has been said that Nazism is not a philosophy but a passion for destruction. Destruction, however, cannot be achieved with the Nazi consistency or on the Nazi scale, except by means of a certain philosophy and as an expression of it. It has been said that the Nazis are not ideologists but power-lusters. In fact, they are power-lusters whose power depends on a specific ideology. It has been said that the Nazis are not thinkers but criminals. The truth is that they are criminals spawned by thinkers, i.e., philosophically produced criminals-which is what gave them the kind of world-historical role denied to any plain criminal. The intellectuals of the West today {as at the time of Hitler} are a product of the same philosophical trend. Most of them, still reflecting some remnant of a better past, condemn the actions of Hitler, while advocating the same basic ideas that he did {though in different variants}. Such men are helpless to understand Nazism or to explain its emergence or to fight it.
( Leonard Peikoff )
[ The Cause of Hitler's Germany ]
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