses protesting that ultimate icon of evil: the white policeman. But today the awesome combined military power of the US and Israel, bombarding puny Palestinian civilians, leaves leftist activists scratching their heads. Why were they celebrated by the national media as they burned down city blocks to protest one violent death at the knee of a white policeman but are now falling under a hail of police batons for token protests over the slaughter of 30,000 helpless civilians?
In order to correct this victim-oppressor incongruence, the US establishment is today demanding that George Floyd and yesteryear’s racial martyrs be pushed aside to make room for posh and privileged Ivy-league Jewish students in America’s pantheon of victimhood. Conservatives are twisting themselves into pretzels chasing those sweet AIPAC bucks. Totally contradicting recent GOP crusades demanding free speech on campus, a large portion of the conservative movement is now engaged in a race to throw the Constitution into a burning dumpster of totalitarian speech controls. Zionists among Evangelical Christians, who hold every word in the Bible to be the literal truth, will soon be happy to have their Holy Book censored as “hate speech” over declarations of Jewish involvement in the death of Christ.
Although he does not practise this himself—in a case of do what I say, not what I do—Musk is now calling for a universal moral standard upon which to judge actions. Like in sports, irrespective of their identities, Musk wants people to be judged by their actions, not their intersectional victim status. This indeed at first glance seems a reasonable position. But will a multi-billionaire oligarch ever really be held to the same standards as the lowliest homeless bum?
Under Musk’s proposed universal moral standards, a white police officer’s actions towards a black suspect would be judged by the same criteria as a black police officer’s actions towards a white suspect. On the geopolitical level, Musk is implicitly demanding that the Russian army’s actions towards Ukrainian civilians be judged the same way as Israel’s treatment of Palestinian civilians. A universal moral standard would even entail American actions against Japanese and German civilians during WW2 being judged by the same metrics that Soviet treatment of German civilians are.
While in theory we might grudgingly admit this system is fair; nevertheless, as political animals, humans tend to funnel moral judgements through a friend / foe filter. German political theorist Carl Schmitt articulated this concept as follows, “the specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.” Schmitt emphasizes the “political” nature of this phenomenon. What this means is that politics is always a group endeavour. Subjects within the political arena sort themselves into herds based on their understanding of the friend / foe distinction.
What follows is the dropping of any pretension of universal standards. Against enemies, the political actor plays the role of prosecutor, ranting about absolute evil. But when friends take even worse actions, the self-same political actor will transform into a flamboyant Johnny Cochrane-style defense attorney, defending to the death the angelic goodness of the ally. This means when Trump takes home classified documents it becomes a Federal case while when Biden does the same it’s simply a case of grandfatherly forgetfulness, or vice versa. Free thinkers must stay above these simplistic tribal binaries.
As tensions increase, the very act of staying above the fray leads to accusations of treason. The tactic of totalitarian polarisation has long been deployed to enforce partisan obedience. Calling his sheep to the herd, George W. Bush proclaimed, "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” He was on solid ground here since even Jesus had demanded, "Whoever is not with Me is against Me, and whoever does not gather with Me scatters" (Matthew 12:30). In turn Lenin proclaimed "It is with absolute frankness that we speak of this struggle of the proletariat; each man must choose between joining our side or the other side. Any attempt to avoid taking sides in this issue must end in fiasco."
To explore the ideas behind Musk’s tweet in depth requires a stroll through the works of Thucydides and Nietzsche. Both men can be qualified as “realists” in that they center a rational examination of the material world and reject idealizations and appeals to other-worldly moralities.
Might and Right: Thucydides’ Melian Dialogue
As the veil of Global War 6 slowly lifts, revealing its hideous guise, in Ukraine and Gaza leaders of the weak must decide whether to fight or submit to the dictates of massively superior power. Rhetoricians steeped in other-worldly nihilism will push the weaker side on, promising salvation, glory, or a bounty of virgins in the next world. Nevertheless, real world balance of power calculations are not at all straightforward, particularly with the variable of morale or fighting spirit.
While human technological progress is undeniable, “from the slingshot to the megaton bomb” as Theodore Adorno insists, mankind still hasn’t hashed out the ways and means to stop slaughtering each other. On the contrary, according to Adorno, “the unity of the control of nature, progressing to rule over men, and finally to that over men’s inner nature.” forces us to confront, “the total menace which organized mankind poses to organized men.”
