Anyway, I think this whole argument is muddled on many levels. Mainly, as is often done, it conflates Nazism and Fascism. Heidegger's thought obviously had a lot of shared features with fascist thought (since he was basically a fascist, this is not exactly surprising). However, what is singularly evil about the Nazis is not that they were Fascists but that they were GENOCIDAL fascists WITH A RACE THEORY on which they based their genocide, which puts them leaps and bounds in terms of moustache-twirling evillness ahead of the Fascists. There is no race theory in Heidegger, and there is no notion of the inherent awesomeness of particular ethic groups (except in the "Greek and German are metaphysical languages" sense) and the corresponding vileness of others, and I think trying to derive such notions from Heidegger's work would take some pretty damn creative textual exegesis. Assuming genocidal intent is a defining characteristic of Nazism that distinguishes
it from run-of-the-mill Fascism, which is about .000001% as malevolent, Heidegger is part of the Fascist group but not the Nazi group, Party membership notwithstanding.
--- On Wed, 7/9/08, andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> The ideas that Heidegger never repudiated, however, had
> only one sort of seed, the bad kind. A few weeks ago I was
> at Auschwitz-Birkenau and walked into a gas chamber that
> was built to murder me, and looked at the ovens a few feet
> away where they planned to turned by body to ash and smoke
> and unlike a fair number of my relatives who walked into
> that gas chamber, I walked out through the door into the
> light and air instead of leaving via the chimney. It's
> quite an experience. T recommend it to all. No one on this
> list would have been exempt.
>