Right now—not only in the United States, but
especially there, with the recent election
results—a new Conservative Revolution movement
has crystallized internationally. In the
U. S., that part of the Republican Party
around such people as Newt Gingrich, Phil
Gramm, William Weld, and others, are in an
unbroken tradition with people like Nietzsche,
the Nazis, fascism—a tradition that goes
without interruption to the ecology movement
and New Age.
Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder of the Schiller
Institute, presented this case study of Martin
Heidegger as part of her keynote address
to the Sept. 3, 1994 conference of the Schiller
Institute in Vienna, Virginia. On Dec. 10,
she addressed the Schiller Institute conference
in Eltville, Germany, on "Why the Renaissance
Must Prevail Over the Conservative Revolution."
Excerpts from both speeches appear in the
boxes accompanying this article.
The Nazi past of this leading 20th-century
philosopher helps to illuminate the reappearance
of fascist ideas among ‘respectable’ spokesmen
of the so-called “right’ and “left’
Martin Heidegger is generally known among
professional philosophers in academic circles.
Many believe that he is the greatest thinker
of this century. Many French philosophers
are convinced of it, and many even think
that he is the greatest thinker of all time.
(After having tried to read him, I can tell
you that that is a little bit difficult to
imagine, because what he has produced is
an incredible amount of gobbledygook.) His
work is a symptom of our present-day confusion.
Why present Martin Heidegger as a case study?
It has a lot to do, indirectly, with our
efforts in respect to the United Nations'
world population conference in Cairo in September
1994, and also something which happened in
1987, which somehow escaped our attention
at the time. It is understandable why, because
that was the moment when the onslaught against
the LaRouche movement was really going on,
the Boston trial, the criminal indictments.
My life was totally focused on defensive
action, trying to save my husband's reputation,
organizing internationally people who would
testify for his character, people active
in science, and so forth, so my mind was
occupied with that, and I missed something
which I have now discovered, and it gives
me an incredible delight.
In 1987, a Chilean scholar by the name of
Víctor Farías published a book called Heidegger
and Nazism, and this book hit like a bomb.
What was in this book, was so outrageous,
that it caused a tidal wave of articles,
special editions of magazines, and, since
the Spring of 1988, many books. There is
hardly a publisher or journalist or philosopher
who did not write something about this case,
because what Farías did in this book, was
to present the documentation that Martin
Heidegger, who was a pupil of Edmund Husserl,
and who, in the 1920's, suddenly became famous
for his book Being and Time, was a Nazi.
Not only had he joined the NSDAP (Nazi party)
in 1933, and paid dues until the end of the
war in 1945, but he also had collaborated
throughout with the system, had admired Hitler,
and was a Nazi thinker par excellence.
This caused an earthquake in the academic
world, because forty-two years after the
war, somebody who had been the most respected
philosopher of the century, whose ideas were
totally accepted, who had influenced Jean-Paul
Sartre, the French existentialist, as well
as Jacques Derrida, was exposed as a Nazi.
In Germany, there was a whole Heideggerian
school following Hans-Georg Gadamer, who
was close friends with Carl Friedrich von
Weizsäcker. A freakout occurred. One school
said, "Oh, this is nothing new. We knew
it all along; what about it?" Another
school said, "Maybe Heidegger was politically
a collaborator of the Nazis, but his philosophy
has nothing to do with it, and he is just
politically naive." Then there was another
line saying, "Oh, he's a Nazi; so what?"
But if the facts were all known, why did
no consequences follow from this knowledge?
And why, suddenly, in the year 1987, was
there this tidal wave of deserters suddenly
saying, "No, I have nothing to do with
Mr. Heidegger"? Obviously, the slogan
was, whoever can save his neck, should run
as fast as possible, because if you keep
supporting Heidegger, then it raises a couple
of questions about yourself.
One of the persons most closely associated
with Heidegger was Jacques Derrida, who,
acting like a cornered rat, started to counterattack.
After all, he said, National Socialism in
Germany or in Europe did not pop out of the
ground like a mushroom, and to think that
it would be possible for European philosophy
to treat National Socialism as a distant
object, is at best naive and, at worst, obscurantism
and a grave political mistake. This is the
pretense, said Derrida, that National Socialism
has no connection to the rest of Europe,
to the rest of the philosophers, and to the
rest of the political speeches which have
been made; and this is just not the case.
Now, a person who actually had voiced criticism
of Heidegger throughout the period, a French
philosopher named Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt,
correctly pointed to the fact that it was
not only the party membership and such things,
but that Heidegger's National Socialism lies
at the essence of his thinking, and that
the world has to face the fact of what that
implies for all those who endorsed him, especially
that the question was now on the table: how
to treat a "philosophy of the century"—which
it was called many times—which, without any
question, prepared "post-modern"
thinking, and also was part of National Socialism,
and that such a connection existed.
Heidegger, without any question, was the
dominant philosopher in France, accepted
by everybody, which obviously has a lot to
do with the French blocking on the history
of the Vichy period. As a result of the debate
over Heidegger in France, it became clear
that the accepted categories of right and
left, which stemmed from the French Revolution
two hundred years ago, not only did not function
in politics, but also did not function in
philosophy.
“At the U. N. Cairo Conference: A Battle
Against Nazi Ideology”
There was debate back and forth, and the
longer this so-called philosopher controversy
lasted, the clearer it became that it was
not Heidegger's Nazi past which was being
debated, but it was the accepted philosophy
of the present epoch, and that this was being
shaken to its foundation.
Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt pointed to the
fact that even in Heidegger's first work,
Being and Time, the vocabulary and the style
are very close to Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf.
Among other things, Heidegger said that technology
is the power which turns man away from the
actual meaning of his life. In his book,
he calls this condition of being turned away
from the actual meaning of one's life, the
Seinsvergessenheit, the being-forgottenness.
(If that sounds weird, don't worry; it sounds
weird in German, too, because Heidegger is
famous for having constructed new words to
give a twisted meaning to ideas. You have
to dive into it, and after you swim in it
for a long time, you get used to it, but
by that time, you are totally brainwashed,
so it's not really all that useful. It's
like a language which is five degrees off,
and once you adjust your eye, you get used
to it.)
