Yes, that's it, exactly, we were stabbed in the back.
-German General Erich Ludendorff, fall, 1919, Adlon Hotel interview with General Sir Neill Malcolm, head of the British Military Mission in Berlin.
Remember.
-Last words of King Charles I to Bishop William Juxon just before his execution outside the Banqueting House in Whitehall, January 30, 1649
Following are our terms. We will not deviate from them. There are no alternatives. We shall brook no delay.
-Section 5 of the Potsdam Declaration,(Proclamation Defining Terms for Japanese Surrender), Potsdam, Preußen, July 26, 1945.
No terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted.
-Brig. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, U.S.A. to Brig. Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner, Sr., C.S.A., before Fort Donelson, Tennessee, February 16, 1862
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Summary: As we find ourselves hunkering down in the face of the Covid-19/coronavirus pestilence, and as many of us find ourselves dusting off, or purchasing anew, copies of Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, we also find ourselves witnessing the protracted death throes of Independent Vermont Senator Bernard Sanders’s doomed primary campaign for the presidency of the United States. We also find ourselves watching Sanders intransigents trying very hard to fabricate a congenial “we wuz robbed,” stab-in-the-back narrative, a Dolschstoßlegende to try to explain away Bernie’s unexpectedly lackluster performance. There are still those alive in their great age who can remember how the German right eagerly trafficked in such “we wuz robbed,” stab-in-the-back, Dolschstoßlegende fantasies in their ultimately successful attempt to discredit and destroy Germany’s Weimar Republic. It cannot be allowed to happen another time.
Cathedral City March 26, 2020 –- as we shelter in place, curling up with old, dusty, or recently purchased copies of Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, a book whose reading ought to frighten the shit out of every one of us, our enforced staycations have given us the unwonted leisure of witnessing the protracted death throes of Independent Vermont Sen. Bernard Sanders’s primary campaign for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States.
A week ago, I suggested in this blog that the Sanders campaign might possibly be in what amounted to surrender negotiations with the Biden campaign to work out terms for some kind of graceful Sanders withdrawal in a fashion that would enable the party to unify quickly and find the cohesion necessary to defeat the treasonably incompetent, but well financed and organized, Russian asset Donald Trump.
I appear to have been somewhat in error. Apparently, Sanders and his claque of redeless, millennial, cargo shorts communists have resolved to fight it out to the bitter end, notwithstanding the damage they may do to the Democratic Party and to the country in the process. Already, however, Gospodin Sanders and his campaign have begun fabricating a repetition of their 2016 “we wuz robbed,” stab-in-the-back, Dolschstoßlegende to try to explain away Gospodin Sanders’s unexpectedly lackluster performance in the 2020 Democratic primaries.
These attempts by Sanders intransigents to fabricate again their “we wuz robbed,” stab-in-the-back, Dolschstoßlegende of 2016 bear a disturbing resemblance to those of the German right wing to fabricate a similar narrative against the Weimar Republic after the end of the Great War.
Indeed, the structural reasons for Sanders’s well-nigh inevitable loss are similar to those underlying the defeat of the German Reich in the Great War, and are just as ineluctable. Imperial Germany believed that its superior resources, military prowess, and kultur, coupled with the famous discipline that resulted in one wag describing the Germans as a people who, if they wanted to start revolution by seizing the train stations, would all line up to purchase tickets, would see it successfully through a European war. Similarly, Sanders and his campaign staff believed with a kind of touching, almost childlike faith that the small, hard core of Sanders’s followers would be enough to take him first past the post in a badly fragmented Democratic primary.
What Sanders and his remarkably redeless followers did not realize was that their zeal, their toxicity, and their combative approach to the Democratic primary electorate would alienate that electorate and engender a Democratic coalescence around the person of a more viable candidate, Joe Biden.
The sheer combative pugnaciousness of Sanders’s followers, their misogyny, their condescending attitude toward loyal Democrats, their eager and uncritical repetition against Biden of Trump/Kremlin talking points, and they are more or less constant freakouts at even the slightest criticism of the sour, superannuated shtetl Stalinist schnorrer, all of these raised up a tsunami of anger and disdain, rather akin to the reaction of what French Prime Minister René Viviani pointedly called the civilized world against the German torching of the world-famous library of Louvain/Leuven on August 25, 1914.
This incendiary act was sought to be justified by the government of the Reich as a necessary act of Schrecklichkeit, a kind of Clausewitzian terror intended to frighten the Belgian people into submission. Instead, the burning of the library at Louvain and the other terroristic acts that accompanied the German Rape of Belgium steeled the resolve of the Belgians and imposed upon the Reich a moral odium it was never able to shake off.
The moral odium of the burning of the library at Louvain, the execution of Edith Cavell the following year, and the mass executions that took place, particularly of young men of military age, aroused in Europe, and later in the United States, a fighting spirit against Germany that was not extinguished until the armistice of 1918.
Unfortunately, the defeat of Imperial Germany did not produce the desired Wilsonian outcome of a comprehensive European peace. Within days of the conclusion of the armistice, and its signature by Matthias Erzberger, the German right was already excoriating the government of the new Weimar Republic as the Novemberverbrecher (November criminals) and busily promulgating what became known as the Dolschstoßlegende, a stab-in-the-back narrative designed to exonerate the German Armed Forces in particular and the German right in general from responsibility for Germany’s defeat.
