DOLCHSTOSSLEGENDE
What a fascinating article:
Monday, May 08, 2006
Dolchstosslegende
posted by TheGreenKnight
The German word "Dolchstosslegende" means roughly, "myth of the stab-in-the-back." In the June issue of Harper's, Kevin Baker has a major article about the history of this peculiar right-wing myth. It's a long article and well worth reading in full, but here's a brief summary with some excerpts. The understanding of this myth is, I think, crucial to understanding the origins of the phony culture war, and therefore to understanding the mindset of the American right.
The story of the stab-in-the-back is common in many ancient myths, in which the hero is betrayed by a close friend and companion. The point of this story is usually to convey the importance of the hero: too strong or wise or good to be defeated by his enemies, the hero can only be defeated from within his group of companions. When you regard your nation as heroic, as many Americans do, then similarly it cannot be defeated by external enemies, only by internal ones.
Baker argues, since the end of World War II, the myth of the stab-in-the-back has been the device by which the American right has both revitalized itself and repeatedly avoided responsibility for its own worst blunders. Indeed, the right has distilled its tale of betrayal into a formula: Advocate some momentarily popular but reckless policy. Deny culpability when that policy is exposed as disastrous. Blame the disaster on internal enemies who hate America. Repeat.
Baker takes the reader on a journey through the past century of the myth. The main part of his narrative gets under way late in the Second World War and the summit at Yalta. This, Baker explains, was a time when American conservatism was practically extinct. Roosevelt's New Deal was popular and successful, and the American right's isolationism was seen as a moral failure. However, the right seized on the summit at Yalta, claiming (with no evidence, of course) that the pact between Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin had been engineered to favor the Soviets (whom the right revisionistically now claims we should have annihilated - while we were simultaneously trying to annihilate Japan and Germany; OK - maybe some on the right claim we should have forgotten about Germany and should have just annihilated the Soviets, who had just stuck it to Germany at Leningrad and who would have been a formidable enemy with respect to whom those very same isolationists claimed we had no business starting a war with - but never mind) -- and that the responsibility for this lay with Alger Hiss, the American bureaucrat who turned out to be a Soviet spy (whether Hiss actually perjured himself has not been definitively settled; whether he did is quite beside the point).
Baker explains that Hiss was a perfect villain for the right's purposes. He was not only a communist and a spy; he was also an effete Eastern intellectual (read: Jewish - DRL) right down to his name -- and, by implication, possibly a homosexual. In fact, one of the most strikingly consistent threads in this history is the way in which homosexuality (or code words for it) is constantly used by the American right as a synonym for treason. (One of the 14 most conspicuous signs of a fascist government is hatred of homosexuals). In reality, Hiss was only a minor figure who played no policy role at Yalta. Furthermore, the only alternative to the Yalta agreement would have been immediately to embark on World War III, a massive struggle between the USA and the USSR that would have reduced whatever remained of Europe to smoking ruins. But facts are no bar to a powerful myth, and after Yalta the Dolchstosslegende had come to America. (Bush said what happened at Yalta was "wrong" - the decision at Yalta was made as the result of deliberation and thinking based on the best intelligence available. His decision to invade Iraq, 60 years later, when we supposedly have much more highly developed intelligence-gathering capabilities - was the product of lies. The Gentleman's F he got in history seems to have served him well).
It was continued and renewed in Korea, when MacArthur's fervent desire to turn North Korea into a radioactive wasteland was denied by Truman (who quite properly relieved the strutting peacock general of his command for insubordination). As Baker puts it,
MacArthur now became the martyred Siegfried, stabbed in the back by weaklings at home who were for some reason afraid of victory(funny how conservatives, even as they glamourize McArthur, say that Korea was a "Democrat war," and a waste of time). It was the fault of these "whimpering," "soft," "cowardly," "lavender" "appeasers." The right-wing fear that the Administration -- and, by extension, the Democratic Party -- had been taken over by treacherous homosexual spies bent on America's defeat led directly to McCarthyism and the Red Scare.
Centrist Republicans such as Eisenhower (who, as one historian said, "preferred to cut McCarthy down from offstage," apparently in a manner that was quite subtle) desiring to regain the White House, played along, with electoral success. It was now established that this paranoid right-wing myth could be parlayed into votes for the Republican Party.
But it was during and after Vietnam that the Dolchstosslegende took on its modern form: the culture war. Although it was a Democratic administration that began the Vietnam War, it was a Republican one -- the Nixon administration -- that finished and lost it (after continuing it for five years and expanding its geographical scope).