"Man, in the course of the history of
Occidental culture," says Heidegger,
"has forgotten the essentials of human
life. People live life in an unactual way,
and they look for entertainment in their
flight from death agony. The actuality of
true life, lies in the banal, basic experience
of the being-thrownness"—Geworfenheit,
that is, you are thrown into history, and
plop, there you are. "Man, therefore,
originally is not the self-conscious, self-righteous
subject for whom the world is an object,
but man is eternally in the world; he is
part of it, and he must live with it, in
sorrow."
The individual's fear of his death, at the
end of his unactually lived life: that is
the basic subject of existential philosophy.
"Thrownness to the being," Verfallenheit
an das Seiende, is the basic idea of Being
and Time. At first, he meant the Dasein,
the "being there," in respect to
the individual: that you are just there.
(He has these incredible, profound insights,
like "existence just happens to exist.")
But later, in 1933, "being there"
becomes the form of the existence of the
collective. "The individual, wherever
he stands," Heidegger wrote in 1933,
"is worth nothing. The fate of our people
in their state, is everything." He said
this on the occasion of having called somebody
to take a seat in the university.
In 1933, Heidegger became the rector of the
University in Freiburg, and this was not,
as he later tried to pretend, just an effort
to save the mind and what not; this was a
clearly calculated move by certain Nazi cadres
to put Heidegger in there, after they had
cleaned out Jewish and other unwanted scholars.
“Academic ‘Political Correctness’: Heritage
of the Nazi Heidegger”
Now, in his famous, or, rather, infamous,
Rectorate speech, Heidegger said: "The
university has to conduct a decisive fight
in the National Socialist spirit, which must
not be suffocated through humanizing, or
Christian conceptions." On Nov. 1, 1933,
he said, in another speech, "The National
Socialist revolution brings about the complete
upheaval of German existence [Dasein]. It
conserves knowledge as the necessary basic
property of the leading individuals in their
völkisch [popular] tasks of the state."
"Continuously, your courage should grow,"
says Heidegger, "for the saving of the
essence and the elevation of the most inner
force of our people in its state. The Führer
himself, and he alone, is the present and
the future German reality, and its law. Learn
to know, ever deeper. From now on, each matter
demands decision in every acting responsibility.
Heil Hitler!"
In the Fall 1933 Freiburger Studenten Zeitung,
he wrote, "Not theorems and ideas should
be the rules of your existence. The Führer
himself, and he alone, is the present and
future reality, and its law."
For Heidegger, National Socialism meant the
complete overthrow of knowledge: "Proceeding
from the question and forces of National
Socialism, science must be considered completely
new. The university of tomorrow must be based
entirely on the Weltanschauung [worldview]
of National Socialism."
Heidegger was very ambitious. He wanted to
be not only rector of Freiburg, but he wanted
to become the explicit and unchallenged leader
of all German rectors, the "leader of
the leaders" of intellectual Germany.
And, from Freiburg, he wanted the total renewal
of the German university, in the spirit of
his inaugural speech. This attempt failed,
only because his theories were a little bit
too esoteric for the party leadership in
Berlin, which rejected him for this reason—a
rejection which he took as an abysmal insult
and from there on, he had certain prejudices
against Berlin. But he did not criticize
Hitler in the slightest.
Immediately after these Rectorate speeches,
he wrote a letter of faith to Hitler in Berlin:
"To the savior of our people out of
its need. Determination and honor! To the
teacher and frontier fighter of a new spirit."
It is documented that Heidegger was also
a snitch in respect to his colleagues, that
he was informing on them to the Nazi authorities,
causing their layoffs and similar things.
He was a cowardly opportunist who, from 1933
onward, pretended not to know his teacher
Husserl anymore, because he was Jewish. But
he never broke his friendship with another
person by the infamous name of Eugen Fischer,
who was the organizer of euthanasia against
the mentally retarded; this Fischer had demanded,
in
1939, explicitly, the extinction of the Jews.
It was this same Fischer who protected Heidegger
from having to join the labor service in
1941.
In 1945, Heidegger immediately started to
create a coverup and a mythology of his own
resistance. He said: "I thought that
after Hitler in 1933 had taken the responsibility
for the entire German people, that he would
have the courage to detach himself from his
party and its doctrine [what an idea!—HZL]
and the whole matter would lead to a renewal
and a collection to take responsibility for
the entire West. This conviction was a mistake,
which I recognized on June 30, 1934."
This was the date of the assassination of
Ernst Röhm, and the eclipse of the SA (Storm
Troopers). "Indeed, I intervened in
1933 to affirm the national and the social,
but not National Socialism and nationalism,
and not the intellectual and metaphysical
foundations on which biologism and the party
doctrine were based."
Now, this is, in all likelihood, a total
fabrication, because one of his former friends,
the relatively famous philosopher Karl Löwith,
recently published his diaries, in which
he reported about the last discussion he
had with Heidegger in Rome, in 1936, where
Heidegger expressed an unbroken faith in
Hitler and the conviction that National Socialism
was the designated path for Germany. Löwith
told Heidegger that his engagement for National
Socialism was totally coherent with the essence
of his philosophy, to which Heidegger agreed
without reservation, and added that he was
also certain that his notion of historicity
represented the basis for his political activity.
“The ‘Conservative Revolution’: Counterattack
Against the Renaissance”
As a matter of fact, Heidegger, already at
the beginning of the 1930's, was totally
convinced of "being-thrownness,"
that any political activity, was totally
in vain, because existence is not such, and
the individual is just "thrown"
like that. So Löwith said, in qualifying
this encounter, that Heidegger did not recognize
the destructive radicalism and the petit-bourgeois
character of all of the Nazis' "strength-through-joy"
institutions, because he himself was a radical
petit-bourgeois. Heidegger's only complaint
in 1936 was that things were not moving fast
enough.
Now, even after he was no longer the rector
of Freiburg University, he continued until
1941 to give his famous Nietzsche lectures,
and one can actually say that he was the
official philosopher of the Nazis. Eugen
Fischer had used this as an argument to free
him from the labor service, by saying to
the Nazi authorities, "We do not have
that many Nazi philosophers, and if we have
one, we should treat him well."
Heidegger, even in the 1950's, quoted Nietzsche
positively for the notion that human beings
are not made equal, and each person does
not have the capacity and the right for everything.
Now, you can't always blame husbands for
their wives, so I don't want to use the horrible
utterings of Mrs. Heidegger as a proof against
him, but what she said about motherhood,
as the conservation of racial inheritance,
would just turn your stomach. So I don't
want to use it against him, even though he
had such a wife.
