Opinion | Trump Contrives His Stab-in-the-Back Myth - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...p-biden-conspiracy-theory.html
trump myth stab-in-the-back betrayal conspiracy theory
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The word Dolchstosslegende is hard to pronounce but important to understand. It translates as “stab-in-the-back myth” and was a key element in the revival of German militarism in the Weimar years. Even modestly educated Germans know exactly what it denotes and the evil it entails.
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The main point of the exercise is no longer (if it ever seriously was) to find a judge, governor or other pliable instrument to deny Joe Biden the presidency.
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It is to deny the legitimacy of the Biden presidency, of the electoral system that gave him the office and of the federal and judicial systems that turned Trump’s legal challenges aside.
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In a famous passage of “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” Hannah Arendt noted how “Mass Propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.”
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it had the double advantage of bucking up a humiliated nation’s pride and playing to its gut prejudices.
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There’s a difference. The success of the first rests on a plausible interpretation of facts. The success of the second requires a psychologically astute understanding of the people to whom the lie is peddled
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52 percent of Republicans think the president “rightfully won” re-election, at least according to a Reuters Ipsos poll from last week. In other words, a majority of Republicans will believe literally anything Trump says.
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Nor does it matter that the lawyer Sidney Powell painted an anti-Trump conspiracy so vast that it seems to have embarrassed Giuliani and would have made the ghost of Joe McCarthy proud. What matters is that Powell’s list of enemies — from the director of the C.I.A. to the former Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez — hit all the right notes for the president’s die-hards.
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The Dolchstosslegende worked because so many Germans were happy to believe what, at some level, they also knew wasn’t true.
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it had a clear aim that a growing number of Germans shared, which was to overthrow the struggling Weimar Republic by claiming that it was founded on treason. In other words, it wasn’t just a conspiracy theory. It was a political weapon with the revolutionary aim of destroying democracy itself.
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the aim is clear: to treat the Biden presidency as a product of treachery by a political order that is so comprehensively corrupt that it will require far tougher means than the ones Trump employed to root out.
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What I am saying is that this modern-day Dolchstosslegende, like surf pounding against a bluff, abets future demagogues by eroding public confidence in democratic institutions, until, unprotected, they collapse.