Human nature being the same as it ever was opens the vast vistas of past conflicts to help solve the riddle of contemporary war. The most distant war of which we have detailed knowledge is the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC) fought between alliances led by Sparta and Athens in Ancient Greece. In his History of the Peloponnesian War, the conflict is rendered by Thucydides with stark partisan detachment. After all not many people today want to be assaulted by shallow patriotic gaslighting from more than 2000 years ago, while plenty of readers are happy to read an analytical and morally neutral appraisal of the war.
Thucydides served Athens as a wartime general. He lost his command and was exiled after the warmongering demagogue Cleon had him court marshalled. The fleet Thucydides was commanding arrived two days too late to capture the city of Amphipolis. In exile, Thucydides launched into his writing project with detached neutrality. It is true though that the only character not treated fairly was his persecutor Cleon.
The Cleon exception proves Thucydides’ strategic empathetic rule. What is remarkable in Thucydides’ history is his ability to present a multiplicity of perspectives in the many speeches he composed for the various protagonists. His perspectivism is a fresh contrast to the more common univocal partisan approach.
In his history, Thucydides illuminated archetypes. The catastrophic war he recounts served as a canvas for his larger study of universal aspects of human nature. By banishing the Gods from earthly intervention and frowning on idealist concepts such as justice and pity, Thucydides kept his work real—and still pertinent today.
The absence of romance in my history will, I fear, detract somewhat from its interest; but if it be judged useful by those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the interpretation of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it, I shall be content. In fine, I have written my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time.
It’s commonplace today to see Thucydides as the founding father of realism. Realism holds that there are only human actors moving across the stage of our here-and-now material world. There are no Gods, no Platonic forms, and above all no universal morality intervening in this world. Human nature alone writes the script and directs the action. No off-stage entities, springing from the fertile imagination of philosophers, priests, or moralists exist for Thucydides. The various combatants are never qualified as good or evil. Portraying a world heaving and retching to the whimsy of great powers is a vile and horrifying prospect. Thucydides refuses to shy away from brutality by applying the dainty decoration of religion or hiding in the refuge of morality tales. Thucydides insists on portraying reality with all its odious displays of power. One of the most horrifying is the Melian dialogue.
The Melian dialogue dramatizes an ultimatum delivered by the Athens to Melos: surrender or be annihilated. The Athenians, representing the architype of a self-defined enlightened empire, we today recognize in NATO. The Melians represented aristocratic pride and steadfastness in defense of their small, independent city-state. Perhaps shades of Hamas can be detected here. In hindsight we see the Melians were doomed to incorporation into larger and larger political units, as eventually they were swallowed up by the Macedonian Empire, the Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire and today are embedded in the American Empire.
Sixteen years into the Peloponnesian War, despite being culturally close to the Spartans, Melos managed to maintain a policy of neutrality. But one-by-one Athens conquered each and every island in the Aegean Sea—except Melos. Athens’ democratically elected assembly could not allow this bad example to persist within her sphere of influence, for fear other islands might start dreaming of independence and escape paying a portion of their GDP for collective defense against the Spartan menace. Athens democratically ordered a “with us or against us” policy at Melos. Arriving with an armada of 34 ships transporting 3000 troops, the Athenian envoys assembled the Melian oligarchs and gave them an offer not to be refused: either join our alliance by paying annual tribute or fight us and have all of your men slaughtered and your women and children sold into slavery.
Athens was at the height of her power 16 years into the Peloponnesian War, which she would go on to eventually lose a decade later. What is of most interest in the dialogue are the criteria the two parties use to make their decisions. The Athenians argued that it was in both of their real world interests for Melos to surrender. In response, the Melians appealed to other-worldly notions of justice and fanatically high hopes that the powerful Spartan alliance would intervene in sympathy for their plight. The Melian approach can be called strategic nihilism, since the islanders were basing their future prospects on nothing material.
The dialogue begins with the Athenian envoys announcing, since they were meeting in private, that they wouldn’t bother with any moral niceties:
We shall not trouble you with specious pretences---either of how we have a right to our empire because we overthrew the [Persians], or are now attacking you because of the wrong that you have done us---and make a long speech that would not be believed; and in return, we hope that you, instead of thinking to influence us by saying that you did not join the [Spartans], although they are colonists, or that you have done us no wrong, will aim at what is feasible,
Instead the discussion would be limited to who held superior power:
Since you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equal power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.
