Here is a fascinating short article in the British Journal of Medicine by Robert N. Proctor, professor of the history of medicine at Penn State University:
The campaign was mounted despite the arguments that (1) taxes on tobacco were a significant source of income for the German government and (2) the tobacco industry provided thousands of jobs. Political principles were at stake.
The chief anti-smoking activist, one Adolf Hitler, stated that “Nazism might never have triumphed in Germany had he not given up smoking.”
I gave the Nazi anti-smoking campaigns a passing mention in Nietzsche and the Nazis, in the context of discussing the Nazis’ socialization of the body politic, and Proctor has developed the anti-smoking theme in much greater detail.
A strong observation from Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges’s The Ancient City:
“It is a general fact, and almost without exception in the history of Greece and of Italy, that the tyrants sprang from the popular party, and had the aristocracy as enemies. ‘The mission of the tyrant,’ says Aristotle, ‘is to protect the people against the rich; he has always commenced by being a demagogue, and it is the essence of tyranny to oppose the aristocracy.’ ‘The means of arriving at tyranny,’ he also says, ‘is to gain the confidence of the multitude, and one does this by declaring himself the enemy of the rich. This was the course of Peisistratus at Athens, of Theagenes at Megara, and of Dionysius at Syracuse.’”
Setting aside any comparisons to contemporary politics, how well does Coulanges’s observation hold up historically? He mentions examples from Greece and Italy. Are the Jacobins of the French Revolution an example? Hitler and the National Socialists? Mao and the Communists? Counter-examples?
(Coulanges’s quotations from Aristotle are from Politics V.8, VIII.4, 5, and V. 4. The image is of statues of tyrannicides Harmodius and Aristogeiton, who killed Peisistratus’s son Hipparchus.)
Stephen Hicks discusses postmodernism and its rhetorical strategy of using skepticism against modern society. This is from Part 14 of his Philosophy of Education course.
Postmodernism draws many themes from Marxism. Here Stephen Hicks discusses several problems from Marxist theory and history that the postmoderns react to. This is from Part 14 of his Philosophy of Education course.
Stephen Hicks discusses post-modernism’s philosophical themes in contrast to those of pre-modernism and modernism. This is from Part 14 of his Philosophy of Education course.
Stephen Hicks discusses the use of history in postmodern education. This is from Part 14 of his 
