Rodrigo Antunes / Lusa
Rui Tavares speaks in parliament, in the solemn session celebrating the 52nd anniversary of the 25th of April
This Saturday, Livre’s spokesperson accused the president of Chega of having cited Adolf Hitler and a Nazi myth in his speech at the formal session on April 25th when he repeated the expression “stabbed in the back” several times, which refers to the “Legend of the Stab in the Back” that defeated the German army.
Speaking to journalists during the traditional descent of Avenida da Liberdade, in Lisbon, to celebrate the Carnation Revolution, Rui Tavares stated that Ventura, in the solemn session commemorating the 25th of April, in Parliament, repeated “a phrase from Hitler four or five times, as if it were nothing”.
“The famous phrase ‘stabbed in the back’‘, is a phrase that comes from the Nazis, and which referred to the First World War and which he used for the Colonial War, as if it were nothing”, he maintained.
At issue is the intervention in Parliament, in which he pointed out those who “praise guerrillas who were killing soldiers Portuguese all over the world” and stated, repeating the expression three times, that these Portuguese were “stabbed in the back”.
A “legend of the stab in the back” was a political myth spread in Germany after World War I, according to which the German army would not have been defeated on the battlefield, but yes internally betrayed by, among others, socialistsBolsheviks and German Jews, having contributed to the rise of Hitler’s Nazi Party.
Rui Tavares considered that there is a escalation not political speech that is to be ignored: “Today he quotes Hitler and the Nazis, everyone pretends they didn’t hearand tomorrow you say or do something even more terrible, and everyone pretends it’s not you.”
Also the PS deputy Eva Cruzeiro criticized the expression used by André Ventura, considering, in a statement this Saturday on the social network ‘X’, that This is not just any “sentence”.
The phrase “refers directly to the Stab legendthe Legend of the Stab in the Back, one of the pillars of propaganda that paved the way for Nazism”, notes the socialist deputy.
“He was systematically used to fuel resentmentfabricate internal enemies and justify the erosion of the democracy of the Weimar Republic. It was central in narrative that Adolf Hitler exploited to come to power”, he criticized.
For the socialist, the leader of Chega I wasn’t making “an innocent rant”but rather the “summon a dangerous political imaginarybased on division, distrust and distortion of history”.
And he concludes: “Anyone who knows history recognizes these signs and know that the democracy is not lost overnightit wears out when discourses that have already proven, in the past, where they lead are normalized. André Ventura openly shows his plan. It is unacceptable.”
What is the Stab legend
The famous “Legend of the stab in the back” that fueled Nazism was a conspiracy theory used by marshal Paul von Hindenburg to exempt itself from responsibility for Germany’s defeat in the First World War, explains .
In the last months of World War I, in 1918, the German military situation was unsustainable, but the generals Hindenburg and Ludendorffthose truly responsible for the failed strategy, refused to take the blame.
When the armistice was signed in November 1918 by the civilian government of the new Weimar Republic, the military took the opportunity to divert responsibility, claiming that they had been “stabbed in the back” by internal traitors.
According to the conspiracy theory, widely spread in Germany after the First World War, the German army had not been defeated on the battlefield, but rather betrayed by civilians in the rearnamely Republican politicians, socialists, communists and Jews — that would have undermined the war effort and forced an unnecessary surrender.
Von Hindenburg’s argument that the revolutionary forces had demoralized and stabbed the Army in the back was propagated by military and royalist politicians, through conservative and far-right newspapersand gained an explosive content that was underestimated by the Democrats, says DW.
Germany was actually defeated militarily. By 1918, the army was exhausted, supply lines were collapsing, and the Allies, reinforced by the entry of the United States, had an overwhelming advantage.
The surrender was a direct consequence of military reality, not of any internal “betrayal,” and the legend was essentially a scapegoat manufactured by military elites to protect their reputation.
