My wife, Beth, reads aloud to me when we travel. Our current read is Eric Metaxas’ Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy. The book has set me to thinking.
Metaxas describes Germany between two world wars. The allied victors applied crushing terms to a defeated Germany at World War I’s Treaty of Versailles. These terms led to national foment, civil unrest, revolution, and factions vying for political power and dominance.
Communism was yet in its Bolshevik infancy. The pro-Russian German communists opposed the National Socialist Party, the Nazis, in a quest to control Germany’s future. The Nazi propaganda smeared the communists as Jews who were bent on destroying the German fatherland. Jewish owned businesses were fined, boycotted, and labeled for their ethnic ownership. When war erupted yet again on the European continent, the final solution was enacted, exterminating over six million European Jews in unprecedented genocide.
Listening to Beth read Bonhoeffer’s story triggered a series of observations to parallels we are experiencing in twenty-first century American life and culture.
America celebrates a class of powerful elitists who control politics and media. These powerful elitists promote cultural and moral relativism, simultaneously contradicting themselves, by making "truth" claims as to what they declare to be right and wrong.
Traditionalists who cling to historically patriotic along with traditional religious values based in the Holy Bible and the Judeo-Christian ethic, are declared to be wrong. Such values are targeted by the cultural progressive elitists as bigotry, hate-speech, intolerance, and deserving a punitive response.
The jack boots are thumping on the cobble-stone.
The punitive response is harsh, swift, and aggressive. Progressivists dominate the nation’s courts, legislative values, and government’s executive decisions. Businesses must cater to the progressive agenda. Churches must adopt the progressive agenda. Schools must bow to the progressive "truth." Government issues its edicts demanding conformity. Media declaims non-conformists as radical fundamentalists--ugly labels!
The Schutzstaffel (Nazi SS) is at the door.
Bakers and businesses are ordered to serve all comers, especially those who are advancing a progressive agenda. Any deviation against the received politically correct view is offensive.
"Hate speech (dissent) must be silenced."
"Divergent views must be suppressed!"
Progressives demand that political and religious views be homogenized into a shared, media-approved, politically-acceptable, and conformist view of reality!
The rainbow-hued swastikas of fascism are unfurled and waving their call to silence non-conformance.
Who will stand? Who will be principled non-conformists? Who will volunteer to think in an age that commands thoughtlessness? Who will have the courage to speak? Will you? Will I?
Thank you, John. Good word and challenge.
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