Ben Wilson

That is the visible sign of the success of November 8th, that in its wake, the youth will rise up like a storm tide and unite.

So just think about that for a moment.

He is turning a failed coup in a collection of dead boys, of dead young men, into a founding myth, into a sacred origin story.

This is the work of a political genius.

And he did.

He turned this failure, this abject failure, into a sacred moment, into a part of a founding myth.

One of the things that you can see this in is there were these swastika flags, right?

The famous Nazi flags, the circle with the swastika inside.

And they were parading these flags everywhere.

during the butch, when they get fired on by the police.

And so some of these flags get splattered with blood.

Some of them fall and are dipped in blood of people who are bleeding out on the ground.

So you have these bloody flags.

And these flags would be declared sacred.

And at later Nazi rallies, these flags would be touched to new swastik flags to dedicate them, to set them apart, so to speak.

Like...

Swastika flag wasn't like an official flag until it had touched one of these flags present at the Beer Hall Putsch that had been stained with the blood of martyrs.

So Hitler does an excellent job of myth-making around this, of putting narrative around it so that he controls the story so that it's not just an abject failure, but it is the start of something and the culmination of a genuine commitment to national revitalization.

Okay, so he gives these speeches.

He kind of makes his myth out of it.