Amerika

A book presents an interesting possibility: that America has a culture of defeat regarding racial issues, and therefore is slavishly imitating diversity because it believes it was conquered, probably during the Civil War and Civil Rights era, by ethnic others.

Any time a nation experiences a defeat, it embraces a culture of defeat where it tries to figure out what went wrong and how to borrow the methods of the victors:

Focusing on three seminal cases of modern warfare — the South after the Civil War, France in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, and Germany following World War I — Schivelbusch reveals the complex psychological and cultural reactions of vanquished nations to the experience of military defeat.

Drawing on responses from every level of society, Schivelbusch shows how conquered societies question the foundations of their identities and strive to emulate the victors: the South to become a “better North,” the French to militarize their schools on the Prussian model, the Germans to adopt all things American. He charts the losers’ paradoxical equation of military failure with cultural superiority as they generate myths to glorify their pasts and explain their losses: the nostalgic “plantation legend” after the fall of the Confederacy; the cult of Joan of Arc in vanquished France; the fiction of the stab in the back by “foreign” elements in postwar Germany. From cathartic epidemics of “dance madness” to the revolutions that so often follow battlefield humiliation, Schivelbusch finds remarkable similarities across cultures.

In the Civil War, the entire nation was thrown into warfare over northern manufacturing concerns and a fascination by northern religious radicals with the institution of slavery. After the war, it was clear America could not heal, so we were all defeated together. It seemed the ethnic others won.

The civil rights conflict of the 1950s reflected our WW2 position of being anti-nationalist, and using that, the Left took over. They prioritized the ethnic Other through affirmative action and relentless propaganda which mirrored the Sino-Soviet critique of our racial problems.

Americans began to see themselves as a people defeated twice by diversity, and so they adopted diversity as a religion to stave off feelings of loss and uncertainty.

Tags: culture of defeat, diversity, integration, vietnam conflict