Now, the subject of the comparison of manifest destiny with Nietzsche's conception of amor fati is genuinely an interesting and, to me, a novel one. It is true that from the start, as in all monotheistic or monistic creeds, there was in Christianity a belief in an historical ordering principle.
In Christianity, this took the form of a faith in Providence, the belief that God in some way and to some extent "pulled the strings of history". In the orthodox Christianity of the first millenium, this was atteunated by an understanding of evil as a principle separate from God. The theory ran that God was goodness and that evil was therefore an absence of God. Insofar as this world was corrupted by evil, God's sovereignty was frustrated. God here, incidentally, is understood not only as a person, but as a substance, as Good and Being and Justice par excellence.
Now with the reformation, the substantial understanding of God (which had provided a necessary counterpart to the understanding of Him as a person), and the existence of evil as a separate principle began to be undermined. Calvin's first concern was to present a rigorous and absoute doctrine of the sovereignty of God over creation, which logically ended with the assertion that wherever men are evil, it is because God wills both their evil and their damnation through it. To be more precise, without going into the complexities of intralapsarian as opposed to supralapsarian Calvinism, the theory stated that God could prevent men from evil by perfectly efficaciously bringing them to repentence and Christianity. If God didn't do that to a man, he passively allowed the evil, leaving the man in sin and the victim in suffering. Now, to make the careful logical distinction, that doesn't mean that God wills evil, but that he allows it. Likewise, it does not mean that he allows any particular evil, but that he allows these people to will evil things in general or in principle. But at bottom, in my estimation, it denied man enough freedom that he could be responsible for the way his disposition towards evil actually produced evil acts (even if any particular evil acts were insisted to properly belong to him), and allowed God enough power that he could prevent any particular evil act He chose. In other words, the principle that had kept men from fatalism (that God had no part, either passively or actively, in evil) was deliberately and as a first principle denied.
The reformed protestant understanding was carried over to America, where men decided that insofar as God wills all things good actively and all evil things passively, and insofar as their being Christians show them to be favoured as a willed good, their actions were legitimated by divine sanction. There's still a tension, because evil as a principle still exists in the hearts of men, but these people presumed that for the most part they were in God's good books. Now, even this perverted and deformed Christianity cannot own that a person can do evil that good will come of it, or, in other words, that means justify ends. Their evil is therefore limited to only that that they can explain away as good. Nonetheless, as long as they can explain it away, their doctrine of providence clearly allows them to cite God's approval in a way that Lutheran or Catholic thought would not allow.
Perhaps the most obvious and vulgar descendants of this line of thought are the Westboro Baptist Church. Their ideology, because it seems to neglect the passive/active distinction, is something even Calvin would have found clearly blasphemous. All evil that other people do is not to them some sad fact which they should seek to ameliorate in the victims and seek repentence for in the perpetrators. Rather, it is a sign of divine wrath for the victims and a deliberate damning to divine punishment for the perpetrators. The members of the church can, of course, point this out in the most vile ways, because that must be good, because they enjoy divine favour.
But there is a difference with Nietzsche. And that is this: A member of WBC, when pressed, would not and could not admit the goodness of the holocaust. Their odious philosophy will keep them from expressing sympathy with the victims (who, to them, must have deserved it), but they will admit the moral evil of the perpetrators (although they will deny that these were properly speaking free in choosing to do it, whilst affirming that somehow they can nonetheless be punished for it). Nietzsche, by contrast, must, under pain of logical contradiction, state that the holocaust must be loved. His conception of fatalism not only means that we must exult in all of our own actions, none excepted, but that we must exult in everything precisely as it is. You could no more wish the holocaust undone than wish the flowers undone, because they emerge from the same principle. The WBC at least retain some conception that the holocaust is "the evil that men do". Nietzsche will not see any sense in the word "evil". He is not, as it is often insinuated, an ideologue of National Socialism. To him, all things occur at the level of the individual. Any conception at the level of "race" or "nation" would have been quite foreign to his thought. Any concept of eugenics would have seemed quite bizarre to him, being as it was an illegitimate framing of Darwinian discourse. I remain convinced that his anti-semitism was at bottom a hatred of judaism and not a hatred of jews, however unfortunately he may at times have expressed himself. But, we must admit, any objection to the holocaust would have struck him as mere ressentiment. He may have seen no particular reason to commit those atrocities, but equally he would have seen no particular reason to oppose them. And that, in the end, is something you cannot even say of the WBC.
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