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About The North Coast times-eagle. (Wheeler, Oregon) 1971-2007 | View Entire Issue (Aug. 1, 2006)
PAGE 12 STABBED IN THE BACK! THE PAST«. FUTURE OF A RIGHTWING MYTH \'k '/ I BY KEVIN BAKER First drink, hero, from my horn: I spiced the draught well for you To waken your memory clearly So that the past shall not slip your mind! -HAGEN TO SIEGFRIED DIE GÖTTERDÄMMERUNG’ Every state must have its enemies. Great powers must have especially monstrous foes. Above all, these foes must arise from within, for national pride does not admit that a great nation can be defeated by any outside force. That is why, though its origins are elsewhere, the stab in the back has become the sustaining myth of modern American nationalism. Since the end of World War 2 it has been the device by which the American rightwing 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, always making sure to increase the number of internal enemies. As the United States staggers past the third anniversary of its misadventure in Iraq, the dagger is already poised, the myth is already being perpetuated. To understand just how this strategy is likely to unfold — and why this time it may well fail — we must return to the birth of a legend. The stab in the back first gained currency in Germany, as a means of explaining the nation’s stunning defeat in World War 1. It was Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg himself, the leading German hero of the war,who told the National Assembly, “As an English general has very truly said, the German army was ‘stabbed in the back.” Like everything else associated with the stab-in-the- back myth, the claim was disingenuous. The ‘English general’ in question was one Major General Neill Malcolm, head of the British Military Mission in Berlin after the war, who put forward this suggestion merely to politely summarize how Field Marshal Erich von Ludendorff — the force behind Hindenburg — was characterizing the German army’s alleged lack of support from its civilian government. “Ludendorff’s eyes lit up, and he leapt upon the phrase like a dog on a bone," wrote Hindenburg biographer John Wheeler-Bennett. “'Stabbed in the back?' he repeated. ‘Yes, that’s it exactly. We were stabbed in the back.” Ludendorff's enthusiasm was understandable, for, as he must have known, the phrase already had great resonance in Germany. The word dolchstoss — “dagger thrust” — had been popularized almost fifty years before in Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung. After swallowing a potion that causes him to reveal a shocking truth, the invincible Teutonic hero, Siegfried, is fatally stabbed in the back by Hagen, son of the archvillain, Alberich. Wagner himself lifted his plot device from a medieval German poem, which was inspired in turn by Old Norse folklore, and of course the same story can be found in a slew of ancient mythologies, whether it’s the fate of the Greek heroes Achilles and Hercules or the story of Jesus and Judas. The hero cannot be defeated by fair means or outside forces but only by someone close to him, resorting to treachery. The Siegfried legend in particular, though, has nuances that would mesh perfectly with rightwing mythology in the 20th century, both in Germany and in the United States. At the end of Wagner's Ring Cycle, the downfall of the gods is followed by the rise of the Germanic people. The mythological hero has been transformed into the volk, just as heroic stature is granted to the modem state. Siegfried is killed after revealing an unwelcome truth — much as the right, when pressed for evidence about its conspiracy theories, will often claim that these are hidden truths their enemies have a vested interest in concealing. Hagen, as a half-breed, an outsider posing as a friend, stands in for some thing worse yet — the assimilated Jew, able to betray the great warrior of the volk by posing as his boon companion. It was an iconography easily transferable to Germany's new, postwar republic. Hitler himself would claim that while recuperating behind the lines from a leg wound, he found Jewish “slackers” dominating the war-production bureaucracy and that “the Jew robbed the whole nation and pressed it beneath his domination." The rape imagery is revolting but vivid; Hitler was already attuned to the Zeitgeist of his adopted country. Even before the war had been decided, a soldier in his company recalled how Corporal Hitler would “leap up and, running about excitedly, say that in spite of our big guns, victory would be denied us, for the invisible foes of the German people were a greater danger than the biggest cannon of the enemy." It didn’t matter that Field Marshal Ludendorff had in fact been the virtual dictator of Germany from August of 1916 PARRISH (CHICAGO TRIBUNE) on, or that the empire's civilian leaders had been stunned by his announcement, in September of 1918, that his last, murder ous offensive on the western front had failed, and that they must immediately sue for peace. The suddenness of Germany’s defeat only supported the idea that some sort of treason must have been involved. From this point on, all blame would redound upon “the November criminals," the scheming politicians, reds, and above all, Jews. Yet it was necessary, for the purging that the Nazis had in mind, to believe that the national degeneration went even further. Jerry Lembcke, in his brilliant work, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory & the Legacy o f Vietnam, writes of how the Nazis fostered the dolchstosslegende in ways that eerily fore shadowed returning veteran mythologies in the United States. Hermann Göring, the most charismatic of the Nazi leaders after Hitler, liked to speak of how “very young boys, degenerate deserters, and