[April 2003 journal entry]
Dietrich’s investment in the Confessing Church as a non-violent civil disobedience strategy depended on two key assumptions/anticipations – i.e., the expectation that the enemy/aggressor will be caused to pause (eventually responding to the strategy) and the ability of the resistors to remain resolute when injuries, deprivations, deaths begin to occur. By 1939 Dietrich saw that the strategy had failed on both counts. Unlike the British in India (where Dietrich tried to travel several times without success), the Nazis were in their homeland and had utter darkness at their core. The ranks of the Pastors’ Emergency League broke in 1937 when the Nazis confronted the Confessing Church after the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
Dietrich’s investment in the Confessing Church as a non-violent civil disobedience strategy depended on two key assumptions/anticipations – i.e., the expectation that the enemy/aggressor will be caused to pause (eventually responding to the strategy) and the ability of the resistors to remain resolute when injuries, deprivations, deaths begin to occur. By 1939 Dietrich saw that the strategy had failed on both counts. Unlike the British in India (where Dietrich tried to travel several times without success), the Nazis were in their homeland and had utter darkness at their core. The ranks of the Pastors’ Emergency League broke in 1937 when the Nazis confronted the Confessing Church after the 1936 Berlin Olympics.