THIS JUST IN: Heidegger Was Really a Real Nazi, Adam Kirsch writes at Tablet:

Yet the attempt to construct firewalls around Heidegger’s Nazism, to save areas of his reputation from its taint, has suffered one failure after another, and this one too must fall. It used to be argued that Heidegger was an unworldly man who briefly blundered into Nazism; this was the exculpatory argument made by Arendt in a radio address broadcast in Germany on his 8oth birthday. This account became unsustainable after the research of Farias and Ott demonstrated the depths of Heidegger’s involvement with Nazism, including his carrying out of the law that purged Jews from university teaching. Then Heidegger’s defenders tried to distinguish between his political activity, which may have been culpable, and his thought, which remained untainted. But Faye proved beyond a doubt that, in the first years of Hitler’s rule, Heidegger taught seminars in which he gave his most famous philosophical concepts and terms an explicitly Nazi resonance.

And note this earlier paragraph:

This hope is expressed again and again in the “Black Notebooks” for 1933, the year Hitler took power and Heidegger became rector of his university. “A marvelously awakening communal will is penetrating the great darkness of the world,” Heidegger writes. Nazism, with its rhetoric of destiny and rebirth, was going to define new coordinates for human life, simply by the authenticity and confidence of its self-assertion. These coordinates might be upside-down, from the perspective of conventional morality; Nazism might call murder, conquest, racism and dictatorship good, where the old Judeo-Christian morality thought them bad. But because values are determined by conviction, not vice versa, the Nazis could succeed in bringing into being a new world in which evil actually was good. “The mission—if precisely this were the mission: the full imposing and first proposing of the new essence of truth?” Heidegger asks, thrilled at the prospect that truth itself can be transformed.

And an inadvertent preview of gay postmodern philosopher Michel Foucault’s lunatic embrace of the new “political spirituality” of the 1979 Iranian revolution.