A Killer IDEA

 

20 years back when I was desperately trying to get a break as a Director, I was trying to seek an appointment with Mr. Ramoji Rao who was a full time Producer by then and had come up with the some unconventional hits like “Srivariki Premalekha”, “Mayuri” and “Pratighatana”.

 

So I thought my best chances were with him but the problem was to get access to him. So I came up with a killer Idea and wrote an article titled “The Ideas that killed 30 million people” for his then newspaper called “Newstime”. It got published and then I identified myself to him as the writer of that article and got my appointment with him. Nothing materialized out of it as he felt that it was not right to give a break to me as a Director considering my complete lack of experience, whereas I was trying to convince him that a Director needs imagination and it’s only technicians who need experience to put that on celluloid. He set aside my argument saying that at best he can give me a job as a Columnist.

 

Well, even though nothing came out of that article, that article was my first claim to fame. My family and friends were thrilled to see my name in print. I lost that article till recently a friend of mine Raja who kept it for all these years gave it to me. I am putting that in here for you guys to get bored, amused, interested or whatever else you might feel.

 

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“The Ideas That Killed 30 Million People” written by RGV in ‘NewsTime’

 

The writing finger writes knowing not to what use the book and its ideas would be put by future generations. The most horrendous example of the phenomenon is Nietzsche being appropriated by Hitler and the lesser Nazis.

 

Although the ideas that nourished the intellectual roots of Adolf Hitler, who started as a small-time painter and went on his way to become the master of Europe, can be traced back to many a megalomanical thought that poured out from a few German minds of 19th century, no other man’s ideas have contributed so much to the barbarous part of the Nazi mind as those of the philosopher Nietzsche.

 

Nietzsche’s writings, often dismissed off as but outpourings of a raving insane mind by many a thinker now and then and described by George Santayana as full of genial imbecility and boyish blasphemy, were untiringly praised by the Nazi writers with great enthusiasm. The Nazis would quote him on every conceivable subject. Hitler openly declared his admiration for the philosopher and often used to visit the Nietzsche Museum at Weimar and publicize his deep respect for Nietzsche by posing for photographs of himself staring in rapture at the painting of the philosopher.

 

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born in 1844. He was descendant of the Nietsky family, a reputed race of aristocrats and warriors. But he himself was a weak branch of this mighty tree. As a result of genetic inheritance of a feeble constitution from his father he was subject to a variety of physical ailments, neuralgia, weak eyes, dizzy headaches.

 

He was the laughing stock of the school with his weak body and shy nature. He was afraid of the boys and never could bring himself to use their slang and cuss words. But for the short time he used to play with his sister he always would wind up in a corner with some book or the other. After school he joined the University of Bonn and from there he transferred to Lepzing and devoted himself to the study of German language.

 

He discovered Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea and hungrily read every word of it. Schopenhauer declared that nature traps humanity into an existence of misery through procreation by baiting sex. So in order to escape this trap man should willfully stop procreating and breathing. Nietzsche absorbed this pessimistic doctrine and transformed it from a will to die to will to live. The will should be to live in spite of all the suffering that we endure. Such an assertion of the will raises man above himself and transforms him into God, he claimed.

 

One day during the war between Germany and France, he saw a troop of cavalry marching to the front and at that moment he said his entire philosophy fell into place. He felt for the first time that the strongest and highest will to life does not find expression in a miserable struggle for existence but only in a will to war, a will to power, a will to overpower.

 

In an evil moment man has created God and thereafter was chained to his own creation. He urged that man should be able to break the chain and gather courage to be himself and to surpass himself. Man must strive to become Superman. He dismissed morality as but a device to lead men by their noses and proceeded to define good and evil. The term good was not an ethical classification formerly but only a social distinction. Good formerly meant brave and strong. The strong used to impose their will on the society and draw a moral code to suit their own characteristics.

