The “Stab in the Back” Myth and World War I
A great opinion piece in the NY Times this week by Bret Stephens drew a direct parallel line between today’s Team Trump and the German army’s defeat in 1918. The commonality is the term Dolchstosslegende, which literally means “stab in the back myth”, and was used during the remilitarization in Weimar period after WWI. The myth goes like this – when the German army was being routed all over northern Europe towards the end of the war in 1918, it was actually winning, and corrupt politicians stabbed the military in the back by signing an armistice with the Allies to end the war. That lie was used thousands of times by Hitler and his henchmen as they seized power from the “schemers” (politicians and Jews), proclaiming they were restoring Germany’s honor and greatness. Sound familiar?
Dolchestosslegende is precisely what Trump, Rudy, and his merry band of deplorables are using against Americans to steal the election from a duly elected President, Joe Biden. And the amazing feature of this myth is that it really doesn’t matter if the lies are blatantly false; it proves that if your repeat an outrageous lie enough times, people will believe it. Trumpland is so inured to receiving lies that they are simply accepted, even though they are pure farce.
And that is the point.
And what do we do about the myth believers? Ever read Eric Hoffer’s book, The True Believer? Exceptionally well done book written by a man with no “education”. Previously I always thought of them as “flat earthers”, rejoicing in their rejection of facts, science, knowledge, whatever you want to call it. They allegedly comprise about one-third of the population. Among them are David Duke types. Suggestions, anyone?
1My sister’s in-laws fell down this particular rabbit hole a while ago. They think Tucker Carlson is a traitor, and treat NewsMax and One America Network as left-of-center news networks.
Like Flat Earthers, it is unclear how to get them back to a shared reality.
2this is really a great blurb on history repeating itself..
3Let’s hope this backfires on Trump in the upcoming election in Georgia. He’s been telling people there that their elections were fraudulent, but they need a big turnout for Perdue and Loeffler and now the Georgia GOP is worried that voters will stay home because of the Talking Yam and his false claims. Sad!
4Not recent. Remember that most of these people (but not all) are also Christians of a particularly obtuse type. They have not shared reality with other people since 1859.
The same phenomenon can also affect leftists, as it did notoriously during the Stalin cult.
I am reading Richard Fried’s ‘Nightmare in Red,’ which turns out to be the best short summary of McCarthyism; a useful reminder for those of us old enough to remember and introduction for the young; and hilarious. But the takeaway is that all the stuff people are wringing their hands about has been around for a long time.
5Same myth every sore loser hauls out when they lose a war. The confederates after the civil war, the right wing after Korea and Vietnam, soon, the war in the Middle East.
See a pattern here? The right wing ALWAYS blames the left when they run afoul of the electorate. They NEVER own their failures, ever, ever, ever.
6Actually, “Dolchstosslegende” doesn’t literally mean “stab in the back myth” — a “Dolch” is a dagger, a “Stoss” is a stab or shove — so its literal meaning is a dagger stab legend/myth. However, the colloquial translation of the expression into English is, of course, “stab in the back”
But, yes, the traitors of the Trump Reich are using every bit of cheating, lying and deceit they can for their propaganda. They are adherents of Goebbels and Goering, who said you just need to keep repeating lies long enough and often enough that the masses begin to believe they are truth.
Goebbels and Goering would be so proud.
7My maternal Grandfather served in the German Army during WWI. He was gassed in the trenches. He left Germany for the US, arriving in 1921 thanks to the sponsorship of a relative. He went back after getting established, married my Grandmother and they sailed back to their new home, never to return. He told us stories about how Hitler had propaganda delivered to German Americans in the US. He’d burn it. They learned English as fast as they could. Once my mom started school, there was no more German regularly spoken. He and my grandmother criss crossed the country several times on road trips. They loved America. When I was in my 20s, I did a trip to Poland via Germany to visit friends I’d made during my fisheries work. He could not understand why I would want to go there. He would be aghast at where we are today.
8fenway fran, your grandfather turned his back on Germany but thousands didn’t. I’m sure you know about Fritz Kuhn and the German-American Bund who held a huge rally in Madison Square Garden in 1939. (I wonder if Fred Trump was there.) Fascism is alive and well, all over Europe as well as here, and we can never stop being vigilant.
9Trumpf is not smart enough to come up with the playbook being used by the gop by himself. While he’s always lied and cheated and had a cult leader effect on those around him in the Trumpf organization, tapping into the broader population of white nationalists, supremacists, neo-nazis , etc has been a product of the Bannons, Stephen Millers and the like. Much of this hatred dates back to the civil war as much as anything. Those around him advising him on building his base have been very successful in drawing in other malcontents and religious fanatics. All of this was certainly built around repeating misinformation and conspiracy theories about the Democratic Party and “libs.”
10Until repugnantican “leadership” begins to build on other messages like their conservatism vs hateful fantasy, nothing will change. Unfortunately, many in congress have taken on the belief system of trumpism, partly to maintain power but many because they are now cultists.
