National Socialism

“Only a God Can Save Us” documentary

The line is from Martin Heidegger’s resigned and despairing Der Speigel interview, shortly before his death in 1976. At Rockford University we hosted a showing of Jeffrey Van Davis’s film on Martin Heidegger’s philosophy and his disturbing relationship with National Socialism. After the showing, we had a panel discussion featuring director Van Davis, professors David […]

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Why did Bertrand Russell blame German fascism on German philosophy?

Reprising this from Thomas Akehurst’s Philosophy Now essay on why Bertrand Russell blamed German fascism on German philosophy: “What is less well known is that in the 1930s and 1940s Russell’s attention turned to the idea that the origins of Nazism were primarily philosophical.” Russelll, according to Akehurst, mentioned several German philosophers by name, among

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Zeev Sternhell on the Nazis’ pillaging of Nietzsche

Refreshing this quotation from Zeev Sternhell’s The Anti-Enlightenment Tradition (Yale University Press, 2010), a scholarly study of the most disturbing intellectual trend of the modern world — the ongoing lineage of intellectuals opposed to the Enlightenment tradition of reason, naturalism, individualism, and freedom. Along the way Sternhell asks, of Nietzsche’s place in the trend, an

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“The Nazis were Socialist” — really?

From 2006, an eight-minute documentary clip with my answer. Topics covered: (1) National Socialist philosophy, (2) the Nazi Party’s original 25-point platform — collectivism, economic socialism, nationalism, authoritarianism — (3) negotiations to merge with the German Socialist Party, (4) Hitler and Goebbels speeches on socialism, and (5) the symbolism of the swastika. From 2006, an

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Viktor Frankl: On the original preparation for the gas chambers

Frankl was a Holocaust survivor and Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at the University of Vienna Medical School: I became acquainted with the last stages of corruption in my second concentration camp in Auschwitz. The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity

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Dr. Otto Dietrich, Hitler’s National Press Director [on Kant]

Dietrich was a Ph.D. in Political Science from Freiburg University (where later Martin Heidegger was professor of philosophy). In a 1934 lecture delivered at the University of Köln, Dietrich bases National Socialist political philosophy directly upon the philosophy of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel. A key theme of the lecture is Universalism versus Individualism, where individualism

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