I hesitate to post anything formally as I get nothing positive out of
discussions with Christopher Webber at all, even if I generally welcome
passionate disagreement.

I appreciate Mat's teaching of tolerance for everyone and everything.
Even for anti-Semitism or even for Hitler.  Intolerance is what makes
Hitlerism evil, and to be intolerant is too be like him.  The flip
side of this is that it is also a great thing to fight for one's ideals.
Friendship and love means to tolerate and understand somebody, but to
have a friend is to also have an enemy.

Next I cannot accept a primarily Rassentheorie ['race-theory'] based
interpretation of Wagner - especially not of the Ring.  I will continue
to argue that there is enough ambiguity in the figure of Alberich that he
is capable of being an abstract myth-symbol.  He is a symbol of someone
driven by the Blind Will.  A Blind Will which is also a Will to Power.
He symbolises the evil of the Will to Power.  Power is evil.  Alberich
can thus also as much be Stalin or Hitler, or anyone driven by a blind lust
for power.  In other words it is critical to appreciate the Schopenhauerian
meaning of the Ring cycle to rescue it from the Nazi 'Rassentheorie'
centred interpretation.  Any insinuation that Wagner considered the
Nibelungs to be in anyway Jewish must therefore be considered entirely
subordinate to the Schopenhauerian meaning of the Ring.  Thus for the
Nibelungs to cease to be an abstract myth-symbol and instead be a concrete
representation of a particular group of people AND NOTHING MORE one would
have accept that Jewish people are all deaf and look like ugly dwarves etc.
Once one rejects the 19th century caricature and stereotype, the Nibelungen
again become abstract myth-symbols.  I have emphasised that there are
MANY aspects to the Ring and if pressed I will say that Rassentheorie
may be just one aspect of this.  I believe it to be a negligible one,
and something that becomes less and less apparent after Das Rheingold.
I believe the Hegelian, Marxist, and Schopenhauerian aspects to be
vastly more important.  To elevate Rassentheorie to the status of being
the CENTRAL meaning of the Ring is Hilterism.  Interpreted in this way
it becomes true that 'to understand National Socialism one must first
understand Wagner' (Adolf Hitler).  I understand Wagner - that is why I
do not understand National Socialism.  That is why I do not understand
repeated attempts to interpret everything in Wagner primarily and only
from the perspective of Rassentheorie.  And then to defend Wagner in
Israel after proposing such an interpretation - what would motivate someone
to want to interpret Wagner in this way? It makes me shudder with horror
to imagine.

Mats says I do not see the man Wagner in his works.  I am afraid I do see
more than fleeting glances.  But I do not choose to dwell on this aspect of
Wagner.  Rather I choose to see the Hegelian/Schopenhauerian Idealist.  Of
course he failed miserably to live up to his own ideals as most of us do -
but they are inspiring ideals nonetheless.  To fail to see that is to be a
blind cynic who can only dwell in the stench of Wagner's excrements.  To
see this and only this in another human being - that is truly evil.  It is
a degeneration to the level of that same excrement.  That is why I find
this discussion so distastful and can only see in it a smear campaign
against Wagner.

Lastly when I say that late Wagner is Absolute Music and
orchestral I mean by that this is what makes the works poetic,
dramatic, and philosophical.  It is in the same way that late Beethoven
is poetic,dramatic and philosophical.  That is to say that the ESSENCE of
the poetic, the dramatic and the philosophical is music!  Of course this
is just Schopenhauer all over again.  That is also what Wagner is all
about.  Events on the stage become mere 'acts of music' to use Wagner's
own expression.  It was of course partly the centrality of music in
Schopenhauer that influenced Wagner so heavily.

Satoshi Akima
Sydney, Australia
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