Daily Blague

If you haven't been urged by another blogger to read Kevin Baker's essay, "Stabbed in the Back!: The past and future of a right-wing myth," in the June 2006 issue of Harper's, then let me do so. Sadly, it is not online - Harper's content rarely is - and I hesitate to say that the essay is worth the $6.95 newsstand price, so let me urge you to subscribe today. Harper's comes right after The New Yorker in importance for me; it is always thoughtful, and never ideological. It has a leftish lean (in today's skewed climate, anyway), but it does not have a leftish agenda (as, say, The Nation does, quite openly). The monthly Essay almost always tells me something that I didn't know, or puts together pieces that I've been fiddling with in vain.

Kevin Baker's essay is a deconstruction of the Siegfried legend. In Die Götterämmerung, the final opera in Wagner's Ring tetralogy, the hero, Siegfried, is stabbed in the back with a spear. His killer, Hagen, has learned from the deviously betrayed Brünnhilde, that Siegfried is invulnerable except at one spot on his back, where a fallen leaf prevented Fafner's gushing blood from soaking his skin. (See "Achilles Heel.") Hagen has also treacherously set Siegfried up so that he will appear to deserve to die. The truth comes out soon enough, and Hagen is swept away by the flooding Rhine at the end.

According to Mr Baker, demagogues on the right have made use of the Siegfried legend to explain national setbacks since the end of World War I. While noble and tragic in Wagner's opera, the legend takes on a distinctly kitschy feel when put to work in a democratic setting. The nation is seen as a strong and virtuous youth. It is beset by internal enemies who know its secret vulnerabilities. Thus the nation is strong and at the same time weak. It is heroic; it is also victimized. Betrayal is made possible by the possession of speical knowledge. That citizens should be willing to buy into such an image of the nation tells us something about contemporary democracy. One would think that the adolescent and none-too-bright hunk would be an inadequate symbol of a complex body politic, and it is, but it appeals to voters who see themselves participating in democracy not as old, wise, and deliberate, but rather as young, untested, and at least a little bit hotheaded. Add to that the Anglophone mistrust of intellectual brilliance, and you have the perfect environment for rabid conspiracy theories. 

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. Since the end of World War II it has been the device by which the American right wing has both revitalized itself and repeatedly avoided responsibility for its own worst blunders. Indeed, the right has distilled the tale of betrayal into a formula: Advocate some momentarily popular but reckless policy. Deny culpability when that policy is exposed as disastrous. Blame the disaster on internal enemies who hate America. Repeat, always making sure to inscrease the number of internal enemies.

That's the start of Mr Baker's essay. He ends it on a quietly breathtaking note, citing an address in which George W Bush asserted that the Yalta Agreement was one of the greatest wrongs of history. This has been a claim of the right ever since the Iron Curtain went up after World War II: looking for a culprit, the right forgot its own intransigent opposition to foreign engagements (prior to Pearl Harbor) and blamed Roosevelt for handing Eastern Europe to Stalin on a platter. As an American myth, the "treason" at Yalta is a classic stab in the back (specifically, an ailing Roosevelt was stabbed by Alger Hiss, of all people). The funny thing about Mr Bush's address is that his audience was Latvian: he was in Riga at the time (May 2005).

The ultimate irony of Bush's perpetuating the 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 that he was apportioning them equal shame with Stalin and Hitler for the greatest calamities of the twentieth century.

In so far as Latvia was wronged at Yalta, America itself loosed Hagen's spear. Leave it to our fine president...