These words resonate strongly with us today, in particular on the steppes of Ukraine and the rubble of Gaza. The Athenians continued by claiming that the only universal law that exists is that might makes right:
Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can. And it is not as if we were the first to make this law, or to act upon it when made; we found it existing before us, and will leave it to exist forever after us; all we do is to make use of it, knowing that you and everybody else having the same power as we have would do the same as we do.
The Melians then counter by hoping the powerful Spartans will come to their aid.
Much in the spirit of how the US betrayed the Kurds eight times, the Shia in Iraq, the Hmong in Vietnam, liberals in Afghanistan, and currently Ukrainians—not to mention blowing up their ally Germany’s pipeline—the Athenians dash the Melian hopes that the Spartans will play the role of a Messianic superman. Just as the Americans today feel no shame in prioritizing their own interests first, great powers like the Spartans do not sacrifice themselves for the weak:
But...your notion about the [Spartans], which leads you to believe that shame will make them help you, here we bless your simplicity but do not envy your folly. The [Spartans]...are most conspicuous in considering what is agreeable, honourable, and what is expediently just...
Then the Athenians lay out in sharp contrast the difference between the fantasy of hope versus making cold calculation based on the real world:
Your strongest arguments depend upon hope and the future, and your actual resources are too scanty as compared to those arrayed against you, for you to come out victorious.
War it was! The parties separated and the Athenians began executing a siege on the Melians. One real world aspect the Athenians did not take into account was fighting morale. The Melians were highly motivated since they were facing death while the powerful Athenians were hardly bothered to take on such a weak opponent.
Early in the war, mirroring early Ukrainian success against the much more powerful Russian army, the Melians struck at the Athenians:
Meanwhile the Melians attacked by night and took the part of the Athenian lines over against the market, and killed some of the men, and brought in corn and all else that they could find useful to them, and so returned and kept quiet, while the Athenians took measures to keep better guard in future.
Much like the Ukrainian successes in Kharkov and Kherson regions in 2022, the weak Melians continued to inflict damage upon the overconfident Athenians:
About the same time the Melians again took another part of the Athenian lines which were but feebly garrisoned.
But as seems to be happening today in Ukraine, the Athenians finally decided to take matters seriously by changing commanders and sending in more troops:
Reinforcements afterwards arriving from Athens in consequence, under the command of Philocrates, son of Demeas, the siege was now pressed vigorously; and some treachery taking place inside, the Melians surrendered at discretion to the Athenians, who put to death all the grown men whom they took, and sold the women and children for slaves, and subsequently sent out five hundred colonists and inhabited the place themselves.
The Athenians were pragmatic and dealt within the realm of reality. They knew they would win because they were stronger. The Melians relied on dodgy allies, mercurial Gods, and the moral certitude that they were the good guys—that they were are the right side of history, as one might say today. Taking a very long view, one might be tempted to say the arc of history eventually did bend in direction of the weak, but far too late the save the Melians.
The tragic power of the dialogue is that both sides can be seen as correct. It’s easy to understand a great power taking moves to help them in a struggle against another great power. It’s even easier to sympathize with a weak people getting overrun by the mighty. If Thucydides can be seen to take a side, it is that real-world calculation are a superior guide to survival than other-worldly wishful thinking.
Nevertheless such reality-based calculations are not so easy. If we look at Eastern Europe since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and those empty promises about NATO not moving an inch eastward, we see a replay of the Melian dialogue. NATO marched east because they were strong and the post-Soviet Russians were weak. For decades the Russians chose to grudgingly acquiesce to NATO superiority instead of imitating the Melians by getting crushed in the rubble of moral glory.
Even in 2022, it was not clear to all who was Athens and who was Melos in the Donbass. It wasn’t total lunacy to think that NATO + Ukraine on paper seemed a formidable force. Moreover, Russia, “a gas station masquerading as a country”, was supposed to have its Ruble turned to rubble via sanctions.
