Back to the Future

The economy crashes, war looms, a savior appears – haven't we been here before?

By Justin Raimondo

""The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!"

– Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche eventualy went mad, some say due to the effects of syphilis, others blame the implications of his complex and darkly ironic philosophy of life, which included, as its central precept, the doctrine of eternal recurrence. The concept makes its most dramatic appearance in Thus Spake Zarathustra, where Nietzsche, speaking through Zarathustra, is arguing with a grey dwarf who represents human limitations......

In any case, it's this latter interpretation that fascinates me, these days, because we seem to be reliving the first days of the Great Depression of the 1930s, and war drums are heard in the distance. As the stock market takes another dizzying dive, and the ghosts of FDR, Hoover, and – yes – Hitler return to haunt us, reproach us, taunt us, the madness that overtook Nietzsche isn't hard to understand. To continually make the same mistakes, to stumble over the same ruts in the road, to repeat mindlessly and without the least bit of irony or self-mockery the dusted-off slogans of yesteryear, all to the same tragic and bloody effect – what kind of a nightmare universe are we living in?......"