Indeed, the German Dolschstoßlegende may be said to have gotten its “official” start in a fall, 1919 interview between Gen. Sir Neill Malcolm, of the British Military Mission in Berlin, and former German general staff chief Gen. Erich Ludendorff, who, responding to a question from Gen. Malcolm concerning the responsibility for Germany’s defeat, exclaimed “[Y]es, that's it, exactly, we were stabbed in the back.”
A century later, with the Sanders campaign losing steam and the Biden campaign apparently going from strength to strength as the forces of moderation gain ascendancy in the Democratic Party, the prefervid votaries of Vermont Senator find themselves falling back upon Gen. Ludendorff’s view of events. They are unwilling to accept two well supported hypotheses for Vice President Biden’s unexpectedly strong performance in the Democratic primaries from and after South Carolina.
The first of these hypotheses is that Democratic primary voters have been more favorably impressed with the quondam Vice President than they have with a pugnacious, self-righteous, un-self-aware, contentious, self-described democratic socialist from one of the whitest states in the Union. Joe, who has the distinct historic advantage of having been vice president to America’s first African-American president, and who also has the advantage of not demanding from his supporters absolute ideological purity on every issue, has an ability to connect with electorates of color that Bernard Sanders does not. Joe also has an ability to empathize with people that Sanders, who sees people largely as ideological abstractions, also appears to lack.
The second hypothesis stems from, and is supported by, the ineluctable fact that both Sanders and his followers tend to be offputting. As has been noted extensively, by abler analysts that I, Sanders’s failure to grow his base, to rely upon a small, hard core of ideologically committed, pugnacious, followers, many of whom have severe anger and misogyny issues, also put off millions of more moderate Democrats who are not only tired of the treasonable incompetence of the Trump administration, but are also tired of the relentless angry, Marxist posturing from the Sanders campaign.
Add to that the ill concealed misogyny of the Vermont Senator and his followers, exemplified in his dismissal of Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, when Gospodin Sanders airily discounted Sen. Warren’s candidacy by stating that a woman could not be elected president, and further exemplified by his and his followers’ eager, unceasing, and uncritical repetition against Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, and Warren herself of the Trump campaign’s talking points in 2016 against Hillary Clinton, and it is not difficult to see why women and moderate men would be flocking to the notoriously tactile Joe Biden, even if Joe does have a propensity for gaffes that send the #metoo people into orbit.
Finally, the other bit of evidence that supports the second, “Sanders and his base are unbelievably offputting” hypothesis lies in the equally eager, unceasing, and uncritical repetition by the Sanders campaign and the Senator’s followers of a widely debunked “Joe has dementia” narrative taken straight from the talking points and agitprop of Donald Trump and the Moscow Kremlin.
It is common knowledge that Vice President Biden suffered from an appalling childhood stutter. As a southpaw, growing up in a world of northpaws, I, too, suffered from a childhood stutter, albeit far milder and less intrusive than that which afflicted the former Vice President. I overcame it when the hormones of my queer puberty kicked in, but when I broke my left wrist several years ago, and had to take up writing with my right hand, it manifested itself again. My revenge, like that of many other members of the Irish diaspora, was to take the tongue of the conqueror and make it so completely my own that I gained a reputation for having what the Irish would call “the gift of the gab,” and, since revenge is a dish best savored ice cold, I cemented that revenge by taking a 780 verbal on my SATs.
I thus reject the Sanders/Trump talking point that the sequelae of Vice President Biden’s stutter, which can sometimes creep up on all of us sometime stutterers and induce the occasional verbal gaffe or misstep, are a sign of incipient dementia. I also find that the Sanders campaign’s repetition of such a talking point reflects a serious lack of moral compass. Indeed, I consider it tantamount to Donald Trump’s mockery of New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski at a 2015 rally, when Trump poked fun at the reporter’s arthrogryposis, a debilitating disability of the joints.
To make fun of someone’s disability, and to imply that that disability connotes mental limitations or the onset of dementia is simply immoral. Trump was wrong to of done it to Serge Kovaleski, and the Sanders campaign and his supporters are equally wrong to have done it, and continue to do it, to Joe Biden.
Thus, the data supporting the “Sanders and his campaign are unbelievably offputting” hypothesis are clear, convincing, and beyond reasonable doubt. Add to that the Sanders campaign’s solipsistic, un-self-aware unwillingness to acknowledge incipient defeat, and their insistence upon nurturing aggrieved memories, as if King Charles the Martyr had whispered “remember” into their collective ear as he was being led to execution, imposes upon them a moral odium from which, like Imperial Germany after the burning of the library in Louvain, they may never escape.
The time is at hand for the much-maligned Democratic National Committee to issue to Sanders an ultimatum, couched in the same uncompromising terms as the Potsdam Declaration addressed to Japan in July, 1945 “Following are our terms. We will not deviate from them. There are no alternatives. We shall brook no delay.”
Joe Biden, love him, like him, or loathe him, is the prohibitive favorite of the Democratic Party to be its nominee for president of the United States. The Sanders people need to get their asses in line, get with the program, and loyally support the Party’s nominee. They need to stop presuming upon the good nature of the Biden Democrats, and to understand that a point is at hand at which, as Gen. Grant wrote to Gen. Buckner on that chilly February morning in 1862 before Fort Donelson, “[N]o terms except an unconditional and immediate surrender can be accepted.” We can brook no delay.
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Paul S. Marchand is a lawyer who lives in Cathedral City and practices law in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. He is a recovering politician, having served two terms on the Cathedral City city Council, and more years than he cares to think about on the Riverside County Democratic Central Committee. He was all in for Hillary in 2016, and is all in for Joe this time around. The views contained herein are his own, unless you find them congenial, in which case, they can be yours, too.
