Epilogue: On Falling
以下是《戰敗文化：結論》章節的條列重點與文章提出的核心問題整理：
🧩 一、條列重點摘要
1️⃣ 冷戰結束作為「最後的戰敗」
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作者將蘇聯解體視為20世紀最後一次「偉大的戰敗」。
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1989年柏林圍牆倒塌至1991年蘇聯旗降下，是無戰場、無流血卻仍屬「戰敗」的歷史轉折。
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這場戰敗來自內部瓦解而非外部征服，因此被延遲地理解為失敗。
2️⃣ 冷戰的本質：全球內戰的第三階段
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歷史學者恩斯特‧諾爾特（Ernst Nolte）稱之為「全球內戰」的延續。
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1861–1945年的「全面戰爭」轉變為以經濟競爭為主的冷戰模式。
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軍事不再是決定性力量，經濟生產力成為戰爭的真正核心武器。
3️⃣ 經濟勝利與「全球化」的誕生
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西方在冷戰中以經濟優勢取勝，首次出現「由經濟主導的勝利」。
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經濟被賦予宗教與民族的地位，取代上帝與國家，成為新的信仰。
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「全球化」是經濟的戰爭化新名稱，帶著「復仇成功」的傲慢與幻覺。
4️⃣ 9/11：商人之塔的墜落
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世界貿易中心的倒塌象徵「商業文明的戰敗」。
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相較於五角大廈，雙塔的毀滅更具象徵性：
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代表「經濟力量」的傾覆。
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取代傳統軍事堡壘成為新的「失敗神話」。
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9/11是現代版「特洛伊陷落」：從戰士堡壘轉向商人高塔的墜落。
5️⃣ 「墜落」的象徵與文明的輪回
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「墜落（fall）」象徵從權力高處的急劇下滑。
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「墜落者」的紀念碑象徵人類試圖再度「舉起」失落的榮耀。
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人類文明的「上升與墜落」成為歷史永恆的節奏。
6️⃣ 美國的越戰創傷與報復循環
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越戰後的美國陷入「否認敗戰」的心理狀態。
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1980年代以軍備競賽與海灣戰爭掩蓋創傷。
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9/11後的「反恐戰爭」如同舊怨重演，是報復與補償的政治劇本。
7️⃣ 戰敗文化的最終轉化
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「戰敗」不再只屬於戰場，而滲入經濟、科技與文化領域。
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戰敗的象徵從「軍事敗北」→「經濟危機」→「信仰崩潰」。
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現代世界已進入「無聲的戰敗時代」——沒有勝者，只有墜落與再起的循環。
❓二、文章提出的主要問題
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當戰爭不再以軍事形式出現時，「戰敗」還意味著什麼？
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冷戰是否標誌著「非軍事戰敗」的新形態？
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經濟、文化、信仰的瓦解是否構成新的「敗亡」？
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經濟取代戰爭成為勝負的主戰場，是否也埋下新的危機？
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全球化是否只是「資本主義的報復」？
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當經濟取代宗教與國家成為信仰時，人類還能如何反省？
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9/11為何成為新時代的「墜落神話」？
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為何「商業之塔」比「軍事堡壘」更具象徵力量？
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9/11是否揭示了文明轉向「商業敗亡」的時代？
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美國的戰敗文化是否正重演歐洲的錯誤？
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美國的反恐戰爭是否等同於法國的「報復主義」或德國的「否認敗戰」？
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「越戰創傷」是否仍主導了美國的外交心理？
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戰敗文化的最終啟示是什麼？
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是否存在「文明的學習型戰敗」？
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戰敗能否孕育真正的現代性與反省？
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或者，人類注定在「上升與墜落」的神話中循環？
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是否希望我將這三份（法國、德國、結論）整合成一份「歐洲與現代戰敗文化比較分析表」，並附上跨國問題意識（如美國與中國的延伸）？這樣可以直接作為論述或投書草稿的研究骨架。
Let us turn now to the last great defeat of the twentieth century, the collapse of the Soviet Union, which began in 1989 with the breach of the Berlin Wall and concluded two years later when the hammer and sickle was removed from the Kremlin. Russia and the East European nations subsequently experienced almost all of the phases of defeat, from the dreamland state with its hopes for salvation and desire to imitate the victors, to disillusionment, moral outrage, and retreat into the bastion of nationalism. Today, historians routinely make comparisons between the Soviet Union of 1991 and the German empire of 1918. Yet quite some time passed before contemporary observers recognized the demise of Communist Europe as the defeat that it was.
