http://harpers.org/archive/2006/06/0081080Stabbed in the back! The past and future of a right-wing myth
By Kevin Baker (June 2006)
(some quotes from the article follow and I've added emphasis to certain sections so you can get the important idea quickly.)
"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."
"The stab in the back first gained currency in Germany, as a means of explaining the nation's stunning defeat in World War I."
The article describes how this syndrome began in America with the right, sensing an opportunity, claimed that FDR stabbed us in the back at Yalta where he supposedly gave away Eastern Europe. Of course in the end we got it back without any Vietnam-style casualties.
For the next 50 years, the right would continue this path from McCarthy to Nixon. From the W. Bush years to now. But the irony is at the end of the article which is simply incredible:
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. Bush's pandering was directed instead to the nations he was visiting, in a region that still battens on any number of conspiracy theories. Why he should have so denigrated his own country to a few small Eastern European nations might seem a mystery, until one considers that this is the “new Europe” that Bush has solicited for troops for his Iraqi adventure . . . and where he appears to have found either destinations or conduits for victims of “extraordinary rendition,” en route to where they could be safely tortured in secrecy.
An American president, wandering the halls of Eastern European palaces, denounces his own nation in order to appease his hosts into torturing secret prisoners. Our heroic age surely has come to an end.