NO RUDDSY SWORD

NO RUDDSY SWORD:

The Bonhoefferian unacceptability of Kevin Rudd's acceptance speech

With gilded words, soft as a sunset, dull as a pillow and sheathed in pillow talk, we saw and heard Kevin Rudd, the new prime Minister of Australia, draw out his sword for our future. There was no sharp delineation of difference, no acute challenge, no cutting edge, only the faint reflections of dim light breaking through from the hill.

This is the same Kevin Rudd, who, in his essay: ‘Faith in Politics’ published in ‘The Monthly’ some time back, wrote: ‘Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian, pastor and peace activist. Bonhoeffer is, without doubt, the man I admire most in the history of the twentieth century.’

This is Dietrich Bonhoeffer who defied Hitler, who called for German Christians to act in confession to the risks of the Cross - ‘The Church and the Ecumenical Movement,” - published in his book “No Rusty Swords”. Also saying (in his ‘Ethics’): ‘Yet our business now is to replace our rusty swords with sharp ones.’

But the spin and propaganda politics that Hitler was master of have leant the duller sword to ongoing history, and to our own times. Had Kevin Rudd been got at by the spin doctors for the campaign? Then he should have stopped campaigning once he had won. His espousal of Bonhoeffer bears no justification for this Ruddsy Sword.
After all, Mr Rudd did vow to "work together ... to carve out our nation's destiny".

In his essay ‘Dietrich Bonhoeffer on Truth and Politics’, Stanley Hauerwas, the Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics at the Divinity School of Duke University, writes: ‘Bonhoeffer was a relentless critic of any way of life that substituted agreeableness for truthfulness.” On any reading of Bonhoeffer it becomes clear that he would also be a critic of any policy, speech or program that substituted agreeableness for truthfulness, and even more so, a critic of any Government that substituted agreeableness for truthfulness just to achieve populism, and rightly so, given Hitler’s mass movement appeal there and then in Bonhoeffer’s Germany.

But then we have Kevin Rudd’s acceptance speech.

You must watch it, listen if you can bear to concentrate on the words, but you cannot read it, for it its not meant as words - to be weighed in any balance. KEVIN07, the snapshots of Kevin Rudd's vision for Australia are only to be found on the Official Website of the ALP ... Kevin's Acceptance Speech. I am told you need Adobe Flash plugin version 8 or higher. The question as to why it has not been published is interesting, one maybe answered by media-arts analysts, for scrutiny of the text soon reveals what a limp thing it is.

If this my-space style video is the only vision for Australia, then God save us.

Rudd’s speech is in two roughly equal parts; the spin, and then the thanks. The thanks, including his introductory words about John Howard, are simple and personal, noble and down-to earth, seeming true to the man who admires Bonhoeffer. Maybe the man who might lead us with Bonhoefferian insight is still within.

The rest of the speech seems to have other origins: it is vague, generalised and slavishly following of ideological and attitudinal fashions. It seems to owe its create to spin doctor and liars.

It was the Americans who invented Boosterism and then later named it spin. In his essay ‘Dietrich Bonhoeffer on Truth and Politics’ Stanley Hauerwas writes “Christians came to America having fought hard to renounce confessional struggles. Subsequent generations born free of the battles for which their forebears fought no longer think it necessary to fight about anything. The struggle over the creed which occasioned the flight of their fathers and mothers becomes—for their sons and daughters—something that is itself unchristian.”

And maybe Australia is becoming more like America in these times of reality transvision. The essay ‘What is Meant by Telling The Truth’ that Rudd quotes in his article ‘Faith in Politics’ contains these writings by Bonhoeffer about the USA: ‘Thus for American Christianity the concept of tolerance becomes the basic principle of everything Christian. Any intolerance is in itself unchristian.” [from A Testament to Freedom: The Essential Writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, edited by Geoffrey B. Kelly and F. Burton Nelson. (San Francisco: Harper/San Francisco, 1990), p. 498]

Bonhoeffer writes: 'Because Christians in America have no place for the conflict truthfulness requires, they contribute to the secularization of society; [No Rusty Swords, pp. 286-287] a society, moreover, which finds itself unable to subject politics to truth and the conflict truthfulness requires. [ No Rusty Swords, pp. 168-169] Tolerance becomes indifference and indifference leads to cynicism. '

Tolerance, conflictlessness, these seem like peace, but such peace breeds its violence in secret.

This untruthful existence is exactly the danger into which Rudd might fall, if he has not already.