From: GEVANS613-AT-aol.com Date: Thu, 18 Sep 2003 10:31:51 EDT Subject: To Rene re: Stuart's Book. Jud: Attempting [like Rene does] to divert attention from the enormity of the Nazi atrocities by drawing attention to other wicked acts [the Dresden Raids for example] It is interesting and instructive that Rene and Heidegger use the same ploy. Rene writes: The Nazi atrocities should be seen in context, not like an untouchable god. When Nolte did this in relation to the Gulag, he was demonized. But Russia was one of Germany's opponents in ww1. But Russia aimed at Germany as the next socialistic nation. But Russia is 2 steps away from Germany. But Stalin planned to attack Germany. Jud: Firstly, as usual stick a big IMO [not IMHO] in front of every one of my sentences. Why Stalin planned to attack Germany? Because he knew what was coming. Rene: But Hitler offered to Churchill to deal with Russia, but instead got a war declaration. Jud: Should Churchill have agreed? Rene: We feel threatened now, but what about Germany amidst mere enemies? Jud: She made the enemies herself by starting the First World War. Rene: All this contributed to the holocaust, and we'll never understand it, as long as it is left out. Do we want to understand or to instrumentalize? I fear, the holocaust is only beginning. Jud: I hope Stuart doesn't fall into that trap? Rene: I see almost everybody deny or revise genocides, except me. You left something out in your accusation: YOU denied Dresden and all the other cities and the expulsion/murder of millions of Germans. When I said you were contaminated by the nazi thing (now even collectionneur) you cheered: "Contamination?, I CALL IT REVENGE!" (your capitalization) praised you when you took it back, but now you start it all over again. My knowledge of genocides and their history is by far superior to yours. Have you read Fest now? Or the director of the holocaust institute in Jerusalem, etc. etc.? The pinball machine character of list conversation though is not limited to your existence: widerwille is the true 'unrepresentable background' of all talk. Even the most objective of all knowledge: physics, has a relation to an observer. Objectivity IS a relation, it is not a thing. But this is just a special case of Being as presence. (i detect behind all defence against Heidegger a basic naive realism, heritage of the middle ages) That's why I read Kant with my students, and everybody else reads Heidegger, writes Heidegger... Jud: This last paragraph is bollocks - but I'll deal with that at another time. Rene: This same thing can be discovered in the assertions of Anthony Crifasi, to whom god is just Descartes' guarantee for objectivity, but who goes all the way to Calcutta to hide it for himself. There is, btw a lot of similarity between the two of you, change some terms, the meaning remains the same (salva veritate). I consider though you to be the more authentic, because of your real and felt-through bewilderment at seeing your idea of reality go down. Science, gone away from philosophy which grounded it, changes everything into phantasy. But not a phantasy that masks true reality! But phantasy that IS, becomes reality. Seen thus, we are far more powerful beings, than thought at first. Jud: I do feel a certain sympathy and respect for Anthony, but that is based upon my admiration for the tenacity with which he defends his beliefs not because I agree with him or those beliefs. I suppose it is because I see him and I as lone fellow victims in the Heideggerian Arena of the Absurd, constantly squinting up at the mass arrays of down-turned thumbs? ;-) Personally I agree with you Rene, that if Stuart goes ahead and writes his book on the basis of the 'pussy-in-the-middle' plan he has outlined, he will be wasting his time both creatively and commercially. The name of the game [certainly commercially] is iconoclasm as far as Herr Heidegger is concerned - the academic community has 'gone on the turn' regarding the Magician of Messkirch whose tricks turn more and more flat and inept at each performance, and Stuart ignores this at his peril. It's completely up to him of course, and it may well be that he has done some market research and spotted a niche - I would be sincerely happy if I were proved wrong - but I doubt it. I see no such corner of the market existing, for the 'reasonable' approach of attempting hermeneutically to untangle the convergences between Heidegger's political commitments and his philosophical ideas of authenticity and nihilistic acceptance of death as an ever-present black-clad figure at the party [the Christmas Party or the Nazi Party it doesn't matter which] with a placard [written in the old German Gothic lettering of course] saying: 'Daseins of the World Unite! The bird of time is on the wing, and has but a little way to fly - so just do you own thing, and wait for that Pie in the Sky.' It's all been done before ad nauseum. Far better to take the Heideggerian bull by the hermenuetical horns to address the question of WHY Heidegger was attracted to join the Nazi Party, and WHY millions of Austrians and Germans where easily persuaded to do likewise, and WHY Hitler chose the unpopularity of the Jews as the main platform of his political movement, and WHY the people agreed with him and voted them into power? Is anyone still under the impression that this hatred for the Jews was because they crucified our Lord? Is anyone childish enough to believe that it was simple as that? In my opinion Jews are simply cleverer than most gentiles, are more driven, more commercially adventurous, are less interested in working for other people, more intent on working for themselves and establishing and building up substantial businesses or successful career, and generally speaking they much more interesting and stimulating