In-der-Blog-sein

Memory Hole quotes extensively from David Horowitz's The Politics of Bad Faith:

Of all the influences on contemporary academic radicals, Martin Heidegger's may be the most revealing. Heidegger's influence derives partly from his importance to academic theory generally, but also from the fact that he has directly influenced seminal leftists like Derrida, Foucault and Sartre. As a Nazi, Heidegger's socialist utopia was national in character, but his response to its implementation in the Third Reich is strikingly reminiscent of Marxist responses to the revealed horrors of the Soviet state. In Heidegger’s postwar refusal to recant his Nazi commitments, he anticipated the denials later employed by American leftists refusing to discard their parallel faith.

Interesting this notion of "academic theory". What is it? Nothing by that name shows up in Heidegger. Perhaps it refers to the Western canon that Heidegger taught and was immersed in? Is that Mr. Horowitz wants to expel from the academy. I presume he'd like to censor anything he doesn't understand.

Comparing the responses of ex-Nazis and communists to the atrocities of the XXth century dictatorships and seeing the similarities makes me question if Mr. Horowitz can see at all. When a Nazi, Heidegger was very much a nationalist, and against its socialist tendencies. Clearly Mr. Horowitz is unaware of Heidegger's time before the de-nazification tribunal in the late 1940's when he did everything he could to recant and evade his earlier political engagement. Heidegger with his silence, the rocket scientists that taught me fluid and thermodynamics, and so many others just wanted to forget and put behind them the dreadful errors of the 1930s. Communists, the other hand, continue to wear Che pins and wave their red flags proudly. How much more different could their reactions to the past be?

The second mode of denial favored by western Marxists and Nazis like Heidegger is the doctrine of moral equivalence, which is simply a form of nihilism. This is an attitude that refuses to distinguish between actually existing totalitarian socialisms and the liberal realities of capitalist states.

Really what we have is the victors writing history. Totalitarians are evil, whether in the guise of socialism or capitalism, liberal or conservative. Liberal capitalist reality includes the extermination of hundreds of native peoples, slavery, and so on. It's all very tragic. One acknowledges such, hopefully learns from the past, and carries on coping. Examining the past indicates to me that the greatest danger comes from those that are blind to their own failings, and must demonize others to hide the vacuity of their thinking, or lack there of. Nihilism in deed.  ¶ 4:42 PM