After the war, Heidegger did not say one
word about the Nazi period. He did not say
one word about his being the rector of Freiburg
University, nor did he ever comment on the
Holocaust, nor any other occurrence of this
period.
He probably didn't feel guilty. He didn't
feel that there was anything wrong, because
in Heidegger's thinking, there is simply
no room for individual responsibility. The
theory of "being thrown" (Geworfenheit)
into a time to which one has to react with
determination and for which one has to be
open—such a theory does not know the notion
of individual responsibility.
In 1945, the French occupying powers removed
Heidegger's permission to teach, but unfortunately,
he got it back in 1951. He was immediately
re-integrated into the respected circles
of the academic world, and this was all the
more profound, because it came with the official
sanction of the occupying power.
One of the most important influences in my
life, the famous Cusanus researcher Professor
Herbst, told me a long time ago, that the
occupying powers insisted that Heidegger
be taught in theology classes in Germany,
in the same way that they had insisted that
pragmatism, John Dewey, positivism, and so
forth, be part of the official de-Nazification
programs.
In this climate, no one asked questions any
longer. In France, a boom in Heidegger philosophy
occurred. Practically everyone became a Heideggerian:
Jean Beaufret, Sartre, Christian Jambet,
Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu, and other famous
Frenchmen. Many said that Heidegger has to
have a place in history like that of Hegel
and Plato, that he is one of the greatest
thinkers of all time.
A German professor named Guido Schneeberger,
who actually knew some of Heidegger's lectures,
started to prepare a compendium, which he
published in 1961, with
217 texts which prove, without any question,
Heidegger's Nazi convictions. But he could
not find one German publisher to publish
it, so Schneeberger published it himself.
He sent it to many universities, who bought
the book; but it never appeared on the shelves.
The professors and the assistant professors
quickly made sure the book would disappear.
Karl Jaspers, himself a man of questionable
convictions, testified that his former friend
Heidegger lacked—and he said this to the
investigating commission of the occupying
powers—any conscience for truth, in favor
of a "magic of words" [beschwörenden
Zauber].
So, that was the situation. Everything had
been swept under the carpet. Heidegger was
respectable, influential, in the academic
world.
The Heideggerians Scramble Then, in 1987,
the book by Víctor Farías, Heidegger and
Nazism, hit like a bomb. It shattered the
myth which Heidegger had concocted after
the war, the myth that he had supported the
Nazis only briefly. Instead, the book proved
that he had a very deep commitment to Nazism.
In 1988, a biography of Heidegger appeared
by Hugo Ott, which was a "cover-your-behind"
line: Admit the Nazism, but try to save the
philosophy by trying to pretend the two have
nothing to do with each other.
Derrida went into a complete freakout. He
said: "The facts have all been known
for a long time, and if one reads Farías's
book, one wonders if he read Heidegger for
longer than one hour."
This is always the accusation: that people
don't understand Heidegger's profundity,
and so forth.
Derrida said: "Why deny that so many
courageous works in the Twentieth Century
dare to enter the region of thought which
some call the 'diabolical'? It just happens
to be true. Rather than deny it, we have
to investigate the analogies and points of
connection between Nazism and Heidegger's
thinking. The commonalities of Nazism and
anti-Nazism: I will prove that it's all the
same; it's mind-boggling if you think about
it."
“Nietzsche: The Conservative Revolution Spawns
an Irrationalist ‘New Age’ ”
An interviewer of Derrida in this controversy
asked, "Is not what you are saying only
a sniping response to those who accuse you
of the deconstruction of humanism and of
being a sponsor of nihilism?"
Derrida then moved, through his lawyers,
to prevent the publication of an interview
he had given in a book, The Heidegger Controversy,
and tried then to elaborate a long explanation
of why the Heidegger of pre-1933 was totally
different than the Heidegger of 1934 and
later.
Jürgen Habermas of the Frankfurt School also
felt the need to cover his behind. He said:
Ah, now we finally know that this resistance
is a pure legend, it never happened. Habermas
also reveals—and this is something that demands
further investigation—that all of Heidegger's
lectures of the 1930's are still classified,
and that the few persons who have some copies,
are not allowed to quote them. This is really
very fascinating. Habermas says that he is
sure that if these lectures were to be made
public, then Farías's case would be proven
even more.
Jürgen Busche, the chief editor of the Hamburger
Morgenpost, said: "I don't care if Heidegger
is a Nazi. Look at it. He doesn't have one
fascist pupil, and after all, Heidegger is
to be seen in the context of the late Romantic,
and he's actually the same as the Greens
today"—which happens to be true!
Rudolf Augstein, the famous British-licensed
editor of Der Spiegel, said, Oh, somebody
who has fertilized so many important minds,
can't be labelled a Nazi. Michael Haller,
the "Zeit-Dossier" department head
of Die Zeit magazine, said, Why, Heidegger
was called the greatest thinker. Now, suddenly,
he is just a swindler, who cheated with verbal
trifles; why, suddenly, is everybody deserting
him? Bourdieu, the French philosopher, said,
"Heidegger is the philosophically acceptable
variant of a revolutionary conservativism
of which Nazism was just one more possibility."
And that is actually the truth: it was part
of the Conservative Revolution.
Nazism and Post-Modernism Now, here we get
to the essence of what went wrong in this
entire century, because Heidegger was a Nazi.
More correctly, he was exactly one of the
representatives of the Conservative Revolution,
of which Nazism was one possibility, but
he was also the ideologue of post-modernism.
Now, this is very interesting, because here
we get to the real truth of the matter. Heidegger,
in 1953, said the amazing words: "It
is not nuclear war that represents the greatest
threat, even if that is the worst thinkable;
but more threatening, is the peaceful, continuous
development of technology, because it robs
the thinking human being of his essence,
of his ability to think."
The author Milan Kundera comments on that
quote, that the worst thing about this, is
that this conception of Heidegger's does
not shock anyone anymore; the problem is
that it has been accepted.
Heidegger's only criticism of the Nazis was
that he mistrusted the party apparatus and
their belief in technology and progress,
having the same view as Ernst Jünger, who
wrote that the total mobilization led to
a horrible use of technology, industry, and
so forth. These are all the fathers of modern
eco-fascism.
