Member-only story
Stabbed in the Back for a Lost Cause
The similarities between Trump’s election narrative mirrors both Nazi and Confederate rhetorics
The Nazis came to power, in no small part, because of a conspiracy theory that is known to History as the Stab-in-the-back myth. Not only did the Nazi promote and distribute the theory, but they also made it an integral part of their lore.
According to Hitler and other proponents of this theory, Germany was on the verge of winning WWI on the battlefield (spoiler alert: it wasn’t) when it was betrayed on the home front by a cabal of Republicans and Jews.
The Nazis referred to the government officials who had signed the Armistice as the November criminals and depicted the surprisingly modern and liberal Weimar Republic (who saw the emergence of the first gay rights movement) as
a morass of corruption, degeneracy, national humiliation, ruthless persecution of the honest ‘national opposition’ — fourteen years of rule by Jews, Marxists, and ‘cultural Bolsheviks’
Wikipedia
This perceived and propagandised persecution of the honest national opposition can also be…