crime as a virtue

[three_sixty]

"A young German had the right to shave his beard only by moistening it with the blood of an enemy killed in battle. Robbery was an honourable exercise i nrisk and hardening when it was commited outside the tribe, according to Tacitus.

The Greek Olympus is identical with the Germanic Valhalla as far as the moral values which reign there and the occupations and the sentiments of the gods are concerned. Zeus triumphed by force over the rest of the gods in battle waged with the help of Prometheus. His soul was the seat of indescribable intrigues, criminal ideas and choleric outbursts. He recoiled before no injustice, no sentiment, however horrible it was, he, was the master of Olympus, could covet the wife of another god."
- Chiekh Anta Diop, "The Cultural Unity of Black Africa," p. 162

"The legend of Prometheus is an original property of the entire Aryan race and a document which testifies to the faculty for the profound and the tragic; and it would not even be difficult to believe that this myth had the same characteristic significance as the legend of the fall of man had for the Semetic race, and that there existed between these two myths a degree of kinship similar to that between brother and sister. The origin of this myth of Prometheus is the inestimable value accorded by a naive humanity to fire . .. But that man could have fire freely at his disposal and that he did not recieve it as a ray of light, seemed to the primitive sould to be a sacrilege, as stealing from divine nature. Whatever humanity could acquire of the HIGHEST AND MOST PRECIOUS IT OBTAINED THROUGH A CRIME and it must thereafter accept the consequences, that is, the torrent of ills and torments with which the angry immortals must aflict the human race in its NOBLE ASCENSION. This is a harsh thought which, by the DIGNITY IT CONFERS ON CRIME, contrasts strangely with the Semetic myth of the fall of man, where CURIOSITY, LYING, COVETOUSNESS, in short a whole procession of the more SPECIALLY FEMININE sentiments are regarded as the origin of evil. What distinguishes the Aryan conception is the SUBLIME IDEA OF EFFECTIVE SIN AS THE TRUE PROMETHEAN VIRTUE; and this furnishes us at the same time with the ETHICAL FOUNDATION of pessemistic tragedy; the JUSTIFICATION of human suffering, the JUSTIFICATION for the transgression of man, but also the evils which are a consequence of it."
- from Nietzsche, "The Birth of Tragedy or Hellenism and Pessimism," p.67. as quoted by Dr. Cheikh Anta Diop in his work "The Cultural Unity of Black Africa" pg. 170

"The analysis of the legend of Prometheus led Nietzsche to make an effective criminality a constitional element of the Aryan consciousness. By going deeply into the myth of the blacksmith in Black Africa and in Ancient Egypt we arive easily at a hero equivalent to Prometheus, the fire-stealer and benefactor of humanity by the new techniques he brings. Here also the idea of crime is not absent, but it is DIMINISHED AND REDUCED RATHER TO THE LEVEL OF A GREAT MISTAKE - a sort of indescretion committed with regard to the gods. Its consequences would only be fatal to the descendents of the man who commited it and they would be restrictive; there would be in no way arise any feeling of permanent guilt weighing on the whole of humanity and obliging the latter to create for itself a pessemistic universe. The universe of the Meridional world is OPTIMISTIC. Osiris has no feeling of guilt, neither has his son Horus, nor his wife Isis. Seth, the criminal, is the only one who could have this: it is he who is the personification of evil and only he, to the exclusion of all of the rest of right-thinking humanity, will suffer consequences.

The sentiment of Aryan gulit is the same as the Semetic sin arising from the "fault of a woman" and certain exegetists see in this the result of knowledge: knowledge = consciousness of good and evil. The apple which Adam was made to eat by Eve could only symbolize that. On these grounds it is really through his knowledge that Prometheus became a sinner and a criminal; Nietzsche does not make the comparison since for him knowledge and the determined contemplation of pure truth must lead to inactivity, if there were not the magic of art as succour.

Here also the explanation of Aryan criminality, of Semitic sin, does not stand up to comparison and analysis. It cannot be denied that the ancient Egyptians had acquired knowledge of a degree required by the forgoing exegeses. They would then, in consequence, have acquired the same sense of guilt, contracted the same notion of sin, extending to every human being, if such were the fatal corollary, in the human conscience, of the acquisition of knowledge. It was certainly otherwise and the Egyptian mental universe - and the Meridonial, in general - is quite optimistic, in a conscious and reasoned manner. It would not be exact to say, or to maintain, that the Dogons of the Cliffs of Bandiagra had at their disposal a philosophical system in so far as is understood by this expression, a system of speculative thought conscious of itself; but it is not exaggerated to admit that they had a coherent cosmology which explains, in a satisfactory manner for their consciousness, all aspects of the Universe, as has been shown by Marcel Griaule in God of Water. Among them, the primitive ancestor had also stolen the secret of the gods; a fault had been committed from the beginning of procreation, but this was rather a fault among human beings, created by the gods after a certain experience, and it was immediately corrected and reabsorbed, instead of forming till the end of time the sentiment of some unknown, irrational, undeserved fault which must be expiated throughout one's whole life.

Consequently, it is by referring to the respective cradles of the Aryans and the Meridionals, that one can understand this divergence in the contents of the human consciousness which apparently should be one, uniform. It has already been seen that, in passing from South to North, geography, climate and the conditions of existance effectively REVERSED the moral values, which become opposed to each other like the two poles: EVERY DEFECT HERE IS A VIRTUE THERE. It is also remembering the criteria of the war-like northern morality particularly of the Aryan Germans, a morality necessitated by the conditions of life, that one can understand the slow formation, through contact with antagonistic outside influences, of a feeling of moral unease terminating in the idea of guilt among some of them, of sin among others, both specifically Northern sentiments, although collective. Nietzsche was therefore right in making criminality and sin a constitutional component of the Aryan conscience . . . . "
- Chiekh Anta Diop, "The Cultural Unity of Black Africa" pp. 177 - 180