>In this regard, there is, of course, the infamous
>remark in which he compares the Holocaust to the mechanization of
>agriculture as comparable crimes against human authenticity.
Uh...This isn't what Heidegger said. By the time he wrote The Question Concerning Technology, he had given up his authenticity-speak. He said the death camps and the agricultural industry were both instances of the reification of the world taking part in the modern age, that is, interpreting all things as disposable, rationally manipulatable resources. The point was to slam agricultural industry, no slight the death camps.
Actually, Heidegger DOES have a post-WWII justification of his activities with the Nazis (though not one, I suspect, that people on this list would feel much sympathy for): That Nazism, as a countermove to modernity, was good in essence, but that the Nazi ideologists had corrupted it with biologism and stupidity.
Actually, Heidegger wasn't well-thought-of by the Nazi hierarchy, who didn't like his attacks on biologism in the 1935 lectures on Nietzche and, I suspect, the use of "degenerate artist" Van Gogh as an example in The Origin of the Work of Art. Somewhere there's a letter by some Nazi muckey-muck saying "We need to be careful of Dr. Heidegger; he subscribes to a version of National Socialism existing only in his own mind."
It's also worthwhile noting that when MH contrasts the "German essence" to that of other nations, he always mentions the US and USSR, never the Jews.
Not meaning to absolve him of his obvious toadying to the Nazis, scandalous betrayal of Husserl and fascist (though not Nazi; there is a difference) tendencies.
Chris Doss The Russia Journal