Heidegger, in the 1950's, wrote the incredible
sentence: "Agriculture is now a motorized
food industry, which, in essence, is the
same as the production of corpses in gas
chambers and extinction camps, and the same
as the blockade and starvation of countries,
the same as the fabrication of the H-bomb."
It's hard to comment on this, because he
criticizes technology, but he doesn't bother
about the annihilation of human beings!
“The ‘Conservative Revolution’ In the U.
S. Today ”
Obviously, under the influence of the occupying
power, the "very respected" philosopher
Hans-Georg Gadamer, who has published one
zillion books, standard works and whatnot,
said, after the Farías scandal broke out,
that "most of this was known,"
and that "it would be an insult to say
that his political error had nothing to do
with his philosophy, that this was insulting
to such an important thinker," and after
all, how would those who make such a criticism
reconcile this with the fact that "he
is the same man who already in the 1950's
said incredibly wise things about the Industrial
Revolution and technology, which astound
one for their foresight."
Bishop Lehmann Defends Heidegger After the
war, there was the coverup for all the reasons
we have discussed many times. Heidegger was
actually imposed by the occupying powers;
but Gadamer wrote this after the Farías book
came out. He admitted that most of the facts
were known, obviously, among the insiders.
In 1966, a certain Karl Lehmann published
an article in the Philosophical Yearbook
about the "Christian Experience of History
and the Ontological Question in the Young
Heidegger." He discusses a lecture which
Heidegger gave in the Winter semester, 1920-21,
under the title, "Introduction to the
Phenomenology of Religion," in which
he comments upon the letters of the Apostle
Paul as "a phenomenologically rich example
of religious behavior." He chooses there,
in particular, the first Letter to the Thessalonians,
about the sudden coming of the Lord. Some
of you may know this story, that you never
know when the Lord is coming, you have to
be attentive for the time.
What Lehmann then does, is to say that this
is the Kairos, the moment which determines
fate. Lehmann claims that there is a remarkable
relationship in this affinity of time and
being to the theology of St. Paul. (Yet,
as we noted earlier, Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt
pointed out that the affinity was rather
to Hitler's Mein Kampf!)
And then Lehmann says that Heidegger's notion
of fear, this fear of death agony, which
is the entire determining aspect of life,
is the same as the suffering and martyrdom
that Paul is talking about. And then he says
that "Paul opens up the most extreme
possibilities of human existence."
Lehmann notes that Heidegger was able to
make use of Aristotle in the most productive
manner, for his own questioning.
What is most outrageous about this, is that
Lehmann treats Heidegger in the most objective
and positive manner, as if nothing were wrong.
He says, finally, "The destruction of
traditional theology through Heidegger was
shocking, obviously; but his conviction that
ontology could not be based in the traditional
theological form, he had already said very
clearly in Being and Time." So, he does
not find this very objectionable, that theology
does not have to explain ontology; and, he
says, all the questioning of Heidegger is
in vain, if one substitutes for the word
Being, the word God.
Lehmann regrets that a serious confrontation
with Heidegger from the side of Catholic
theology, which would do justice to the depths
of the problem, is not visible, and, finally,
that Heidegger's thinking is still waiting
for a future dialogue—even the early Heidegger.
Now, the whole article would not be so earth-shaking—as
a matter of fact, it's not very profound
at all—except that Karl Lehmann is, today,
the head of the German Bishops Conference.
And the office of Bishop Lehmann just cancelled
a room we had rented for a forum against
the Cairo conference, and the reason given
in the letter was, "the extreme belief
in science and progress by the Schiller Institute."
Now, I would dare venture the hypothesis
that that characterization, which has also
gone out in a slanderous book published by
the infamous Herder-Verlag, has a lot to
do with Lehmann's convictions about Heidegger.
“The Fascist Core of Ecologism ”
One could say, that in 1966, before the Farías
book detonated this bomb, maybe Lehmann was
not so smart, and he just overlooked this—he
didn't get it. But, the only problem is that
what Lehmann forgets to mention, already
in 1966, is that Heidegger did not believe
in God. He was a very well known anti-theist.
So, if Heidegger's Nazi outlook did not bother
him, Lehmann, as a Catholic official, should
have at least objected to the anti-theism
of Heidegger, because the Dasein, the being
there of Heidegger, is without God. In contrast
to this, look at another pupil of Husserl,
who deserves, actually, to be much more famous
than the evil Heidegger: Edith Stein, who
was born Jewish, converted to Catholicism,
and made exactly the attack on Heidegger,
which Lehmann, obviously, forgot to notice.
Edith Stein also became very famous. She
received early recognition in the philosophical
world. She became a Catholic, and she was
finally killed by the Nazis at Auschwitz,
in retaliation for the Dutch bishops' denunciation
of the Nazis. They killed many nuns from
Dutch convents at that time. Edith Stein
was beatified by the Pope, during the Pope's
last trip to Germany, and she is an outstanding
figure.
Heidegger started out as a Catholic philosopher,
but then he lost his faith, and he became
a celebrity among the professional philosophers
today. Edith Stein went exactly the other
way.
Now, one could think: Lehmann did this in
1966, he was not yet head of the Bishops
Conference. So, maybe, one could credit him
with making youthful errors. But then, in
his recent book, published in 1993, what
do we see in the chapter about "Man
and the Environment"? It is full of
praise for Limits to Growth, Dennis Meadows
and the Club of Rome. He quotes Heidegger
as if the Farías debate had never occurred,
and, in the chapter about the relationship
to creation and the Book of Genesis (which
he modifies—he is pretty much on the side
of man being a steward rather than a master
of the universe), he says: "Maybe it
comes to an encounter with the late Heidegger.
He also sees man in danger of losing his
being, his essence," and then he keeps
on quoting Heidegger, on and on.
(Parenthetically: a while ago, LaRouche had
insisted that the entirety of Liberation
Theology in Latin America was not primarily
communist-inspired, but inspired by existentialist
philosophy. I think this is now pretty much
proven, because Lehmann is the head of the
German Catholic Church, and Misereor and
so forth are the main funders of that, including
the rebellion in Chiapas, Mexico.)
The Heidegger affair—and this is why I decided
to present this case study—is the most embarrassing
for official academia, because nearly everybody
endorsed him, and it just shows the total
bankruptcy of the Conservative Revolution,
being identical with post-modern ideology.