As Baker explains, more than 21,000 Americans were killed in Vietnam during Nixon's time in office, and there were no Democrats to blame it on. The only political hope for the administration was to turn its gaze outward -- to blame the people....Over and over, antiwar protesters were called Communists [or] perverts....Older, more established dissidents were ridiculed ... as "nattering nabobs of negativity," (Spiro Agnew's most famous phrase) and, unforgettably, as "an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals." These invectives were, of course, doubly disingenuous; it was [VP Spiro] Agnew and [speechwriter William] Safire who very much wanted such persons to be known by the damning label "intellectual," and what the vice president was really calling them was fags. (He also delighted in using epithets like "fat Jap," and various other racial slurs. Nixon did not pick this man for his political skill. He picked him as "insurance against assassination.")
After the war was lost, the right continued to push the Dolchstosslegende because it was the only thing that distracted attention from the fact that it was they who had lost the war. Three iconic symbols came to encapsulate the myth: Jane Fonda in Hanoi; returning veterans being spat upon; and the POWs left missing in action in Vietnam. Never mind the actual facts: that Fonda's photo-op had no effect on the war effort, that the spitting never actually happened (I'm quite sure that it did, but that more than a few Republicans were spitters, not to mention draft-dodgers), that there was no evidence of any POWs still MIA (guess we'll really never know about that one. Ross Perot came to political prominence not in 1992 but several years earlier, when he peruaded George Bush Sr. to let him finance a search operation for POWs).
The myth had taken a life of its own, and the culture war that it engendered became the permanent form of politics in America for the next three decades. Of course, now that Iraq is turning out to be a bust, the Bush administration is trotting the old narrative out again -- but this time it has less traction. Try as they might, they cannot use the myth to prevent the war's unpopularity, or to shore up Bush's disastrous disapproval ratings. Baker speculates that this may be because Bush has asked Americans to sacrifice so little for this war; by failing to put the country on a war footing, Bush has failed to make the war a convincingly heroic national effort in anything more than words -- and words get stale quickly. So, in Baker's conclusion, we see how the adminstration has taken the myth on tour -- to eastern Europe, where it's come full circle back to Yalta:
[I]n May 2005, George W. Bush was in the Latvian capital of Riga, describing the Yalta agreement as "one of the great wrongs of history"....The Yalta myth has finally lost its old magic, here in historically illiterate, contemporary America....Bush's pandering was directed instead to the nations he was visiting, in a region that still battens on any number of conspiracy theories....this is the "new Europe" that Bush has solicited for troops in his Iraqi adventure...and where he appears to have found either destinations or conduits for victims of "extraordinary rendition," en route to where they could be safely tortured in secrecy.An American president, wandering the halls of Eastern European palaces, denounces his own nation in order to appease his hosts into torturing secret prisoners (so much for appeasement: Dick Cheney just glower-powered Russia).
Our heroic age surely has come to an end.At one point, Baker asks an obvious question, but fails to answer it. That's not a shortcoming of his essay, really, because the question is genuinely puzzling:
Why should we wish to maintain a narrative of horrendous national betrayal, one in which our own democratically elected government, and a large portion of our fellow citizens, are guilty of horribly betraying our fighting men?Baker's answer to this question is that the myth transformed into the culture war, and became permanent that way, but that really only pushes the question back a step. Why the culture war? Why should it have had such legs in a certain segment of the population? Why should anyone want there to be evil traitors in their midst, and why should they so fervently want them to exist that they will simply make them up in the absence of any real ones?That's the real question, and it's one that stumps Baker, as indeed it has stumped many people. I don't really understand the answer myself. But as I've said many times before, the culture war is not real. It is a myth. Baker's essay is a crucial tool for understanding the origins of the myth.
*********************************************************************
What's the Matter With Kansas provides the answer to "why the culture war?" Because in a culture-war mentality, there is ALWAYS someone to hate, ALWAYS someone to demonize, ALWAYS people to wedge-issue, and thus, always less accountability for the culture warriors. It has these legs because Republicans have succeeded in getting middle-class Americans boiling with tax rage; because Republicans have succeeded in getting them boiling with rage about Janet Jackson's breast, and because Republicans have succeeded in getting them boiling with rage that America is constantly under siege by anyone who isn't a "heartland" "family values" voter. The Republicans have been doing this since 1968 - and notice, if you will, how they have not been truly crushed in an election since then. Getting people riled up about a problem makes them feel good and makes the people feel the Repugs "Get It" - the people know they won't have to THINK about it, but nonetheless believe someone is "listening to it." The "it," though - a stereotyped notion of one thing or another that should have been buried years ago, is something that the Republicans and their listeners should, rather than "get," be getting away from, for the sake of mankind.
Monday, May 08, 2006
Dolchstosslegende
posted by TheGreenKnight
The German word "Dolchstosslegende" means roughly, "myth of the stab-in-the-back." In the June issue of Harper's, Kevin Baker has a major article about the history of this peculiar right-wing myth. It's a long article and well worth reading in full, but here's a brief summary with some excerpts. The understanding of this myth is, I think, crucial to understanding the origins of the phony culture war, and therefore to understanding the mindset of the American right.
