Until his death in 1900 Nietzsche remained a mute invalid under the guardianship of his sister Elisabeth, a repulsive individual with whom he quarrelled bitterly when she married an antisemitic high school teacher, Bernhard Förster, and accompanied him to found an “Aryan” colony, Nueva Germania, in Paraguay. Following the failure of the fly-blown settlement and the suicide of her husband, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche continued promoting racist ideas by seizing control of her helpless brother’s writings, establishing a Nietzsche Archive and methodically deleting passages in which he lambasted the “race swindle”. For this service she was duly rewarded. On the basis of a highly selective biography and a heavily redacted compilation of Nietzsche’s writings that she published under the title The Will to Power, she was several times nominated by admiring German academics for the Nobel prize in literature. When she died in 1935, Hitler attended her funeral.
/../
Mill believed everybody gained from freedom of expression, including those who wanted to shut it down: all human beings want the benefits that come from growing knowledge. But what if many are happy to relinquish these benefits for the sake of values they consider more important and want to impose on others? Mill’s answer is that what matters is the continuing advance of the species. But as Nietzsche understood, the idea of “humanity” as a collective agent with universal goals that it pursues in the course of history is a secular residue of a religious faith in providence.