Today it is clear that Russia is not only backed by her own formidable arms industries, but is also supported by those of China, Iran and North Korea. Russia itself has five times the population of Ukraine. The financialized West has proven to be paper tigers with impotent arms industries. And America has too many other interests to get bogged down on the Eurasian steppes. Like Sparta so many years ago, when push came to shove, they will abandon Ukraine to her fate. In the end Russia has proven to be Athens and will force Ukraine to suffer what she must.
With the US stoking and funding the war in Ukraine, no university anti-war protests ever broke out. This despite several factors that in the past might have sparked student action: Ukraine’s neo-Nazi militias, a CIA-backed coup d'état of a democratically elected government in 2014, and Ukraine’s explicit blood-and-soil nationalism. Instead the American left celebrated the war with almost as much gusto as a Covid vaccine.
The framing of Ukraine as a weak victim bravely standing up to mighty (yet incompetent) Russian oppression fit snugly into woke / Christian morality of weak-makes-right. This fetish for victimhood and weakness is easy to understand in a small powerless state. But the US is meant to be the global superpower, why in a nation of such military might is weakness celebrated?
One counter explanation is that since Ukraine was declared an ally of the US, it is natural that Americans’ friend / foe filters selected for Ukraine. But the exact opposite happened in the case of Israel. The Israel / Hamas balance of power closely resembles that of Athens / Melos. Despite relentless efforts to place Israel in the victim category, as the combined might of US and Israeli firepower turned Gaza into rubble, the reading of much of the American left portrayed Israel as a Goliath state and the Palestinians as David. But since Israel is often branded as America’s “Greatest Ally”, the friend / foe filter should have pushed the left to support Israel. Instead, US campuses erupted in support of the weak and vulnerable. Despite complete coherence with a decade of woke indoctrination—in addition to millennia of Christian teaching—the American cultural elite are outraged that these students aren’t siding with the masters of mayhem.
Nietzsche’s Eagles and Lambs
In his masterpieces, Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morals, Friedrich Nietzsche traces the genetic roots of European systems of morality. He schematises Europe’s moral genome’s paternal line as master morality, and declares the maternal line to be slave morality. The earthly realism of Thucydides and other pre-Platonic Greeks are the paradigmatic ancient examples of master morality. The reality-denying idealism of Plato and Socrates and the other-worldly religions of Judea and Christianity are the fonts of slave morality. From Beyond Good and Evil:
There is a master morality and a slave morality; – I will immediately add that in all higher and more mixed cultures, attempts to negotiate between these moralities also appear, although more frequently the two are confused and there are mutual misunderstandings. In fact, you sometimes find them sharply juxtaposed – inside the same person even, within a single soul.
Master morality is self-referential and stands above the herd. Aristocratic masters are good because they are powerful and powerful because they are good. The lowly herd, if it is noticed at all, is bad because it is weak. Master morality is down-to-earth and emphasizes the real world because that is where life is good for the elite.
The noble type of person feels that he determines value, he does not need anyone’s approval, he judges that “what is harmful to me is harmful in itself,” he knows that he is the one who gives honor to things in the first place, he creates values. He honors everything he sees in himself: this sort of morality is self-glorifying. In the foreground, there is the feeling of fullness, of power that wants to overflow, the happiness associated with a high state of tension, the consciousness of a wealth that wants to make gifts and give away. The noble person helps the unfortunate too, although not (or hardly ever) out of pity, but rather more out of an impulse generated by the over-abundance of power
Slave morality is the revolt of the weak and botched. Through the magic of priestly gaslighting, and driven by overwhelming fear, the slave creates a binary. The first move in the process is to declare her master as the pole of absolute evil. In reaction, since the slave is not master, she is by default declared good. And so a system of morality is created where all that is powerful and healthy is deemed evil and all that is sick and weak is good. Nietzsche found these priests ingenious in their ability to trans-valuate the master’s values. Further gaslighting occurs as the philosophers and priests comfort their slavish flocks. No need to fret over your current misery, there is a paradise awaiting those like you in the next world. While the evil masters are burning for all eternity down below, the saintly slaves will leisurely float above them, feasting on endless milk and honey.
