Wilful Misinterpretation

In ideological struggle, the scoundrel wishes to make known that all great thinkers are essentially on his side, so that it appears that the light of genius shines on him. As often happens, however, the writings of great thinkers exhibit views that are anathema to his ideology. The bold step here is to denounce these thinkers, but this is dangerous; for claiming that a widely acknowledged genius is an idiot can reflect badly on one’s character, even if he is an idiot. The safer option is to misinterpret wilfully the writings of great thinkers in concordance with one’s ideology. One says things such as, “Taken at face-value, it could be thought that by saying ‘x’ he means x,” and then one should intimate that only ignoramuses, reactionaries, and naifs could think that he means x. For instance, it has been the sport of many an ideologue to pretend that Nietzsche’s advocacy of warfare was no such thing, that what he was really advocating was philosophical warfare in passages such as the following:

War indispensable.— It is vain reverie and beautiful-soulism to expect much more (let alone only then to expect much) of mankind when it has unlearned how to wage war. For the present we know of no other means by which that rude energy that characterizes the camp, that profound impersonal hatred, that murderous cold-bloodedness with a good conscience, that common fire in the destruction of the enemy, that proud indifference to great losses, to one's own existence and that of one's friends, that inarticulate, earthquake-like shuddering of the soul, could be communicated more surely or strongly than every great war communicates them: the streams and currents that here break forth, though they carry with them rocks and rubbish of every kind and ruin the pastures of tenderer cultures, will later under favorable circumstances turn the wheels in the workshops of the spirit with newfound energy. Culture can in no way do without passions, vices and acts of wickedness.— When the Romans of the imperial era had grown a little tired of war they tried to gain new energy through animal-baiting, gladiatorial combats and the persecution of Christians. Present-day Englishmen, who seem also on the whole to have renounced war, seize on a different means of again engendering their fading energies: those perilous journeys of discovery, navigations, mountain-climbings, undertaken for scientific ends as they claim, in truth so as to bring home with them superfluous energy acquired through adventures and perils of all kinds. One will be able to discover many other such surrogates for war, but they will perhaps increasingly reveal that so highly cultivated and for that reason necessarily feeble humanity as that of the present-day European requires not merely war but the greatest and most terrible wars—thus a temporary relapse into barbarism—if the means to culture are not to deprive them of their culture and of their existence itself.
(Human, All Too Human, §477.)

How clear would Nietzsche have had to be in order not to be sympathetically misinterpreted by persons desperate to save him from his clearest assertions? How was he ever to advocate x if lesser and ideological men are forever going to take ‘x’ to mean not-x? Credulity has been stretched to such lengths by those who would like to tame and save Nietzsche for themselves that this radical aristocratist has even been seen by some as a prole-loving egalitarian!