prostitutes tore the insignia off our best front-line soldiers and spat on their field-gray uniforms.” As Lembcke points out, any insignia ripping had actually been done by the mutinous soldiers and sailors who would launch a socialist uprising shortly after the war, tearing them off their own shoul ders or those of their officers. GOring’s instant revisionism both covered up this embarrassing reality and created a whole new class of villains who were — in his barely coded language — homosexuals, sexually threatening women, and other “deviants.” All such individuals would be dealt with in the new, Nazi order. The dolchstosslegende first came to the United States following not a war that had been lost but our own greatest triumph. Here, the motivating defeat was suffered not by the nation but by a faction. In the years immediately following World War 2, the American right was facing oblivion. Domestically, the reforms of the New Deal had been largely embraced by the American people. The Roosevelt and Truman administrations — supported by many liberal Republicans — had led the nation successfully through the worst war in human history, and we had emerged as the most powerful nation on earth. Franklin Roosevelt and his fellow liberal internationalists had sounded the first alarms about Hitler, but conservatives had stubbornly — even suicidally — maintained their isolationism right into the postwar era. Senator Robert Taft, “Mr. Republican," and the right’s enduring Presidential hope, had not only been a prominent member of the leading isolationist organization, 'America First’, and opposed the nation's first peacetime draft in 1940, but also appeared to be as naive about the Soviet Union as he had been about the Axis powers. Like many on the right, he was much more concerned about Chain Kai-shek’s worm- eaten Nationalist regime in China than U.S. allies in Europe. and “The whole Atlantic Pact, certainly the arming of Germany, is an incentive for Russia to enter the war before the army is built up,” Taft warned. He was against any U.S. military presence in Europe even in 1951. This sort of determined naïveté had Taft and his move ment teetering on the brink of political irrelevance. They saved themselves by grabbing at an unlikely rope — America’s own dolchstosslegende, the myth of Yalta. No reasonable observer would have predicted in the immediate wake of the Yalta confer ence that it would become an enduring symbol of Democratic perfidy. Yalta was, in fact, originally considered the apogee of the Roosevelt administration's accomplishments, ensuring that the hard-won peace at the end of World War 2 would not soon dissolve into an even worse conflict, just as the botched peace of Versailles had led only to renewed hostilities in the years after World War 1. The conference, which took place in the Soviet Crimea in February 1945, was the last time “the Big Three” of the war — Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin — would meet face- to-face. The U.S. negotiating team went with specific goals and was widely perceived at the time as having achieved them. Agreements were reached on the occupation of the soon-to- be-defeated German Reich, the liberation of those Eastern European countries occupied by or allied with Germany, the Soviet entrance into the war against Japan, and, most signifi cantly in Roosevelt’s eyes, on the structure of a workable, international body designed to keep world peace, the United Nations. FDR’s presentation of these agreements before a joint session of Congress that March met with almost universal acclaim. This was not surprising. Roosevelt, who had been at Versailles as a junior member of the Wilson administration, was preoccupied with making sure that his vision for the postwar world did not founder on any partisan bickering with Congress. Before leaving for Yalta, he had briefed a group of leading Senators from across the political spectrum on what he hoped to accomplish, and solicited their opinions and questions. The delegation he took with him to the Soviet Union was a bipartisan team of senior diplomats, advisers, and military men, and he continued to cultivate support from all quarters on his return to the United States. Such prominent Republican figures as Arthur Vandenberg, the once-isolationist Senator from Michigan turned internationalist, and Thomas Dewey, Roosevelt’s fierce opponent in the 1944 Presidential race, expressed general support for the results of the Yalta conference. Taft and the right wing of the Republican Party were more skeptical, but offered no substantial criticisms. Save for a few Congressmen, newspaper publishers, and columnists on the extreme fringe of the right, this early Cold War consensus would survive until 1948. Then, Dewey's and the Republicans' stunning losses in the elections that fall, combined with a confluence of American set-backs abroad, served to revivify the right. Not only did the Republicans lose a Presidential election against a badly divided, national Democratic Party; they also lost the Congressional majorities they had just managed to eke out in 1946, following 14 years in the political wilderness. It now seemed clear that the Republicans would never return to power merely by supporting Democratic policies, or by promising to implement them more effectively, and the rightwing gained traction within the Party. The Lower Columbia Clinic 595 18th St. ) / Astoria, O R > 503 325-9131 Bikes & Beyond 1089 MARINE DR. ASTORIA, OREGON TUSCAN STEA K H O U SE D O W N TO W N ASTORIA 1149 COMMERCIAL ® (503) 325-9001 PETER ROSCOE CHEF/OWNER i Thomas S. Duncan, m . d *2^ Susan L. Skinner, 5 C.N.M., C.F.N.P., I.B.C.I.C. Michael J. Meno, in, pac Medical care for the entire family PVu'-W. M in o r surgery surgery / la c ta tio n counseling < •Í