Now, that these people are aware of it, is
clear. Let me give you one more quote. The
French philosopher Jean Baudrillard says,
too bad that this Heidegger debate came too
late. "What's the difference now, if
one accuses Heidegger or tries to whitewash
him? All those on the one side and those
on the other, fall into the same low thinking,
which is no longer even proud of its own
origins, and which no longer has the strength
to grow beyond them, and that finally wastes
the few energies left to it in tirades, accusations,
justifications, and historical confirmations.
And since philosophy no longer exists, it
must prove that with Heidegger, it has finally
discredited itself. All this is a desperate
attempt to find some posthumous truth or
justification, at a moment when there is
not enough truth left to allow any investigation,
where there is not enough philosophy to make
any connection between theory and practice,
and not enough history to bring any historical
proof. Our epoch is characterized by the
fact that we do not anymore have the truth
for recognition." So, he says, Heidegger
should have been attacked, as long as it
was time. "Indeed, the Heidegger case
proves the total bankruptcy of the dominating
schools of thought. They have deconstructed
themselves completely, and they are finished."
A Turning Point in History When the Soviet
Union collapsed, and especially in the most
recent period, Lyndon LaRouche emphasized
that this collapse, as gigantic as it is,
is still only the "first shoe"
to drop. The Soviet Union only collapsed
as part of the system which dominated the
Twentieth Century, for which the names of
Versailles, Yalta, and the condominium between
the superpowers, are the appropriate names,
and unless there is the kind of urgent reform,
the second phase of the collapse will be
even more enormous, and everything in the
West will come down, just as communism came
down in the East.
This is a gigantic statement, and most people
say, "Wait a second, do I really want
this? Because, you know, I do not exactly
know what will come out of this."
When communism collapsed, Marxism was suddenly
discredited (except among a few people),
and with it, the entire set of axioms which
characterize Marxism also went out the window:
Marxist economics, the idea of the Five-Year
Plan, economic planning; communist or Marxist
art theory, so-called "socialist realism."
Everyone can see now, clearly, that the Marxist
theory of history, that history is the history
of class struggle, was a concept which was
completely ridiculous.
But the intellectual and spiritual catharsis
of the West is still to come, and it will
wipe out and discredit all the ideologies
and so-called theories which are associated
with the "Enlightenment": liberalism,
empiricism, positivism, existentialism, structuralism,
post-structuralism, and deconstructionism.
All of these things will not stay around,
and people should start to readjust their
thinking. We are looking at a dying epoch,
and a lot of the things which have bothered
us will no longer be there. We should be
rather happy about that.
I dare this prediction, because I am a cultural
optimist at heart: What will prevail, after
all these theories and ideologies are out
the window, is the method of truth-seeking,
and the idea, not of one truth, but of the
intelligibility of the laws of Creation,
and the ability of man to have an ever better
knowledge of these laws, because man is imago
viva Dei, he is the living image of God,
and therefore, with his creative activity,
he can not only know these laws, but he can
also change them.
The mythologies of the Twentieth Century
will be smashed, and the truth will emerge.
—HZL
At the Cairo Conference: A Battle Against
Nazi Ideology In late August 1994, the evil
Conor Cruise O'Brien, the journalist mouthpiece
of the British oligarchy, had a vitriolic
attack on what he called the emerging "holy
and explosive alliance" between the
Vatican and Islamic fundamentalism, in the
context of the then-upcoming September United
Nations world population conference in Cairo.
O'Brien said—and here there was an element
of truth—that the Cairo conference would
be "the most important world conference
ever" to have taken place, that at Cairo
the "greatest ideological debate"
would take place "between those who
hold values derived from the Enlightenment
and believers in supernaturally revealed
certainties." Now, that is a lie, because
the anti-Enlightenment side of this fight,
was the people who believe, not in "supernaturally
revealed certainties," but who believe
that creative reason is an efficient force
in the universe, and who believe that man
is made in the image of God.
So the fight which took place in Cairo, was
not between, as the language is commonly
used today, the Enlightenment—and, therefore,
"the rational people"—and the "dogmatic
fundamentalists"—and, therefore, "the
crazies." The true fight in Cairo was
between those people who are proponents of
Nazi ideology and oligarchism, and, on the
other side, those people who believe that
there is a method of truth-seeking of which
man is capable, because he is in the image
of God.
We in the LaRouche movement campaigned to
close down this Cairo conference. We were
able to demonstrate that this conference
was in the tradition of the infamous
1932 eugenics conference in New York; it
was exactly the same philosophy as the Nazi
Race Hygiene Conference of 1935 in Berlin.
The verbiage and the philosophy were identical
with Hitler's so-called Generalplan Ost,
which was a plan for how to reduce the Slavic
populations in Ukraine, Poland, and elsewhere.
To this historical understanding, we added
that the first evil person who came up with
the concept of "carrying capacity,"
that is, that the Earth has only a limited
"carrying capacity" for its human
population, was this evil Venetian monk Giammaria
Ortes.
Those of you who have been familiar with
the LaRouche movement, know that for decades
we published the evil plans of the Club of
Rome's Dr. Alexander King—that he was afraid
that the black, yellow, and brown people
would outnumber the white Anglo-Saxon race.
We published the evil doings of the Club
of Rome and the World Wildlife Fund. We published
the fact that Prince Philip, this degenerate,
wants to be reincarnated as a virus in order
to reduce the world's population. We did
this for two decades, and people would say,
"Oh, you are exaggerating. These are
just some crazy people, this is not relevant."
But now, when the United Nations had the
nerve to put their plans openly on the table,
before the world—as a matter of fact, there
are official U. N. documents which say that
the desired low variant of the population
is 2.5 billion people—now, all of a sudden,
this crime was so incredible, that the world
understood what was going on, what the conspiracy
was that we were talking about. That the
United Nations was to be established as a
world government which could decide who lives,
and who dies; which country is allowed to
have how many people; which country will
not get aid if they don't agree to forced
abortion (because this is what really what
was at stake, and not the nice verbiage about
"women's rights," and so forth),
or to what the Nazis had determined useless
eaters to be, the mentally retarded, the
disabled, the Jews, Gypsies, and so forth,
only, this time, it was supposed to be the
Third World, and, especially, the poor in
the Third World.
When Conor Cruise O'Brien said "forces
of Enlightenment," what did he mean?
