For over a century a highly inflamed and partisan pseudo-theory in various guises has beset the world of geopolitics and diplomacy, of historians and historical discourse. It is the diatribe of the Dolchstosslegende — The “Stabbed-in-the-Back” Myth from the Great War to the Present. This militarist grand daddy of conspiracy theories was initially used to try to rationalize the loss of Imperial Germany and the Central Powers in World War I to the Entente Powers of the British Empire, France, Russia, and the United States. The German military had not lost the War. It was the subversive “November Criminals” (composed of communists, duplicitous socialist politicians, and especially Jewish radicals and financiers in the Fatherland) who forced the Kaiser to abdicate and days later signed the November 11, 1918 armistice, ending hostilities. The humiliating Treaty of Versailles was the final nail driven in the coffin of Germany’s defeat.
Germany’s de facto military dictator, General Erich Ludendorff, was among the first to embrace the idea that the country had been betrayed by communists, politicians, and most of all, Jews. Though a wartime census showed that Jews were overrepresented in both the German Army as a whole and in frontline units, the “Big Lie” stuck. Its propagation was aided by often well-intentioned generals and politicians, who told the returning soldiers that “no enemy has vanquished you.”
When Adolf Hitler, a decorated veteran and budding demagogue, embraced this fiction, the Dolchstosslegende (literally “dagger stab myth”) was cemented. The German Army had not lost. It had been betrayed by the home front and the politicians.
This demonology of conspiracy mongering and revisionist accusation did not cease with focusing on the Great War but has engulfed virtually every conflict since — World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria. In particular, note this excellent retrospective on Lost Battles of the Vietnam War.
A very interesting, extremely partisan Democratic critique of “right-wing Republicans” from Robert Taft to George W. Bush, appeared originally in the June 2006 edition of Harper’s Monthly, “Stabbed in the Back! The past and future of a right-wing myth.” The article was particularly notable or memorable at the time and bears mentioning.
The author Kevin Baker sees a decided historic parallel with Hitler and the National Socialists raising the “stabbed in the back” charge against the “November Criminals” responsible for Germany’s defeat in WWI in their rise to power during the Wiemar Republic, and conservative Republicans’ admonitions and accusations of treason against Democrats since FDR attended the Yalta Conference in 1945, right to the George W. Bush regime. In many ways, this article is a mirror version of Ann Coulter’s neocon McCarthyite screed, Treason. I decidedly don’t “buy” everything this guy offers in his sometimes shoddy line of goods, but never-the-less it is still a very informative and well thought out essay worth reading if only because as it dramatically foreshadows much of the seething conspiratorial narrative of the elaborate anti-Trump Russiagate hoax of the present.
Political Witch-hunting is nothing new to the Left.
The anti-Roosevelt, anti-Truman non-interventionist “Old Right” of Murray Rothbard, Albert Jay Nock, Robert Taft, Garet Garrett, John T. Flynn, or Howard Buffett had absolutely nothing in common with the “Red-State Fascists” of the Bush regime and the Republican Party at the time Baker’s incendiary piece appeared.
At the top of this blog is the excellent short film, You Can’t Print That: Conversations With George Seldes. Seldes was a veteran investigative journalist who became a legend to generations of reporters. In this video he discusses interviewing Field Marshall von Hindenburg shortly after WWI. He relates Hindenburg’s real reason Germany lost the war, and how and why the “stabbed in the back” myth was created and its impact on world history.
11:39 am on February 1, 2020