There are various reasons the historical turning point of 1989–91 was not immediately acknowledged as a downfall. That it was prompted by internal decay without an external catalyst certainly played a role, as did the suddenness and lack of violence of the Soviet regime’s collapse. Then, too, after forty years, no one had expected a decisive outcome to the Cold War. The idea that the Cold War was not a genuine war had, over the course of almost half a century, become deeply embedded in people’s minds; the conflict, they felt, was the avoidance of war, the prevention of World War III. In truth, though, the Cold War was the third phase of the global civil war (as historian Ernst Nolte called it) that had commenced in 1917. Because of the post-1945 threat of mutual atomic annihilation, however, the third phase differed from the earlier stages in that it was not waged by military means. The Cold War stood in the same relation to the “total wars” of 1861–1945 as eighteenth-century cabinet warfare did to the unleashed fury of seventeenth-century religious wars: it was a successful strategy of self-preservation adopted by military cultures that otherwise threatened to destroy themselves.
While the Cold War seemed to break radically with a long tradition of armed conflict between competing states, it was at the same time the logical extension of tendencies in warfare since the nineteenth century. Without exception, the total wars of the modern age were ultimately decided by economic rather than military factors. The military was always just the tip of the sword: the weapon’s real heft resided in the industrial capacity of the societies involved. The decline of the art of military strategy in the twentieth century was fully in keeping with the transformation of warfare into a competition between destructive systems of production, or, to recall the image from the battle of Verdun, industrial blood pumps. Warfare became a phenomenon in which human and material resources were delivered for destruction to the battlefield until only the economically more robust side—the victor—remained standing.
In a refinement of the pattern, the Cold War skipped over the actual process of destruction on the battlefield, pitting economies against one another directly. Perhaps its most important innovation was the liberation of the economy from a subordinate role as supplier to the military and its promotion to a power in its own right with decision-making prerogatives. From the Marxist perspective, the economy had, of course, always played this role, if in a surreptitious, subterranean way. The West’s victory in the Cold War was, however, the first to be achieved explicitly by the economy in its own name. Perhaps it is for this reason that the economy received a new nom de guerre: globalization. The casino-like euphoria of the 1990s betrayed clear signs of hubris or, more fittingly, smug satisfaction at having avenged free-market capitalism’s worst defeat: the Great Depression and the economy’s subsequent subjugation to Keynesian state regulation.
The growth in the economy’s power and prestige after 1990 was not confined to its functional efficiency but came to touch areas of society previously monopolized by religion and nationalism. If people looked toward anything in the hope of salvation or in fear of damnation, it was increasingly the economy. Having lost faith in God, the nation, and utopian politics, they credited the economy with the power both to create paradise on earth and to destroy life as they knew it. In the West, the threat of collective extinction attached no longer to war—which had in any case become a long-distance media event—but rather to the economy, with its double threat of devastating the environment and wiping out jobs. In her book The Economic Horror, Viviane Forrester even referred to the unemployed as the “defeated.”
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ACCORDINGLY, ON SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, the attack on the Pentagon was greeted with considerably less panic than that on the World Trade Center—a fact that can of course be explained by the divergent scale of destruction. Compared with the apocalyptic ruins and the deaths of thousands in Manhattan, the hole ripped in the side of the Pentagon had an almost old-world quality, like damage done to a medieval castle. But the function and symbolic import of the two sites also shaped the public reaction. Despite the shock of the event, it could hardly have been inconceivable to Americans that the nation’s military headquarters should have been a target for attack. The strike against the twin towers was far more traumatic. In its lifetime, the World Trade Center stood as an example of 1960s shoe-box architecture, impressive primarily for its astounding lack of fantasy and aesthetic worth. But with the towers’ collapse, two other dimensions were made visible: the sheer violence of their physical mass, evident in the wreckage, and the extent of the hatred that had chosen them as symbols to be destroyed. September 11 contained something of the fall of Troy, the first of all defeats, with which we began this book. Only in 2001, it was not the destruction of the warriors’ fortress that carried the symbolic power but the fall of the merchants’ towers.
