The Dead-ender American Right uses 1920's German rhetoric

I'm glad that Josh Marshall sees this also. When the Right-wing starts a war and it goes badly south on them, they can't just chalk it up as an effort gone bad and move on. They are really emotionally invested in their wars, and instead of admitting they are lost they have to find a scapegoat to blame. We are seeing this now with the Dead-ender Republican war-supporter right-wing.

What I'd like to focus on though is the increasingly clear and no less disturbing trend for the president's defenders to ape the tactics, rhetoric and strategy of the post-WWI German revanchist right, which laid the groundwork for and in many respects evolved into the Nazi party.

An inflammatory comparison? Yes. But the inflammatory nature of the comparison shouldn't scare us into ignoring how strong the similarities are. You see it in the explicit 'stab in the back' rhetoric and the effort to cover up their own authorship and prosecution of the role by blaming their own failures on the critics of the war.

And then perhaps the most telling sign, from an American perspective: As the dead-ender right's plans and dreams about Iraq come under greater and greater strain from the alternative universe of reality, and as the president's popularity wanes further and further, there's a growing tendency for them to think about and write about domestic American politics in terms of violence and extra-constitutional action.

Every proposal that might end the war in Iraq on a positive tone (there are none the offer to "win" the war there) depends on a successful Iraqi government taking control of Iraq and bringing peace and stability to that nation. Yet there is no hint that the Iraqi government will ever become the government of more than the "Green Zone." The Saudi Arabians have given up the expectation that the Maliki government will succeed.

The Dead-ender Right-Wing is refusing to recognize the reality in Iraq and instead trying to sell the fiction that the war in Iraq has been lost because of the powerless rhetoric of criticisms of the war here in America. This is the classic "We lot because we were stabbed in the back by the" Socialists Liberals rhetoric used by the German right wing and ex-military after WW I.

The fact is that the last two years of WW I were fought under the total command of Germany by Ludendorf and Hindenburg, they tried everything they could, and when the final, last-ditch effort in Spring of 1918 failed they realized that the war could not be won, so they (the Generals, not the government) surrendered.

Iraq is as unwinnable for the Americans today as was "The Great War" for the Germans in 1918. But the right-wing which in both cases was responsible for starting the two wars refuses to take any responsibility for their own actions. Instead the search for domestic traitors who stabbed the nation in the back was (and is) used to avoid responsibility by those truly responsible.

More from the John Marshall article:

As the war for faux-democracy looks more and more like a debacle, the lure of authoritarianism at home becomes greater and greater for the war's dead-end defenders. And as redeployment looks more and more likely, they have to keep raising the stakes on the consequences of doing so. Apparently our whole future, our honor, destiny, certainly our safety from the Iraqi insurgents who will restart the insurgency in the US -- all of this is in the balance. The stakes must keep rising because that is, paradoxically, the only way for them to avoid taking responsibility for their failures.

This is a fantasy, and like most right-wing political fantasies, it is nasty and self-serving. But like the similar right-wing inspired military fiasco in Vietnam, this one will ring through American politics for the next generation.

Where is Buffy the Vampire-Slayer? Now that her show has been canceled she should have plenty of free time. We need her and her stakes to impale in the hearts of the right-wing dead-ender "Undead" before they again rise up to try to kill everyone around the Hellmouth at Sunnydale and in the rest of America.