Far too little
attention has been paid to addressing the fundamental role that ideological
indoctrination in classrooms and lecture halls has played in delivering the
atrocities of Nazism to the world. The German university was the ideological
originator of Nazism, turning romantic racial myths and superstitions about
Germany and the Jews into a systematic “scientific” body of knowledge that gave
rise to Nazi racial policy and justified the horrors of the Nazi atrocities.
Professors and academics with
multiple Ph.D.s eagerly collaborated with the Nazi leadership and
selected who was to be sterilized and who lived or died for the glory of the
Volk, advocated which races were to be exterminated and which nations
were to be invaded and conquered for lebensraum.
Lately, many
notable historians and political commentators have been comparing our own time
to the ominous prelude to World War II. Herbert London, renowned historian and
President of Hudson Institute declared, “we are back in 1940”
(4) as global terrorist attacks, proclamations of Jihad, the threat of a
nuclear Iran, fatwas against the West and the annihilation
of Israel are broadcast from the Middle East on a daily basis. Other historians
compare these times to Germany in 1938, when Neville Chamberlain appeased Hitler
while Nazi tanks thundered across Europe. Charles Krauthammer, concluding from
the current alarming trends that the lessons of the Holocaust are still
unlearned, he recounted the apprehension of Bernard Lewis, the world’s
preeminent Middle East scholar saying he “confessed that for the first time he
feels it is 1938 again….in 1938, in the face of the gathering storm -- a
fanatical, aggressive, openly declared enemy of the West, and most determinedly
of the Jews -- the world did nothing”. (5)
How could Germany, the home of Goethe, Bach
and Beethoven in the heart of advanced European civilization, boasting the
world’s highest literacy rate and most highly industrialized economy and a haven
for the persecuted Jews of Eastern Europe, give rise in a matter of years to the
one of the most barbaric, evil political regimes in human history dedicated to
the total extermination of every single Jew in Europe? How did a madman like
Hitler, a nobody in 1923, become the Chancellor of Germany in 10 years? How did
the Nazis impose their will with astonishing ease on such a highly civilized
nation leading the population to willingly, with little or no opposition,
participate in institutionalized mass murder?
Scholars have
focused on the legacy of Prussian
militarism, the dislocations of the Great Depression, the severity of the
humiliating treaty of Versailles, Goebbels’ massive propaganda campaign, or the
continuing hold of medieval Christian antisemitism. But I believe that the sudden rise of Hitler, the atrocities of
World War II, and the Holocaust were the direct result of decades of
indoctrination in mythical nationalism and racialist ideologies by German
universities, indoctrination that parallels the current work of American
universities with respect to identity politics, multiculturalism,
deconstructionism, scholar-activism and education for social justice.
What happened in Germany in the prewar period is, therefore, a
cautionary tale.
Political Indoctrination in the German University
In the early
19th century, liberal ideals of equality, freedom and civil rights
from the Enlightenment and the French Revolution spread throughout Europe and
into Germany. In country after country, Jews were emancipated and started to
enjoy equal rights as citizens; this was true of Germany too, after Napoleon’s
triumphant march into Berlin in 1806. “… In
the city of Bonn … the Christian citizenry broke down the ghetto walls
and jubilantly linked arms with the Jews”. (8)
But in 1819,
university students from Wurzburg suddenly burst out in violent mob attacks
against Jews unlike anything witnessed since the Middle Ages. Spreading to other
cities, this was the massive, but historically obscure German pogrom of the
19th century called the Hep-Hep riots. These rebellious students led
angry mobs to unleash their fury on Jewish business owners and citizens blaming
them for the woes of the German economy. Seeing themselves as neo-Christian
knights, they shouted the wild crusaders’ cry “Hep! Hep!” meaning, “Jerusalem is
destroyed” as they terrorized and attacked Jews throughout the country, chasing
and assaulting them in the streets, vandalizing and plundering their homes and
businesses. (9)
The student
rioters were incited to violence by a growing breed of radical German professors
and scholars who disseminated provocative romantic, and nationalist political
ideologies in the lecture halls of the finest German academic institutions in
early 19th century. This marked the beginnings of the German
Volkisch movement, the precursor
of National Socialist (Nazi) ideology. The concept of Volksgeist - the
spirit of the people - was conceived in the late 1700’s by Johann Gottfried
Herder, an eminent scholar, preacher and teacher. The Volk, a group of
people with a shared history, fatherland and folklore, was inseparable from its
Geist, the collective spirit. They were one and the same – an actual
living organism, a mystic union of the people with their common cultural
heritage, the fundamental Germanic soul.
Herder’s powerful idea was originally intended as a cultural romantic
movement, advocating the existence of universal truths beyond the grasp of
rationality, an alternative to the revolutionary Enlightenment tradition of
reason and individual liberty. But it aroused the intellectual community with an
obsessive passion to re-examine their beloved German historic, cultural, and
medieval mythical roots. It was soon transformed into a fanatical political
movement in the universities, with a battle cry for German unity, supremacy and
statehood. This provided for a new pride and mythology of sacred Germanic blood
and soil for a frightened pastoral people torn and confused by the turmoil of
the industrial revolution and modernity. Jews, viewed as the quintessential
outsider, dwelling in the industrialized urban centers, came to be detested as a
contaminating alien presence that had to be purged from the pure integrity of
the German Volk. A wandering Semitic race, they were viewed as parasites living
off their generous European hosts, disconnected from the land and the Volk,
deriving their exploitive power through the modern “evils” of commerce, capital,
and moneylending. (11)
Berlin
University was one of the many hotbeds of Volkish ideology since its founding in
1810. The scholar known as the father of German nationalism, Johann Gottlieb
Fichte, who was the first rector of Berlin University, lectured on the
superiority of Germans, resisting the Enlightenment ideals of the French and
argued against Jewish emancipation. Hitler later devoured Fichte’s writings,
which later became core beliefs of Nazi ideology. One of the major disciples of
German professor Immanuel Kant, Fichte
twisted Kantian metaphysics into a
radical form of German Idealism, propounding a consciousness-only
doctrine which opened a Pandora’s box of wild dream-like myths of Germanic
racial supremacy and imaginary evils of the Jews, which was well received in
academic circles.
Fichte ushered
in a virulent strain of antisemitism into the halls of academia while appearing
to be a noble defender of human rights and virtue. He incited and mobilized his
students for future violent political action by preaching that the redemption of
the German people, the renewal of humankind and the total salvation of the soul
and the mind were to be accomplished by the annihilation of this wicked
“Jewishness.”
His influence spread far and wide throughout
the German academic world where his devoted students and disciples devoured and
spread his teachings.
In
Revolutionary Antisemitism from Kant to Wagner, Paul Rose discusses the
professors who inherited this revolutionary ideology from Fichte and played a
key political and organizational role in encouraging a climate of extreme
nationalism and antisemitism that inflamed their students to commit violent
actions. University of Jena professor,
Jakob Fries, Fichte’s leading disciple and one of the most zealous Jew-hating
pamphleteers, wrote “Endangering German Welfare and Character by the Jews”
(1816) demonizing the Jews as “bloodsuckers”. In other writings, he called for
the “radical extermination of the caste of Jews.” Meanwhile, Ernst Moritz Arndt, a politician,
pamphleteer and professor of history at the University of Bonn, argued against
the external enemy - the liberal ideals of the French-- and the internal enemy -
the Jews.
Rose also
discusses the key role played by the Burschenschaften, radical German student
fraternities in instigating the riots. These fraternities, one of the
more visible manifestations of Fichtean nationalist ideology, were an
amalgamation of French liberal revolutionary ideals and extreme German
nationalism inciting hatred of the Jews to a fiery new level. Love of the
fatherland, the German Volk, and German unity were their guiding principles.
They glorified a mythical golden past of idealized heroic warriors and medieval
Teutonic Knights. Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, a Prussian gymnastics educator in
Berlin organized the Burschenschaften in Jena, was a fiery German patriot
was worshipped as a Fuhrer by his students and founder of the German gymnastics
movement, which grew into a paramilitary army. Jahn’s gymnasts were the
precursors of the Nazi party’s military arm, the SA brown shirts, and as writer
Peter Viereck noted, “Father Jahn” was considered “the first storm
trooper”. As a champion of the Volk, he
took the concept a step further laying the political and spiritual foundations
for German unification and expansion, which later became the basis of Nazi
thought. He wrote in 1810:
A state without Volk is
nothing, a soulless artifice; a Volk without a state is nothing, a bodiless airy
phantom, like the Gypsies and the Jews. Only state and Volk together can form a
Reich, and such a Reich cannot be preserved without Volkdom. (24)
The net effect of the
provocative scholarship and advocacy of the professors was the angry expressions
of the students, which intensified year after year until they exploded into
violence in 1819. The end result of the revolutionary ideology of Fichte and his
disciples - the professors, pamphleteers, antisemitic student festivals, the
gymnastic movement, and the Burschenschaften, is revealed in the outpouring from
the depths of the student’s tormented souls, in the prelude to the vicious
Hep-Hep riots. These shocking writings from student diaries reveal the real
seeds of Nazi antisemitism:
The shameful confederation
against Prussia which, as everybody knows, was made possible by the typically
treacherous Jewish espionage, makes me feel as if my limbs were torn from my own
body….I now swear that my whole life will be dedicated to the resurrection of
the Reich.
The Jewish emancipation (of
1812) was the destruction not only of Prussia but of the whole German nation,
the totality of the Volk. (25)
The anguish of a revolutionary
Jewish student who was swept up in the thrill of the movement, but suffered the
tragic fate of being condemned by his Jewish identity, is expressed in his
words:
Never in my life have I been asked so often, so
intensively, so persistently, about my being a Jew, as during the last
week. It was the week…of that
great event at Wartburg….Some pitied me for being doomed to be a Jew,
others accused me; some insulted me, others praised me for it….but all my
comrades were constantly aware of it. Oh, how deeply disappointed, how deeply
wounded, frustrated, humiliated, how much in pain, in despair – and now ever
since then, how perplexed, how bewildered, how hopeless am I… Didn’t we all
believe that these days, when the light of such great men as Fichte, Jahn, or
Arndt brightens our life, are the days of a total renewal of man, of Germanic
man, days of moral regeneration, of national unity, of a complete and final
redemption of our soul and our mind, of mankind, of a complete return to the
womb of our entire existence, to nature.
(26)
In order to restore order to a
land overwhelmed by antisemitic rioting and revolution, the authoritarian Prince
Metternich quickly imposed the repressive Karlsbad Decrees. The Burschenschaften
were banned, books and newspapers were censored, professors were dismissed, and
most German reform movements came to an end. Professors who were questioned by
the Prussian police quickly changed their violent tone regarding the Jews.
However, Metternich’s
draconian measures, designed to choke off both liberalism and nationalism for
good, only bottled up the turmoil of the Volkish ideologies in the pressure
cooker of academia until they boiled over into 20th century Nazism
and the Third Reich.
March of Absolute Spirit Through History
Meanwhile, in Berlin University, Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich Hegel, revered professor of philosophy, later appointed rector, was
molding and shaping minds for the coming century of ideology. His ideas spread
like wildfire through the German academy, inspiring disciples on both the left
and the right. Hegel, who belonged to the German idealist school of thought,
turned Kantian metaphysics on its head by teaching that the ultimate reality,
Absolute Spirit was ultimately knowable through our understanding of the
daily phenomena we experience around us. Absolute Spirit, according to
Hegel, is a living, self-conscious organism that expresses itself through a
process of continuous historical change known as the dialectic. The dialectic is
the march of Spirit through human affairs manifesting itself through its
chosen agents, the great historical leaders and nations guiding the human race
toward greater freedom. Spirit was initially working through the French
and the great leader Napoleon, tearing down the old order and bringing liberal
changes throughout Europe. When it was finished working with Napoleon’s destiny,
at his fated Waterloo, Spirit started working through its next chosen
agent – the German people. According to Hegel, the goal of history is to be
found in Spirit’s final agent, the unified German state, the highest form
of human association, where true freedom is to be attained as the German people
attune their national consciousness to Spirit’s ultimate manifestation in
the state. The supreme ideal of freedom entailed the subordination of individual
wills in obedience to the dictates of the state. Hegel wrote, the individual’s
“highest duty….is to be a member of the state.”
Rose
reveals Hegel’s dialectical narrative of the Jewish people who, according to
Hegel, had completed their historical destiny in ancient times and were now mere
wanderers, transient “ghost-people” without a land or national Spirit to
guide them, consigned to eternal parasitism, living off the fruits of healthy
nations. Absolute Spirit had passed from the ancient to the modern
Christian world, and since the Jews had rejected Christ’s teaching of love,
history had passed them by and they now must die out and thus be relegated to
the scrap heap of history. Hegel wrote:
The teaching of love failed to overcome the whole fate
of Judaism…The Jewish multitude were bound to wreck His attempt to give them a
(new) consciousness of something divine…. All the conditions of the Jewish
people, including the wretched, abjectly poor, and squalid state they are in
today, are nothing more than the consequences and developments of their original
destiny – an infinite power that they desperately sought to surmount – a destiny
that has maltreated them and will continue to do so until this people
conciliates it by the spirit of beauty, abolishing it as a result of this
conciliation. (29)
While
Hegel often argued for the protection of the civil rights of Jews, as one of the
duties of the state, his historical philosophy of the obsolescence of the Jewish
people became one of the theoretical pillars of antisemitism that spread among
his followers in the German academy and provided the fuel for future persecution
and attacks.
