Fortuitous Poem by Leszek Kolakowski, II

The Nazis told their supermen
To read the Will to Power,
And it is no good saying
That it was a mere chance,
And that they might have equally well
Have chosen the Critique of Practical Reason.

It is not a question of establishing
The guilt of Nietzsche, who as an individual
Was not responsible for the use of his writing;
Nevertheless, the fact that they were so used
Is bound to cause alarm and cannot be dismissed
As irrelevant to the understanding of what was in his mind.

St. Paul was not personally responsible for the Inquisition
And for the Roman Church at the end of the fifteen century,
But the inquirer, whether Christian or not, cannot be content
To observe that Christianity was depraved or distorted
By the conduct of unworthy popes and bishops;
He must rather seek to discover what it was in the Pauline epistles
That gave rise, in the fullness of time, to unworthy and criminal actions.

Our attitude to the problem of Marx and Marxism should be the same
And in this sense the present study is not only a historical account
But an attempt to analyze the strange fate of an idea
Which began in Promethean humanism and culminated in the monstrous tyranny of Stalin.