Chapter 29 Dietrich and Ruth and Their Times Relevance for America in 2020-21 — Lessons of Historyi “Who Controls the Past
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Chapter 2 9 Dietrich and Ruth and their Times Relevance for America in 2020-21 — Lessons of Historyi “Who controls the past,” ran the Party slogan, “controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” Part One, Chapter III of 1984 by George Orwell.1 “Hence, for the cup of liberty to be replenished, it’s beholden upon the people, by means of truth, to fervently attempt the liberation of the past, however recent or distant, from tyrants.” The author inspired by George Orwell and the American Founding Fathers. Ferdinand Schlingensiepen, author of Dietrich Bonhoeffer 1906-1945: Martyr, Thinker, Man of Resistance, which is one the premiere sources for this book, wrote an English language article in 2015 on the official Bonhoeffer website titled Making Assumptions About Dietrich: How Bonhoeffer was Made Fit for America.2 The title can perhaps be generalised to “Made fit for the English Speaking World.” Ferdinand was born in 1929 and post-war was a close friend of Eberhard Bethge — who was Dietrich’s closest friend. Eberhard died in 2000, but Ferdinand is still alive at the time of writing, aged 91.3 He spent crucial years of his childhood in an illegal Confessing Church seminary that his father led until his arrest.4 In the article, he is critical of the American conservative author and radio presenter Eric Metaxas who wrote Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy A righteous Gentile vs, the Third Reich published in 2010, and the liberal author Charles Marsh, a liberal theologian from Virginia and author of Strange Glory, A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer published in 2014. The former is the most prominent source for my book, closely followed by Ferdinand’s book and then Eberhard’s giant biography. After I found and read Ferdinand’s 2015 article in 2016, I started to thoroughly vet my citations of Eric Metaxas, and in my book, the majority of my citations of Eric Metaxas are accompanied by other sources, often those of Ferdinand and Eberhard. Charles Marsh I never used in my book, and indeed, while Ferdinand was critical of Eric Metaxas, he was even more so for Charles Marsh. To summarise, this is how Ferdinand sees Metaxas and Marsh: “ Marsh and Metaxas have dragged Bonhoeffer into cultural and political disputes that belong in a U.S. context. The issues did not present themselves in the same way in Germany in Bonhoeffer’s time, and the way they are debated in Germany today differs greatly from that in the States. Metaxas has focused on the fight between right and left in the United States and has made Bonhoeffer into a likeable arch-conservative without theological insights and convictions of his own; Marsh concentrates on the conflict between the Conservatives and the gay rights’ movement. Both approaches are equally misguided and are used to make Bonhoeffer interesting and relevant to American society. Bonhoeffer does not need this and it certainly distorts the facts.” and… “Unlike Metaxas, Charles Marsh does know some German. He has read Bonhoeffer’s writings in the original and has carried out research in Germany. He served briefly as a ‘Bonhoeffer guest professor’ at Humboldt University in Berlin. Even so, his manuscript needed more substantial corrections than that of Metaxas before being published in Germany.” and… i Note that in this time of growing mass censorship in America and indeed elsewhere, it’s possible that some source endnote links, since the time of writing in March 2021, have been removed. For articles, it may be possible to still retrieve them on the WayBack Machine or Web Archive at https://archive.org/web/. Just type or paste the link into the dialogue box. In the case of videos, especially YouTube videos, given YouTube’s mass censorship, I have as much as possible, given links to these videos on alternative platforms such as The Epoch Times Youmaker platform at https://www.youmaker.com/. Indeed, some links already given by me, are via the Web Archive. See for example, the final footnote (not endnote) for this chapter. YouTube videos might be retrieved on the Internet Archive with the Youtube code for the video. For example; Joshua Philipp’s Question and Answer on December 19, 2020 still on YouTube at https://youtu.be/EI4zqaRG-sk, can also be accessed on the Internet Archive at https://archive.org/details/youtube-EI4zqaRG-sk. At 45 minutes and 30 seconds, Joshua answers a question of mine where I use the pseudonym “kulturedyobbo.” “The authors have received much praise from their respective admirers. Both of them write extremely well. In Germany only those readers who can compare the German version of the biography with the American version will be able to see the pictures these two Americans are painting of Bonhoeffer. Both authors are said to have included new research. Whereas Metaxas actually presents very little that is new in this respect, new findings are restricted to the chapter on Bonhoeffer’s first visit to the United States in Marsh’s book.” and… “Marsh refers to Bonhoeffer’s fiancée [Maria von Wedemeyer] by surname only