On Jul 8, 2008, at 12:16 PM, Chris Doss wrote:
> I was thinking, and it strikes me that Marxists, or people
> sympathetic to Marx, are not in a particularly good position to
> take the "everything Heidegger wrote is infected by dangerous Nazi
> cooties" approach. One, while Hitler was not a Heideggerian, Stalin
> was in fact a Marxist. I would imagine that the number of large-
> scale murders embarked upon by Heideggerians is zero. Two, while
> finding the real or imagined scary Nazi-cootie bits in Heidegger
> takes careful textual exegesis, and Heidegger did not even believe
> in the main core of Nazi ideology (the race thing), the links
> between Marx and Stalin are obvious. Three, while Hitler probably
> had only the vaguest idea who Heidegger was, and while Heidegger
> had almost certainly no influence whatsoever on Hitler's worldview
> or actions, everything Stalin did was in Marx's name, both in word
> and probably in his mind.
Except that Heidegger was an actual Nazi, and Marx was long dead before Stalinism existed.