Friday, March 9, 2012

Heidegger's Children

In a review of Richard Cravatt's new book, Genocidal Liberalism: The University’s Jihad Against Israel & Jews, a scathing indictment of academe's Zionhass (as you can no doubt tell from the title), David Solway espies the seminal work of a revered German philosopher (and, famously, Hannah Arendt's lover when she was his student):
The godfather of the current mob of academic gangsters, [Martin] Heidegger was appointed Rector of the University of Freiburg in 1933, using his considerable reputation to further the Nazi supremacist dogma. For Heidegger, the function of the university was to provide what he called, in his Rector’s Address, “service to knowledge” as an obligation to the National Socialist state, that is, to entrench a species of politicized education—in this case, the absurd theories of National Socialism, the restriction of free expression, and, ultimately, a lethal campaign against the country’s and the continent’s Jewish inhabitants. The current academic campaign against Jews and Israel, expressed in the condemnation of Israel as an apartheid and occupying regime engaged in the “ethnic cleansing” of the Palestinians, is merely an updated and partially laundered variant of the German original. It is a palpable lie masquerading as an apodictic truth supported by fraudulent research and revisionist infatuations. The invention or suppression of facts and the propagation of fictitious memes and venomous tropes have become the liberal academy’s stock in trade.
The creator of bad ideas (Heidegger, Marx, Marcuse, Arendt, Said, Foucault, etc.) eventually dies, but the bad ideas, alas, live on, thereby according their creators a type of immortality. Then again, zombies and vampires are immortal, too--until you finally do them in with a wooden stake.

No comments: