Posted on 05/15/2005 12:18:20 PM PDT by West Coast Conservative
Welcome to FR!
Dictatorships tend to be very anti-intellectual in nature. If you were a dictator, why would you want smart, well-educated people around to gainsay you?
This is an outstanding piece. I especially liked the very clear comparison of these nihilists with the Hitler Youth.
The smart, well-educated people didn't "gainsay" him. Hitler sought out sympathetic intellectuals in the early days of the Nazi movement to give his fledgling party gravitas. When the Nazi party took over Germany, those "sympathetic intellectuals" were popular (in large part due to the threat of force from the fascist state), so those sympathetic to Nazism were the majority.
The gentleman here is right: while Hitler himself wasn't even able to get into art school, some of Hitler's most important early allies were intellectuals.
A truly outstanding retort. Much of that I did not know.
You are so right. Princeton hired professor Peter Singer to teach. Mr. Singer is an advocate of killing babies up to a year old if they don't pass some sort of "test" to prove that they are worthy of living. Singer's views were known before he was hired. Why was he hired then? This is how far down the slippery slope academia as slid. I'm sure many of the lib professors who rant about Bush and Iraq or conservatism in general chortle when they read about pies being thrown at conservative speakers. Remember it was the left who coined the phrase "the end justifies the means".
Then you have to ask yourself why dictatorships are so popular with leftists? Nazis and Communists did many similar things including creating totalitarian police states and eliminating undesirable class or ethnic groups. Communists were probably worse than Hitler at doing this. Maybe most leftists sided with communists over Nazis, but it only proves one kind of poison was not much different than another.
ping
Princeton has had a long history of association with proto-nazi ideologies. Woodrow Wilson was an early exponent of Eugenics. Family tradition I guess.
Well said.
I also think there's a tendency among these intellectuals to disparage anyone they dislike as uncouth, stupid, brutish, etc. They always underestimate those from outside their realm, both good and bad. Hitler's organizational genius, as remarked by Paul Johnson, is one example of what these elitists were unable to see, an example of the blindness of their intellectual pretensions.
Hitler was evidently smarter than them, else they would have stopped him.
For what its worth, I share many of these pretensions. But we overestimate intellect; that's my considered opinion. Intellect is not wisdom, and wisdom is not virtue.
http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/hitler'sdoggie.htm
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Did Dog-Joke Cause Heidegger's Downfall?
Oh well, at least we can be thankful that Heidegger didn't copy his master's belief in astrology and incorporate the movement of the spheres as part of his bizarre kiddy-wink non-system. It's a pity really, for had he done so, he certainly would have increased his chances of achieving his ambition of becoming Hitler's private philosopher. It's a shame really - for otherwise some flickering early colour-film might have survived of him, Eva Braun, Hitler's dog 'Blondie,' together with der Fuhrer's personal astrologer cavorting on the terrace of the Eagle’s Nest which lies high above Berchtesgaden perched atop the Kehlstein mountain.
Ironically, according to one of Heidegger's colleagues: Julius Furzarsch head of the Racial Science Dept at Freiburg, who later survived three years in a Soviet Labour Camp for peddling porn on the Reiperbahn, it was a reference to Hitler's dog that caused Heidegger's downfall in the Nazi Party. In 1949 Furzarsch wrote an account of his days as a member of staff at Freiburg during Heidegger's Rectorship. Due to the political climate of the times the book was never published. The manuscript has now been discovered and a book released by Nuremburger Presse under the title: 'Herrumbummeln mit Heidegger' and it has just hit the German bookstalls. According to Furzarsch's account it was a chance remark - a silly thoughtless joke that Heidegger made which put a stop to his meteoritic rise in the Nazi hierarchy.
Furzarsch reports that Heidegger once told a group of colleagues th3e following joke, that Hitler had once commented to a group of Romanian fascists:
'Mein Hund hat keine Nase.'
'Wie riecht er? asked one of the Romanian visitors politely.
'Schrecklich,' laughed Hitler.
According to Furzarsch this got back to the dog-lover Hitler who immediately ordered that Heidegger should tender his resignation as rector.
And so apparently ends all the speculation, about whether Heidegger actually did resign his high position because he became disenchanted with the party, or that his activities as a secret liberalising mole burrowing into and undermining the racial obsessions of his party colleagues was proving to be fruitless, or that he suddenly decided that the writings of the mad poet Hoelderlin were of more import that the mad dictator Hitler, or that Elfride rang the Gestapo and reported her husband's affair with a Jewish teenager etc., etc. - all these guesses were wrong.
It was therefore all down to an insensitive joke that Heidegger made about Blondie, [whose nose had been half-bitten off by one of the guard dogs at Berchtesgaden - which was later hung with piano-wire over the heavily fortified entrance-gate as a warning to other dogs.] In fact, Hitler's Blondie didn't attend his funeral, though I'm sure she would have -- if her master hadn't tested his cyanide pills on her first.
Well - at last we know!
Have the fanatics arrested. That will solve the problem liberals have with free speech.
Somebody needed an a$$ whuppin'.
Thanks for the ping!
Ms. Coulter stood stunned atop her stage, unprepared for a jackass to say something so utterly crude and to the point. Her pompous and mean air is enough to stump questioners into timidity; I wasn't about to let her stop me. The audience members looked at me with raw disbelief; later, even friends who know me well admitted that they'd been surprised at how vulgar I'd been. The others in line for Q&A, mostly liberals, looked at me like I'd set their cause back forty years.
Did I give a shit? No. If I had a message, it's that the whole thing was a joke--hell, our whole political scene today is a f***ing joke.
He can't backpedal quick enough. Even his stooge friends are giving him grief and distancing themselves.
And in the Free Republic thread reporting the incident a gang of pukes defended the creep, arguing that it was a "fair question" given Scalia's dissent in a sodomy case.
Ajai Raj surely comes from parents who were too timid to disclipline him. What he needed were some good old fashioned smacks on his butt when he mouthed off like that at home!
Alas, he has no concept of right and wrong behavior. Dennis Prager, once again, hits this one out of the park.
Damn right. You don't break a union by patting an organizer on the head and telling him not to solicit union members on company time. You toss him and the folks you see discussing life with him on the street.
That should have been most intellectuals and academics sided with communists over Nazis...not leftists who naturally would side with communists.
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