I am beginning to worry that we may be on the verge of losing China. Should we raise tariffs again to keep them in line? It seemed to work so well with the last president*
11I have finally figured out why that fellow is so upset with the press. They continue to describe his complexion as orange, while for him it is obviously a golden hue.
Like a nice toilet.
did something similar happen at appotomax after the civil war?
12And speaking of repeating lies until they’re believed.
https://www.cnn.com/business/live-news/election-2020-misinformation/h_60e951081996eb3176e3b4749fa72f61
This one was under my radar.
13As trump is to Reagan, Bannon, Stephen Miller and Alex Jones are to Limbaugh, Beck, and O’Reilly.
14Same message, without the misdirection.
And of course, the base is blaming George Soros.
15The more things change……
Herr Twitler is planning to skip Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s Inauguration in January. He’s actually planning to stage his 2024 presidential campaign kickoff rally at the exact same time!
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Speaking of Germans and Nazis, the PBS series “Rise of the Nazis” is still airing. PBS reruns stuff too, this series will be back. It can be streamed too. Many parallels to the Trumpzis.
In episode 1, the phrase “Make Germany Great Again”, was used; it wasn’t clear if this was an actual early Nazi slogan, but it probably was, and aped later by the Trumpzis , as they have utilized most of the Nazis’ methods and tactics.
Rise of the Nazis
NOW STREAMING
See how Adolf Hitler and the Nazis rise to power and usher in the death of democracy.
https://www.pbs.org/show/rise-nazis/
“About the Episodes
Episode 1 | Politics
Learn the chain of events that propels Hitler from the fringes to the heart of the government. After leading a failed coup in 1923, he turns the Nazis into a legitimate, mainstream party and plots to overthrow Germany’s political elite.
Episode 2 | The First Six Months in Power
Discover the measures Chancellor Hitler takes to dismantle the German state. The Nazis have the power to ban free speech, books are burned, and Jewish people, gay people and those holding anti-Nazi beliefs begin to disappear.
Episode 3 | Night of the Long Knives
16See how Hitler finds himself caught between Germany’s president and the Nazis’ power base. His advisors persuade him to destroy the Nazi stormtroopers and their leader – one of his oldest friends – to make the SS Germany’s only paramilitary force.”
The strategy of repeating lies over and over has clearly worked for the goopers. I’m convinced the only chance that Dems have for the future is to adopt similar tactics–except that we can stick to TRUE stuff. We just have to make the messages short and easily chantable.
17fenway fran and Buttermilk Sky. Economic conditions in Germany were bad in the ’20s (partly because of German unwillingness to pay reparations) and 500,000 Germans, mostly men, emigrated to the US. Your grandfather was an exception. Almost all of the 500,000 returned to Germany when employment improved under Hitler.
The Foreign Department of the NSDAP was not a serious effort and Kuhn was never taken seriously by the Nazis. It was more grassroots than astroturf.
More interesting, to me anyway, was the sympathy for the nazis among the Germans and Scandinavians who has settled the upper Midwest before WWI. It was no accident that Lindbergh led America First (his father had been a sort of proto-nazi in he ’20s) or that McCarthy attacked the Army over its supposed harshness toward the Malmedy killers.
There was a lot of homegrown admiration for Hitler, an episode of our history that has been nearly erased.
18LIn @17: Fantastic point!
19But also emotional. Beyond bumper sticker power points, the right’s effectiveness hasn’t relied only on pushing tribalism, but on seriously pissing people off. IMHO, that’s why limbaugh has been so repugnantly effective. But he had the massive resources of the think tank infrastructure guiding him. We need his equivalent for outrage. We’ve already got well documented truth to back it up.
Related to the need for progressive chant-able slogans. As Joe Goebbels said:
“There was no point in seeking to convert the intellectuals. For intellectuals would never be converted and would anyway always yield to the stronger, and this will always be “the man in the street.” Arguments must therefore be crude, clear and forcible, and appeal to emotions and instincts, not the intellect. Truth was unimportant and entirely subordinate to tactics and psychology.”
Of course, at the end Goebbels fed his wife and children cyanide capsules before snarfing a couple himself. We could only wish that Trump would think similarly in his loss, but nope, we’ll be stuck with him and his awful get for decades to come.
[Another Goebbels quote is actually a bit hopeful, although he was applying it to his opponents: “There will come a day, when all the lies will collapse under their own weight, and truth will again triumph.”]
20I have read that Goebbels quotation in many places but it has never made sense. The intellectuals went over to the nazis with a will, sometimes with a stop at conservative parties along the way.
Goebbels himself was an intellectual (that Dr. was genuine) but it seems he was motivated by resentments linked to his club foot and being left out of the manly cool boys at school.
The resentments of people who are talented but not quite of the first rank has proven just as problematic in democratic settings as in Weimar Germany.
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