people to be with — even the unacademic ones. There is an expectation within Jewish families that the offspring should use their intelligence - not waste it, get off the arses and get stuck in to hard work to be able to provide a comfortable home for their wives and families. This work ethic is not so strong in those goyish lands of the so-called mythical and laughable 'Protestant Work-Ethic.' The 'Protestant Work Ethic' may have meant something when compared to the lazy Catholics of Mussolini-land who lay around eating spaghetti and pinching women's arses all day, or Franco's guitar-playing layabouts watching 'Death in the Sand' from dawn to dusk, but compared to the quick Jewish intelligence and zeal for work it was Manana-time all day in pre-war Germany baby. {I won't risk the Spanish tilde] Jewish people, as is human nature like to help each other, (I like to help my fellow Liverpudlians) and as most Jews are talented anyway, it is understandable that if there is a certain position vacant in an enterprise, the Jewish boss is more likely to give it to another Jew or to a family member. WHY? Well for starters he knows that because Jews are normally hard workers and not clock-watchers, and because they WANT to suceed, there is every likelihood that in the end his choice of a fellow religionist will prove to be correct. Unfortunately [though understandably] the result of this Jewish activity of hard work, innovation, lack of clock-watching, desire to succeed, and mutual help to their co-religionists often results in large sections of certain areas of enterprise: banking, trade, industry, manufacturing, and cultural areas such as the arts, music, entertainment, the media etc., being owned by people of Jewish descent. This sets up antagonisms, and [I'm sorry but there is no other word for it] the less hard-working, less imaginative, pedestrian Germans, didn't stand a chance. Hitler, was jealous of the Jewish success, and he, who was never a hard worker, [turning down commissions for his painted-postcards etc., after his friend had been tramping the streets in the pissing rain all day getting him orders] and other out of work gentiles didn't have the same imagination as their Jewish neighbours, and didn't have the gumption to do a Norman Tebbit and get on their bikes and go and look for work, and if their was no work to BLOODY WELL emigrate like the Jews did when work was short. So what happens? Because of the stupid, crazy and vengeful imposition of the Treaty of Versailles by the victorious Allies things collapse in Germany and many are starving. What section of society are they going to target? I don't need to spell it out. Yes, in 1939 England had the luxury of a media do the job of polarisation and sensationalising the matter of Hitlerism, but the unfortunate Jews in pre-war and wartime Germany did not. Any newspaper, magazine or radio station which dared speak out against Hitler was closed down immediately, and its proprietors sent to the gas-chambers. Those thoughtful Jews who tried to understand the premises of such Nazi actions and critique or even excuse the thinking of those involved with such actions never had a chance and were never heard of again. You ask whether the Nazi crimes are any worse than the Dresden Raids etc. It's all context dependent. Right now in Britain there is a plea about to go through the courts to have the charge of murder dropped against a certain woman called Ruth Ellis and changed to 'Causing Death due to Diminished Responsibility. ' She was a good-time girl who shot her false-hearted lover and was the last woman to be executed by hanging in Britain [1955] I remember it as if it were yesterday. Thousands of Britons pleaded for her life to be spared and many people from other countries also wrote to the Queen on her behalf. I think that this sort of killing is different to a man that murders a child, or a bank-robber who kills in the pursuit of a robbery, but someone who plans the murder of millions as an industrialised praxiology merely on the basis that they are of a different religious or racially ethnic background is in quite another ball-park murder-wise. So the answer to your difficult and profound question is: ... it all depends on the type of murder [whether cruelty and torture are included for example] whether it is for gain, whether it is emotionally driven [a betrayed woman or man] Having said all that I think if you stopped and asked 100 people in the street they would mostly all say that murders involving huge numbers of people are more inhuman and hideous than the murders of small or smaller numbers. Remember the Dreseden raids were indiscriminate bombing of cities [like what the Jerries did to London, Birmingham, manchester, Liverpool with the intention of destroying the will of the WORKERS WHO WORKED IN THE DOCKS AND ARMANEnT FACTORIES they were QUITE DIFFERENT form the rounding up of the Jews, Gypsies, Homosexuals etc., tatooing a number on the arms, sorting them into categories - the fit ones work - the old and the young and the sick straightr to the gas-chambers etc. This was A DIFFERENT TYPE OF MURDER RENE AND WELL YOU KNOW IT. Most people [and certainly all my personal Jewish friends] consider it so in the sense that it was the wholesale eradication of men, woman and children who, to all extents and purposes were as German or even MORE German than their next door blue-eyed neighbour could be, and had gloried in their Germaness and the German culture to which they contributed so much. In modern New York one still comes across Jews who escaped the holocaust imersed in German culture, the music, the culture, for that represented their youth in a land that most of them loved. There is something particularly horrible about those photographs of obviously respectable, middle