Marxism as “scientific socialism” and what happens when the scientific data fail to cooperate. For more, here is the full 2018 lecture at the University of British Columbia.
How Failed Marxist Predictions Led to the Postmodern Left — lecture excerpt 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 »
The old philosophy question — How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? — has gotten a bad rap.* Yet three important answers contest for dominance: 1. An infinite number of angels can dance on the head of a pin. As purely spiritual beings, angels do not take up physical space, so
So how many angels *can* dance on the head of a pin? Read More »
What are Fascism and Nazism, historically and philosophically? What are their connections to Benito Mussolini, Friedrich Nietzsche, Joseph Goebbels, and Adolf Hitler? And do those words describe today’s Alt-Right and Antifa members? Vin Armani’s one-hour interview with me appears at 60:10:35 of this two-hour show: Related: Nietzsche and the Nazis. Mussolini and Gentile’s The Doctrine
“Fascist” and “Nazi” discussion at the Vin Armani Show Read More »
Wisdom from a giant of the nineteenth-century — Frederick Douglass (circa 1818-1895): “Everybody has asked the question … ‘What shall we do with the Negro?’ I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the
Black History Month: Frederick Douglass Read More »
Historian Thomas Nipperdey on one reason why German philosophy came to prominence in American intellectual life: “Until 1830 it was the general rule that talented and curious young minds gravitated to Paris; but from then on they came, in ever-increasing numbers (American students, for example) to Germany, to Berlin.” For more on the meaning and implications
Thomas Nipperdey in Explaining Postmodernism Read More »
In 1770, tensions were high between the American colonists and their British rulers. Anxious soldiers confronting an angry mob precipitated the Boston Massacre. Eight soldiers were then put on trial for murder. The lawyer John Adams was a strong American patriot, yet he took on the defense of the British soldiers. His purpose was explicitly
Revolutionary justice: French versus American style Read More »