Yale Professor’s Portrayal of Hitler’s Ecological Anti-Semitism Slips into a Nazi Black Hole

The Intellectual Conservative ^ | 11/23/15 | Mark Musser

[Olympiad Fisherman]

In the opening chapters of “Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning,” Yale professor Timothy Snyder forcefully acknowledged what he calls the “ecological” Anti-Semitism of the Fuhrer, “An instructive account of the mass murder of the Jews of Europe must be planetary, because Hitler’s thought was ecological, treating Jews as a wound of nature.” In spite of such an assertion, however, the great caveat of Snyder’s book is he inexplicably fails to discuss the Nazi ecological historical record that should have informed his thesis ...

[tophat9000]

Bump

[ifinnegan]

IOW Nazis were Green.

[Billthedrill]

I have found it exceedingly difficult to dredge clarity out of Mein Kampf, it being what it was, a torrent of pop romanticism, ill-understood pop biology, and half-digested pop historiography. Hitler was not a formally educated man, but an autodidact with an extremely spotty reading list that he stopped adding to in his late 20's, having learned everything there was to learn at that point.

You're simply not going to get a great deal of meaningful formal philosophy from that mess, try as you might to find influences. Schopenhauer, certainly, and more than a little of Hegel and Marx as the author cites, but no real firm grasp of any of them. Citing one's focus of hostility - in his case the Jews - as being contrary to nature is not, IMHO, a precocious case of eco-madness but a habit that goes back at least to Rousseau. What drove Hitler was hatred, passion, and paranoia, not philosophy.

[Olympiad Fisherman]

Precisely - passion, willpower and instinct, rather than reason, is at the heart of the German existentialist movement, which was formalized by the likes of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche - Hitler’s 2 favorite philosophers - and Hitler read a lot more books than most people read today. Sadly, many in the West have invested deeply in Germany’s godless intellectual traditions of the 1800’s and early 1900’s and are quick to portray Hitler as a blithering idiot akin to a Hogan’s Heroes TV show - but this is nonsense. I would encourage to watch this by Dr. Stephen Hicks based on his book “Nietzche and the Nazis” - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-WaeXHMeho.

[Olympiad Fisherman]

Here is more on the same subject - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOt2KhpCatg.

[Olympiad Fisherman]

Fascist expert Georg Lukacs pointed out that tracing the roots of Fascism includes virtually every critical German philosopher of the 1800’s including, but not limited to, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Dilthy, Heidegger, and even Jaspers. Carl Gustav Jung was no fascist slouch either, but gets out of it because he is Swiss. Heidegger, the most influential philosopher (again existentialism) of the 20th century, was also a flaming Nazi early on. Worse, all these men are still extolled in modern academia by the Left, and their ideas are very pervasive.

[SunkenCiv]

Hitler's favorite artist vas von Stuck; in the book "The Psychopathic God" the author noted that this painting, which dates from Hitler's birth year, became a model for his appearance, including that cape he wore at the Nuremberg rallies, and frankly the scene in the painting is pretty frightening.

Wild Chase - Franz von Stuck - The Athenaeum