What if people who were violated, oppressed, suffering, unfree, exhausted, and unsure of themselves were to moralize: what type of moral valuations would they have? A pessimistic suspicion of the whole condition of humanity would probably find expression, perhaps a condemnation of humanity along with its condition. The slave’s gaze resents the virtues of the powerful. It is skeptical and distrustful, it has a subtle mistrust of all the “good” that is honored there –, it wants to convince itself that even happiness is not genuine there. Conversely, qualities that serve to alleviate existence for suffering people are pulled out and flooded with light: pity, the obliging, helpful hand, the warm heart, patience, industriousness, humility, and friendliness receive full honors here –, since these are the most useful qualities and practically the only way of holding up under the pressure of existence. Slave morality is essentially a morality of utility. Here we have the point of origin for that famous opposition between “good” and “evil.” Evil is perceived as something powerful and dangerous; it is felt to contain a certain awesome quality, a subtlety and strength that block any incipient contempt. (BGE 260)
French philosopher Gilles Deleuze is an important interpreter of Nietzsche. In his work Nietzsche and Philosophy Deleuze clarifies the two concepts:
Master morality is based on self-affirmation: “I know that I am good, so I will take those qualities in myself that I consider to be good and consecrate them.” You are defining what is good by seeing the good in yourself, and whatever limits that is bad.
Slave morality is based on negation of someone else, especially if they’re someone you envy. “I hate him because he has what I do not, so I will define good as whatever destroys him.” You are defining good as whatever undermines those you envy and hate, and defining evil as whatever benefits them.
Nietzsche uses the predatory relationship between birds of prey (masters) and lambs (slaves) to illustrate the two existing systems of morality. From On the Genealogy of Morals:
There is nothing very odd about lambs disliking birds of prey, but this is no reason for holding it against large birds of prey that they carry off lambs. And when the lambs whisper among themselves, 'These birds of prey are evil, and does this not give us a right to say that whatever of the opposite of a bird of prey must be good?', there is nothing intrinsically wrong with such an argument - though the birds of prey will look somewhat quizzically and say, 'We have nothing against these good lambs; in fact, we love them; nothing tastes better than a tender lamb.
A simplistic reading of Nietzsche would be that he is calling for a return to master morality. While he certainly revels in a subversive joy by describes aristocratic values within a European context of increasing equality and democracy; nevertheless, Nietzsche’s philosophic aim is well into the future. He has deep admiration and respect for the origins of Christianity, which emerged from the “genius” of the Judaic priests in the their struggle against the much more powerful Rome. Despite being wiped out on the battlefields and then exiled into the four corners of Europe, Nietzsche insists that ultimately Judea triumphed over Rome by spreading slave morality throughout Europe.
Slave morality is a doubled-edged sword for powerful elites. For example, feudal lords found Christianity useful for tamping down peasant revolts. The feudal social structure featured a warrior master class deploying a priestly strata to soften the great mass of serfs. The clergy’s job is to turn their flock’s gaze away from their present misery by dangling the carrot of eternal life in the promised land. But the masters had to be very careful not to hit on their own supply of slave morality, lest their will to rule were to become compromised. Such a process seems to have occurred in the United States over the past few decades.
The catalyst of slave morality is the impotent longing for revenge: resentment. Nietzsche and most secondary commentators on his works render the word in French: ressentiment. Due to herd-like instincts, this rendering has become common usage, so this regime will be slavishly followed below.
Deleuze, in Nietzsche and Philospohy describes the mechanism of ressentiment:
The one who gives ressentiment form, the one who conducts the prosecution and pursues the enterprise of revenge even further, the one who dares to reverse values, is the priest. And, more especially, the Jewish priest, the priest in his Judaic form. It is he, the master of dialectics, who gives the slave the idea of the reactive syllogism. It is he who forges the negative premises. It is he who conceives of love, a new love that the Christians take up, as the conclusion, the crowning glory, the venomous flower of an unbelievable hatred. It is he who begins by saying "the wretched alone are the good; the poor, impotent, lowly alone are the good; the suffering, deprived, sick, ugly alone are pious, alone are blessed by God, blessedness is for them alone - and you, the powerful and the noble are on the contrary the evil, the cruel, the lustful, the insatiable, the godless to all eternity; and you shall be in all eternity the unblessed, accursed and damned!" (GM I 7 p. 34). Without him the slave would never have known how to raise himself above the brute state of ressentiment. (p. 118°
The genius of the Judaic (and later Christian) priests was to turn the very nature of the master in upon himself. The masters were taught that their existence was a “sin” and soon priests began to rule as “anti-masters.” The master’s “I will” which brought creativity and joyful affirmation is replaced by ascetic priest’s “Thou Shalt Not” and demolition and negation follow. The master’s originality of conception is replaced by the priest’s exhortation to be against something—anti-fascist, never-Trump, anti-racist, anti-Semitic, anti-immigration—hatred of exterior objects defines the slave’s interiority.
