CB: IMO, breeding a pervasive sense of national humiliation was
> >good. We need that again and more of it. For national shame and
> >against national pride.
It didn't seem to do the Germans a lot of good. National humiliation is the other side of the same false coin as national pride. Better to try to somehow dissolve or destabilize the idea of the nation -- generally, a racist idea.
Yoshie Furuhashi:
> The victory of the Vietnamese should have been an occasion for
> celebration for the majority of Americans who had come to oppose the
> Vietnam War, but American defeat doesn't seem to have brought much
> joy to anti-war & even leftist Americans. Why no celebration? ...
There didn't seem to be much to celebrate. Two million Vietnamese dead, maybe, millions more maimed, their country wrecked, fifty-odd thousand Americans dead, hundreds of billions of dollars taxed out of the workers and poured down the rathole, the perps mostly unscathed and unrepentant, a pervasive sense of general dishonor and disgrace with which even the opponents and critics of the war were tainted.
Of course, an American victory would have been worse still. Victory is death. They should be mourned, not celebrated.