Home » Von Stauffenberg’s son’s story

Comments

Von Stauffenberg’s son’s story — 14 Comments

  1. I am copying my post from another thread as a lot of the documents have to do with the talk and discussions leading up to the American Revolution and is what set that to be the almost bloodless thing it was (compared to the french revolutions depredations, but not otherwise).

    If the American Revolution was like the French Revolution, the winners would have not given the losers a choice to stay, or leave… they would have been murdered…

    but then again, the french revolution was more informed by marx, than the following documents by some very religious people who put the whole of the western ideal of freedom in the point of the heirarchy of rule starting with God…

    c. 410 – Augustine, Sermon 12 [Ben. 62] on the New Testament (Matt. 8.8 and 1 Cor. 8.10)

    c. 1100 – The Charter of Liberties

    c. 1159 – Policratus (the first justification for rising up to remove tyrants)

    June 15, 1215 – The Magna Carta

    1265-1274 – Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica [murdering tyrants is out, but resisting them is ok]

    August 1, 1291 – The Schweizer Bundesbrief

    April 6, 1320 – The Declaration of Arbroath

    1536-1560 – Institutes (John Calvin)

    1556 – A Short Treatise of Politike Power

    1557-1644 – The Geneva Bible’s

    very important documents as to discussions on what to do with tyrants.. kill them or not? if not, then what? etc…

  2. Then Peter and the other apostles answered and said, We ought to obey God rather than men. (Acts 5.29)

    BRING BACK LEX REX!!!!!

    i wonder what would happen if we walked around with a T-Shirt that said: LEX REX!!!!!

    Lex, Rex is a book by the Scottish Presbyterian minister Samuel Rutherford (1600?-1661). The book was published in 1644, had the English subtitle of “The Law is King”, and although intended to be a comprehensive defence of the Scottish Presbyterian ideal in politics, was published in response to Bishop John Maxwell’s “Sacro-Sanctum Regus Majestas”. The book defends the rule of law and the lawfulness of defensive wars (including pre-emptive wars) and advocates limited government and constitutionalism in politics and the “Two Kingdoms” theory of Church-State relations (which advocated distinct realms of church and state but opposed religious toleration). Rutherford’s Lex, Rex utilizes arguments from Scripture, Natural Law and Scottish law, and along with the sixteenth century Vindiciae contra tyrannos, it attacked royal absolutism and emphasized the importance of the covenant and the rule of law (by which Rutherford included Divine Law and Natural Law as well as positive law). After the Restoration, the authorities cited Rutherford for high treason, but his death intervened before the charge could be tried. Lex, Rex itself was burned in Edinburgh (the Scottish capital) and St. Andrews (where Rutherford had been principal of the university) and in 1683 Oxford University included it in what ended up being the last official book-burning in England.

    The attack on absolutism, the defence of the rule of law and the emphasis on the importance of the covenant made Lex, Rex a precursor to the social contract idea, and helped pave the way for the political theory of John Locke. However, Rutherford’s views on Church-State relations and his opposition to religious toleration were opposed to Locke’s views in those areas.

    [how many know about this stuff besides me? rather than assume, i will ask….]

    all these documents that set for the moral ideas of freedom, the rule of law and so on, tend to be from very religious Christian or Jewish theologians and men.

    if you know the whole cannon of these old writs, you would EASILY understand their animus to religion. for as long as religion lasts, these records and ideas will last, and people will find them and relearn them, or reapply them.

    technically my dredging it up to post from others dredging up to post… is the first step to reapplication… as it was the learning of the idea that came before the desire to apply it rather than accept tyranny.

    A tyrannical government is not just, because it is directed, not to the common good, but to the private good of the ruler, as the Philosopher states (Polit. iii, 5; Ethic. viii, 10).

    Consequently there is no sedition in disturbing a government of this kind, unless indeed the tyrant’s rule be disturbed so inordinately, that his subjects suffer greater harm from the consequent disturbance than from the tyrant’s government.

    Indeed it is the tyrant rather that is guilty of sedition, since he encourages discord and sedition among his subjects, that he may lord over them more securely; for this is tyranny, being conducive to the private good of the ruler, and to the injury of the multitude.

    we no longer remember what was meant by “philosopher states”… but its very important.

    the change that happened in the Enlightenment was the dethroning of the philosophers as rulers of men through their inane ideas.

    Gallileo, and others with their methods and factual records, and the idea that all ideas be grounded in reality, morals, ethics, the new rule of law of which kings are equal to peasants (see how far equality has warped by feminism?), and more.

    in fact, the attempts of the dominicans to use the church to crush the arguments that were being put forth (and so the left blames the church not the begger philosopher like them who sought some form of statist power to vanquish enemies!).

    but over the time of that, and not long after, the philosophers were relegated to a bunch of people with some kookie ideas that didnt work, but sounded nice.

    marx, neitshe, sartre, hegel, etc. etc. etc..

    were the army that created the romantic era… a relexive period where philosophers sought to reclaim their power of diktate through jumping a head and defining what science would find, and declaring whatas there.

    this is why marx and others say all these futurist things. they were trying to show that they knoew more about the essential universe than the enligtenment people who still believed in god, and whose scientific method crushed their arguments by showing their assumptions about reality had no basis in reality.