He meant the image of man associated with
Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Bentham, and all their
evil, so-called theories: empiricism, the
idea that only sensuous experience gives
you any knowledge about the world; positivism,
that you have to bang your head against the
wall three times, in order to believe it—an
image of man which is associated with the
idea that man in general is a beast, and
that an oligarchical power elite can rule
over herds of animals which he can cull down
to the wanted size at any time he wishes
to.
In "How Bertrand Russell Became an Evil
Man,"* LaRouche wrote that the Twentieth
Century will be known in history to have
been the century of the greatest number of
popular mythologies, and the most frauds
about science, history, and other things.
One of these frauds is the question of what
is actually the true basis of Nazism, which
was brought to the fore in the Cairo conference
in its purest essence. —HZL
* Fidelio, Vol. III, No. 3, Fall 1994.
Academic 'Political Correctness': Heritage
of the Nazi Heidegger It is impossible to
graduate from a university in North or South
America, or in Western Europe, without being
forced to study one or another of the corrupt
philosophical fads spawned by the ideas of
Martin Heidegger. Such seemingly-contradictory
theories as existentialism, anthropological
structuralism, Catholic "liberation
theology," various varieties of Protestant
Biblical criticism, radical ecologism, most
versions of non-Communist New Leftism of
the last thirty-five years—plus a baker's
dozen of more recent philosophical trends
like post-modernism and deconstructionism—all
acknowledge their origins in the Nazi epistemology
of Heidegger. Heidegger intellectual prominence
in Germany immediately after World War I
was based upon his call for a revival of
"Aristotelean-Scholastic philosophy"
to combat what he saw as the lingering influence
of Plato's metaphysics on European civilization.
Working closely with phenomenologist Edmund
Husserl and proto-existentialist Karl Jaspers,
he became the guru of an entire generation
of German students, including: his lover
Hannah Arendt, who became the theorist of
"anti-authoritarianism"; Hans-Georg
Gadamer, one of postwar Germany's most-important
philosophers, and founder of modern communications
theory; Hans Jonas, the world's leading expert
on gnosticism; Rudolf Bultmann, the Protestant
theologian who pioneered "de-mythologizing"
the Bible; Fr. Karl Rahner, the Jesuit priest
whose Heideggerian theory was the basis for
"liberation theology"; and Herbert
Marcuse, later a leader of the Communist
International's Frankfurt School, and godfather
of the 1960's New Age student rebellion in
both Europe and America (and, at the end
of his life, the sponsor of the ecological-extremist
Green Party in West Germany). Heidegger's
influence in pre-war France was almost as
massive, largely through the efforts of Alexandre
Kojève, an instructor at Paris's elite Ecole
Practique des Hautes Etudes from 1933 to
1939. Kojève's class roster during that period
included the majority of France's postwar
intellectual heroes: sociologist Raymond
Aron, structuralist Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
Communist Party official Jean Desanti, psychotherapist
Jacques Lacan, and existentialist philosopher
Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre, who became famous
as a Communist, travelled to Nazi Germany
in 1933 to study with Heidegger. Especially
after World War II, this many-headed Heideggerian
monster was transplanted to America. It is
now entrenched as the philosophical basis
of every one of the "politically correct"
theories dominating U. S. campuses—including
the nominally leftist deconstructionism of
Jacques Derrida and the late Paul De Man
(himself a Nazi collaborator in wartime Belgium).
Acording to African-American professor Cornell
West, who is the most sophisticated theorist
of political correctness in America today,
the "Heideggerian destruction of the
Western metaphysics" must be acknowledged
as the core of the multicultural critique
of Western civilization. "Despite his
abominable association with the Nazis,"
wrote West in 1993, "Martin Heidegger's
project is useful." —Michael J. Minnicino
The 'Conservative Revolution': Counterattack
to the Renaissance The name Conservative
Revolution historically was first used by
Hugo von Hoffmannsthal and later coined by
Moeller van den Bruck, the famous author
of the book The Third Reich, from which the
Nazis actually took the name. What they meant
by this, was to describe an oligarchical
tendency, which emerged at the beginning
of the Nineteenth Century, against different
aspects of the influence of the Renaissance
tradition.
Why do we attribute such enormous importance
to the Golden Renaissance of the Fifteenth
Century? The major achievement, and what
really makes it a watershed between the Middle
Ages and modern times, was, first of all,
that mainly through the efforts of Nicolaus
of Cusa and his famous book Concordantia
Catholica, for the first time in history
the principles were defined on which the
sovereign nation-state could be built. Most
important was the idea that only in a nation-state,
in which the representative government would
create accountability for those who are the
representatives of the people, and who are
accountable in practice not only to the people
but also to the government, was the possibility
created for the individual to participate
in government.
Associated with that, in this period the
work of Cusa and the other fathers of the
Council of Florence defined the obligation
of the sovereign nation-state to foster the
common good through the application of scientific
progress for the benefit of the population
at large. Thus, the Renaissance ended practices
which had been based on the oligarchical
assumption that society would be forever
divided into three classes: a tiny group
of oligarchs; the lackeys of oligarchs, the
hangers-on-to-power, those who profit from
the evil system, which helped the oligarchical
system to function; and, lastly, the ninety
to ninety-five percent of the population:
the underlings, serfs, slaves, and so forth.
It was especially the unity of the Church
accomplished at the Council of Florence,
re-establishing in the context of the above-mentioned
factors, the possibility for the individual
to access the Filioque—the idea that, in
practice, each individual person could participate
directly in God's creative reason—which created
the modern age. This Filioque principle gave
each individual a sense of sovereignty and
of limitless perfectibility, which indeed
broke the rules, broke the system which had
existed before that time. And it was exactly
that new, sovereign authority of the individual,
against which the Conservative Revolution
was mobilized.
The reason why this occurred especially at
the beginning of the Nineteenth Century,
was because this period, in many respects,
was a nightmare for the oligarchs. First
of all, the American Revolution was in fact
the first time that the principles which
Nicolaus of Cusa and others had established
in the Fifteenth Century—the idea of individual,
inalienable rights based on natural law—was
put into a constitution. It was the first
time that a government was established—with
some imperfections—in which a republican
representative system was established, and
which no longer had any place for oligarchs,
princes, or baronesses. This was a fact over
which the oligarchies, especially the British,
George III, went crazy, because it was a
threat to their system.