Eventually, with the rise of the bad conscious, the subject of slave morality is taught to drive his hatred inward, towards himself. From Deleuze:
The power of ressentiment is therefore completely directed towards the other, against others. But ressentiment is an explosive substance: it makes active forces become reactive. Ressentiment must then adapt itself to these new conditions; it must change direction. The reactive man must now find the cause of his suffering in himself. Bad conscience suggests to him that he must look for this cause "in himself, in some guilt, in a piece of the past, he must understand his suffering as a punishment.” And the priest appears a second time in order to preside over this change of direction: "Quite so, my sheep! someone must be to blame for it -you alone are to blame for yourself." The priest invents the notion of sin." 'Sin'. . . has been the greatest event so far in the history of the sick soul: we possess in it the most dangerous and fateful artifice of religious interpretation." The word "fault" now refers to the fault which I have committed, to my own fault, to my guilt. This is how pain is internalised: as the consequence of a sin it now has only an inward meaning. (Quotes are from Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals)
Wokeness is simply a continuation of Christian slave morality by secular means. In Christianity the debt of original sin can never be repaid, only occasional interest payments are possible. In wokeness, white guilt for slavery is eternal, any potential reparations to blacks will not pay down the original guilt.
So how does a group of people pull themselves out of the abyss of guilt and bad conscious? One modern day example of an ideology based on Nietzsche’s philosophy that achieved partial mastery is Zionism.
A Master Emerges in Zion
It doesn’t take a Nietzsche scholar to read Hamas’ actions on October 7th as a violent slave revolt and Israel’s reaction as a master reasserting his domination. Zionist hardliners would happily claim that the slave morality permeating international institutions and American liberals is the only thing holding them back. The Palestinian Question could be answered by cleansing Gaza and then the West Bank of any trace of the indigenous population, much as the Romans did to the Jews two millennia ago. The tragedy of the original Melian dialogue is no doubt repeating as farce during the Israeli-Hamas negotiations, as this threat of annihilation is brandied around as Hamas defends the rightness of its cause.
But since Nietzsche held that the Jews were the collective genius behind slave morality, is his work put into question by today’s spectacle of a masterly Jewish State being tied down by slave ideology?
Jacob Golomb, in his work Nietzsche and Zion, would say no. Golomb traces the ideological green shoots of Zionism springing from the rich intellectual soil of Nietzsche’s ideas. Zionism emerged at the end of the 19th century, its goal was a haven for European Jewry in the Biblical land of Zion—also known as Palestine. At a most fundamental level, Zionism was a movement which sought to peel back layers of Jewish slave morality to make room for a new Israeli to emerge by embracing the creative self-affirmation of master morality.
Several Zionist founding fathers—Theodor Herzl, Martin Buber, and the first President of Israel, Chaim Weizmann—were all heavily influenced by various aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy in their endeavour to found a Jewish State:
Nietzsche assists Herzl in expressing the gap between the optimal authentic power of the Ubermensch and the depth of weakness that looms beneath the "human, all-too-human," and which must be overcome if the authority and dignity of the free Jew is to be attained. Indeed, careful reading of Herzl's writings shows that most of the traits he attaches to the marginal Jews in the Diaspora belong to the patterns of negative power ascribed by Nietzsche to the "morality of slaves" and the "crowd," whereas the main objective of Herzl's Zionist revolution is to strengthen and solidify the powerful patterns of "nobility" and "morality of masters" (to use the enticing and provocative Nietzschean terms). Herzl' s disdain for the Jewish uneducated masses, and his will to transform them into something more sublime and noble, are well known. His revolution aimed to foster in the life of the marginal Jew moral patterns and qualities once prevalent among the ancient Hebrews: "In order to remain in its place and also to wander the race should be first improved. It is necessary to strengthen its power for war, to instill in it the joy of working and all good virtues. "
Israel was a nationalist and socialist project, both of these being powerful manifestation of the slavish herd according to Nietzsche—who was also hostile to all forms of the state. Nevertheless, Nietzsche, despite his disdain for Christianity and its Judaic sources, expressed great esteem for Old Testament Israel:
For modern Jews to overcome their fossilization within the ghettoes and to become effectively active agents, to create their own history vis-a-vis that of gentile Europeans, they had to overcome their traditional Talmudic patterns of learning, which could not be incorporated within secular Zionist culture. The Jewish or, more precisely, Zionist Renaissance demanded that the Jews overcome their antiquarian-rabbinic consciousness, around which they had structured their Jewish identity in the Diaspora, and instead adopt a "monumental" approach centering around the grandeur of their glorious days in ancient Israel. This incitement to "monumental history," which the Zionist revolution aspired to foster, is expressed in Nietzsche's essay on history in which he asserts that "monumental" historical consciousness lends support to the creative and powerful individual who seeks an existence that expresses his inner power
Ironically, Zionism as a project can be summarized by the 21st century-inspired slogan of Make Israel Monumental Again.
