Ominous Parallels by Leonard Peikoff

conflict; a glorification of cruelty and conquest, of “the magnificent blond ibrute, avidly rampant for spoil and victory”; 22 the view that a few superbeings, “beyond good and evil,” have the right to enslave the inferior masses for their own higher purposes—this is part of the Nietzschean legacy, as interpreted (with some justification) by the Nazis.
    And there were many other such voices in Germany, ranging from dreamy apostles of otherworldly mysticism to mindless champions of this-worldly nationalism (many German intellectuals were both). Those best-known for the former attitude include Meister Eckhart, a medieval neo-Platonist often called the father of German mysticism; Arthur Schopenhauer, an Orientalist doom-preacher who was a major influence on men such as Nietzsche and Freud; and Friedrich Schleiermacher, a leading romanticist theologian. Those best-known for the latter attitude include Heinrich von Treitschke, an historian of the Prussian school, who helped to spread Hegel’s ideas (“The grandeur of war lies in the utter annihilation of puny man in the great conception of the State....”); Richard Wagner, a fiercely racist disciple of Schopenhauer (“[We must] be brave enough to deny our intellect”); and Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, a literary critic and youth mentor in the Weimar Republic, who coined the term “the Third Reich” (“We have to be strong enough to live in contradictions”). 23
    All of these men and movements contributed the notes, the chords, or the screeches that fused into the Horst Wessel song. And they are merely some of the obvious voices in Germany from a chorus sustained across hundreds of years and gradually rising in volume. If the brutes finally rose from the gutters and stamped a swastika across the doctrines of the centuries; if, plucking the naked essence of those doctrines from the atmosphere, they began to preach the worship of the all -powerful, collectivist, militarist state, ruled by a master Führer in the name of a master race; and if, finding an avid following, they proceeded to drench the world in blood—one need not ask what made it possible.
    In one respect, Hegel’s share of the responsibility has been widely recognized: the similarity between his politics and that of Hitler is hard to escape. But Hegel’s politics is not a primary. It is an expression of his fundamental philosophy, which is the culmination of a long historical development.
    Hegel would not have been possible but for Kant, who would not have been possible but for Plato. These three, more than any others, are the intellectual builders of Auschwitz.

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    Hitler’s War Against Reason
    Statism and the advocacy of reason are philosophical opposites. They cannot coexist—neither in a philosophic system nor in a nation.
    If men uphold reason, they will be led, ultimately, to conclude that men should deal with one another as free agents, settling their disputes by an appeal to the mind, i.e., by a process of voluntary, rational persuasion. If men reject rea son, they will be led, ultimately, to conclude the opposite: that men have no way to deal with one another at all—no way except physical force, wielded by an elite endowed with an allegedly superior, mystic means of cognition.
    The branch of philosophy that deals with the powers of reason as a cognitive instrument is epistemology, and this issue is the key to its relationship to politics. It is not an accident that Plato, Kant, Hegel, Marx, and the whole tradition of German nationalism from Luther on, advocated a variety of anti-senses, anti-logic, anti-intellect doctrines. The statism all these figures upheld or fostered is a result; the root lies in their view of knowledge, i.e., of man’s mind.
    The aspiring dictator may not be able to identify in philosophic terms the clash between reason and his particular schemes. But he, too, is aware of it. In some (usually unverbalized) form, he knows that he cannot demand unthinking