INKTOBER DAY 15: DAGGER

15. Oktober 2023  •  1 Minuten

Reactionaries appeal to the shame of weakness when they style themselves as victims of an alleged stab-in-the-back conspiracy.

Historian Richard McMasters Hunt argues in a 1958 article that the myth was an irrational belief which commanded the force of irrefutable emotional convictions for millions of Germans. He suggests that behind these myths was a sense of communal shame, not for causing the war, but for losing it. Hunt argues that it was not the guilt of wickedness, but the shame of weakness that seized Germany’s national psychology, and “served as a solvent of the Weimar democracy and also as an ideological cement of Hitler’s dictatorship”

— Wikipedia article on the Stab-In-Back Myth (German: “Dolchstosslegende”)

(→ Inktober drawing challenge 2023)