Another ‘stab-in-the-back’ myth?

||| FROM ORCAS CURRENTS BY JENS KRUSE |||

IN MARCH OF 2017, I gave a presentation at Orcas Center, in which I described a series of events that transformed the German Weimar Republic of 1919–1933 into Hitler’s Third Reich, asking the implicit question, “Could something like that be occurring here in the United States?” In order to answer that question, I examined what was happening in the early months of the Trump administration that did — or did not — resemble the events of 1932 to 33. [1]

Now that this administration is entering the rearview mirror, a month after election day, it is a good time to reassess those questions and try to determine whether U.S. democracy was equal to this challenge where Weimar Germany was not. And is it stronger or has it been weakened during the past four years?

Our first impression might well be that democracy survived and may even have gotten stronger during that period. Since 2017, two national elections have occurred, and both have produced results that can be seen as corrections to the 2016 results. In the 2018 mid-term elections, the House of Representatives became controlled by the Democrats, producing at least some possibility for oversight of the executive branch. In the recent presidential elections, Joseph R. Biden was elected president with the same electoral-college vote count as Donald J. Trump won in 2016 — and with more than a 6 million popular-vote advantage. A record number of U.S. citizens voted in the midst of a pandemic, in defiance of multiple attempts to suppress their votes. By all reasonable accounts, the 2020 election was secure, free, and fair.

So these results and circumstances seem to suggest that, in spite of the last four years, U.S. democracy is still alive and well. But our norm-smashing president has not accepted the results, has not conceded, and — at least until very recently — was sabotaging the transition process. What may at first glance seem like a petulant refusal to admit that he has lost is in fact highly dangerous for democracy.

To understand why that is true, it is again instructive to look at the example of the Weimar Republic.

THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC, the first fully democratic German state, lasted only about 15 years. The young republic struggled with tremendous difficulties throughout its short life: near civil war-like conditions during its teething years in the aftermath of World War I; economic and political crises caused at least in part by the harsh terms of the Versailles Treaty; and hyperinflation. Large segments of the German population and society viewed the republic as illegitimate and yearned for return to a monarchy or other autocratic form of government.

The Weimar Republic realized some economic and political stabilization in the mid- and late 1920s, accompanied by a remarkable cultural flowering. But the Wall Street crash of 1929 and the subsequent world economic crisis imposed catastrophic economic and political consequences on Germany.

Here I would like to focus on one particular aspect of history that contributed greatly to the republic’s destruction. I was reminded of this aspect by a segment of Fareed Zakaria’s GPS program on CNN on Sunday, November 15. [2] He told viewers of a disturbing historical analogy between the Weimar Republic’s origins and our current historical moment. At the end of World War I, two German military leaders, Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff, spread the lie that Germany had been on the verge of winning the war — that it had not in fact lost, but rather had been betrayed by a conspiracy of Communists, Social Democrats and Jews. This myth became known as the Dolchstosslegende, the myth of the stab in the back. Even though there was no evidence for it whatsoever, this myth was believed by many Germans during the Weimar Republic and festered throughout its existence. The myth was exploited by the Nazis, contributed greatly to their rise, and eventually helped them gain power and establish Hitler’s dictatorship.

Hindenburg and Ludendorff, after August 1918 at the latest, knew full well that the war was lost. But they wanted to avoid the taint of responsibility for that loss. So they tasked a centrist politician, Matthias Erzberger, with the armistice negotiations.  They then testified to a parliamentary committee that the German military had been “stabbed in the back.” This conspiracy theory — initially concocted for the narrow purpose of deflecting from their responsibility for the loss and to maintain their reputations — soon became the rallying cry of right-wing and conservative parties. These parties, including the Nazis, used this myth to delegitimize the new democratic republic that had been created in the wake of the lost war and the revolution that followed.

As Benjamin Carter Hett, whose book The Death of Democracy Zakaria cited in his segment [3], writes:

The idea that the democrats were responsible for the lost war, and that the Treaty of Versailles was the fruit of a democratic conspiracy against the army — a ”stab in the back” — thus began as a lie that the military high command used to excuse its own conduct of the war. Nationalists picked it up to delegitimize democrats. Democrats tended to respond, as the historian Jeffrey Verhey writes, with “that tone of disbelief rational people feel when faced with profound irrationality.” Yet millions of Germans believed in the stab in the back anyway. They didn’t care if it was rational. It fit their deeper ideological outlook, perhaps even their psychological needs. They wanted to believe it. [p. 32]

So a lie that was born with the purpose of retrospectively explaining away the loss of the war quickly morphed into a myth that the Nazis, enabled and supported by conservative and nationalist parties and politicians, could employ to delegitimize and destabilize the young republic. From their earliest days the Nazis used the myth in their speeches and messaging. In their telling, the first German democracy was a creation of Social Democrats, Communists and Jews. The politicians who had created it were not opponents but enemies: traitors and criminals.

Using this blatant lie, the Nazis gained power in the German Parliament, or Reichstag. In the July 31, 1932, elections the Nazis doubled their strength and became the largest party in the Reichstag with 37.4 percent of the vote. In the November 6, 1932, elections, their percentage fell to 33.1 percent. And in the March 5, 1933, elections, the Nazis — after Sturmabteilung (Storm Trooper) terror in the streets — won 43.9 percent of the popular vote, enough to form a Reichstag majority with another nationalist party.

On March 13, roughly six weeks after President Hindenburg had appointed him Chancellor, Hitler established the “Reich Ministry of Volk Enlightenment and Propaganda” under Joseph Goebbels. With this tool at his disposal, and with the skillful use of the new technologies of radio and film, Goebbels and the Nazis repeated and spread the Big Lie until a large segment of the population took it to be the truth.

READ FULL ARTICLE: https://orcascurrents.com/a-stab-in-the-back-of-american-democracy/