The Culture of Defeat : On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery

Rating:
Summary: Sore Losers Make Bad Medicine
Review: THE CULTURE OF DEFEAT, an appraisal of the sociocultural similarities apparent in the American South after the aftermath of the Civil War, France after the Franco Prussian War, and Germany after WWI, is an extraordinary performance. Much more than mere sociology or social psychology, it ranges with bracing erudition and insight across the realms of intellectual history, cultural criticism, and political and economic history, synthesizing across these disciplines to elucidate its main thesis: that these "losing sides" went through nearly the same stages of national consciousness as they sought to come back from defeat, that each put forth an explanation of their failure in similar terms, and each, in the fullness of time, came back as more powerful after their defeats.

Dreamworld, scapegoating, revenge -- these are just a few of the parallel stages these defeated states went through. For instance, Germany, France, the American South, all cultivated a "dreamworld" in the immediate aftermath of their defeats, a period of time where leaders are blamed for misleading the people into a war that could not be won, a time when the defeated nation looks to the victors for recognition of their true goodness and their unfortunate victimization by a corrupt elite. In licking their wounds, new more powerful "us vs. them" discourses were created and served to bind the defeated together in seeking their redemption among nations. The Southernization of U.S. politics, for example, over the past 25 years is emblematic of how the South has indeed risen again. In the short term, it took only a few years (with the rise of the Ku Klux Klan as the enforcement arm of Southern elites) to rewrite the Reconstruction codes as Jim Crow laws and the "lawful" suppression of the African American to be de facto reinstituted against the early injunctions of the victor. As Schivelbusch points out, in a terrible irony, the Nazis looked to these codes for instruction as they planned the demonization and destruction of the Jews.

Unlike Kubler-Ross' famous (and in danger of becoming as trite and omnipresent as the 12 step program) stages of grief, nation states do not apparently move toward acceptance. In the nation state new discourses must be hammered together out of the wreckage of defeat, and new goals and national purposes must be forged out of the ashes. One assumes it is difficult to mobilize a citizenry under the banner of acceptance. Schivelbusch, to this point, interestingly, takes issue with the notion that the cycle of defeat and revenge was broken at last after the Second World War through American munificence with Japan and Germany. Schivelbusch suggests that a form of revenge has indeed been in play in the economic arena.

In his conclusion, Schivelbusch notes it is not much of a stretch to suggest that these same patterns may hold true in the wake of the current U.S. war and that a new, more virulent culture of defeat may be created in the Middle East. In less interesting and compelling fashion, other recent books suggest this has already come to pass. Importantly, what Schivelbusch does is show how Western states, too, use the same language of dreamworld and revenge, and shows how they have embarked on the same paths of retribution and domination.