A Free Left Blog

The philosopher Martin Heidegger was a Nazi. He was a member of the party from 1 st May 1933, ten days after becoming Rector of Freiburg University and three months after the Nazis took power in Germany, to the end of World War II. This is problematic for the likes of me who have been profoundly influenced by Heidegger’s writings and find beautiful, even magical, insights in them. (For me, reading Division I of Being and Time , though slow and painstaking, was like turning a light on to the world as it really is.) Recently, with his so-called ‘ black notebooks’ apparently revealing deeper anti-Semitism than was previously thought, attacks on Heidegger and his philosophy for being Nazi have reached a crescendo. The Guardian for example published this article , entitled: ‘ Heidegger's 'black notebooks' reveal antisemitism at core of his philosophy ’. That piece and, it seems, the notebooks themselves, reveal nothing of the sort – though to begin with it is ...

The way liberal-left opinion and much of the mainstream political class has turned its fire on the UK Independence Party ( UKIP ) over its latest poster campaign has been quite something to behold – and if I am not much mistaken it could play straight into UKIP’s hands. For me, this one above is rather good as a political poster, making a simple straightforward political point ('EU Policy at Work. British workers are hit hard by unlimited cheap labour') with a simple straightforward image. But it has been attacked with quite impressive outrage from all sides, bringing comparisons with Nazi propaganda and stimulating all from Tories to Greens to vituperation and anger. Tim Montgomerie, the creator of ConservativeHome website and now comment editor at the Times, even tweeted: 'Strong anti-immigrant poster campaign from UKIP', appended to the above photograph. Another UKIP poster to have appeared overnight has the simple statement ’26 million people in Europe...