In this audio podcast for Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) I discuss some of the philosophical influences that led to the atrocities of the attempted genocide of the Jewish people, including the rise of the Idealism of G.W. Hegel and the pragmatic concept of the “dialectic” that was used to negate the value of the individual in preference to the collective…. Hegel directly influenced Karl Marx and his godless materialism and social revolutionary theories, and in general it may be said that German idealism led both to the nihilism of Friedrich Nietzsche and to barbarity of Adolf Hitler’s national socialism.
Listen to the podcast: