Appendix 2: Quotations on Nazi socialism and fascism [Nietzsche and the Nazis]
Quotations on Nazi socialism and fascism. Excerpt from Nietzsche and the Nazis.
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History
Gannibal, “dark star of the Enlightenment”
Imagine that this is your life story: You are born in Africa, possibly in Ethiopia or perhaps Chad, but as a child you are taken by Arab slavers and sold in Constantinople to the Sultan of Turkey, before long catching the eye of a Russian diplomat and spy, who acquires you and smuggles you out
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“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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Christianity: Good or Bad for Mankind? Bernstein and D’Souza
A debate from 2014, I believe, between Andrew Bernstein and Dinesh D’Souza, hosted at the University of Texas. Arguments about religion typically fall into three categories: 1. Philosophical arguments about supernaturalism, faith and reason, the source of morality, and so on.2. Scriptural arguments about passages in the religion’s core texts.3. Historical arguments about the record
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Peter Watson on *The German Genius*, 1754-1933
I’m re-reading Peter Watson’s The German Genius: Europe’s Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution, and the Twentieth Century (Harper Perennial, 2011). It’s a powerful history of the intellectually most powerful nation in Europe in the last three centuries. Watson introduces his theme and its scope this way: Between the publication of Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s groundbreaking
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Burckhardt quotation on the birth of individualism in the Italian Renaissance
A favorite from Jacob Burckhardt’s great The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860): In the Middle Ages, “Man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation — only through some general category. In Italy this veil first melted into air; an objective treatment and consideration of
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Kostyło’s review of *Nietzsche and the Nazis*
Professor Piotr Kostyło of University of Casimir the Great reviewed the Polish edition of Nietzsche and the Nazis. Here’s an English translation of Kostyło’s review: “Do We Know What We Advocate? Stephen Hicks’s Defence of Individualism” [pdf]. The original Polish: “Czy wiemy, za czym cie opowiedamy? Stephena Hickss obrana indywidualizmu”. The review was published in
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Iatrochemists: why iron salts cure anemia
A fun anecdote from the history of medicine. (Fun in hindsight, though not necessarily fun for those who lived through the medical history.) The late-medieval Iatrochemists believed that progress could be made by uniting medicine with alchemy. Their intellectual leader was Paracelsus (1493-1541), a Swiss physician whose goal was to reform medical chemistry by rejecting
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