Tales from the Dolchstosslegende, Part XXIV

HTML Mencken over at Sadly, No! has this quote from genocidal Canadian basement-dweller Adam Yoshida:

The Knife and the Back

From the very beginning what has frightened me most about the Global War on Terrorism is this: that the United States and the West simply do not, in their present condition, have the stomach to bring this war to a successful conclusion. I have never really been given a satisfactory answer to the question, “how do you win a war against the enemy in front of you while ignoring the knife-wielding enemy behind you?”

At every step, the left – and its many allies on the rest of the political spectrum – have sought to obstruct all efforts to win this war. At every turn they’ve handcuffed our forces and circumscribed our options.

[…]

rather than join in the effort to defeat this enemy, certain treasonous elements within lurking here at home have seized the opportunity for their own petty political advantage – or, in certain cases, out of genuinely-felt but nonetheless objectively evil moral principles.

The enemy within acts as a form of heavy artillery on behalf of the wider enemy conspiracy.

[..]

When liberals betrayed us during Vietnam and stabbed our soldiers and our allies in the back, the result was millions of dead. Not that many people noticed because it happened in a far away land about which we know little. But, if we let them pull off their betrayal this time, the millions of dead will be in our own cities. They will come from our own towns and our own homes.

Which leads to the inevitable Yoshida-riffic eliminationist conclusion:

What is required today is what has been required from the very beginning: an all-out and total offensive against the enemy on all fronts and without the least shred of compassion or restraint.

The operating premise of S,N! is that the batshit loopy wingnuts of the right blogosphere tend to express, in its purest form, the murderous insanity that underlies so much right-wing thought, yet which "respectable" conservative pundits are too polite to make explicit. And it's a good premise.

But we can take it a step beyond where HTML Mencken takes it. Discussing Yoshida's ravings, he argues that "it takes Adam Yoshida to say in the plainest way what Glenn Reynolds, Rush Limbaugh, Redstate.com White Trash, Mark Steyn, Jim Pinkerton, Patrick Bateman Stephen Green, Marie Jon’, Michael Barone, and, especially, Jeff Goldstein really mean."

But why stop at the bloggers? This Dolchstoss nonsense goes all the way up to the oh-so-respectable think tanks and journals of the besuited, "intellectual" right. To Noemie Emery of the Weekly Standard. To Jonah Goldberg of the National Review (and the LA Times Op-Ed pages). To Mackubin Thomas Owens, also of the National Review. To the very architects of the "surge" themselves, Kagan & Kristol. To the Heritage Foundation. To the American Enterprise Institute.

The new Dolchstosslegende is not just a pastime of nutty right-wing bloggers. It is a careful and deliberate creation of the the best and the brightest of the conservative movement, an effort by certain of our political elites to avoid blame for their own prodigious failures and incompetencies by portraying their domestic opponents - us - as traitors to the nation. This is not a passing fad; it's a generational battle.

If I seem to harp on the Dolchstosslegende a little too often, it's because I think it is very, very dangerous.

Labels: Dolchstosslegende, Sadly No

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 10:42 AM