 

But as the time went on, a new set of people have risen who were physically weak but mentally strong. In a struggle against their warrior masters they invented the so called virtues as a weapon to use against the sword. A system of ethics was founded to cover their own weaknesses. They proclaimed the rights of the underdog to shackle the natural instincts of the strong and to perpetuate their own impotent rule. A religious propaganda was launched in their support to exalt their own impotency. The poor, the weak, the lowly are the good and for them alone is salvation.

 

In such a way did “the fox replace the eagle”. It was an act of clever revenge on the part of the cowardly against the courageous. It was the most pious fraud ever committed in history, declared the anti-Christ, as Nietzsche called himself.

 

Society does not exist for its own sake, claimed Nietzsche, but only as an elevator by means of which a select race of human beings may elevate themselves to a higher duty. It will be ascertained beyond doubt for any reader of Mein Kampf that Hitler took his select race of human beings to be Aryans. Nietzsche’s views are reflected often in Hitler’s Mein Kampf. “All the results of art, science and technology that we see before us today, are almost exclusively the creative product of the Aryan…It is the fire of his knowledge that caused man to climb the path to mastery over the other beings of this earth. .. The Aryan, in his encounter with lower people, subjugated them and bent them to his will…As long as he ruthlessly upheld the master attitude, not only did he remain master, but also the preserver and increaser of culture. As soon as the subjected people began to raise themselves up and approach the level of their conqueror, the barrier between mater and servant broke down. The Aryan gave up the purity of his blood and, therefore, lost sojourn in the paradise which he had made for himself… We all sense that in the distant future humanity must be faced by problems which only the highest race, becoming master people and supported by the means and possibilities of an entire globe, will be equipped to overcome”.

 

The above extracts from Mein Kampf clearly indicate to what extent Nietzsche influenced Hitler.

 

Nietzsche further claimed that all talk about “good and bad conscience” is sheer nonsense. Actually a strong man does not feel any sense of shame for any of his deeds. Do the great birds of prey feel shame as they seize helpless sheep, he reasoned.

 

“The strong men, the masters regain the pure conscience of a beast of prey; they can return from a fearful succession of murder, arson, rape and torture with same joy in their hearts, the same contentment in their souls as if they had indulged in some student’s rag.

 

“Man must be evil; for evil is man’s best force. The evilest is necessary for Superman’s best”.

 

These words were uttered by the most terrible man that has ever existed, as Nietzsche described himself in his autobiography Ecce Homo, had a profound influence in shaping the mind of Hitler and a host of lesser Nazis, and in time they would justify the breaching of Versailles Treaty, the violation of the Hague Convention and the most cold –blooded and ruthless deeds such as the suppression of personal freedom, the brutal practice of slave labour, the depravities of Auschwitz and other such concentration camps, the ruthless massacre of his own followers in 1934, the savage killing of the war prisoners and the senseless slaughter of millions of Jews.

 

He had created the greatest revolution in history, declared Nietzsche. Some day after his death, history would no longer be divided into BC and AD, the era before Christ and the era after Christ. Christ would be forgotten now that Nietzsche has replaced him. History would be divided into BN and AN, the dark centuries of ignorance before Nietzsche, and the enlightened centuries after Nietzsche.

 

About war, Nietzsche lashed out in the  thundering language of The Old Testament in which Thus Spoke Zarathustra is written: “Ye shall love peace only as a means to a new war. Ye say that it is the god cause that halloweth every war. I say unto you that is the good war that halloweth every cause.

 

“Lo I command you to make way for the predator, the splendorous blond beast would arise again,” he prophesied.

 

“Let the nations of the World beware! Let the democracies of Europe tremble! Within fifty years these babel  governments will clash in a gigantic war for the markets of the world.

 

“The beasts of prey, the race of conquerors shall rise in mightier and more deadly form. Those who cannot bear my philosophy are doomed and those who regard it as the highest blessing are destined to be the masters. The superman is coming. Make way for him or be destroyed. He and the elite around him would be the lords of the earth”.

 

Few people who have read Mein Kampf, the so called Nazi bible, and the people who have followed the deeds of Hitler and his Nazi followers during the course of the Second World war would doubt that Hitler considered himself the superman of Nietzsche’s prophecy.

 

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