September 1, 1939 is the date the German Nazis invaded Poland, initiating World War Two. Less well remembered is the shortly thereafter Soviet Russian invasion of Poland. A month earlier, the Nazis and Soviets had agreed not to attack each other and to divide Poland (and other parts of eastern Europe) between them. The Soviets […]
Remembering the Nazi-Soviet invasions of Poland Read More »
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. The book based
How Socialist Were the Nazis? Read More »
My four-minute response to interviewer Ignasi Boltó’s question about why National Socialism and Communism are often evaluated so differently. My full interview with Ignasi Boltó of Instituto Juan de Mariana: “Stephen Hicks on Postmodernism, Western Values and Jordan Peterson.”
Nazism is Bad, but Communism is “Cool”? Read More »
I gave a talk in Gdańsk, Poland, on “The Philosophers and the Birth of National Socialism.” Along the way we discuss Oswald Spengler, Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Nietzsche, and others. The video of the lecture and question period is here (or at YouTube): Thanks to Dr. Marek Szymaniak of the Museum of the Second
“The Philosophers and the Birth of National Socialism” — Gdańsk lecture Read More »
I’m reading Daniel Guérin’s The Brown Plague: Travels in Late Weimar and Early Nazi Germany (Duke University Press, 1994), based on the French journalist’s trips through Germany in the early 1930s. Guérin was then a young leftist whose thinking later evolved in a communist-anarchist direction. Germany both attracted and appalled him with its extremist politics. From
Guerin’s travels in late Weimar and early Nazi Germany Read More »
From Alex Von Tunzelmann’s Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire: Gandhi advised the British to give up the fight against Hitler and Mussolini, and he advised Jews in Germany to offer passive resistance to the Nazi regime: “Gandhi’s position on nonviolence was absolute. Aggression could never be returned. He did
Gandhi’s pacificism and the Nazi threat Read More »
[This column is a part of the Theist vs. Atheist series debate between Stephen Hicks and John C. Wright. This is Hicks’s response to Wright’s column. Here are the links to other columns in the series.] To evaluate religion’s track record we need to specify our evaluative benchmarks and identify whether we are evaluating religion generically
Religion and the Verdict of History [Theist vs. Atheist series] Read More »
Nietzsche and the Nazis: A Personal View was first produced as a documentary in 2006. The book version was published in 2010. A Polish translation is forthcoming in 2014. We are releasing an audiobook version serially. To begin, here are Parts 1 and 2. Part 1. Introduction: Philosophy and History [mp3] [YouTube] [5 minutes] 1.
Audiobook version of Nietzsche and the Nazis Read More »