CONTUMELY
The first Fascist?
A CLASSICIST
A Mr Denis Arnold, I see, was foolish enough to declare in the Sunday Thnes that Richard Wagner was the first Nazi. This is manifestly untrue. Most classical scholars would now agree that the first national social- ist of any great note was Plato, who ruined the teachings of Socrates (not that those were particularly sound) but more especially those of Heraclitus. Plato himself might not have earned this rebuke had his works been lost: alas, he and his followers creeped their way into early Christianity.
However, the first Nazi, if by Nazi is simply meant an offensive bully with racialist overtones (and this, I imagine, is what was intended when that musical thug, Richard Wagner. was thus described) seems more likely to have been the God of the Book of Job, who himself (or Himself) must be con- strued as the mythopoeic invention of that greatest of all ancient poets, Job himself.
I suppose. also, that a case could be made for (or rather, against) Abraham; and against all those authors of the Old Testament who utilised their literary and prophetic skills in seeking to create and then to perfect the myth that the Israelites, being chosen of God, were racially or religiously superior.
At all events, it is clearly arrant nonsense to suppose that the vices of Nazism started with a German composer called Richard Wagner—although even a classical scholar might willingly enough concede that that Germanic composer was by no means reli- able on the subjects of raze and myth and blood and politics.
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