In Nietzsche and the Old Testament, scholar Israel Eldad sorts out this seeming confusion between Nietzsche’s attitudes towards the various manifestations of Judaism and the Bible:
Yet there is no sharp division between the Old and New Testaments. The New is in no way an absolute negation of the Old, for already in the Old are to be found the roots of Christianity, for instance in the account of the separating of man from nature. Christianity, especially the Pauline version, inherited from Judaism the very concept of sin, the "revolt of the slaves," and the priestly rule. All these, according to Nietzsche's outlook, do not apply to the personality of Jesus himself. At times it seems that the idea of the Jews' being "guilty" of Christianity is accepted by Nietzsche not in conjunction with the heroes of the Old Testament, but as a postbiblical link. It was the Exile that forced the Jews to develop an unnatural Judaism, the fruit of which is Christianity.
In this sense one can find the discerning distinction between the terms "Israel" and "the Jews" or "Judaism." The first usually merits a positive response, whereas the latter is treated in a negative fashion. "Usually," I note, for, from a historical-psychological standpoint and apart from a religious value system, Nietzsche is astonished at the will to survive and the strength of life of the Jews throughout their exilic history, and especially in their state of dispersion. It is as if this strength of will atones for their "sin" toward mankind's history: "Jewish" [Slave] morality.
Paradox of Egalitarian Mastery
As a society striates, as the difference between rich and poor deepens, so grows the necessity and severity of slave morality. Only in a relatively stable and egalitarian society, such as the agrarian republics in the pre-Civil War US, promoted by Thomas Jefferson, would a society exist without exaggerated manifestations of slave morality. Of course the US model was ultimately ruined by the presence of real, existing slavery.
Nevertheless, such a society of near equal property owners, so many Athens and Spartas, as demonstrated in the Melian dialogue, would be a domain of an equality of masters. The scarcity of weakness would mean few have to suffer what they must. As a society trends towards equality, it acts as a social incubator of a healthy and active master morality. The key being that equality breeds respect, which in turn restrains the worst of masterly excess. An eagle can only swoop down if a population of lambs presents itself.
But the US is far from that archetype and so Elon Musk’s push for a universal morality will fall prey to slave morality. Already in response to the Gaza protests, a woke-right tendency is rising within the Republican party to demand safe spaces and speech controls in favour of Jewish students.
After decades of preaching the evils of settler colonialism, in order to increase white guilt, slave morality is blowing back on the US pro-Israeli elite. If America is presented as evil for stealing Indian lands, why wouldn’t young students make the same judgement on Israeli acquisition of Palestinian territory?
Congress is currently debating what they call the Antisemitism Awareness Act but which is in reality the Israeli Patriotism Act, which will legally mandate that America’s friend / foe binary permanently and universally feature Israel in the friend position.
The goal of both terrorism and student protests is to provoke the masters towards self-defeating overreactions. With the Israeli lobby and bipartisan Congressional majorities carpet bombing the US constitution, does this not already mean the students have won?
And what if the bad example of Israel fighting back against the moral usury of woke guilt inculcation were to inspire deplorable American identity groups, currently defined as oppressors, to stage similar ideological counter-strikes?
excelente!