National Socialism – Page 2 – Stephen Hicks, Ph.D.

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

Leave a Comment / History, History of Philosophy / Stephen Hicks

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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Orwell on Nazism as socialism

7 Comments / Socialism / Stephen Hicks

George Orwell, in contrast to those who want to distance National Socialism from their own preferred version of socialism: “National Socialism is a form of socialism, is emphatically revolutionary, does crush the property owner as surely as it crushes the worker.” [1] Also, and in fuller detail: “Internally, Germany [under the Nazis] has a good

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Remembering the Nazi-Soviet invasions of Poland

1 Comment / History / Stephen Hicks

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

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How Socialist Were the Nazis?

2 Comments / History, Politics / Stephen Hicks

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

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Nazism is Bad, but Communism is “Cool”?

Leave a Comment / Politics / Stephen Hicks

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.”

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“The Philosophers and the Birth of National Socialism” — Gdańsk lecture

Leave a Comment / History, Philosophy / Stephen Hicks

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

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Guerin’s travels in late Weimar and early Nazi Germany

Leave a Comment / History, Politics / Stephen Hicks

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

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Gandhi’s pacificism and the Nazi threat

5 Comments / History, Politics / Stephen Hicks

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

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