Nietzsche saw civilization’s inner restraint dissolve entirely against the stranger

Evidence

The same men who are held so sternly in check inter pares by custom, respect, usage, gratitude, and even more by mutual suspicion and jealousy, and who on the other hand in their relations with one another show themselves so resourceful - in consideration, selfcontrol, delicacy, loyalty, pride, and friendship - once they go outside, where the strange, the stranger is found … [they] emerge from a disgusting procession of murder, arson, rape, and torture, exhilarated and undisturbed of soul, as if it were no more than a student’s prank, convinced that they have provided the poets with a lot more material for song and praise. (Nietzsche, 1968:476) The paradox is as much terrifying as defiant to all easy explanation. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 378

Categorization

• XREF: Directly anticipates Bauman’s thesis that the Holocaust was a product of modernity, not a relapse into barbarism. Ties to my library’s thinking on how moral restraints are situationally switched off.
• DEEPTHINKING: Nietzsche’s paradox — the self-controlled, courteous man who becomes a ‘disgusting procession’ of atrocity against the stranger — is the chapter’s historical anchor: civilization does not restrain cruelty, it confines and redirects it.