Ragnar Redbeard, Friedrich Nietzsche, and the Will-to-Power

by James Harting

I SEE THAT Ragnar Redbeard’s 1896 tome Might Is Right is being discussed again. It was referenced in the manifesto of a “mass shooter” in California, and a new “authoritative” edition has been published. Over on Counter-Currents, an enthusiast has described it as “Holy Writ” (Mighty Whitey: Might is Right as Holy Writ).

As I have written elsewhere, this book played an important role in the formation of my own worldview many years back. There is much good material in Ragnar Redbeard’s book, as well as a little bit of nonsense. (For example, I do not think that nudism will play an important role in the new order which we will build for our Race in the future.) Overall, for a book 123 years old, it remains remarkably relevant.

About 10 years before Might is Right was first published, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote a book with similar themes and a higher-octane intellectual content. It is entitled Der Antichrist in German, which may be translated both as “The Antichrist” and “The Anti-Christian.” One often-quoted line from it is “Pagans are all of those who say ‘yes’ to life.”

Here are some longer excerpts from the famous H.L. Mencken translation:

What is good? — Whatever augments the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself, in man.

What is evil? — Whatever springs from weakness.

What is happiness? — The feeling that power increases — that resistance is overcome.

Not contentment, but more power; not peace at any price, but war; not virtue, but efficiency (virtue in the Renaissance sense, virtu, virtue free of the acid of morality).

The weak and the botched shall perish: first principle of our charity. And one should help them to it.

What is more harmful than any vice? — Practical sympathy for the botched and the weak — Christianity….

[…]

The problem that I set here is not what shall replace mankind in the order of living creatures ( — man is an end — ): but what type of man must be bred, must be willed, as being the most valuable, the most worthy of life, the most secure guarantee of the future.

This more valuable type has appeared often enough in the past: but always as a happy accident, as an exception, never as deliberately willed.

[…]

The European of today, in his essential worth, falls far below the European of the Renaissance; the process of evolution does not necessarily mean elevation, enhancement, strengthening.

True enough, it succeeds in isolated and individual cases in various parts of the earth and under the most widely different cultures, and in these cases a higher type certainly manifests itself; something which, compared to mankind in the mass, appears as a sort of superman. Such happy strokes of high success have always been possible, and will remain possible, perhaps, for all time to come. Even whole races, tribes and nations may occasionally represent such lucky accidents.

We have now reached a crucial juncture in the life of our Race. We must collectively decide whether we wish to survive and continue on the upward path of development which Nature has decreed for us – or whether we wish to perish as a people.

On the most profound level, we are engaged in a spiritual struggle for our survival. Well might Alfred Rosenberg give his magum opus, The Mythos of the 20th Century, the subtitle “An Evaluation of the Spiritual-Intellectual Confrontations of Our Age.”

I recommend all three of these books to anyone interested in pursuing this topic further:

• The Antichrist by Friedrich Nietzsche
• Might Is Right by Ragnar Redbeard
• The Mythos of the 20th Century by Alfred Rosenberg

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Source: Do Right and Fear No One