The two terms I most often see bandied about when discussing the current Abomination are Nazi and fascist. Members of the Abomination take issue with the terms, call them lazy, false, historically inaccurate.
Is it inaccurate to call them Nazis? How about fascists? What would you call them?
I read a book a few months ago by Richard Wolin titled Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology, and I’ve returned to it repeatedly since then. Heidegger is a philosopher who has influenced my thinking in fundamental ways and Wolin’s deconstruction of him is troubling. I am still working it around in my head and will write about it eventually. If you’ve had a beer with me since I first read it, I’m sure I found a way to shoehorn it into the conversation somewhere.
In the book, Wolin combs through Heidegger’s Black Notebooks (his family only allowed their publication to begin in 2014, and it has added almost three thousand pages of source material to his corpus), published lectures, and personal letters to bring clarity to the Heidegger controversy. In all the writing, lectures, and podcasts I’ve come across over the years, they will mention that he was a member of the Nazi Party with some discomfort and then move on as if it had little or nothing to do with his philosophy. Wolin’s book sets out to remove the cordon sanitaire between his groundbreaking philosophical work and his Nazism.
Things that have always been common knowledge: Heidegger remained in the Nazi Party to the very end of the war when the party collapsed. In 1945, the denazification committee asked Karl Jaspers to evaluate Heidegger’s denazification files and advise them on whether they should let him teach again. Jaspers told them no, not so soon. Heidegger was banned from the classroom for five years.
What Wolin establishes from the beginning is that the Black Notebooks clearly reveal Heidegger’s commitment to German exceptionalism and his belief in “redemptive antisemitism.” Wolin writes, “As the Black Notebooks attest, he held that the reemergence of Being in its glory and plentitude would not take place until ‘world Jewry’s” disintegrative influence was eliminated.” Wolin demonstrates repeatedly that while Heidegger publicly rejected biological racism, he was a spiritual racist and accepted the Nazi Rassengedanke (race thinking/race ideology).
Heidegger was never de-Nazified. Neither were many (most?) true Nazis. They licked their wounds, regrouped, and got back to it. Beginning in the 1950s, far-right parties came into existence, groups such as the German and Austrian Neue Rechte, Alternative for Germany (AFD), the Austrian Freedom Party, the Nouvelle Droite in France, and the jack-booted march of the Republican Party in the US straight into the Abomination it has become. What Heidegger provides to these groups is “an ‘existential’ rationale for replacing the prevailing civic understanding of citizenship with an ethnic definition predicated on the ‘right of blood.’”
Wolin writes of how in the 1960s they realized “postwar fascism needed an ideological overhaul.” Enter the specter of “population replacement,” in which white Europeans became the victims and colonized people the criminals, “thereby reversing the opposition between perpetrators and victims.” Wolin continues:
Russia’s leading Heideggerian, Alexander Dugin, has summarized Heidegger’s commitment to “ethnocentrism” as follows: “We are deeply convinced that our common goal aims at the protection of the specific nature of nations, cultures, confessions, languages, values, and philosophical systems… Dugin’s glorification of völkisch [ethno-nationalist] self-assertion merely instrumentalizes the language of democratic self-determination for the ends of ethnic chauvinism. Once the pseudo egalitarian veneer is stripped away, their arguments provide a template for the exclusion of groups that fail to conform to the fiction of an ethnically homogeneous citizenship.
The dream of an ethnically homogeneous citizenship is fueling the kidnapping and imprisonment of brown-skinned people in the U.S. The Abomination’s goal is nothing less than to purge the United States of people (criminal or not; citizen or not) who are not of white, European blood. Black ICE members have suddenly become prominent, strolling in airports, casual, friendly, smiling. They have to know they are not a part of that white-nationalist, insurrectionist club. They have to know they are on borrowed time if the purge is successful. Just ask the Black military members being barred and purged from positions of authority.
Wolin writes that Steve Bannon, after declaring Breitbart News a “platform for the alt-right,” enthused of Heidegger in an interview with Der Spiegel, “That’s my guy!” The Abomination is growing ever more comfortable displaying Nazi ideas and slogans. Indeed, they have become commonplace in the Republican Party. As have Nazi salutes and Nazi haircuts, which are both easy to deny and then dismiss those who point them out as hysterical—while smirking to one another.
When the Moms for Liberty quoted Hitler in 2023, I assumed it was because one of them found a pithy quote for their newsletter and either didn’t notice or didn’t know who he was—now I’m not so sure.
The Abomination in Chief’s straight-up Nazi Rassengedanke has been no secret for a long time. As I wrote in 2020:
He believes he and his family are among the Übermenschen, born into a superior race destined by genetics to win. While touring a Ford manufacturing plant in Ypsilanti, MI, he praised the founder, who was an anti-Semite and Nazi collaborator: “Good bloodlines, good bloodlines, if you believe in that stuff, you’ve got good blood.” He has repeatedly stated that he does in fact believe in that stuff. Has said of himself, “You know, I’m proud to have that German blood, no question about it. Great stuff.”
The band Chumbawamba, best known for “Tubthumping,” has a song called “The Day the Nazi Died.” It refers to Hitler’s Deputy, Rudolf Hess, who was the last living Nuremberg war criminal at Spandau prison. He died in 1987 at the age of 93 and the prison was razed, in no small part to keep it from becoming a pilgrimage site for neo-Nazis. In the song, the band sings, “So if you meet with these historians, I’ll tell you what to say/Tell them that the Nazis never really went away.”
Wolin writes that communism, fascism, and Nazism “ultimately discredited themselves,” but that “conservative revolutionary thought that hovered between Nazism and fascism” survived and thrives. Since fascism varies widely across cases, Stanley Payne’s method of using common traits (anti-liberalism, ethnic nationalism, mass mobilization, etc.) to establish a kind of family resemblance seems like the right way to go.
Forty, fifty, a hundred years from now, what do you think they will be called? I’m okay taking Wolin’s placement of movements like MAGA between Nazism and fascism and calling them Nazi-fascists for now.
“The Day the Nazi Died” was covered by the punk band The Snorts in 2023, and they added the refrain, “They’re here and they’re there and they’re everywhere/They’re here and they’re there and they’re everywhere.”
Previously Published on substack
Noah Wulf on Wikimedia Under CC License