Hegel’s philosophy dominated German scholarship into
the next century. His concept of Absolute Spirit laid the foundation for
a messianic quasi-religious cult of nation-worship employing his concept that
the state is the “Divine Idea as it exists on Earth” and the Germans were given
the pride that they were the new “chosen people” whom Spirit selected as
its agent in human history. This scholarship moreover sowed the seeds for the
messianic fervor after World War I when the German people longed for a Fuhrer,
the human incarnation of Hegel’s Spirit walking on earth, to lead them
out of the darkness to the promised Aryan land of true freedom. The highest
principle, supremacy of the state, to which all individuals must be subordinate,
and who are worthless ghosts without it, inspired all the horrific political
ideologies of the 20th century including Communism, Fascism and
Nazism. One of his foremost disciples was the Young Hegelian by the name of Karl
Marx who utilized this scholarship to open vast new radical horizons of
destruction and mass murder in the coming century. (30) But there was
something even more sinister brewing in the German University.
Crossing The Academic Threshold of Evil
The Volkish
movement in German universities through the 19th century took myths
and superstitions to a whole new scholarly level. Professors and their young
idealistic students took the old, and newly minted myths of the German heroic
past and imaginary evils of the Jews and turned them into a systematic body of
thought, which ultimately emerged as racial policy and institutionalized mass
murder after the Nazis seized power.
One of the
myths was that Germanic people were descendants of the ancient “Aryans”. The
assertion that Aryans were a pureblooded “blond, blue-eyed” master race with
superior racial features was a myth presented as fact, as well. According to historians, the Aryan people, if
they ever existed at all, intermingled with others somewhere in the region of
Afghanistan, Iran, and northern Pakistan some four thousand years ago and lost
their identity as a people. However their purported language, with similarities
to Sanskrit and Persian, spread out over the centuries after the Persian
conquest of India, and is considered to be the basis of most European languages
today. (31)
Volkish
mythology presented as fact the unfounded notion that Germans were the
descendents of a heroic Teutonic or Aryan god-like race of human beings, who
fell from grace, as their land was contaminated with non-Germanic aliens, the
Jews and Gypsies who infiltrated and polluted the German Volk, the sacred
fatherland and folk of the ancient Aryan master race. This fabricated mythology
inculcated in students the belief that the eradication of the Jews and Gypsies
would restore the golden age of the Aryans and save mankind from ruination.
Volkish nationalist indoctrination intensified in later part of the
19th century as professors
and scholars in the German university produced voluminous writings and
dissertations defending their racial nationalist screeds and lectured
vociferously “to overflowing university classrooms.” (32) Volkish ideology was widely
disseminated in the German high schools and universities. The agents were the
teachers, professors, textbooks, curricula, student fraternities, professional
associations, and the dozens of boarding schools established to transmit Volkish
ideology. (33)
The supremacy
of the Aryan “race,” as well as the myth that cultural degeneration is caused by
the mixing of races, was asserted as objective fact by the writer Houston Stewart Chamberlain,
one of Germany’s most revered thinkers of the 19th century. He
proclaimed that history was driven by the struggle between races in which the
Germans, the purest Aryan species, were pitted against the Jews who were the
most devious, parasitic and wicked “race,” agents of a morally hollow capitalism
and liberalism. His antisemitic tomes provided the spiritual foundation for Nazi
ideology and Hitler, who praised him as “the prophet of the Third Reich,” and
the inspiration for an Aryan empire to rule the world. (34) Chamberlain
and the Volkish scholars
zealously spread racial and nationalistic theories that glorified war based upon
Chamberlain’s writings and trumpeted the racial theories of history to which
they had become recently indoctrinated by colleagues and contemporaries of
Chamberlain.
One such
contemporary, Paul de Lagarde, professor of oriental languages, who also taught
at a Berlin public school in the later part of the 19th century, was
a virulent Volkish antisemite, and had widespread influence as a popular voice
for Volkish ideology. Inspired by Hegel and Fichte, he called for a German
faith, divorced from Christianity, but related to the mystical Volk that
underlies the German nation. Lagarde saw the Jews as aliens living on German
soil, the enemies of Germany. Referring to the Jews as vermin that had to be
wiped out, he said: “With trichinae and bacilli (bacteria) one does not
negotiate, nor are trichinae and bacilli to be educated; they are exterminated
as quickly and thoroughly as possible.” (35) Another influential romantic
Volkish thinker, professor Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, an historian who taught at
the University of Munich in the later half of the century published a massive
tome, The Natural History of the Volk as the Foundation of a Germanic
Sociopolitical System, where he idealized the pristine life of the German
countryside and condemned the commercialization and artificiality of the
industrialized urban centers. (36) Christian Lassen, professor of
ancient civilizations at the University of Bonn, contrasted the Semites with the
Aryan “race”, in a work entitled, Indian Antiquities, argued that:
“History proves that Semites do not possess the harmony of psychical forces that
distinguishes the Aryans.” (37) These figures of the Volkish movement,
popular in academic circles, were later worshipped by Hitler and Nazi elites.
However one more vital element was needed to complete the ideological foundation
of Nazi Germany. This element was the new and growing academic movement that
joined the pure fantasy of Volkish romanticism with the distinguished field of
biological science.
Chamberlain
and many of his contemporaries spent much effort twisting Darwin’s theory of
evolution into the doctrine of social Darwinism. These pseudoscientists held
that the fittest race, the Aryan race or pure Germans, would dominate those
deemed biologically inferior just as the fittest individuals dominated species
in the natural world. The leading
proponent of nationalism, racism and social Darwinism in Germany was Ernst Heinrich Haeckel. He was the
distinguished professor of zoology and comparative anatomy at the University of
Jena who is primarily responsible for reversing the humane progress of Western
civilization in Germany. "Haeckel was
able to attract students from all over Europe and the world to Jena, where he
gained enormous fame as a teacher. Haeckel transformed the University of Jena
into one of the most exciting centers in Germany for biological study." (39)
Only such a celebrated and distinguished scientist as Haeckel could take the
mystical Volkish fantasies across the academic threshold, a daunting task no
mere romantic scholar or writer like Chamberlain could accomplish. Haeckel was an illustrious academic
whose career as an acclaimed research zoologist gave his perverse
pseudoscience widespread legitimacy. In
“The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide,” Robert
Lifton describes Haeckel as “a towering figure in German biology and an early
Darwinian, …also a racist, a believer in a mystical Volk, and a strong advocate
of eugenics who ‘can be claimed as a direct ancestor’ of the Nazi ‘euthanasia’
project.” (40) The Nazi ethos of “life unworthy of life” and the
euthanasia program put into practice by the Nazi doctors, as Lifton explains,
relied strongly upon the solid grounding in claims to scientific, logical and
rational legitimacy. For Nazi doctors initially trained in the healing arts to
be cool, detached practitioners of euthanasia – “direct medical killing”- and
directing the “killing program” at Auschwitz “from beginning to end”, the
boundary between healing and killing had to be destroyed. The scientific
tradition established by the work of Haeckel and his followers enabled the Nazi
doctors to erase the healing/killing boundary by enforcing the grandiose Volkish
mission for the healing of the German race by killing off the
“lower races”. It was the stamp of scientific legitimacy afforded by academia
that enabled the great evils to come. Lifton elaborates:
“…Haeckel embraced a widely held nineteenth-century theme….that
each of the major races of humanity can be considered a separate species.
