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This is what Bush, Cheney and the Republicans are attempting to do to Kerry and to all the Democrats. The GOP is trying to use the old Nazi trick of saying the liberal opposition WANTS to lose the war and help the terrorists. It's called "Dolchstosslegende" or
Stabbed in the Back! As with the Nazis, it is a reprehensible attempt to cover up a disastrous foreign policy:
DolchstosslegendeThe official birth of the term itself possibly can be dated to mid 1919, when Ludendorff was having lunch with a British general Sir Neil Malcolm.
Malcolm asked Ludendorff why it was that he thought Germany lost the war. Ludendorff replied with his list of excuses: The home front failed us etc. Then, Sir Neil Malcolm said that "it sounds like you were stabbed in the back then?" The phrase was to Ludendorff's liking and he let it be known among the general staff that this was the 'official' version, then disseminated throughout German society. This was picked up by right wing political factions and used as a form of attack against the SPD-led early Weimar government, which had come to power in the German Revolution of November 1918.... Barth traces the first documented use to a centrist political meeting in the Munich Loewenbraeu-Keller on November 2, 1918, in which Ernst Müller-Meiningen, a member of the Progressive coalition in the Reichstag, used the term to exhort his listeners to keep fighting:
'As long as the front holds, we damn well have the duty to hold out in the homeland. We would have to be ashamed of ourselves in front of children and grandchildren if we attacked the battlefront from the rear and gave it a dagger-stab.' ("...wenn wir der Front in den Rücken fielen und ihr den Dolchstoss versetzten.")
Barth also shows that the term was popularized when the patriotic German newspaper Deutsche Tageszeitung cited a December 17, 1918 Neue Zürcher Zeitung article that summarized two earlier articles by British General Maurice with the phrase that the German army had been 'dagger-stabbed from behind by the civilian populace' ("von der Zivilbevölkerung von hinten erdolcht."). (Maurice later disavowed having used the term himself.) Thus Barth shows that the term was in common use long before the apocryphal Ludendorff-Malcolm conversation.
The charges that the left-wing had been complicit in Germany's defeat drew heavily upon figures like Kurt Eisner; a Berlin born Jewish German who lived in Munich. He had written about the illegal nature of the war from 1916 onwards and he also had a large hand in the Munich revolution until he was assassinated in February 1919. The Weimar Republic under Friedrich Ebert violently suppressed workers' uprisings with the help of Gustav Noske and Reichswehr General Groener, and tolerated the paramilitary Freikorps forming all across Germany.
In spite of such tolerance, the Republic's legitimacy was constantly attacked with claims such as the stab-in-the-back. Many of its representatives such as Matthias Erzberger and Walther Rathenau were assassinated, and the leaders were branded as "criminals" and Jews by the right-wing press dominated by Alfred Hugenberg.German historian Friedrich Meinecke already attempted to trace the roots of the term in a June 11, 1922 article in the Viennese newspaper Neue Freie Presse. In the 1924 national election the Munich cultural journal Süddeutsche Monatshefte published a series of articles blaming the SPD and trade unions for Germany's defeat in World War I (the illustration on this page is the April 1924 title of that journal, which came out during the trial of Hitler and Ludendorff for high treason). The editor of an SPD newspaper sued the journal for defamation, giving rise to what is known as the Munich Dolchstossprozess from October 19 to November 20, 1924. Many prominent figures testified in that trial, including members of the parliamentary committee investigating the reasons for the defeat, so some of its results were made public long before the publication of the committee report in 1928.
The Dolchstoß was a central image in propaganda produced by the many right-wing and traditionally conservative political parties that sprang up in the early days of the Weimar Republic, including Hitler's NSDAP. For Hitler himself, this explanatory model for World War I was of crucial personal importance. He had learned of Germany's defeat while being treated for temporary blindness following a gas attack on the front. In Mein Kampf he described a vision at this time which drove him to enter politics. Throughout his career he railed against the "November criminals" of 1918 who had stabbed the German Army in the back....
Other wars have been viewed as winnable but lost due to some sort of homefront betrayal. For example,
similar ideas emerged in the United States in the latter stages the Vietnam War, when counter cultural movements were similarly interpreted as peopled by "degenerates" or as being secretly manipulated by international Communist forces. These claims evolved into the idea of the so-called "Vietnam Syndrome", according to which US foreign policy was crippled by the withdrawal from Vietnam. However, others believe that this "syndrome" is a myth.The July 14, 2006 issue of Harper's magazine has a article by Kevin Baker arguing that the myth should not be applied to the current war in Iraq:
Who could possibly believe in a plot to lose this war? No one cares that much about it. We have, instead, reached a crossroads where the overwhelming right-wing desire to dissolve much of the old social compact that held together the modern nation-state is irreconcilably at odds with any attempt to conduct such a grand, heroic experiment as implanting democracy in the Middle East. Without mass participation, Iraq cannot be passed off as an heroic endeavor, no matter how much Mr. Bush's rhetoric tries to make it one, and without a hero there can be no great betrayer, no skulking villain.Nevertheless, some have applied a 'stab-in-the-back' theory to the Iraq War. For example, Baker notes that
talk radio host Rush Limbaugh accused Illinois Senator Dick Durbin of "giving aid and comfort to the enemy," i.e., treason. Accoding to Baker, President Bush's deputy chief of staff Karl Rove said: "Al Jazeera now broadcasts the words of Senator Durbin to the Mideast, certainly putting our troops in greater danger. No more needs to be said about the motives of liberals." According to Baker, Bush said: "These baseless attacks send the wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy that is questioning America's will...As our troops fight a ruthless enemy determined to destroy our way of life, they deserve to know that their elected leaders who voted to send them to war continue to stand behind them.".http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolchstosslegende From the Kevin Baker article "Stabbed in the Back?":
And yet,
a convincing national narrative, though it may be the sheerest, most vicious fiction, can have incredible staying power—can perhaps outlast even the nation that it was meant to serve. It is ironic that, even as support for his war was starting to unravel in May of 2005, George W. Bush was in the Latvian capital of Riga, describing the Yalta agreement as “one of the greatest wrongs of history.” The President placed it in the “unjust tradition” of the 1938 Munich Pact and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which together paved the way for the start of World War II in 1939. Bush's words echoed his statements of three previous trips to Eastern Europe, dating back to 2001, during which he had pledged, “no more Munichs, no more Yaltas,” and called Yalta an “attempt to sacrifice freedom for the sake of stability,” a “bitter legacy,” and a “constant source of injustice and fear” that had “divided a living civilization.”
The ultimate irony of Bush's perpetuating this ageless right-wing shibboleth is that for once it wasn't intended for home consumption. The Yalta myth has finally lost its old magic, here in historically illiterate, contemporary America. Nor did Bush make any special attempt to let his countrymen know he was apportioning them equal blame with Stalin and Hitler for the greatest calamities of the twentieth century.
http://www.harpers.org/StabbedInTheBack.html
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