The story of the stab-in-the-back is common in many ancient myths, in which the hero is betrayed by a close friend and companion. The point of this story is usually to convey the importance of the hero: too strong or wise or good to be defeated by his enemies, the hero can only be defeated from within his group of companions. When you regard your nation as heroic, as many Americans do, then similarly it cannot be defeated by external enemies, only by internal ones.
Baker argues, since the end of World War II, the myth of the stab-in-the-back has been the device by which the American right has both revitalized itself and repeatedly avoided responsibility for its own worst blunders. Indeed, the right has distilled its tale of betrayal into a formula: Advocate some momentarily popular but reckless policy. Deny culpability when that policy is exposed as disastrous. Blame the disaster on internal enemies who hate America. Repeat.
Baker takes the reader on a journey through the past century of the myth. The main part of his narrative gets under way late in the Second World War and the summit at Yalta. This, Baker explains, was a time when American conservatism was practically extinct. Roosevelt's New Deal was popular and successful, and the American right's isolationism was seen as a moral failure. However, the right seized on the summit at Yalta, claiming (with no evidence, of course) that the pact between Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin had been engineered to favor the Soviets (whom the right revisionistically now claims we should have annihilated - while we were simultaneously trying to annihilate Japan and Germany; OK - maybe some on the right claim we should have forgotten about Germany and should have just annihilated the Soviets, who had just stuck it to Germany at Leningrad and who would have been a formidable enemy with respect to whom those very same isolationists claimed we had no business starting a war with - but never mind) -- and that the responsibility for this lay with Alger Hiss, the American bureaucrat who turned out to be a Soviet spy (whether Hiss actually perjured himself has not been definitively settled; whether he did is quite beside the point).
Baker explains that Hiss was a perfect villain for the right's purposes. He was not only a communist and a spy; he was also an effete Eastern intellectual (read: Jewish - DRL) right down to his name -- and, by implication, possibly a homosexual. In fact, one of the most strikingly consistent threads in this history is the way in which homosexuality (or code words for it) is constantly used by the American right as a synonym for treason. (One of the 14 most conspicuous signs of a fascist government is hatred of homosexuals). In reality, Hiss was only a minor figure who played no policy role at Yalta. Furthermore, the only alternative to the Yalta agreement would have been immediately to embark on World War III, a massive struggle between the USA and the USSR that would have reduced whatever remained of Europe to smoking ruins. But facts are no bar to a powerful myth, and after Yalta the Dolchstosslegende had come to America. (Bush said what happened at Yalta was "wrong" - the decision at Yalta was made as the result of deliberation and thinking based on the best intelligence available. His decision to invade Iraq, 60 years later, when we supposedly have much more highly developed intelligence-gathering capabilities - was the product of lies. The Gentleman's F he got in history seems to have served him well).
It was continued and renewed in Korea, when MacArthur's fervent desire to turn North Korea into a radioactive wasteland was denied by Truman (who quite properly relieved the strutting peacock general of his command for insubordination). As Baker puts it,
MacArthur now became the martyred Siegfried, stabbed in the back by weaklings at home who were for some reason afraid of victory(funny how conservatives, even as they glamourize McArthur, say that Korea was a "Democrat war," and a waste of time). It was the fault of these "whimpering," "soft," "cowardly," "lavender" "appeasers." The right-wing fear that the Administration -- and, by extension, the Democratic Party -- had been taken over by treacherous homosexual spies bent on America's defeat led directly to McCarthyism and the Red Scare.
Centrist Republicans such as Eisenhower (who, as one historian said, "preferred to cut McCarthy down from offstage," apparently in a manner that was quite subtle) desiring to regain the White House, played along, with electoral success. It was now established that this paranoid right-wing myth could be parlayed into votes for the Republican Party.
But it was during and after Vietnam that the Dolchstosslegende took on its modern form: the culture war. Although it was a Democratic administration that began the Vietnam War, it was a Republican one -- the Nixon administration -- that finished and lost it (after continuing it for five years and expanding its geographical scope).
As Baker explains, more than 21,000 Americans were killed in Vietnam during Nixon's time in office, and there were no Democrats to blame it on. The only political hope for the administration was to turn its gaze outward -- to blame the people....Over and over, antiwar protesters were called Communists [or] perverts....Older, more established dissidents were ridiculed ... as "nattering nabobs of negativity," (Spiro Agnew's most famous phrase) and, unforgettably, as "an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals." These invectives were, of course, doubly disingenuous; it was [VP Spiro] Agnew and [speechwriter William] Safire who very much wanted such persons to be known by the damning label "intellectual," and what the vice president was really calling them was fags. (He also delighted in using epithets like "fat Jap," and various other racial slurs. Nixon did not pick this man for his political skill. He picked him as "insurance against assassination.")
