Jews are “the father of all wars.” From The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, to Henry Ford’s The International Jew, to right-wing prophet David Ickes (endorsed by novelist Alice Walker), this monstrous lie always reemerges after being debunked by all decent people.

But how do you get from Jews as fomenters of all wars to Jews as masterminds of all defeats? Perhaps it’s the belief among antisemites that their nations’ defeats are attributable to Jews being the chief “enemy within.”

The classic formulation is the “Stab in the Back” legend (Dolchstoßlegende), formulated in Germany during World War I but seized on after the war by the German Army’s High Command. Germany’s top generals blamed their defeat on the “November Criminals”: civilian politicians, many of them Jews, whom the generals maneuvered into signing the surrender terms of November 11, 1918.

This was the “big lie” — and it would be manipulated by Adolf Hitler to help the Nazi Party seize power in 1933.

The US, it is said, almost never suffers from this complex because Americans have rarely lost wars and are less prone to antisemitism. This is not strictly true.

According to “How the Jews Caused the American Civil War,” a hoary antisemitic indictment still quoted on white supremacist web sites, “The  War of 1812 was instigated by the Rothschilds to force the renewal of their Charter for the Bank of the United States. When this charter was vetoed by President Andrew Jackson in 1836, the Jews …  set up their plan to bring about the Civil War, [to] despoil the wealthy Christian families of the South.”

After the war, the Confederate South was glorified by “Lost Cause” mythology that took the form of another sometimes-antisemitic “Stab in the Back” legend.

Henry Ford blamed “German-Jewish bankers” for World War I and Russia’s communist revolution. Then American antisemites blamed Jews for World War II, during which Jewish traitors supposedly undermined the war effort through espionage and appeasing Soviet Russia.

The Vietnam War was sometimes blamed on “the best and the brightest” Jews in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. After the US’s final ignominious defeat in 1975, Henry Kissinger was blamed. He and Richard Nixon wrote memoirs suggesting that the US was “stabbed in the back,” though not by Jews. And “Jewish neocons” were held responsible for the interminable wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Today, some conspiracy-minded insurgents wearing “Camp Auschwitz” and other hateful t-shirts believe the US is in a second civil war, beginning with the November 2020 presidential election.

Cast as internal traitors, Jews — led by conspirators George Soros and ZOG (the “Zionist Occupation Government”) — are deemed perpetrators of November’s “stolen election.” At a December Proud Boys rally and at the Capitol coup attempt, a t-shirt was emblazoned with the logo “6MWE,” short for “6 Million [Jews] Wasn’t Enough.”

As David Duke wrote just after the November election: “The Jewish Supremacist-controlled media and entertainment industry plays a crucial role in helping to set the stage for this ongoing conflict — while, behind the scenes, dedicated Jewish Supremacist activists work full-time at inciting and radicalizing African-Americans…”

Whatever America’s future misfortunes, fault will surely be found with the Jews.

Historian Harold Brackman is coauthor with Ephraim Isaac of From Abraham to Obama: A History of Jews, Africans, and African Americans (Africa World Press, 2015).

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