class Jews being herded uncomprehendingly into cattle trucks, whereas a few months beforehand they had been at the front of a class teaching Goethe or Holderin, or conducting a provincial orchestra. I am not being petty bourgeois here, for the evil that happened to working-class Jews was just as bad. Being an extremely empathetic sort of a person, and having a nostalgic love for the literature, music [both classical and popular] of the Weimar Republic, I simply cannot understand how the gentile German intelligentsia could allow such things to happen, and flock to join the Nazi Party in droves against the background of a constant media onslaught against these Doctors, Surgeons, Professors, Violinists, Philosophers, Writers, Poets, these talented Jews who had given so much to the Fatherland and in whose Great War Army many of them had served with distiction? These speeches of Hitler's, Goebells and Streicher etc., which were fully reported in the newspapers, the radio and the cinema AND pasted on bill boards on streetcorners OVER AND OVER AGAIN - DAY IN DAY OUT - MONTH IN MONTH OUT left nothing to the imagination as to the fate of the Jewish community. Hitler was on record as having promised to hang Jews from lampposts in the mid twenties.[Michael has promised to check his archive] Those Germans that pleaded that they were unaware of what would befall the Jews at Nazi hands are plain and simple liars and Heidegger is one of the biggest of them, for he also made anti-Jewish remarks and attempted to play down his Nazi treatments of his Jewish colleagues. I say again, in the light of the constantly expressed intention of Hitler, Streicher and the rest to get rid of the Jews, to enrol knowingly in the Nazi Party wasa calculated Anti-Semitic act - it was the expression of a monsterous act of ad hominem again a minority of fellow citizens. SO THAT IS WHY I SPEAK SO CONTEMPTOUSLY OF HEIDEGGER, because in the act of joining the party he cut the ties with philosophy and became as bad as any guard who pulled the trigger of a gun on the lip of a mass grave, and any philosophical clap-trap is automatically denigrated the moment he signed his Party Card. Crazy talk of 'Dasein' and 'ontological difference' and the rest of the is turned to purerility when the sentiments behind it become the sentiments of hate, unreason and a monsterous authentic murderousness. The bottom line? Heideggerianism =Nihilism. Nazism = Nihilism. Heideggerianism = Nazism and Nazism = Heideggerianism. So, without trying or wanting to apologise for the Stalinist crimes I do not think that the motivations for murder were the same. In Stalin's twisted mind the ones sent to the camps, or murdered, or both, were enemies of the state, which threatened the establishment of 'Socialism if One Country' [as opposed to Trotsky's 'Permanent Revolution' policy, and although some ethnic groups were moved wholesale, there was to my knowledge no purely organised racialist vendetta against the Jews, although in Stalin's dotage he was suspicious of Jews, and was frightened of the so called 'Doctor's Plot' against him. It may surprise you to know that I wanted to marry a Soviet Jewess called Alla Zinovievna Levitina, and actually worshipped in my fashion - say 'paid my respects' with her in a rather dilapidated schule in the Arbat District of Moscow during the Khruschev period. [I'm a Goy BTW] She was sent to teach school [against her wishes] in Afghanistan to the children of Soviet construction workers, and I never heard of her again. The NKVD knew of our relationship and they offered me a teaching job and a small car - if I'd go to live there, but I said I would prefer if Alla were allowed to come to England - hence the Afghan posting. I'll end by asking you [and anyone else here- I wish Allen wasn't on holiday] a question that intrigues me. I have I think already established my credentials. Why is Heidegger so attractive to many Jewish intellectuals? I would have thought that in view of the anti-Jewish stance of Heidegger [the very act of joining the the Nazi party constituted an Anti-Semitic act] and his treatment of his Jewish colleagues, [Husserl etc.,] was abominable. Many leading Jewish writers and intellectuals have written penetrative Anti-Heideggerean books and articles, but the fact remains that many haven't and even more weird some of them are amongst his greatest supporters, and go to incredible lengths to minimise his crimes and play down his Nazi involvement? Is it a naive belief that his philosophy and his political beliefs can in someway be separated out? Are they hermenuetically innept? Globalisation apart, twentieth-century Capitalism worked moderatedly well on a level playing field when the sides are evenly matched. [Certainly when compared to Soviet Russia] In prewar Germany the sides were not evenly matched and the Jews ran rings around the lazy, unimmaginative, plodding Goys. The answer? Change to ANOTHER KIND of capitalism where the competition can be eliminated leaving the field open to the boneheads again - simple when you thing about it? Any thoughts on this? Enough already... Cheers, Jud. <A HREF="http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/ ">http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/</A> Jud Evans - ANALYTICAL INDICANT THEORY. <A HREF="http://uncouplingthecopula.freewebspace.com">http://uncouplingthecopula.freewebspace.com</A> --- StripMime Warning -- MIME attachments removed --- This message may have contained attachments which were removed. Sorry, we do not allow attachments on this list. --- StripMime Report -- processed MIME parts --- multipart/alternative text/plain (text body -- kept) text/html --- --- from list heidegger-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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