Haeckel believed that varied races of mankind are endowed with differing
heredity characteristics not only of color but, more important, of intelligence,
and that external physical characteristics are a sign of innate intellectual and
moral capacity….Haeckel went so far as to say, concerning these ‘lower races’
(‘woolly-haired’ Negroes), that since they are ‘psychologically nearer to the
mammals (apes and dogs) than to civilized Europeans, we must, therefore,
assign a totally different value to their lives. The Auschwitz self (of
Nazi doctors) could feel a certain national-scientific tradition behind its
harsh, apocalyptic, deadly rationality.”(41)
In “The Scientific Origins of National Socialism,”
Daniel Gasman details Haeckel’s rapturous discovery of Darwinism, which he
instantly elevated into his unifying evolutionary theory of the cosmos. He used
it to shape the new religion of “applied biology” that elucidated all social,
political, ethical, racial and biological phenomena and “called his new
evolutionary philosophy ‘Monism,’ and contrasted it with all of traditional
thought, which he rather disdainfully labeled ‘Dualism,’ condemning the later
for making distinctions between matter and spirit, and for invidiously
separating man from nature.” (42)
It
was this wildly popular scientifically reasoned application of Darwinism as a
social and political ideology that turned the heritage of Western civilization
on its head. Haeckel and his Monist followers utterly rejected the summit of
Western civilization that places man over the beast, bringing the humane
progress of civilization, from the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian heritage to
the Age of Enlightenment, to a halt. They reasoned that nature’s laws that apply
to the animal kingdom should apply to human society as well, and be the ultimate
source of morality. Since human beings were mere animals, they reasoned, the
laws of the jungle should prevail. In the struggle for survival, the stronger
races and nations would survive and the weaker ones would perish. There was "an
exact parallel between the laws of nature and those of society."(46) This
new morality and jungle ethics ushered in the evil consequences of racial
nationalism, which proliferated swiftly thanks to the enthusiasm of the
scientific Monists who formed an unholy alliance with the Volkish nationalists
within the academic community. The survival and betterment of the German race
was to be the sole determinant of this new ethics and moral law.
Gasman goes on
to describe Haeckel’s attitude toward the Jews, who were seen as possessing “inborn racial characteristics
which apparently were resistant to change…. Haeckel was one of the most
vociferous opponents of the Jews, and his importance for the history of antisemitism in Germany is that he did
much to bring the Jewish question into the realm of biology.” (49)
The Psychology of Genocide
In the later
part of the 19th century Bismarck unified Germany and turned it into
one of the major economic powers of the world. Germany enjoyed a long period of
relative peace and prosperity into the early 20th century.
Intellectual poisons were being brewed in the universities, but outside the
hallowed academic walls, Jews were fully emancipated as active German citizens
with equal rights in society. They played an active role in the economic and
cultural progress of Germany and distinguished themselves in all the
professions, business, the arts and sciences, medicine and in the military.
Jewish citizens enjoyed greater liberties and status than in many other European
countries and flooded into Germany from other parts of Europe and Russia where
they were often cruelly oppressed and persecuted.
Antisemitic political parties often
initiated by academics, advocating for racial policy against Jewish civil
rights, had little success in society with the German people, consistently
failed to get antisemitic laws
passed. By the early 1900s, they had
lost touch with the German people and almost died out completely as a political
force. But all the basic ideological
ingredients for genocide-- racial nationalism and biological racism – continued
being assembled in the laboratory of academia.
All that was a Fuhrer to ignite the flame. “Hitler only promised to
fulfill a concept of life which had permeated much of the nation before he ever
entered the scene.” (56)
The appearance
of Nazism on the world stage was not an anomaly. Rather, it was the end product of a
systematic process of ideological indoctrination over a period of many decades
that turned romantic fantasy into truth, while the functions of the psyche known
as conscience, rationality, critical thinking and scientific objectivity were
being numbed and virtually snuffed out altogether..
Hitler’s Professors
The German
university preserved and transmitted racial nationalist dogma from generation to
generation into the 20th century. Future Nazi minds were shaped and
molded in the widespread Volkish and scientific Monist tradition in the grade
schools, universities, medical schools and the Burschenschaften, the Volkish student
organizations. In 1904, Professor Alfred Ploetz, founder of the German Society
for Racial Hygiene, instructed his students in the Haeckelian tradition of
social Darwinism. One student, Fritz Lenz, a “German physician-geneticist
advocate of sterilization” later became “a leading ideologue in the Nazi program
of ‘racial hygiene’.” (59) He advocated for the dire need for a radical
eugenics program to save the Nordic race from extinction. Professor Ploetz and
his Society were part of an early circle of scientific racists in Munich who
championed the new medical paradigm that the health and fitness of the Volk and
the state came before the individual. He believed that, not only must the state
maintain the right to war, where thousands must be sacrificed for the good of
the state, but also in the medical right to biological death of the individual
for the good of the state: “‘The rights to death (are) the key to the fitness of
life.’ The state must own death – must kill – in order to keep the social
organization alive and healthy” (60)
Hitler was
profoundly influenced by the long lineage of Volkish and Monist professors and
scholars. He was an avid reader of Fichte and Chamberlain. The antisemitic
19th century Volkish academic, Lagarde, who provided inspiration for
the extermination of the Jews, was one of Hitler’s ideological heroes. Hitler’s
own contemporary professor and private tutor, Karl Haushofer, some insist, “was
Hitler’s guiding brain…He was called everything from ‘Hitler’s idea man’ to ‘the
man who will in the end take the Fuhrer’s place…” (61) A distinguished
professor and director of the Institute of Geopolitics at the University of
Munich, during the Weimar Republic era, Haushofer taught “that ‘war is the
father of all things’ and that Japan and Germany had a common destiny: to
appropriate more ‘living space’ from other nations…. His disciples and pupils
slavishly followed his theories and style, and evolved a strategy of German
world conquest, which presently had a unique opportunity of fulfillment. His
most famous disciple was Rudolf Hess. He followed Haushofer to the University of
Munich and sat at his feet, ardently drinking in the pseudoscientific political
theories.” (62) Hess introduced Haushofer to Hitler, then in prison,
following the Munich Putsch. “It was Haushofer who taught the hysterical,
planless agitator in a Munich jail to think in terms of continents and empires.
