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Entry: A Thanksgiving Turkey From a Chickenhawk Link: http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/a_thanksgiving_turkey_from_a_chickenhawk#10264 Post contents: Timber, When it comes to H.L. Mencken's thinking on fanaticism, please read his "The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche" (1908). Look especially to the end of the book, where Mencken discusses the different moral implications of Christianity and Darwinism. Among other things, Mencken guotes favorably a suggestion of exterminating blacks as the solution of US racial problems -- this at a time when Hitler was still a schoolboy! More generally, Mencken did not see the struggle between Christianity and science to be about what created things, God or evolution, but about the moral implications of Christianity and Darwinism. These he saw culminating on the one side in Nietzsche's master race of supermen crushing all opposition, and on the other side in the self-overcoming and self-sacrificing humility idealized in Thomas a Kempis' "The Imitation of Christ." This dualism is interesting, because we can look at Mencken's argument with the wisdom of hindsight: what became of the Germans who idealized Darwin and Nietzsche, and what became of the Puritans who idealized Kempis? Sent at: 2008 07 06