After the war was lost, the right continued to push the Dolchstosslegende because it was the only thing that distracted attention from the fact that it was they who had lost the war. Three iconic symbols came to encapsulate the myth: Jane Fonda in Hanoi; returning veterans being spat upon; and the POWs left missing in action in Vietnam. Never mind the actual facts: that Fonda's photo-op had no effect on the war effort, that the spitting never actually happened (I'm quite sure that it did, but that more than a few Republicans were spitters, not to mention draft-dodgers), that there was no evidence of any POWs still MIA (guess we'll really never know about that one. Ross Perot came to political prominence not in 1992 but several years earlier, when he peruaded George Bush Sr. to let him finance a search operation for POWs).
The myth had taken a life of its own, and the culture war that it engendered became the permanent form of politics in America for the next three decades. Of course, now that Iraq is turning out to be a bust, the Bush administration is trotting the old narrative out again -- but this time it has less traction. Try as they might, they cannot use the myth to prevent the war's unpopularity, or to shore up Bush's disastrous disapproval ratings. Baker speculates that this may be because Bush has asked Americans to sacrifice so little for this war; by failing to put the country on a war footing, Bush has failed to make the war a convincingly heroic national effort in anything more than words -- and words get stale quickly. So, in Baker's conclusion, we see how the adminstration has taken the myth on tour -- to eastern Europe, where it's come full circle back to Yalta:
[I]n May 2005, George W. Bush was in the Latvian capital of Riga, describing the Yalta agreement as "one of the great wrongs of history"....The Yalta myth has finally lost its old magic, here in historically illiterate, contemporary America....Bush's pandering was directed instead to the nations he was visiting, in a region that still battens on any number of conspiracy theories....this is the "new Europe" that Bush has solicited for troops in his Iraqi adventure...and where he appears to have found either destinations or conduits for victims of "extraordinary rendition," en route to where they could be safely tortured in secrecy.An American president, wandering the halls of Eastern European palaces, denounces his own nation in order to appease his hosts into torturing secret prisoners (so much for appeasement: Dick Cheney just glower-powered Russia).
Our heroic age surely has come to an end.At one point, Baker asks an obvious question, but fails to answer it. That's not a shortcoming of his essay, really, because the question is genuinely puzzling:
Why should we wish to maintain a narrative of horrendous national betrayal, one in which our own democratically elected government, and a large portion of our fellow citizens, are guilty of horribly betraying our fighting men?Baker's answer to this question is that the myth transformed into the culture war, and became permanent that way, but that really only pushes the question back a step. Why the culture war? Why should it have had such legs in a certain segment of the population? Why should anyone want there to be evil traitors in their midst, and why should they so fervently want them to exist that they will simply make them up in the absence of any real ones?That's the real question, and it's one that stumps Baker, as indeed it has stumped many people. I don't really understand the answer myself. But as I've said many times before, the culture war is not real. It is a myth. Baker's essay is a crucial tool for understanding the origins of the myth.
*********************************************************************
What's the Matter With Kansas provides the answer to "why the culture war?" Because in a culture-war mentality, there is ALWAYS someone to hate, ALWAYS someone to demonize, ALWAYS people to wedge-issue, and thus, always less accountability for the culture warriors. It has these legs because Republicans have succeeded in getting middle-class Americans boiling with tax rage; because Republicans have succeeded in getting them boiling with rage about Janet Jackson's breast, and because Republicans have succeeded in getting them boiling with rage that America is constantly under siege by anyone who isn't a "heartland" "family values" voter. The Republicans have been doing this since 1968 - and notice, if you will, how they have not been truly crushed in an election since then. Getting people riled up about a problem makes them feel good and makes the people feel the Repugs "Get It" - the people know they won't have to THINK about it, but nonetheless believe someone is "listening to it." The "it," though - a stereotyped notion of one thing or another that should have been buried years ago, is something that the Republicans and their listeners should, rather than "get," be getting away from, for the sake of mankind.
posted by EnterCenter at 2:07 PM
3 Comments:
This summarizes what is wrong with the Repug party and America in general in a nutshell. The problem is that it is the human condition to prefer to NOT think, rather than to think. So the only way to combat this hate is to come up with some sort of non-thinking message that appeals to people, OR, to change the culture of the populous so they desire to think.
I will go out on a limb and say the latter is near impossible, so we have to work on the former. So what sort of non-thinking message combats the hate? I like Bill Maher's idea: "Vote for Democrats or DIE!" (based on the environment) I wish the solution was to get people to THINK, but sadly, I do not feel very optimistic about that. After all, we live in a nation where 40% of people actually believe the bible is LITERALLY TRUE! How are we supposed to get THOSE PEOPLE to think???
Nice! Where you get this guestbook? I want the same script.. Awesome content. thankyou.
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Super color scheme, I like it! Good job. Go on.
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