There was another development, which was
equally threatening, and that was the Weimar
Classic, the beautiful humanist renaissance
and Classical period exemplified by Friedrich
Schiller, along with the revolution in music
dating from Johann Sebastian Bach to Johannes
Brahms. The image of man prevailing during
that period gave man greater possibilities
for self-perfection than at any time before.
If you look at the lofty conception of man,
as it was developed by Schiller or the Humboldt
brothers, the idea of mass education on the
basis of these ideas was, from the standpoint
of the oligarchs, what they feared most.
And then, you had the beginning of an industrial
revolution associated with the idea of mass
education.
So the oligarchs correctly feared that their
system was coming apart. And from here you
can follow the emergence of the Conservative
Revolution in every country in Europe. It
very deliberately sponsored a counter-movement
against the idea of intelligibility through
reason and the perfectibility of man: Romanticism.
Romanticism, the emotional exaggeration of
all expressions of life, promotes an emphasis
on the natural instincts versus reason, a
mystical fascination with the Middle Ages
versus Classical and Renaissance periods,
and the idea of mental and emotional escapism.
Romanticism was the ideological and emotional
basis for the emergence of the "youth
movement," which then, with the help
of the First World War and the Depression,
led directly to the ideology of the Nazis.
The Conservative Revolution was not a German
phenomenon, however, even if you have a lot
of people in it such as Oswald Spengler,
Ernst Jünger, the Haushofer brothers, Karl
Barth, Martin Heiddegger, Moeller van den
Bruck, Nietzsche, and Wagner. There were
similar people in other countries, such as
Dostoevsky and the two Aksakovs in Russia;
Sorel, Maurice Barrès in France; Unamuno
in Spain; Ebola in Italy; Jabotinsky for
the Jews. In the United States, people to
be named are Lothrop Stoddard, Madison Grant,
and James Burnham. The tradition is continued
by the Club of Rome and similar institutions
today. And today, too, Romanticism is the
basis of ecologism and the New Age. —HZL
Nietzsche: 'Conservative Revolution' Spawns
an Irrationalist New Age Go to any university
in the United States or in Germany today,
and you will find that there is a gigantic
Friedrich Nietzsche revival. Incredible efforts
are being made to whitewash Nietzsche, saying
that he had nothing to do with the Nazis,
that he was misunderstood, or that it was
only his evil sister who falsified his work.
As everybody knows, Nietzsche went insane
in the third stage of syphilis. However,
from reading his writings, you can conclude
that he was insane all along.
Nietzsche was a passionate hater of the humanist
conception of man; he hated Plato, Schiller,
and Beethoven. He denounced Schiller as the
"moral trumpeter of Säckingen";
he (correctly) blamed Plato for having developed
the scientific method leading to scientific
progress; he totally denied the scientific
and humanist explanation of the unity of
human development.
Nietzsche was engaged in a very conscious
effort to undermine the Socratic spirit.
What he did first was to reinterpret history,
methodically replacing all Socratic elements
with a Dionysian conception. Instead of emphasizing
the Classical Greek contribution of Socrates,
Plato, and others, he replaced it with an
emphasis on Dionysian destruction. He emphasized
all periods in history during which irrationalism
existed in an organized form.
Giving up one's own identity to a higher
commonality is not only characteristic of
the Nazis, it is also the sentiment of the
New Age, the Age of Aquarius. This idea of
giving up one's sense of identity is obviously
the opposite of the sense of identity of
the individual in humanism, where the individual
contribution to creative power and creative
development is emphasized.
Nietzsche realized that Christianity obviously
represented the biggest problem for him,
because it defined the idea of man's participation
in God through creative reason. Nietzsche
is most famous for his dictum, "God
is dead." And at the end of his somewhat
autobiographical scribbling Ecce Homo, he
puts forward the slogan "Dionysus against
the Crucified."
This leads us to the heart of the Conservative
Revolution. If you compare Nietzsche, Prince
Philip, the Tofflers, and others of this
sort, what do they mean with their attack
on what they call the "linear world"
(a notion used by all of them)? Romano Guardini,
who was originally associated with the Conservative
Revolution but later clearly broke with it,
wrote an article (later a book) in 1935,
entitled "Der Heilsbringer" ("The
Savior"), which was an attack against
the Führer ideology of the Nazis. Guardini's
main concept was that before Christianity,
all religions were cyclical, as there is
a cycle of nature, a cycle of the times of
the day, of the year, of light and darkness,
a cycle of getting up in the morning and
going to sleep in the evening, a cycle of
spring and autumn, of rising up and sinking
down, of being born and dying. Pagan gods,
which are such saviors, were idols of pre-Christian
cults, such as Osiris, Mithra, Dionysus,
Baldur. They all are only saviors within
this idea of a cyclical conception of nature.
Guardini correctly notes that, at least for
the western world, it is through Christianity
that history emerges. Events from now on
do not eternally return, but occur only once
and not for a second time. The main criticism
of the Conservative Revolution against Christianity
is, that the idea of the permanent progress
of man, of nature, of civilization, devalues
the present in favor of an always better
future moment and future possibility. Armin
Mohler blames Christianity: "At any
rate, for the West, Christianity became the
determinant of destiny. Together with its
secularized forms, the doctrine of progress
of all kinds, it has created the 'modern
world,' against which the conservative revolutionaries
are in revolt."
Nietzsche attacks these "linear"
(as opposed to cyclical) conceptions—they
are by no means linear, of course, but that
is how progress appears for him. In Thus
Spake Zarathustra, he says: "Everything
goes, everything returns, the wheel of being
rolls on eternally. Everything dies, everything
blooms again, eternally runs the year of
being. Everything breaks, everything is being
put together, eternally the same house of
existence is building itself." And in
his posthumous papers, Nietzsche says: "He
who does not believe in a circular process
of the universe, necessarily must believe
in a willful god."
Various representatives of the Conservative
Revolution describe this clash between two
worlds as an "interregnum." Heidi
and Alvin Toffler describe this conflict
as one between the "Second Wave"
and the "Third Wave." Marilyn Ferguson,
in her book The Aquarian Conspiracy, said
that "we are experiencing a change from
the Age of Pisces to the Age of Aquarius,"
meaning that no longer are reason and progress
dominant, but rather feeling—some cosmic
feeling, through which all the conspirators
of this Aquarian conspiracy are united. —HZL
The 'Conservative Revolution' in the U. S.