and deals with her almost as an irritation.” Ferdinand’s concluding paragraph explains Marsh’s reasons for doing so: “Marsh’s argument rests on the assumption that Bethge knew of Bonhoeffer’s secret passion. Marsh does not seem to know that homosexuals in Germany were being sent to concentration camps. The Gestapo would have taken great pleasure in incarcerating a man like Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer would have been under constant strain, if this had been his sexual orientation. Bethge would have sensed something. There was never any suggestion of such tensions when Bethge talked about his time with Bonhoeffer. If even Bethge did not know anything about those homosexual tendencies, then Marsh’s hypothesis is completely unfounded. It does not contribute anything to the theological or political debate about Bonhoeffer in any way.” For liberals/progressives the world over, they see Joe Biden’s victory in the American November 2020 election as a triumph over evil, albeit, given Biden’s interminable gaffes,5 and their irrational hatred of Trump, they celebrated more out of relief than enthusiasm.6 If familiar with Dietrich’s life, they may perceive of Dietrich’s story as an inspiration for democracy in challenging times. In doing so, they are assuming the election was legitimate and reported by a free and diverse unbiased media. However, for conservatives the world over, including myself, the election was anything but fair and legitimate, and trust in the global pack mainstream media (MSM), masquerading as free and diverse unbiased media, has been eviscerated. At the time of writing this chapter in March 2021, unlike 2015 when Ferdinand wrote his article, the American Constitutional Republic itself is now under dire threat, whereupon disturbing parallels with the death throes of Weimar Germany from Dietrich and Ruth’s time, can be drawn. When I think of Dietrich and the November 2020 US election, I think of how Dietrich would have felt in March 1933, when in servile compliance to the thuggery of Ernst Röhm’s Brown Shirt Sturmabteilung (Storm Troopers), still loyal to Hitler at the time, the Reichstag of Weimar passed the suppressive “Malicious Practices” and “Enabling” acts on the 21st and 23rd, just sixteen and eighteen days following the last “free” election on March 5th. The former furnished the judicial means to prosecute anyone who, “with malicious afterthought” put forward reports that might impair the welfare of the Reich; the latter, officially the “Law to Remove the Crisis of the People and the State,” was the constitutional means by which the Reichstag of Weimar,7 like a snake swallowing its tail, passed the law that obliterated its existence. 8 Likewise, following an election riddled with unaddressed irregularities, and the rampant censorship implemented in the first six weeks of the Biden-Harris regime, I see the death of the US Constitutional Republic, as the Democrats repeatedly trample on its very Constitution. To detail in depth,ii the vast case of electoral irregularities in the 2020 US election, would require a book in itself. Nevertheless, some context on this issue that transcends just Trump, needs to be outlined. Firstly, November 2020 isn’t the first time that the legitimacy of the American electoral process has been under a cloud. According to Newsweek, by May 2017, a class action lawsuit alleging the Democratic National Committee worked in conjunction with Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign to keep Bernie Sanders out of the White House had been raging on in the courtrooms for months on end. Yet, most people had no idea of its existence, in large part thanks to the mainstream media’s total lack of coverage. 9 Sanders and Clinton were contesting the Democratic nomination in the months before the 2016 federal election. Hence, according to the Sanders’ camp, Bernie Sanders should have been contesting the November 2016 federal election against Trump, not Hilary Clinton. Moreover, in an article published just nine days before the 2016 federal election on November 8 th, by the progressive journalist Emily Cameron, ironically titled OPINION: Our Elections are a Mess and Only Leftists Care Enough to Fix Them, she opened with: “ The vehement insistence that Hillary Clinton won the Democratic primary fair-and-square is unhealthy for democracy, and the narrative that Bernie Sanders supporters critiquing voter suppression and election fraud are ‘sore losers’ causes lasting damage to our elections.”10 And … “ The Clinton Foundation has received donations from Dominion Voting and H.I.G. Capital, two manufacturers of voting machines. Does this definitively prove Clinton of committing election fraud? No, but it raises a lot of questions.”11 (More on Dominion voting machines later.) And in November 2017, a BBC article was titled; “[Democrat Senator] Elizabeth Warren agrees Democratic race ‘rigged’ for Clinton.”12 Secondly, on February 4, 2021, the global MSM mouthpiece, TIME magazine published a bizarre article of vague double-speak titled The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election.13 A key aspect of the story was to sideline the Biden-Harris campaign from the “shadow campaign” to “save” the election.