Haushofer virtually dictated the famous Chapter XVI of Mein Kampf which outlined
the foreign policy Hitler has since followed to the letter.” (63)
Professors and
students were Hitler’s principal supporters during his rise to power in the
1920’s. 60% of all undergraduates supported Nazi student organizations. (66)
In Rethinking the Holocaust,
Yehuda Bauer describes the major role played by academics, scientists and
intellectuals in the overall operations of the Nazi killing machine: “the murder
groups (Einsatzgruppen) detailed in 1941 to kill targeted groups, mainly Jews,
in the newly occupied Soviet territories, were commanded by Dr. Walter Stahlecker, and Dr. Otto Rasch
(another intellectual with two Ph.D.s)... Some of the concentration camp
commanders boasted university degrees. The doctors, biologists, chemists,
engineers, bureaucrats, and so on, who were involved in everything form
deportations to death camps to medical ‘experiments’, were central, not
incidental, parts of the murder machine. The same must be said about the
scientists, philosophers, historians, and theologians at universities, who
supplied the rationalizations for the murder machine with verve and a great deal
of individual initiative.” (68) He discusses the notorious Dr. Joseph
Mengele, boasting both an M.D. and Ph.D., who played a major role in the
murder machine: “the main figure among the twenty-three Auschwitz doctors who
selected many hundreds of thousands of Jews to die, had no previous record of
antisemitism. He had, however, acquired, as a typical intellectual, total
identification with the Fuhrer and the Party. He and his peers were the product
of a network of the best universities in Europe, which had turned
out…‘technically competent barbarians.’” (69)
When ordinary
Germans and physicians became uncomfortable with the mandatory sterilization
policies, euthanasia program and the racial policies of the Nuremberg Laws, they
were often mesmerized into compliance by the ideological enthusiasm of academics
who provided the ethical justifications for the Nazi eugenics program to better
the human race through proper breeding, and provided suitable euphemisms and
innocent sounding buzzwords, to disguise the acts of racism and murder, such as
“racial hygiene”, “applied biology”, and the national objective of “keeping our
blood pure”. Then a sedated and “Nazified” population and medical profession
could easily make “the transition from sterilization to direct medical killing…
An influential manual by Rudolf Ramm of the medical facility of the University
of Berlin proposed that each doctor was to be no longer merely a caretaker of
the sick but was to become a ‘cultivator of the genes’, a ‘physician to the
Volk’ and a ‘biological soldier.’” (70)
After the
passage of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, academic institutions vied with one
another to curry favor with the Nazis by swiftly enacting racial quotas,
expelling Jewish teachers and banning Jewish students. Schools and universities
quickly became Nazi indoctrination centers, suppressing freedom of expression,
free inquiry, independent research and all objectivity. They became the training
grounds for the intellectual troops dedicated to serving the German Volk and
Hitler. The last vestiges of academic freedom, scholarly autonomy, and freedom
of research and teaching were stamped out. Professors were told by the new Nazi
minister: “From now on, it will not be your job to determine whether something
is true, but whether it is in the spirit of National Socialist revolution.”
(71)
All but a
small minority of professors quickly adopted Nazi ideology for career
advancement and power and eagerly collaborated to intellectually justify the
mass murder of Jews, Gypsies and the mentally and physically disabled. In 1933,
the year Hitler seized power, 1,000 leading German professors signed a public
vow to support him and the Nazi regime. (72) They provided Nazism with
“an intellectual fig leaf with which to cover its project of naked barbarism”,
as did the renowned philosopher Martin Heidegger, rector of Freiburg University,
who was one of the signatories of the vow, declaring: “The Fuhrer, and he alone,
is the sole German reality and law, today and in the future.”(73) He
became a member of the Nazi party in 1933, and willingly collaborated with the
Nazi leadership to advance his own academic career and goal of changing the
university into a “site for the transformation of human existence… To achieve
this aim, he fully exercised his absolute powers as rector resulting in the
‘destruction of the remnants of any autonomy the university still preserved’.”
(74) As rector, he abolished all democratic procedures, expelled all
Jewish faculty, established an obligatory racial purity oath, mandated
attendance in classes on military science, racial theory and German culture, and
instituted the “Fuhrer Principle” and other Nazi policies. (75)
Buoyed by
their new found aggressiveness, professors flocked like lemmings to the Nazis.
As one historian-turned-true believer tellingly declared: “We repudiate
international science, we repudiate the international community of scholars, we
repudiate research for the sake of research. Sieg Heil!”. (78) The utter
wild-eyed fanaticism of the academic community is demonstrated by the following
observation:
For 70
years or more, the professors had preached aggressive nationalism, the German
destiny of power, hero worship, irrational political romanticism, and so forth,
and had increasingly de-emphasized, if not eliminated, the teachings of ethical
and humanist principles…. Essentially neither (professors nor students) wanted
to have anything to do with democracy. In the Weimar Republic…both groups, on
the whole, seemed equally determined to tear down that Republic. The professors
did their part by fiery lectures, speeches and writings; the students did theirs
in noisy demonstrations, torch-light parades, vandalism, and physical violence….
When Hitler came to power, both professors and students fell all over themselves
to demonstrate their allegiance. (79)
The
Humboldtian University
The University
of Berlin, established by Prussian education minister, Wilhelm von Humboldt in
1810, “emphasized a humanistic approach to learning, that is, a completely
disinterested and politically aloof sojourn towards a greater human
understanding of the world, with philosophy acting as the glue between the
different disciplines and faculties” (81) The founding principles of the
University of Berlin were based on the idea that no past, present or future
school of thought or scholars, can have a monopoly on the truth. Rather the
pursuit of truth in an ongoing process of exploration and analysis of the
plurality of ideas, in a process of continuous revision, research, and free
inquiry with the faculty taking the lead, and the student acting as research
assistant. This ideal, free from the vested interests of the state, religious
bodies or local princes, purported to develop the qualities of rigorous thinking
and scientific objectivity, and to reject the tradition of seeking inherited
ideas and beliefs of the past for spiritual or political guidance.
This ideal of Humboldt became the educational
blueprint for universities worldwide, especially for American universities.
(82) However, in Germany, attempts to realize this ideal were frustrated
and thwarted from the outset when it came into conflict with the
scholar-activist brand of Volkish professors and pamphleteers.
