Hitler Survived Assassination 80 Years Ago Today

Two Meanings of History

80 years ago today, Adolf Hitler survived the most famous assassination attempt against him in his East Prussia headquarters, 20 July 1944, a month and a half after D-Day .

One of his own officers, Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg tried the act with a bomb hidden in a briefcase.

During the meeting that was to take place, someone accidently moved the briefcase and so when the bomb went off, a table leg took the full direct force, which deflected the effect enough to allow Hitler to survive and to continue for the rest of the year and into the next.

This proves relativism is absolutely true.

J/K

This is history in the sense that it's what happened. There is another sense of history, the same spelling, which is philosophical in nature, so it's really the philosophy of history, which is not taught in school anymore (leastwise not normally), though it was at Claremont Colleges where I did my doctorate in Public Law. (Btw, acc. to Politico, JD Vance is influenced by Claremont -- glad they decided to pay a little attention).

History in the sense of what happened v. what what happened means, or what the significance of it is, are two sides of the same coin, or the same spelling, "history."

For instance, I may ask my wife, are you going to church today, to which she might ask, no, it's Saturday. But I go to church on Saturday. She might reply, that's because you work at the church. But it's still true that I go to church on Saturday, and she doesn't. I may already know the answer, but she might ask why I'm asking, because she wants to know the meaning, or the significance of the fact (second sense of "history"), whereas I'm just making sure I get the facts (the first sense).

In office hours in front of a nervous student, grading their exam or paper in front of me, I may furrow my brow, twist my nose, pause my pen over a word, and turn the paper to the student, and point out, that this word, see this word ? [Yes, the student says meekly], you spelled that word correctly.

I'm just reporting a fact that happened in history (first sense of "history," the facts).

But the student , readily acknowledging this, wants to know the second sense of "history," what's it mean ? Why are you spending time on it ? What's the significance ?

And I'll say, you want to make history, don't you ? Well, you made history. You did something in the past. You made history. You're like Obama, he made history, too, according to various mainstream media publications. You're like what the Army Times reported in recent years when those two women made it through Army Ranger school . They made history. You did , too. See ? [I point to the correctly spelled word -- the fact he created].

But he wanted to know the significance of the fact.

To which I responded that I was still waiting for the mainstream media to correctly report the significance of the Obama election -- what they focused on, while a fact, was not the true significance. The true significance is available to anyone paying attention, but it's not a fact like how dark his skin appears to some people (not blind people) in broad daylight rather than in a closet without a lightbulb.

Our history is full of facts, some not grasped at all let alone well, but even more elusive at times is the significance of those facts. And what is significance ? Is it merely relative to people's perceptions or beliefs ? Or, is there true significance not dependent on human belief ?

Take Lincoln's assassination, for instance. The significance was catastrophic for the nation, absolutely horrific. That same year, a Democrat took over immediately the presidency. He was from Tennessee, the birthplace, the same year, of the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan continued until that Democrat president was out of office, and a Republican, Grant, took over and crushed the Klan back to the stone age from which they came. The death of Lincoln in one way clarified many things, but it came at a horrific cost. A cost which would have reverberations for decades to come, including but well past the compromise of 1876-77, when a Republican was elected to the presidency but agreed to pull Republican troops out of the Democratic South in order to try to stabilize the region into a "new normal," because there was so much resistance to bringing the darker skinned Americans into the new ethnicity of America. It does not mean that God was not with Lincoln. It does not mean that God was not with the Republicans and against the Democrats -- he most certainly was.

The same with Hitler. God was most certainly against Hitler, even though his disciple Dietrich Bonhoeffer failed in his conspiracy to assassinate Hitler. But we sure would have been grateful had Bonhoeffer succeeded, provided that it would have shortened the horrific events that postdated it. The struggle against National Socialism rightly continued, and so we celebrate the end of that struggle, at the time it ended, in V-E day. But that was not the end of Germany's struggles, or our own. They continued when Stalin, another different kind of Socialist, but an evil man just the same, took over about 1/3 of the country in the Eastern part, including the capital Berlin, which itself had to be divided against the new Socialism. Half the country give or take continued in National Socialism of the most murderous and villainous kind, for decades and decades, with utterly horrific consequences for human flourishing (well-being), except the national socialism was not the German nationality, but the Russian nationality. Germany became a colony of Russia, Russian socialism. That really happened.

We can say we are grateful that there were successes in that struggle, and we are also sorrowful of the failures, or apparent failures, and the hardships and the struggles, against the Leftist attempts to maintain slavery in the United States by terrorism, either de jure or de facto, and the same with the similar attempts in Europe which Republicans also rightly resisted and fought.

We can celebrate and be grateful for God's work when we see it (and we don't often see it so clearly), while recognizing that God is often not predictable in how he chooses to graciously intervene in the affairs of men. That doesn't mean that when you see it, you didn't see it. That doesn't follow at all. The work continues anyway, and we are grateful to be a part of it, and to have joy where we see it, and to ask for it , for more of it, and for the grace and wisdom to steward it with the best light that we have, when we ask in faith, and faith is a gift of God-- he will give good gifts--and when we ask in faith for such wisdom, the Sacred Scripture gives us this promise, he will give it to us, and will be with us and help us along the way.

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Dr. Lucas J. Mather, Ph.D., has developed and taught 190 college and university courses over 20 years in three counties in Southern California. He is the producer and host of The Republican Professor podcast.