Hope meets reality

This is the December version of the political threads that we have had since the end of August—I can't believe that it has been that long!

Word of the month: Dolchstoßlegende

Dolchstoßlegende means literally "dagger stab legend (or myth)". The phrase has its origin in the aftermath of WWI:
Reactionaries of various stripes claimed that Germany lost the war not on the battlefields, but on the home front, where socialists, communists, liberal democrats, or Jews (i.e. all the usual bugaboos of the German right at the time) "stabbed the fighting troops in the back" by sabotaging the war effort (through strikes, anti-war writings etc.). More on the topicality of this term in my first comment...