    so they fomented the future.. they claimed women would be like men and sex would be free and so on. and the people who converted to the philosophical religion which was more cargo cult and easier and whose rules and such, like astrology, had a kind of makes sense feel to it.

    this is why as science is now disproving them again… the enlightenment march pushing the philosophers aside. its the philosopphers that seek, again, like the dominicans of gallileo and the church, to seek a greater power (not god) that they can appeal to to vanquish the foes that are unwriting the facts as to the prophecies of marx and others.

    this is the real war… and its two camps of very smart people… when the philosophers won in germany, they murdered the jews and smart devout christians and the old… the idea was to erase this defeat of philosophical world views and ideology.

    they dont want you to learn that the men of the enlightenment with very superior smart arguments had invalidated the dictatorship by what it was… not that its justification was insufficient… without that idea, you might accept justification to any end. and will.

    sadly… this is probably too long and will be cut down… so rather than my continue to reveal this battle between science and philosophy… including the period when the philosophers tried to take over science a prior time in the past..

    ok… cut it down…

  3. Today, I still ask myself what thoughts were going through his head during that walk

    Save the children who are the only future he has left…

    the same behavior was exhibited in the movie., Life is beautiful

    its what made the people of this era across the west so exceptional… their lives were bigger than just themselves, and even had focus on the smaller parts of the bigger picture.

    i guess today we find it odd as we no longer shield children and raise mental defectives

  4. One of the interesting things about the recent Hollywood presentation of the story, is Stauffenberg’s moral deracination during the process.

    I guess that Tom Cruise didn’t find the real Stauffenberg’s actual moral sensibilities, motivations, and quandries, especially given the Catholic context, very interesting or screenworthy.

    If that is, he even knew any more about them than the screenplay told him.

  5. Interesting story, wasn’t prepared, however, to read “with incredible chutzpah” in the text.

    The failure of the bomb to do its job is one of the too many “what if”s in history.

  6. It is unfortunate that the movie “Valkyrie” did not begin at an earlier point in time and give full credit to some of the other individuals involved in the anti-Nazi plot, particularly Colonel (later General) Hans Oster, who fully grasped the evil of Hitler and began putting together action plans while many of the other eventual conspiracy members were still more or less under Hitler’s spell. It would have been hard to do this under the time constraints of a feature film, of course, but an excellent mini-series on the conspiracy was and still is possible.

    One very objectionable aspect of the “Valkyrie” film is its unfair and historically-inaccurate treatment of Erich Fellgiebel, who commanded Army communications. Whereas the real Fellgiebel was a courageous and early opponent of Hitler, the movie makes it appear as if he had to be blackmailed into participation in the conspiracy. There’s not much excuse for treating real individuals like this.

    My review of the film here:

    http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/6576.html

  7. Fascinating story Neo. I was casually familiar with the story, but found it very interesting to read the son’s perspective.

    Berthold would be about a year older than I, and it is intriguing to compare experiences of WWII. Although my father went to war, and the neighbor “boy” next door and the one across the street, both fighter pilots, were killed, my war experience could not compare to the children where the war was actually fought. In fact this story brings home that most Americans really have never experienced war.

    Von Stauffenberg and his fellow conspirators were incredibly brave and dedicated. I have not seen the Cruise movie, but I doubt that he did them justice.

  8. One of the aspects I find interesting about the von Stauffenberg story is that he was a practicing Catholic, as is his son. My completely non-scientific survey of the German non-communist anti-Nazi movement during the time of the Third Reich seems to show that an active commitment to Christianity–Catholic or Protestant–was often a common denominator. Perhaps the belief that there was a higher purpose than mere politics to resisting the evil that the Nazi regime represented inspired the sacrifices and hardships these brave people endured. It’s not that their resistance was particularly effective; it wasn’t, and the Gestapo was ruthlessly efficient at rounding up these “traitors”. But that a resistance existed at all under these conditions I find remarkable. While the Pope may have made his own accommodations with Hitler and Mussolini for the purpose of taking as much heat off the Church and its flock as possible, that clearly wasn’t good enough for other Catholics like von Stauffenberg.

  9. Thanks, David. I read a few of those, and people involved in the resistance seem to fall into several general categories: communists (no surprise); Jews (and there’s a fair amount of overlap with the communists here); liberal politicians; believing Christians; and disillusioned military officers. Von Stauffenberg was of course a Wehrmacht colonel who saw just how badly the war was going, losing an eye and a hand to a strafing Allied fighter in the process. But although it could be argued that he and his fellow conspirators were German patriots more concerned about “saving the Fatherland” than about Hitler’s crimes, it also would appear that he never lost his moral compass. Serving under Rommel, who never had even a whiff of war crimes allegations around him, would make it easier to stay on-course than, say, fighting partisans in the Balkans or Russia. But I have to believe the Church also had a role here.

  10. Pingback:Maggie's Farm

  11. Always was struck & fascinated with the ‘cosmic coincidence’ of the Event exactly 25-years later: July 20, 1969…The First Moon Landing by Armstrong & Aldrin.

    The vengeance exacted by Der Fuehrer was horrific. He specifically ordered the tried & convicted conspirators to be hanged by piano wire from meat hooks–strangled–and filmed for his subsequent entertainment. But, hey, if it had been Stalin, he’d have killed half-a-million innocents in retribution and slept soundly.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

HTML tags allowed in your comment: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>