BuzzFlash Reviews
The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation (Revised Edition with new preface and afterword)
By Tom Engelhardt
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This seminal book to understanding America's "Victory Culture" has just been issued as an updated and revised edition. If you want to understand why the war in Iraq is just about "winning" and "victory" no matter what the reality on the ground in Baghdad might indicate, this is the book for you.
In fact, America has been built on the need to conquer an enemy, any enemy.
After reading "The End of Victory Culture," one might understandably wonder if the U.S. power structure and dominating cultural narrative can exist without actual or created enemies.
With the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S. power elite -- epitomized by PNAC --
were lost because they desperately needed someone to pummel in order to feel "virtuous." Of course, the real motivation might be that "to the victors belong the spoils of war."
Englehardt, who edits TomDispatch.com, leaves us wondering whether the American military-industrial complex -- and its supporters in Congress and the war -- can live in a world at peace. War is the pretext for their existence in many ways.
If there is no enemy, it's necessary to invent one. Or if it is necessary to avoid capturing a real enemy -- Osama bin Laden or the anthrax terrorist, for example -- in order to continue waging an endless war, that is part of the "Victory Culture" too.
The "Victory Culture" must always seek new conquests. It can never be content being at rest.
"Victory Culture" provides a broad historical context that enlightens us as to how we have arrived at continuing an unjustified war merely because we believe ourselves too noble and privileged to "lose" it.
From the publisher:
"In a substantial new afterword to his classic account of the collapse of American triumphalism in the wake of World War II, Tom Engelhardt carries that story into the twenty-first century. He explores how, in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, the younger George Bush headed for the Wild West (Osama bin Laden, "Wanted, Dead or Alive"); how his administration brought "victory culture" roaring back as part of its Global War on Terror and its rush to invade Saddam Hussein's Iraq; and how, from its "Mission Accomplished" moment on, its various stories of triumph crashed and burned in that land.
"This book is an autopsy of a once vital American myth: the cherished belief that triumph over a less-than-human enemy was in the American grain, a birthright and a national destiny. The End of Victory Culture is a compelling account of how America's premier story - of inevitable triumph against all odds - underwent a dizzying decomposition from Hiroshima to Iraq. As Tom Engelhardt reconstructs a half-century of the crumbling borderlands of American consciousness, he also offers a striking portrait of a post-Vietnam, and then Iraq-mired nation living an afterlife amid the ruins of its national narrative."
An online reviewer:
"This book came out in 1995, and early on in the book, Engelhardt makes a well-worn but important point: "with the end of the Cold War and the loss of the enemy, American culture has entered a period of crisis that raises profound questions about national purpose and identity." Ponder that passage, and what's going on today in the world.
The main thing to ask today is, do we really need to have an enemy and a war to unite the people together? Peace and harmony can do the same thing. We do not need victory-for-one-side culture anymore. What we need is victory-for-all culture."
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