People should rethink
their ideas about cruelty and open up their eyes;…

This is my claim: almost everything we call
“higher culture” is based on the spiritualization and deepening of cruelty.
The “wild animal” has not been killed off at all;
it is alive and well,
it has just – become divine.

Cruelty is what constitutes
the painful sensuality of tragedy.
And what pleases us in so-called tragic pity as well as in
everything sublime,
up to the highest and most delicate
of metaphysical tremblings,
derives its sweetness exclusively
from the intervening component of cruelty.

Consider the Roman in the arena, Christ in the rapture
of the cross, the Spaniard at the sight of the stake or the bullfight,
the present-day Japanese flocking to tragedies,
the Parisian suburban laborer who is homesick
for bloody revolutions,…

There is abundant, overabundant pleasure
in your own suffering too, in making yourself suffer,
– and wherever anyone lets himself be talked
into self-denial in the religious sense,…
or into puritanical penitential spasms, vivisections of conscience…
urged on by his cruelty,
by that dangerous
thrill of self-directed cruelty.

Bear in mind that even the knower,
by forcing his spirit to know against its own inclination,
which constantly tends towards semblances and surfaces,
– there is a drop of cruelty
even in every wanting-to-know.

Beyond Good And Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by Judith Norman, aphorism 229

Cruelty is always a foul obscenity. By no means observes the writer. Nietzsche declares that we have spiritualized and deepened cruelty. Granted you and I no longer sit as did the Romans for hours in a colosseum.  Actual eruptions of blood, beheadings, the self-congratulation of the victor over the fallen body of his opponent are scenes we’d find distasteful, too sharp edged for our sensibility. We will pay the price of admission to a professional football game though. How easy to forget that some of the athletes will be struck down later in life by dementia, a ravening loss of self, the result of serial concussions in the course of play. You felt a thrill when you received your ticket for a good seat. I as well felt a rush of excitement viewing the game on television.

How is the republican party able to stand in the way of aid to Ukraine? Ukrainians will be slaughtered day by day as ammunition runs out, as the population is demoralized by shortages of everything. Moreover our president is loathe to mention terminating the flow of arms to Israel even though it appears the Israeli Defense Force intends to exterminate a majority of the residents of Gaza.

Clearly we Americans are a major sponsor of cruelty.

Pleasure in suffering.

Not unlike that astringent note of bitterness in a good cup of coffee.