MY STRUGGLE

“The victor will never be asked if he told the truth.” ~ Adolph Hitler

Nearly a century ago on July 18, 1925 a book that was written in prison by a distraught and disturbed ego-maniac convicted of treason for an attempted coup in Bavaria two years earlier was published in Germany. Titled “My Struggle,” (Mein Kampf), it was the first volume of the philosophical autobiography of the man who eight years later would ascend to the office of Chancellor of Germany, the first giant step on his road to totalitarian dictatorship.

Mein Kampf, which would become the “Nazi Bible,” was essentially the beginning of the blueprint for the formation of the Third Reich (3^rd Realm or Empire). Once its teachings were allowed and enabled to be put into practice by a proud and gullible populace still stinging from defeat in the first World War, a nation yearning to be made great again, it would lead to a 2^nd World War and anti-Semitic inhumane atrocities beyond imagination. The ensuing “holocaust” led to the systematic extermination of some 6 million Jews, two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish population.

Even as Jews were anathema, no more than mere excrement, so was democracy. The Third Reich was modeled after Prussian absolute authoritarianism, total power to the leader (fuhrer).

Initial meager sales of Mein Kampf mushroomed when Hitler became Chancellor. It also became common place for the Church to give it to couples being married. Leading the charge against church sanctioned Nazism was a Lutheran Pastor and theologian by the name of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He was a founding member of the Confessing Church, which was formed in 1934 as a resistance movement to Hitler and Nazism. Although a staunch pacifist most of his life, the abhorrent evils of Hitler and the Nazi regime led him to become involved in the plot to assassinate Hitler in 1944. As a result of his role in resisting Nazism he was imprisoned and executed in 1945 days before Hitler’s suicide and the fall of the Third Reich.

It was twelve years after the publication of Mein Kampf, and the rise of the Third Reich, that Bonhoeffer wrote The Cost of Discipleship. In what is perhaps the defining sentence of the book, Bonhoeffer declares, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”

On this 99^th anniversary of the publishing of Hitler’s My Struggle, and during these days in which one of America’s political parties is nominating their Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates to thunderous applause and advancing their own authoritarian blueprint to dismantle democracy, it may be time to pick up a copy of My Struggle as America struggles to continue this bold experiment we call democracy. Or better yet, follow that with a reading of The Cost of Discipleship.

I’ll close with with these prescient quotes that deserve our attention as we face a potential Bonhoeffer moment. George Santayana once wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” (It appears in his 1905 book The Life of Reason.) Adolph Hitler wrote, “What good fortune for governments that the people do not think,” and ”The great masses of people will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one.”(quotes from Mein Kampf: https://ptfaculty.gordonstate.edu/jmallory/index_files/page0508.htm)