In every culture, height—and its architectural expression, the tower—stands for power, control, lordship, and mastery. These qualities are symbolically elevated, just as homo sapiens, the only creature that walks erect, rises above the rest of the animal world. Conversely, those who lack power are put down, subjugated, subordinated, and subjected to the power of others. On the rotating wheel of fortune of victory and defeat, the positions of above and below are always being exchanged. The winner rises up in the world, while the loser falls. All Western languages use the verb to fall to distinguish a heroic warrior’s death from ordinary dying. And the monuments erected to those who have fallen in battle are an attempt to lift them back up; borne aloft by angels and eagles, the body of the mortally wounded warrior becomes a majestic gesture of reelevation.
While the notions of rise and decline summon up grand yet gradual movements up and down the scale of power, the fall evokes a sudden and drastic plunge. Edward Gibbon avails himself of precisely this distinction in the title of his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The timeless fascination with falls from power explains why the dominant image of the end of the Soviet Union is not the stately lowering of the red flag with its hammer and sickle over the Kremlin in 1991 but the dramatic collapse of the Berlin Wall two years before. This predilection also explains why the enduring image of the end of the Vietnam War is not the 1973 photograph of the Americans and North Vietnamese signing the cease-fire but the grainy television pictures of the chaotic evacuation of the American embassy in Saigon two years later. In this case, too, there was a time lapse between the official historical event and the image by which it was remembered and transmitted. Surely, the hold that those apocalyptic final scenes from Saigon have over people derives in no small part from the starring role of the helicopter in this act, for that vehicle symbolized the Vietnam War much as the machine gun and the tank represented World Wars I and II, respectively. The helicopter had seemed the perfect weapon for a guerrilla war, a means of close mastery of events on the ground from above, but the images of a hectic rooftop evacuation ultimately made a mockery of any such American superiority.
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AFTER THE AMERICAN withdrawal from Southeast Asia, there was some debate as to whether Vietnam had been a true defeat or simply the first war the United States had not won conclusively. Then in the late 1970s, the Iranian hostage crisis—along with a failed rescue attempt (by helicopter!) in the Iranian desert—pointed up the extent of America’s post-Vietnam malaise. Nothing made the country’s disorientation more evident than the welcome accorded to the embassy workers on their return in early 1980. Not freed in a daring commando operation but handed over by the enemy in an almost patronizing gesture, the returning hostages were nonetheless celebrated with a ticker-tape parade in New York, much like the victorious heroes of two world wars.
The Vietnam debate was never settled; rather, it was buried under the Reagan-era defense buildup, the double victories of the Cold War and the Gulf War, and the reestablishment of America’s universally acknowledged military, commercial, and cultural hegemony over the rest of the world. But earthquakes and aerial bombardments often reveal what lies beneath—for instance, the ruins of earlier, fallen cities—and it is possible that the destruction of September 11 uncovered the suppressed remains of Vietnam.
Though some European pundits spoke of an American defeat in the immediate wake of the terrorist attacks, the wreckage of the twin towers and the damage to the Pentagon were no more a defeat than was the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Unlike 1941, however, the attack on Manhattan was perpetrated not by a clearly defined territorial state with a regular army but by a shadowy adversary, impossible to combat directly with military means. The great crater where the World Trade Center once stood provides a most telling image for the state of the post–September 11 American psyche: a vacuum crying to be filled with an act of military revenge for which there is no addressee.
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COMMENTATORS HAVE UNANIMOUSLY agreed that the terrorism of September 11 is a departure in that it operates with all the anonymous modernity of the system whose symbol it so aptly chose to attack: global capitalism. Furthermore, with their advanced grasp of modern technology, the engineer-terrorists managed—perhaps unintentionally—to achieve a mega-effect entirely on a scale with the gargantuan appetite of that economy.
It is true that the economic and technical environment of the West is as much the natural element of the new brand of terrorists as the rural populations of the Third World were for earlier guerrillas. The nation attacked, though, is still limited to a traditional response: to nominate another nation as a terrorist or rogue state so as to locate the specter of terrorism within a concrete territorial enemy, a target. Thus the United States responded by taking action against Afghanistan, much as thirty years earlier when, tired of fruitlessly battling the Vietcong guerrillas, the United States trained its sights on North Vietnam. Indeed, the Bush doctrine of preventive military strikes eerily resembles the anti-Communist domino theory, that earlier expression of the horror of falling. Could it be that the decades of relative American peacefulness and readiness to cooperate that followed the defeat in Vietnam were merely an interim period, akin to the Weimar Republic, with its pleasant illusion of a pacified Germany? Or, as with the French cries for revanche for Sadowa, that America’s post–September 11 war fever is really a response to an earlier and unresolved defeat?
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