Fascism, Nietzsche, Power
Fascism, Nietzsche, Power
Nietzsche's writing about power dynamics and the creation of the "strong" and "weak," the "good"
and the "bad," is very closely intertwined with the workings of fascist ideology, and how it
understands itself to be "strong." In a Nietzschean sense, however, fascism ultimately fails to be
truly "strong" because it creates itself as a reformed moralistic approach to power, rather than
freeing itself from moralism. More specifically, the construction of the Jews as "weak" by those who
subscribe to fascist ideology, and the portrayal of themselves as "strong,"is almost wholly
antithetical Nietzsche's actual position concerning power dynamics. Instead, as Nietzsche lays out in
The Genealogy of Morals, real power is ... Show more content on Helpwriting.net ...
Nietzsche explains this struggle as a "slave morality," which can only survive if it has a force that
acts against it so its existence is justified; the role of opposition to the slave morality is occupied by
the "strong." He writes "In order to exist at all, slave morality from the outset always needs an
opposing, outer world; in physiological terms, it needs external stimuli in order to act–its action is
fundamentally reaction" (Genealogy of Morals 22). The morality of the strong is precisely the
antithesis of this: it justifies itself by reaffirming the strength of itself – they justify their behaviors
by reaffirming their own lives, not by placing their lives in juxtaposition with the lives of the weak.
Nietzsche expands this, saying "The opposite is the case with the aristocratic mode of evaluation:
this acts and grows spontaneously, it only seeks out its antithesis in order to affirm itself more
thankfully and more joyfully" (Genealogy 22).
What fascists fail to recognize, however, is that fascism does not transcend the need to fight an
opposing force – it does not exist without some "external stimuli" to which the fascists are always
responding. The Jews are constructed as the epitome of this "slave morality"; they are the weak
people subjected by the aristocratically "strong" fascists. But, fascism moralizes in exactly the same
way as the Jews do for Nietzsche;
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