As to why the Nazis were about power -- same review as post #19:
Fascism would not have been possible without Friedrich Nietzsche. There has been no lack of anti-theistic philosophers both before and after Nietzsche, but he is almost alone in honestly facing the consequences of living in a world in which everything is permitted. Most thinkers have sought to preserve some fragment of the intellectual structure that depended from the hypothesis of the Christian God, and so they appeal to reason or history or science. Nietzsche would have none of it. If the skies are really empty, then there are no imperatives. There is, however, life, which in the case of human beings expresses itself not just as biology but as the will. Now Nietzsche, unlike Schopenhauer and unlike many of his own followers, recognized the will is itself a composite entity. It is not a primary physical force, and it is not a god. It does, however, actually exist, and its exercise is all the meaning that life can ever have.
This "everything is permitted" and "nihilism" talk misinterprets Nietzsche, by the way. The Nietzschean Superman is a moral genius -- he has the courage and imagination to reject the slave-morality of Christianity without falling into the trap of a value-free nihilism; he is capable of formulating and living by a new morality. Now, when we look into the content of that morality, that's where it's fair to say that Nietzsche inspired the Nazis, his system of values being entirely masculine and aristocratic. On the other hand, it is worth noting that Nietzsche rejected antisemitism as vulgar and silly -- which is why he had a falling-out with the composer Wagner.The proposition that the meaning of life is the exercise of the will leads to two kinds of conclusions. The most obvious, and the most popular, is the cult of cruelty. Naturally, the street-fighters who normally figure in the public activities of successful fascist parties are rarely well-read in the literature of philosophical nihilism. Nevertheless, even the nihilist violence of the German SA and the Italian "squadristi" chimes with high theory. Fascism promotes ruthlessness for the same reason that it promotes conspiracy theories: for a fascist, nothing is going to happen unless some will makes it happen. One suspects this consideration is also a factor in the usual fascist suspicion of free markets.
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