Humiliation in War
As a factor of political and social instability, to lose a war is perhaps the most obvious form of humiliation, but the United States has never really lost a war, at least not in the classical sense where the national sovereignty is impugned and one nation finds itself subject to another. In each of our three major wars, our own Civil War, the first World War, and the second World War, there was a clear victor in the classical sense. The North prevailed over the South, and thenceforth the South became something a subject people, politically reintegrated into the union, while remaining culturally distinct. There is much that can be said about our Civil War, and much has been said. Suffice it to say that the painful lessons learned during our own period of reconstruction have not been fully overcome, now almost two centuries later, as exemplified by the contentious battle over the heritage represented by confederate statues in confederate states. The ...