As a history geek, I always find it interesting when I stumble upon events from the past that echo to the present. Right now I’m hearing all kinds of echoes around ‘The Big Lie’.
The most obvious and famous is The Stab in the Back. Let’s set the stage. It’s World War I. Germany has invaded Russia, Belgium, and France. After achieving significant success, their drive stalls and the stalemate of bunker warfare commences. This goes on for four years. During this time, Germany is slowly being drained of resources and manpower.
In 1918, after one last failed offensive, the German army effectively collapses. Over the preceding four years, layers of defenses have been built by the Germans in depths of more than 100 miles. These defenses seemed impregnable. However, with the German army collapsing, these defenses are rapidly falling.
Germany is losing the war. The head of the army, Erich Ludendorff, suffers a nervous breakdown. He recovers sufficiently to tell the German civilian government that all hope is lost. An armistice must be negotiated or the country will be destroyed.
The civilian government heeds his warning and negotiates the armistice under ruinous terms. Germany’s war machine is effectively shut down. The resulting oppressive Treaty of Versailles is forced upon the Germans, who really have no choice but to submit.
With the war over and the danger of destruction passed, Ludendorff changed his story. He started claiming that it was the German civilian government that insisted on the armistice. He claimed that the German army was not defeated. It was the German government that betrayed her citizens by ‘stabbing them in the back’ with the ruinous armistice.
The German people, not aware of Ludendorff’s earlier desperate plea and never actually having been occupied by a foreign power (all fighting took place outside their borders) believed this big lie. This led pretty directly to the fall of the civilian government and ultimately to the rise of Hitler and his ardent militarism.
The other historical big lie is the Civil War. After four years of desperate fighting, the Confederacy was decisively defeated. Its land was occupied by the hated Yankees. Its government was in shambles. Its economy was ruined. A generation of men were dead.
The urgent question of the day was, what’s next? How do we re-integrate this third of the nation that had rebelled against our nation and flag?
The answer was The Lost Cause. The premise of The Lost Cause was that the war was just. The Confederacy was justified in trying to secede from the United States. Slavery was a just and merciful institution that served both whites and blacks equally well. In fact, the war wasn’t even about slavery. It was about state’s rights. It was about fighting off an overbearing all powerful North that was trying to exert its will over the Southern states. It was a war that the Southern states fought with honor. They would have prevailed and should have prevailed if it wasn’t for the material might of the North and the overwhelming manpower (the hated ‘mechanics and mudsills’) that the North was able to bring to bear.
In fact, none of this is true (well, except for the fact that the North did have a significant material and manpower advantage). The Southern states seceded precisely because of slavery. If you don’t believe me, simply read the Confederacy Constitution, which is pretty close to a copy of the US Constitution except that the institution of slavery is forever enshrined in it. Read the Confederacy’s Vice President Alexander Stephen’s Cornerstone speech, which was considered the clearest statement of purpose for the rebellion. It explicitly says that the secession was precisely about slavery. Not only was the federal government not oppressing the Southern status, due to electoral systemic inequality (much like exists today with the Republican party), the Southern states held most of the reigns of power. Keep in mind that Lincoln’s platform didn’t even call for the abolition of slavery. He just didn’t want it extended beyond the boundaries of where it already existed. Even this provision was enough to propel the Southern states into rebellion.
Despite this, The Lost Cause narrative carried the day. Southern politicians that had supported secession were able to worm their way back into power. Once in power, they continued on with their previous policies, just under another name. Statues were raised to soldiers that had sworn allegiance to our country but then took arms against it. De facto slavery continued to be practiced. The white power structured survived and thrived.
This narrative carried the day for decades. My favorite example still is Buster Keaton’s silent film The General. It’s based on the true story of Union soldiers (OK, technically scouts) that stole a Confederate train and headed North, wreaking havoc as they went. Ultimately, all soldiers were captured and executed by Confederates. They were the first recipients of the Medal of Honor.
When Keaton remade the film, he was told that it was unbelievable that Northern soldiers could be so brave and that Southerners could be villains. He therefore changed it so that it was a Southerner that stole the train and was the hero. This was directly as the result of entire generations of Americans being brought up with The Lost Cause.
These things seem so unbelievable to me. Clearly the German army was being destroyed. The German civilian government took the only option available to them. Even a cursory reading of history would tell you that the Southern state leaders took arms against the United States of American to defend the right to own human beings.
How can anyone, let alone millions and millions of people, believe such an obvious lie? Not only believe it but in believing it allowed a horrible chain of events to unfold.
This brings us to the current day. In the 2020 Presidential election, Donald Trump was defeated by Joe Biden.
It wasn’t even that close. Voter turnout was the highest in over one hundred years. Biden won by over four percent. He won by more than seven million votes. He won by the same electoral college margin that Trump defeated Hillary Clinton by (a victory that Trump was extremely proud of and often remarked upon).
Yes, there were a couple of states where the margin was close, but even so, most of them were outside the victory margin that would have required a recount. This is not to mention the fact that no state was anywhere close to the 2000 Bush / Gore election results in Florida or the 2004 Bush / Kerry results in Ohio. In both cases, party loyalists called foul, but ultimately the democratic process won out and both Gore and Kerry conceded.
Not Donald Trump. Even now, in April of 2021, he is still crying foul.
This is despite the fact that there is not even a shred of evidence of mass fraud taking place. In an election in which 150 million votes are cast, there will always be a couple of hundred or so questionable votes, but there is no evidence of anything more than that. No, Hugo Chavez did not rise from his grave to malignantly infect electronic voting machines.
Trump’s campaign filed over sixty lawsuits and lost all but one minor one. Trump’s lawyers, out in public crying fraud, once under oath in a courtroom confessed that they found no fraud. A defamation suit has been filed against Sidney Powell, the most fervent of Trump’s defenders. Her lawyers are using the defense that no reasonable person would believe her. Fox News, under threat of a defamation lawsuit, was forced to repeatedly show a video explaining that there was no evidence of fraud on exactly the shows that claimed that such evidence existed. Some states, under extreme pressure, agreed to do manual recounts even in cases where it wasn’t even warranted. Such recounts only nominally changed vote totals.
Even so, the lie persists. Millions of people continue to believe that somehow Biden managed to steal votes from the tens of millions of absentee ballots and the over one hundred thousand polling precincts in our country. A recent poll said that some 55 percent of Republicans believe that the election was stolen or rigged. That is literally tens of millions of people that think that the election was stolen.
So I’m living in a time that I’m quite certain that future historians will consider yet another instance of a big lie. Even living in it, I have to admit that I don’t understand how it’s possible.
What I’m most afraid of is, what will be the ramifications? Already, we have seen our national legislative buildings overrun by a mob threatening to execute our Vice President and our Speaker of the House. Is that the end? I’m afraid not. Because of this lie, what else lies in our future?
dorkenstein 