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NIETZSCHE_WORKSHOP

                                             September 23, 2010
                                    
Upon listening to a recording of          
Julian Reid and Manabrata Guha at the       [ref]
"Nietzsche Workshop" at Western 2010.     
                                          
My first impression: I was struck        
by how the academics have such a limited
range of knowledge... these two are
working on some sort of thesis about how
Nietzsche produced a change in attitudes
toward war, but they don't seem to know
anything about attitudes toward war.


                        Nietzsche called to drop the
                        Christian "slave morality" and
                        his stated to desire to make       LIGHT_EXPECTATIONS
                        man "more evil", "but also more
                        beautiful", and so on...  I
                        don't believe that these were
                        *really* a new set of ideas.

People really and truly used
to think that war was glorious.

                 They used to think a man
                 wasn't fully grown until
                 he'd killed his first man.


     "A war in my younger days, when I was in the Army,"
     Dominey mused, "might have made a man of me."

       "The Great Impersonation" (1920)
        by E. Phillips Oppenheim


                                         The early Saint novels sing the
                                         praises of "battle, murder, and
                                         sudden death"... only later did
                                         Charteris vaguely apologize for
                                         his youthful enthusiasms...

                                        
One of the causes of WW I: the attitude       
that war is the proper occupation of real     
men, a glorious test of character, etc.       
                                              
After WW I, they ducked away from this attitude:
wallowing in cold, wet trenches waiting for the next
influx of chlorine gas changes your view of these things.

The cliche that "War is Hell"
took hold in it's place.



                            It seems to me that the
                            Workshop boys know their
                            Nietzsche, they know their
                            Marx, but they don't seem to
                            know anything about, say,
                            men's adventure fiction,
                            which might give them a
                            different take on Western
                            culture's opinon of War.


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