Nietzsche on the Manipulation of Prejudice

Nietzche

I detest them, these latest speculators in idealism, the anti-Semites, who clad themselves in Christian-Aryan-bourgeois respectability and who endeavor to agitate the bovine elements of the populace by manipulating the cheapest of propaganda tricks, namely moral attitudes, an abuse which exhausts our last ounce of patience (and the fact that every form of intellectual swindle achieves its goal in contemporary Germany must be considered another aspect of the undeniable and indeed already tangible decrepitude of the German spirit, the cause of which I see not only in an all too exclusive nourishment from newspapers, politics, beer and Wagnerian music, but also in the predicates for this diet: the national narrow-mindedness and vanity, the strong principle of “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles,” which is to say the paralysis agitans of the “modern idea.”)

–Friedrich Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral § 26 (1887) in: Werke in drei Bänden, vol. 2, p. 896 (K. Schlechta ed. 1973)(S.H. transl.)