Buzzflash, certainly one of the most valuable sites on the internet, has people that scour the web for articles. Buzzflash then posts dozens of them a week. One in particular caught my eye today, and I think it needs your attention. It is a brief history, appearing in Harper's and written by Kevin Baker, of what has been a recurrent conservative theme since the Second World War: the idea that domestic enemies have stabbed America in the back repeatedly.
Baker points out that betrayal stories have a long history in our species, forming the core of much of our literature. He also reminds us of the way the German far right used the myth of the "Back Stab" to gain power in post World War I Germany. The Back Stab story was that the German armed forces hadn't really been defeated in the war. Rather, they had been undermined by powerful domestic forces within Germany itself, especially Jews and Socialists. It was all complete idiocy of the worst kind, utterly false in every respect, but it gave millions of Germans a strange sort of comfort. They could blame their country's failure on someone else, a convenient target that would explain, with terrible simplicity, why they had failed. It became a psychological crutch to them, absolving them of responsibility for the disaster that had befallen their country.
In a similar sort of way, the political right in this country has persistently--and successfully--used betrayal stories not only to gain political power but to shape the whole cultural narrative of American life. Baker offers compelling, well-documented examples of right-wing myths that have been pushed into our nation's historical consciousness:
--At Yalta, FDR supposedly "handed over" eastern Europe to Stalin, egged on by State Department traitors who manipulated the sick and dying Roosevelt into delivering the east Europeans into Soviet tyranny. (FDR made no such agreement, by the way, and there is little the U.S. could have done to dislodge the Red Army from Poland, Hungary, and other eastern European nations without launching an all-out war for which the American public had zero enthusiasm.)
--In the late 40s and early 50s, Communist sympathizers in our government handed over China to Mao and refused to let Douglas MacArthur win the Korean War. (Yes, there were some Communists in the U.S. government, but the idea that they were driving U.S. policy in Asia is laughable.) Not only Joseph McCarthy but Richard Nixon built careers around these myths.
--In the 1960s and 1970s, it was the Vietnam war protesters that undermined our troops, spat on returning war veterans, and caused us to lose in Vietnam. (Amazing assertions, especially the overwhelmingly false notion that Vietnam veterans were regularly abused, ignored, or subjected to hateful activities.)
--Enlarging these themes into domestic politics, it is "ungodly", "immoral" liberals that are undermining our country by promoting the "homosexual agenda", attacking the "traditional family", trying to destroy free enterprise, waging "class war", and trying to destroy religion (witness their fiendish attacks on Christmas!!).
You see where this is going, don't you? The new backstab myth is being created. If the United States fails in Iraq, it won't be the fault of the conservatives that pushed us into war and then handled it with disastrous incompetence and dishonesty. It will be our fault, those who think the war was a disastrous mistake, for not "supporting the troops". The outlines of this new variation of the myth are being created even now.
Read this compelling article. For those who are older and versed in our nation's modern history, it will remind you of many things you may have forgotten. If you are younger, it will be an education to you--and a warning of what the radical right is preparing to throw in our faces once their disastrous policies have--once again--failed.
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