| | If you have a Netflix membership, you can watch Objectivist philosopher Stephen Hicks' movie Nietzsche and the Nazis as a streaming video. (Click on the "source" below the quote above.) A non-Objectivist friend of mine studying Nietzsche brought this to my attention, unaware that Hicks is an Objectivist.
I think Hicks downplays historical factors in the rise of the Nazis too much, and overplays philosophical ones. (For example, he makes the facile observation that other countries had suffered catastrophic defeats in wars but had not turned to Nazism. Yet it was the terms imposed at Versailles rather than the actual effects of the war itself which were intolerable to a Germany which had signed an armistice, not a surrender.) Nietzsche was neither a German nationalist nor an anti-Semite. Hicks' use of Nietzsche as a comparandum is somewhat of a gimmick, since he could just as easily have compared the Nazis to, say, the Marxists, or to the Lutheran or the Catholic Churches and made the same point, that bad philosophy has bad effects.
Nevertheless this is an interesting film and good to see that it is featured at Netflix. And, for fun, note the fluorescent green beaker in the "science" segment and see how many books you can recognize on the bookshelf behind him for much of the film.
(Edited by Ted Keer on 3/16, 6:27pm)
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There is a perfect likeness between Christian and anarchist: their object, their instinct, points only toward destruction.