Although there
were later attempts to resurrect the Humboltian ideal in Germany, they never
gained traction and eventually died when
the Nazi regime seized power. Sylvia Paletschek discusses the “defeat of the
Humboldtian ideal” as the university concept came under Nazi domination,
demonstrated in the thinking of the following two academics, who became
university professors and later rectors as they charted a Nazi career path:
In his
[professor Adolf Rein’s] view, the guiding principle of the age could only be
that of politics. Thus the political university was the university aligned with
the state… The center of the proposed political university was supposed to be
the new faculty of politics, where humanities and social sciences were to be
combined. Rein was a convinced opponent of democracy. He was committed to a
nationalist conservative view, which was widespread among professors in the
1920s…He considered the idea that the university might hold a neutral view to be
a fiction of the liberal and natural scientific era. (83)
In [professor Ernst] Krieck’s opinion,
science was ‘of use to nobody and nothing, without meaning, without educational
purpose, without ethos, surviving on the basis of a traditionally fostered
prejudice’…It no longer had any educational value and restricted itself to
technical utilization. Only via an external link to a volkisch-politisch
Weltanschauung (Volkish political worldview) would science once again regain
its educational function. This would put an end to ‘the liberalistic illusion,
arbitrariness, the senseless and disconnected plurality.’ (84)
The University
of Berlin, Germany’s most prestigious university, markedly degenerated into a
hotbed of racial nationalism and finally in 1933, the Nazis took control and
turned it into an indoctrination center for the Third Reich, marking the death
of the Humboldtian ideal of scientific objectivity, free inquiry, intellectual
pluralism and faculty autonomy. There, the notorious book burnings took place.
Jews and political opponents were expelled and murdered with the dutiful
complicity of their academic colleagues. After the war, it fell into communist
hands and was renamed Humboldt University. But it quickly became an
indoctrination center for communist ideology, and thus was Humboldtian in name
only. Finally, after the fall of the Soviet Union, it was restructured as a free
Western institution and resumed the futile efforts to resurrect the long gone
and eternally disputed ideals of its founding principles. How ironic that this
world-class university dedicated to the disinterested pursuit of truth and
scholarship, lost its purpose and turned into the very opposite, a political
university for the purpose of Nazi indoctrination, consequently giving rise to
the most barbaric evils of the 20th century.
Ideas Have Consequences
Professors are
in a position of enormous power and authority in front of the classroom, in
molding and shaping young minds, and there is a corresponding responsibility
that comes with this position of authority that can leverage the passion and raw
energy of youth for good or for evil. To abuse this power is the greatest evil
that can lead to horrific consequences as it has since the early 19th
century in Germany. The maxim that “ideas have consequences” is well known.
Moreover, dangerous ideas and the manner in which they are disseminated can lead
to dangerous consequences. Accordingly, their purveyors should be held
accountable for the results, when the results are world war, mass-murder,
genocide, or Holocaust.
The outcome of
The Nuremberg War Crimes Trial, was death by hanging and life imprisonment for
Nazi officials who were tried for war crimes committed during World War II and
crimes against humanity where millions were murdered in the concentration camps
and by slave-labor policies of the German government. In later trials, dozens
more doctors who performed human medical experiments, SS leaders and military
officials who administered the Nazi racial policies, and carried out the mass
extermination of Jews, were sentenced to death by hanging and given long prison
sentences. But how many thousands of professors whom Bauer refers to as
“technically competent barbarians in our universities” got away scot-free and
have led long trouble-free lives, with only their consciences rotting away as
the murderous accomplices of the Third Reich?
Martin
Heidegger lived to the ripe old age of 87 enjoying a reputation as one of the
most important philosophers of the 20th century. After the war, the French Occupation
Authority barred him from teaching, due to his Nazi affiliation, but two years
later withdrew the decision, allowing him to teach freely. His earlier role as a
prominent Nazi collaborator was quickly forgotten and he was welcomed back with
open arms to Freiberg as an esteemed professor emeritus. But his racialist
mindset was still evident in his denials and rationalization of the evils of
Nazism and his unwillingness ever to condemn the Holocaust as evil, although his
followers often pleaded with him to do so.
His inscrutable “scholarship” of the supremacy of Being, a Zen
Buddhist-like state he called dasein, not only endeavored to assuage his
own guilt, but also helped to remove all remnants of guilt from succeeding
generations of intellectuals for the consequences of their ideas. Acclaimed by
Jacques Derrida as the forefather of deconstruction, Heidegger profoundly
influenced Michael Foucault, Derrida and others in the French deconstructionist
school. In order to forget their wartime guilt as a nation of Nazi
collaborators, the French philosophers were eager to embrace the Heideggerian
anti-humanist doctrine that condemned all Western metaphysical thinking as the
debauchery of pure Being, the fall from a primordial pre-Socratic grace,
which culminated in nationalism, communism, capitalism, modern science and
technology, and ultimately Nazism as well. This postmodern scholarship, based on the
assumption that there is no objective truth or meaningful knowledge that can be
gained from applying Western thought to the analysis of literature, questions
our entire inheritance in terms of ideals, morals, values and beliefs.
In addition to
being used for the advancement of radical political agendas by the literary
critics of Western texts, deconstructionism has been manipulated for the
purposes of concealment and denial of culpability of other Nazi collaborators
besides Heidegger. A leader of the Yale school of deconstruction, Paul de Man,
Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale, was known as the “godfather of
deconstruction.” But as it is now well known, he had been hiding the skeletons
of his Nazi collaborationist past in his closet. After his death, public
information came to light in 1987 that he had written almost 200 articles for a
collaborationist newspaper in Belgium during the war. His antisemitic and
pro-Nazi articles called for, among other things, “resistance to ‘Semitic
infiltration of all aspects of European life’… for Jews to be deported to an
island colony (and)… he praised French collaboration with Hitler.” But he never
retracted or owned up to his statements; “instead, throughout his later life he
lied about his Nazi record, refusing to express a word of remorse about it.”
(102) No sooner than these revelations about their hero came to light,
did the deconstructionist apologists begin in earnest, to abolish all
distinctions between guilt and innocence and to obscure all ethical and moral
judgments on the collaborationist crimes of the man they considered to be “one
of the most brilliant literary critical minds of his generation.” (103)
The mental gymnastics and contortions of de Man’s academic loyalists,
attempted to excuse him of all culpability by declaring his blunder to be merely
a literary error rather than a moral offense. They repudiated the conventional
wisdom, specifically in the case of de Man’s articles, that literature refers to
the real world. Rather all literature consists of linguistic events that merely
refer to “a previous text.” Consequently, according to the deconstructionist
approach, “the atrocities we read about are merely literary phenomena, referring
not to the sufferings of real people, real ‘originals’ but only to ‘a previous
text’.” (104) This is an object lesson in the power of
deconstruction to condone evil by obliterating the distinction between text and
meaning.
Not only have
academic deconstructionists and their followers been blinded to the moral
difference between good and evil, but it seems that their focus has been averted
from the visible world, their objectivity and critical thinking capabilities
have been undermined, and their consciences have been numbed. Here, the copious
critical theses of the postmodern academic historians with their own political
agendas become more important than the history itself, thus setting the stage
for totalitarian ideologies, real crimes, genocide, terrorist attacks, the
Holocaust, even the 9/11 attacks on our country, to be viewed as literary
phenomena. This growing cadre of academics and scholars and their disciples have
been indoctrinated in an academic cult of literary criticism, worshiping the
masters, regardless of the past crimes they committed aiding and abetting the
Nazi regime and the Holocaust. Today they are busy writing voluminous
dissertations vindicating our enemies, radical Islamic terrorists who have
declared war on America and have vowed to “wipe Israel off the map.” What’s
worse is that these relativist theories have provided the scholarly stamp for
the soft-core relativism that engulfs American popular culture today, that has
numbed American political conscience to the war against our nation.
It is worth
remembering that not all academics in the German university of the 1930s allowed
themselves to be sucked into the Nazi maelstrom. There were a few with the
integrity to stand up against the storm, hold onto their beliefs, who paid the
price, and there were also a few who lived to tell their stories. Victor
Klemperer, a professor of Literature at the University of Dresden, already in
the minority for his unpopular views on the French Enlightenment, and formerly a
Jew, was expelled after the Nuremberg Laws were enacted. To his great dismay,
faculty, former friends and colleagues deserted him. He witnessed them grovel at
the feet of the Nazis, compromise their consciences and bend their scholarship
to the Nazi’s will. He observed the fake righteous self-interest of his
contemporaries vying with one another to achieve coveted Nazi credentials. They
were the guilty party, not the ordinary Germans. Given the opportunity to mete
out punishment after it’s all over, he wrote the following in one of his
published diaries, I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi
Years 1933-1941:
If one day the situation were reversed and
the fate of the vanquished lay in my hands, then I would let all the ordinary
folk go and even some of the leaders, who might perhaps after all have had
honorable intentions and not known what they were doing. But I would have all
the intellectuals strung up, and the professors three feet higher than the rest;
they would be left hanging from the lampposts for as long as was compatible with
hygiene. (106)
Notes:
I gratefully
acknowledge the invaluable assistance, inspiration and criticism from the
following colleagues: Candace de Russy, Ph.D., (SUNY Trustee, Adjunct Fellow of
the Hudson Institute), Mitchell Langbert, Ph.D. (Associate Professor, Department
of Business and Economics, Brooklyn College), Gerald Matacotta, (MA, History
Professor, Queensborough Community College), Joseph Keysor, (Author, English
Teacher. He has liberally provided quotes and citations from his forthcoming
book: Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Bible: An Evangelical Protestant
Analysis of National Socialism. Also his essay, A Christian Looks at the
Holocaust. Available online: http://www.bedfordgaol.com/index.html)
1) Yehuda
Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001),
p. 33, Italics added for emphasis. Yehuda Bauer is the international director of
Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, and one of the world’s leading Holocaust scholars.
2) Online
review of The Scientific Origins of National Socialism, by Daniel Gasman,
Amazon.com online review, October 3, 2004,
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0765805812/qid=1151986382/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/102-2934964-3601724?s=books&v=glance&n=283155
3) Gerald
Matacotta, MA, History Seminar Series: Past Times, Queensborough
Community
College, 2005-06, History Professor. He inspired the overall theme of the paper and research into some historically obscure topics, perhaps not often encountered in your typical Western Civilization curriculum.
College, 2005-06, History Professor. He inspired the overall theme of the paper and research into some historically obscure topics, perhaps not often encountered in your typical Western Civilization curriculum.
4) Herbert
London, 1940 Redux, New York Sun, 3/29/06 p.10
5) Charles
Krauthammer, Never Again? By Charles Krauthammer Friday, May 5, 2006;
Page A19 Available online: www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/
content/article/2006/05/04/AR2006050401458.html
6) John
Bachelor, The Iran Threat, New York Sun, 5/17/06 p. 10.
7) Thomas
Childers, A History of Hitler’s Empire, 2nd Edition
(Chantilly: The Teaching Company, 2001), p. 9. These lectures in text and CD
format were used for reference throughout this paper.
9) R Larry
Todd, Mendelssohn: A Life in Music (New York: Oxford University Press,
2003) p. 50
10) Carrie
Supple, From Prejudice to Genocide (Stoke on Trent: Trentham Books Ltd.,
England, 1993), p. 24
11) Marvin
Perry et.al., Western Civilization, Ideas Politics and Society Vol.
II, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), pp. 556-7. This text was used as a
reference throughout the paper and for specific quotes as noted.
12)
Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Eighth
Address, quoted in John Rosenthal, The Ummah and das Volk: On the Islamist
and "Völkisch" Ideologies, April 22, 2005. Available online:
http://trans-int.blogspot.com/2005/04/ummah-and-das-volk-on-islamist-and.html
13)
Fichte, Thirteenth Address,
Addresses to the German Nation, ed. George A. Kelly (New York: Harper Torch
Books, 1968), Available online:
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1806fichte.html
14)
Fichte quoted in Lucy S.
Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews 1933-1945, pp. 26-27. Thanks to professor
Steven Saltzman, History Syllabus: Nineteenth Century Europe, Available online:
http://members.surfbest.net/shsaltzman/Dawidowicz.html
15) Fichte
quoted in Paul Lawrence Rose, Revolutionary Antisemitism in Germany from Kant
to Wagner (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 119-120
16) Rose, p. 128
17) Todd, p. 50
18) Dawidowicz, p. 28
19) Rose, pp. 125-131
20) Perry, p. 149
21) Rose, pp. 127-128
22) Ibid., p.127
23) Peter Viereck,
Meta-politics: The Roots of the Nazi Mind (New York: Capricorn Books,
1965), p. 63
24) Dawidowicz, p. 27
25) Rose, p.126
26) Ibid., p.126
27) Ibid., p. 35
28) Hegel quoted in Perry, p. 541
29) Hegel quoted in Rose, p. 111
30) Perry, p. 539-542
31) Ibid., p. 628. See footnote.
32) Gregory Paul Wegner, Antisemitism and
Schooling under the Third Reich, (New York: Routledge Falmer Press, 2002).
Thanks to review by Katherine T. Carroll, Loyola University, Chicago, August 24,
2003. Available online:
http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/wegner.htm
33) Joseph
Keysor, from his work in progress: Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Bible: An
Evangelical Protestant Analysis of National Socialism. Documentation and
quotes provided from private correspondences with the author: according to Mosse
(George L. Mosse , The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the
Third Reich. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1971) there were “at least
forty” such “boarding schools that sought to transmit Germanic ideology to their
students according to the program established by Lietz” (Mosse, p. 160)
34) Perry, pp.628-629
35) Lagarde quoted in Dawidowicz, p. 32
36) Dawidowicz, p. 31
37) Lassen quoted in Dawidowicz, p. 32
38) Lee
Sorensen & Monique Daniels, The Dictionary of Art Historians, A
Biographical Dictionary of Historic Scholars, Museum Professionals and Academic
Historians of Art. Available online:
http://www.dictionaryofarthistorians.org/langbehnj.htm
39) Daniel Gasman, The Scientific Origins of
National Socialism, (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2004) p. 12,
quoted in an essay entitled, A Christian Looks at the Holocaust, by
Joseph Keysor. The chapter on Haeckel is cited for reference and for supplying
quotes from Gasman’s text. The chapter on Hegel was a valuable reference source
as well. Available online: http://www.bedfordgaol.com/part3-7.html, 2005
40) Robert Jay
Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide
(New York: Harper Collins Basic Books, 1986), p. 125
41) Ibid., pp.
441-2
42) Gasman,
pp. 6-7, quoted in Keysor.
43) Ibid., p.
13
44) Ibid., p.
31
45)
Ibid., p. 32
46) Ibid., p.
148
47) Ibid., pp.
126-27
48)
Ibid., p. 41
49) Ibid., p.
157
50) Ibid., p.
158
51) Ibid., p.
xxxviii
52) Ibid., pp.
95-6
54) Ibid., p.
40
55) Perry, pp.
627-634
56) Mosse, p.
301, thanks to Joseph Keysor, from private correspondences.
57) Lifton, p.128.
58) Mosse, p.
152, thanks to Joseph Keysor, from private correspondences.
59) Lifton, p.
23
60) Ibid., p.
46
61) Dusty
Sklar, The Nazis and the Occult, (New York: Dorset Press, 1977) pp.
62-3
62) Ibid., p.
66
63) Ibid., p.
62
64) See
Lifton, pp. 46-48 for a complete discussion of the Binding-Hoche thesis.
65) Lifton, p.
45
66) Perry, p.
796
67) Bauer, p.
35
68) Ibid. pp.
35-6
69) Ibid. pp.
34-5
71) Ibid., p.
37
72) Ibid., p.
37, the figure was actually 960.
73) Dinesh D’Sousa, Illiberal Education: The
Politics of Race and Sex on Campus (New York: The Free press, Division of
Macmillan, 1991), p. 191
74) Robert R.
MacGregor, Resistance or Collaboration?: The Turmoil of Universities in Nazi
Germany (Rice University, 2003) p. 10. Available online:
www.drbobguy.com/papers/germ125/paper.pdf. The previous quote: “an intellectual
fig leaf with which to cover its project of naked barbarism,” is also from
MacGregor’s paper, quoted in his discussion on Heidegger.
75) Jeremiah Reedy, Reflections on the Career
of Martin Heidegger, Shepherd of Being,
Available online: http://www.macalester.edu/~reedy/heidegger.html. Here
he cites Victor Farias work, Heidegger and Nazism in his arguments
against Heidegger’s defenders.
76) David
Horowitz, Ben Johnson, Campus Support for Terrorism (Los Angeles: Center
for the Study of Popular Culture, 2004), p. 3
77) Lifton,
p.122-3
78) Horst von
Maltitz, The Evolution of Hitler’s Germany (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973),
pp. 433-434
79) Ibid., pp.
438-439
80) Bauer, p.
269
81) MacGregor,
p. 3
82) James
Piereson, The Left University,
September 27, 2005, FrontPageMagazine.com,
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=19616 Piereson elaborates on the Humboltian ideal
and its ongoing conflict with the concept of the Left University in America.
83) Margit
Szollosi-Janze, Science in the Third Reich (Oxford/New York: Berg imprint
of Oxford Int’l Publishers Ltd., 2001), p. 48. Adolf Rein,
nationalist-conservative professor of history at the University of Hamburg,
pursued a National Socialist (Nazi) career path, later becoming rector.
84) Ibid. p.
49. Professor Ernst Krieck, influential educator
in the 1920s and 1930s, anti-democratic innovator, later becoming rector of the
University of Heidelberg with help from Nazi officials.
85) Robert
Gorham Davis, Books in Review: Shame and Glory of the Intellectuals. By Peter
Viereck, Commentary Magazine Archive, June 1953
86) Mitchell
Langbert, NCATE and the Nuremberg Laws, Jun. 25, 2006, Democracy Project,
http://www.democracy-project.com/archives/002619.html
87) Phyllis
Chesler, The Antisemitic Divestment Campaign, Feb 14, 2006,
FrontPageMagazine.com,
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=21281
88) Sol Stern,
"Social Justice” and Other High School Indoctrinations, April 13, 2006,
FrontPageMagazine.com,
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=22033
89) Marquette
University School of Education Institutional Report Submitted to National
Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), February 2004
90) Stern,
"Social Justice” and Other High School Indoctrinations
91) Greg Lukianoff, FIRE Statement on NCATE’s
Encouragement of Political Litmus Tests in Higher Education, The Foundation
for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE)
6/6/06 http://thefire.org/index.php/article/7079.html
92) Ibid.
93) Jim Downs,
Jennifer Manion, Taking Back the Academy, History of Activism, History as
Activism (New York: Routledge, 2004), p.xii
94) Ibid. p.
13
95) Mitchell
Langbert, Has Higher Education Overstepped Section 501(c)(3)?, March 20,
2006, Democracy Project,
http://www.democracy-project.com/archives/002437.html.
96) John Gravois, Professors of Paranoia?
Academics give a scholarly stamp to 9/11 conspiracy theories, June 23, 2006,
The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Faculty, Volume 52, Issue 42, Page A10,
http://chronicle.com/free/v52/i42/42a01001.htm. I have also spoken to several
students from Pace University and Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC),
(both in New York City) who exposed the nature of the conspiracy theory lectures
they were forced to endure in both colleges. The student from Pace described his
English Composition class as a semester long rant on 9/11 conspiracy theories.
He claimed that most of the students in the class became unquestioning
believers. The student from BMCC took a class in World Government where the
professor lectured on 9/11 conspiracy theories and secret societies. The
professor failed him for his differing political opinions. His grade was later
reversed after he took action and went to the dean and other professors to
review his satisfactory coursework.
97) Stern,
"Social Justice” and Other High School Indoctrinations
98) James
Piereson, The Left University, September 27, 2005,
FrontPageMagazine.com,
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=19616
99) Ibid.
100) Mark
Lalla, What Heidegger Wrought, Commentary, January 1990
101)
Ibid.
102)
D’Sousa, p. 191
103) Roger
Kimball, Tenured Radicals (Chicago, Elephant Paperbacks, Ivan R. Dee
Publisher, 1990), p. 121. Kimball devotes an entire chapter to de Man, The
Case of Paul de Man, where he details the obscurantist arguments of the
deconstructionists.
104) Ibid.,
p.135
105)
D’Sousa, p.192
106) Victor
Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years 1933-1941, (New
York: Random House, 1998), p. 184.
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