Prompted by an angry and insightful post at Rising Hegemon, I dug out an article by Kevin Baker, published in the June 2006 issue of Harper's. In it, Baker discusses the venerable right wing myth of the "stab in the back," perhaps most famous as the hyper-nationalist rationalization for German defeat in World War I, and justification for pogroms against various alleged internal enemies during the Nazi period, prominently including leftists, Jews, and gays.
But as Baker points out, the stab in the back myth also has an enduring resonance among the American far right. It was deployed in order to recast the post-war settlement at Yalta as nefarious appeasement by an enfeebled FDR and his allegedly communist and homosexual-ridden administration. It was clearly implied by the "Who lost China" campaign waged by the right wing after the Maoist revolution. During the Korean war, MacArthur's folly in provoking Chinese intervention, and his breathtakingly reckless attempt to compensate by urging nuclear war against China, were recast in terms of the traitorous perfidy of lily-livered, limp-wristed Democrats who would not allow him to "win" the war by escalating it into World War III. And then Vietnam -- an unwinnable war in defense of a thoroughly corrupt and unpopular regime which existed only as the creature of US foreign policy and was expressly designed to frustrate the aspirations of Vietnamese nationalism, a war fought against a determined foe able to sustain literally millions of deaths in order to throw off foreign domination -- all of this reduced to the classic stab in the back narrative as exemplified in Rambo's supremely simple-minded slogan: "Do we get to win this time?" (as if 1-2 million Vietnamese killed by our war machine was somehow the result of us not really trying). Layered on top of this is the still resonant -- if factually unsupportable -- mythology of the wholesale abandonment of American Prisoners of War presumably now populating secret geriatric facilities hidden deep in the Vietnamese jungle (on the MIA myth see various works by H. Bruce Franklin).
These stories of American martial prowess betrayed by Democrats, progressives, Jews and gays, these legends of the dastardly stab in the back, are a common raw material of political myth-making on the American right. In light of this, it would be surprising if this story line wasn't trotted out yet again to account for the many failures of the war on terror otherwise inexplicable to the nationalists and jingos for whom America can do no wrong.
Based upon the relatively limited engagement of the American public with the GWOT, Baker believes the stab in the back story won't get a lot of popular traction this time around. After four years of being called a traitor for opposing this war, I'm not so sure. And as unpopular as the Iraq debacle is now, I ask myself whether the stab in the back myth won't make a strong comeback after the next terrorist attack.
But as Baker points out, the stab in the back myth also has an enduring resonance among the American far right. It was deployed in order to recast the post-war settlement at Yalta as nefarious appeasement by an enfeebled FDR and his allegedly communist and homosexual-ridden administration. It was clearly implied by the "Who lost China" campaign waged by the right wing after the Maoist revolution. During the Korean war, MacArthur's folly in provoking Chinese intervention, and his breathtakingly reckless attempt to compensate by urging nuclear war against China, were recast in terms of the traitorous perfidy of lily-livered, limp-wristed Democrats who would not allow him to "win" the war by escalating it into World War III. And then Vietnam -- an unwinnable war in defense of a thoroughly corrupt and unpopular regime which existed only as the creature of US foreign policy and was expressly designed to frustrate the aspirations of Vietnamese nationalism, a war fought against a determined foe able to sustain literally millions of deaths in order to throw off foreign domination -- all of this reduced to the classic stab in the back narrative as exemplified in Rambo's supremely simple-minded slogan: "Do we get to win this time?" (as if 1-2 million Vietnamese killed by our war machine was somehow the result of us not really trying). Layered on top of this is the still resonant -- if factually unsupportable -- mythology of the wholesale abandonment of American Prisoners of War presumably now populating secret geriatric facilities hidden deep in the Vietnamese jungle (on the MIA myth see various works by H. Bruce Franklin).
These stories of American martial prowess betrayed by Democrats, progressives, Jews and gays, these legends of the dastardly stab in the back, are a common raw material of political myth-making on the American right. In light of this, it would be surprising if this story line wasn't trotted out yet again to account for the many failures of the war on terror otherwise inexplicable to the nationalists and jingos for whom America can do no wrong.
Based upon the relatively limited engagement of the American public with the GWOT, Baker believes the stab in the back story won't get a lot of popular traction this time around. After four years of being called a traitor for opposing this war, I'm not so sure. And as unpopular as the Iraq debacle is now, I ask myself whether the stab in the back myth won't make a strong comeback after the next terrorist attack.
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