If you grow wealthier and more powerful over time, I don't consider that a loss.
a war is a war. You getting what you want eventually does not mean the martial conflict is changed.
Pyrrhic victory isn't a victory. If you kill all the other guy's soldiers, but he ends up with the power and you don't, you didn't win.
The USSR eventually fell, so the whites won the civil war.
The USSR fell at the hands of the anti-commumists that mobilized against it at birth. A seventy year struggle culminated in their defeat.
Similarly, white supremacists have run this country lock, stock, and barrel from the day Colombus and his successors landed through to the modern political moment. The Civil War and Reconstruction were brief interludes that failed to break the stride of a movement spanning centuries.
Lots of schlubs died along the way, but their deaths are always sacrifices that folks in power have been willing to make.
If you want to talk about real sustained victory, look to China and Cuba and Iran. Hell, even France has a better track record than the United States when it comes to obliterating dynasties.
You are conflating ideological conflicts with wars. The USSR being defeated does not mean they lost the civil war. That is a ludicrous conception of what a war is. Well the sun will one day explode so really no one has won a war before.
Class conflict undergirding everything is NOT the same thing as literal martial warfare. That's just not what those terms mean, no poetic dramatic framing is gonna change the material reality of what a war is.
The Civil War was over who would rule Russia, the Soviets won through and through. Falling down the line does not change the objective victory in the war.
Also since we seem to love not defining terms; who is "you" that is growing wealthier? A class and a country are not the same thing. Profiteers make off no matter who wins, but wars are fought ostensibly over specific goals and come to a conclusion when both sides cannot or will not fight in that specific armed conflict. The upper class makes bank no matter what, but there is still a losing and winning side unless it is unresolved. If you are fighting over who will rule and someone wins and rules for about 7 decades, they won that war. They may lose ideologically in the long run, but wars are not measured in the esoteric.
You go to war with an objective, if that is achieved then you won. Future conflicts are future conflicts. Napoleon eventually being defeated does not mean the French Republic lost all the wars of the coalitions retroactively. Napoleon's line reclaimed the throne again later, does that mean he won the Napoleonic wars? No he lost, he died in exile his empire lost its holdings, and France would never achieve his set goals again. Larger conflicts exist within history, but they don't somehow change the material context of a war. We do not divide wars like that, no one, no historian, no materialist, no Marxist, no one.
Good study of war aims and goals and how we define them.
https://books.google.com/books?id=ETDtAwAAQBAJ
If you grow wealthier and more powerful over time, I don't consider that a loss.
Pyrrhic victory isn't a victory. If you kill all the other guy's soldiers, but he ends up with the power and you don't, you didn't win.
The USSR fell at the hands of the anti-commumists that mobilized against it at birth. A seventy year struggle culminated in their defeat.
Similarly, white supremacists have run this country lock, stock, and barrel from the day Colombus and his successors landed through to the modern political moment. The Civil War and Reconstruction were brief interludes that failed to break the stride of a movement spanning centuries.
Lots of schlubs died along the way, but their deaths are always sacrifices that folks in power have been willing to make.
If you want to talk about real sustained victory, look to China and Cuba and Iran. Hell, even France has a better track record than the United States when it comes to obliterating dynasties.
You are conflating ideological conflicts with wars. The USSR being defeated does not mean they lost the civil war. That is a ludicrous conception of what a war is. Well the sun will one day explode so really no one has won a war before.
Class conflict undergirding everything is NOT the same thing as literal martial warfare. That's just not what those terms mean, no poetic dramatic framing is gonna change the material reality of what a war is.
The Civil War was over who would rule Russia, the Soviets won through and through. Falling down the line does not change the objective victory in the war.
Also since we seem to love not defining terms; who is "you" that is growing wealthier? A class and a country are not the same thing. Profiteers make off no matter who wins, but wars are fought ostensibly over specific goals and come to a conclusion when both sides cannot or will not fight in that specific armed conflict. The upper class makes bank no matter what, but there is still a losing and winning side unless it is unresolved. If you are fighting over who will rule and someone wins and rules for about 7 decades, they won that war. They may lose ideologically in the long run, but wars are not measured in the esoteric.
You go to war with an objective, if that is achieved then you won. Future conflicts are future conflicts. Napoleon eventually being defeated does not mean the French Republic lost all the wars of the coalitions retroactively. Napoleon's line reclaimed the throne again later, does that mean he won the Napoleonic wars? No he lost, he died in exile his empire lost its holdings, and France would never achieve his set goals again. Larger conflicts exist within history, but they don't somehow change the material context of a war. We do not divide wars like that, no one, no historian, no materialist, no Marxist, no one.
Good study of war aims and goals and how we define them. https://books.google.com/books?id=ETDtAwAAQBAJ