Ecological ethos and reactionary politics: the political implications of Heidegger's philosophy of being

Being for Heiegger is a happening in a relationship - it is the flash of insight that illuminates and overwhelms a human being. Heidegger poses a past golden age compared to which all subsequent ages can be seen as a decline. Nazism looked back to a glorious beginning of German being, nostalgically to the earliest appearance of the German nation as the centre and superpower of medieval Europe. Heigegger's thinking finds a distant parallel in the Nazi obsession with restoring the purity of the essence of Aryan-Germanic being, and comes close to the warlike ethos of fascism