This is really quite remarkable ("it's OK, we always new he was a Catholic reactionary bigot"), and especially this:
Modernity is synonymous with subversion, since with its universalist ideologies (liberalism, democracy, communism) it destroys the communitarian and traditional bonds that unite the members of a given people and separates this same people from its territory and history. Inevitably, the critique of modernity ends up also concerning Jews. The black notebooks confirm this: present in many countries and attached to urban rather than rural life, Jews are the incarnation of "rootlessness", "distance from the soil" and thus subversion. And again, this attitude is far from surprising to the Heidegger scholar: the 2 October 1929 letter in which the philosopher emphasises the need to oppose "growing Judaisation within German spiritual life", reinforcing this by rooting it in authentically German forces, is already well-known. [bold added]
"Inevitably"? And then there's this:
The outcry over the black notebooks is thus unjustified, but it would be all the more unjustified to imagine a mythical, eternally irredeemable Germany, ignoring the historical context in which Heidegger's life and work were situated. His Judeophobia came at a moment when across the west as a whole, on both sides of the Atlantic, there was a widespread view that the true culprits for the October Revolution were Jews. Indeed, in 1920 car tycoon Henry Ford wrote that this event had a racial and not political origin, and, though making use of humanitarian and socialist language, it in fact expressed the Jewish race's aspiration for world domination. It is worth noting that it was Ford's picture that had pride of place in Hitler's study and not Heidegger's: the origins of nazism and the ideological motives inspiring it were not exclusively German.
Certainly anti-semitism was more widespread before Hitler than after, but the suggestion that Heidegger's view were simply the norm is false, as this apologist must surely know. Indeed, although his piece concludes with the defamatory association of Nietzsche with Heidegger and Schmitt, any actual reader of Nietzsche knows that his hatred of anti-semitism (and of German nationalism) was decidedly not part of the temper of his times. Great philosophers don't typically need the excuse that car manufacturers shared their petty prejudices.
(Thanks to Michael Swanson for the pointer to this piece.)
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