Today Now, what is the nature of this latest
expression of the Conservative Revolution?
You can start with Gingrich's endorsement
of the futurologists Heidi and Alvin Toffler.
The Tofflers have written a couple of books
which have become the cult books of this
current, in which the main (and not very
profound) thesis is that the whole world,
all the parties, all the institutions in
different countries, are engaged in a fight
between what they call the "Second Wave"
and the "Third Wave." The First
Wave was the agricultural age, the Second
Wave is the so-called industrial age, and
the Third Wave is supposedly the information
age, surpassing industry and all the values
associated with the time of the Industrial
Revolution and the industrial age.
The Tofflers work extremely closely with
the Stanford Research Institute in Palo Alto,
California, which must be regarded as one
of the key think-tanks of the Conservative
Revolution. It is the same institute which
published a popularized version of a previous
study on the New Age, namely, the book by
Marilyn Ferguson about the Aquarian Conspiracy.
Basically, the Tofflers' thesis is that the
new Third Wave civilization would be highly
technological but completely anti-industrial
at the same time, and that the main conflicts
in society today would emerge from the useless
efforts of representatives of the industrial
age to preserve the core institutions characteristic
of that historical period. For example, the
nuclear family, the idea that you have a
mother, a Father, and children—that should
go. Instead you can have all kinds of other
combinations—two men, three women, five children,
whatever.
Also, mass public education should go, according
to these people. They want to eliminate big
corporations and big trade unions; they want
to eliminate the nation-state. They claim
that the chief conflict in this era will
be between those who try to defend these
old values and those who are willing to go
with the new values, and that the conflict
of the Second with the Third Wave will be
stronger than any previous conflict among
representatives of the Second Wave, such
as the historical conflict between Americans
and Russians, between communists and anti-communists,
and so forth.
They say that this is a new vision—they call
Gingrich the new visionaire—but one can prove
that this is absolutely nothing new. What
Gingrich, the Tofflers, and others are talking
about, is the essence of that spectrum of
Conservative Revolution tendencies of which
the Nazis were only one example. As a matter
of fact, if you read these Toffler books,
they are extremely watered down plagiarisms
of a thousand similar books published by
the Conservative Revolution during the Twentieth
Century. —HZL
The Fascist Core of Ecologism The continuity
of the modern ecologists with the fascists
is easily demonstrated. A case in point is
the work of Friedrich Georg Jünger. In his
1939 book The Perfection of Technology, Jünger
writes: "We must realize that technological
progress and mass education go hand in hand.
... Technological progress is strongest in
those places where mass education has most
progressed. ... [The masses] are the most
usable, docile material for the technician,
without which he never could realize his
plans. ... For us, the notion of mass is
connected with heaviness, pressure, dependency,
and vulgarization." For the oligarchs
of the Conservative Revolution, the idea
of educated masses is a horrible vision,
because it would mean the end of that oligarchical
elite.
For the same reason, they oppose the idea
of the nation-state based on technological
progress. And many of them, including Friedrich
Hilcher and all the different representatives
of the Pan-European Union, want to destroy
the nation-state and replace it with regionalism,
tribalism, estates. If you look at the present
destabilization of many countries, the attempts
to rip countries apart—as in Italy, where
the Northern League is trying to split up
the nation into several parts, or the Chiapas
upheaval in Mexico, or similar things around
the world—the basis for that is the ideology
of the Conservative Revolution.
One element coming from the Conservative
Revolution is the morbid mythical importance
attributed to the so-called "wilderness."
Wilderness has a very special meaning for
Prince Philip and the World Wildlife Fund.
Armin Mohler says: "It is especially
the wilderness which becomes a leitmotif
in the literature of the tradition of Nietzsche."
There, wilderness is counterposed, as a "healing
sleep," to the linear world of destruction.
"In the wilderness, the laws of economy
do not apply; the wilderness is the backdrop
before which the world-feeling unfolds, which
we have tried to describe here," says
Mohler. "It emanates from here, and
to here it always returns." —HZL
Toward A New Renaissance The epoch of six
hundred years of history is now coming to
an end, and with it, all the evil ideologies
emanating from Venetian oligarchism through
the Enlightenment to deconstructionism, and
they themselves are digging their own graves.
The crime of the U. N. Cairo conference was
so enormous, because there, people dared
to propose what the Nazis never dared to
say with publicly with such clarity. But,
being confronted with such an enormous evil,
will trigger an impulse for Good in the world,
and we have to reassert now the principles
of the Council of Florence and the Golden
Renaissance, which means nothing less than
that each human being must have a chance
to live a life as imago viva Dei and capax
Dei. This is only possible, however, if we
bring the political and economic order into
coherence with the laws of God's Creation.
The world cannot survive partially; mankind,
as never before, is all in the same boat,
and we will only save ourselves on the basis
of the highest conceptions. These are the
conceptions discussed, for example, at the
Council of Florence by Nicolaus of Cusa,
who said that concordance in the microcosm
is only possible through the maximum development
of all microcosms. That means the maximum
development of all individuals and all nations.
The sovereign nation-state must be defended,
because it is only through the representative
system, that the freedom of the individual
is guaranteed. Any supranational institution
annihilates such freedom. It is, therefore,
in the self-interest of each individual and
each nation, to work toward the maximum development
of all others. All nations, together, must
be focused on the joint task of the development
of mankind.
We have to have an idea of man and of society
in which the beautiful soul, the person who
with compassion does what is necessary, the
Good Samaritan who helps without even thinking
about himself, is what is normal. Because
what we have now, is not normal, it's a disease.
We are suffering from the fin de siècle,
the end of an epoch. The nastiness in society,
the stabbing-in-the-back, treating each other
like low creatures, looting small nations
for your own profit—all of these things are
not human, they are not part of what we are
meant to be, as man in the image of God.
A new Renaissance means a change of values,
so that people want to be creative as their
purpose in life, that people are so thirsty
for true knowledge, for discovery, for art,
for music, for discovering the laws of composition
of the late Beethoven, of Schubert, of Schiller,
in order to be, then, able to do something
creative themselves. And I think that Nicolaus
of Cusa was correct when he said that once
people have tasted the "sweetness of
truth," they try to find more of it,
and more and more.
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Evans Experientialism 
