Soldiers’ desires to craft a narrative out of the war experience encouraged them to look towards the future. This chapter focuses on another central feature of soldiers’ psychologies: their hope. Infantrymen invested themselves in visions of victorious peace, which supported their morale and encouraged resilience. Nonetheless, their hopes for peace changed over the course of the war. At the end of 1914 and 1916, soldiers remained confident that the next year’s campaigning would bring the war to a successful close. However, their experiences in 1917 left them uncertain that victory was even possible. Censors noted that men began considering the likelihood of a negotiated peace during this period. Nevertheless, the German offensives of 1918 restored men’s faith in victorious peace. Soldiers gleaned immense psychological benefits from their investment in a peaceful future. Hope was a coping mechanism fed by memories, dreams, and fantasies that provided a vision of an alternative world devoid of war: something the men could fight for. Infantrymen developed personal life goals, which instilled their service with a depth of meaning that was itself sustaining. A variety of things fuelled their hope and optimistic reasoning: religion, prisoners, war souvenirs, and rumour all fed hope. Significantly, too, most of these soldiers believed that the German state had to be defeated were there ever to be a lasting peace. More subtle psychological mechanisms were also essential: optimism, certainty, language, acculturation, and the sense of success. So long as men were able to conceive of the war as just, necessary, and winnable they were generally willing to endure the stresses of service.

In chapter 2, we explore the grounds for the Lamb’s selection as God’s chosen king. Common in Greek and Roman ideologies was the notion that kings acquired power by accumulating military victories. Dubbed a “theology of victory”, this ideology dovetailed with the ideology of divine election of the king insofar as the military victories that precipitated royal investiture were imagined to be the result of divinely-aided assistance on the battlefield. Thus, military victories were imagined to be proof of the divine election—and thus legitimacy—of the king. Revelation adopts some of the parameters of the theology of victory, including the notion that a “victory” was required in order to legitimate the Lamb’s investiture as king. At the same time, Revelation radically refashioned this ideology by claiming that the Lamb’s victory consisted not of a military conquest but rather Jesus’ own bloody death. This subversion of the ideology of victory functioned as a counter-narrative to imperial claims of the divine election of the emperor.

In chapter 2, we explore the grounds for the Lamb’s selection as God’s chosen king. Common in Greek and Roman ideologies was the notion that kings acquired power by accumulating military victories. Dubbed a “theology of victory”, this ideology dovetailed with the ideology of divine election of the king insofar as the military victories that precipitated royal investiture were imagined to be the result of divinely-aided assistance on the battlefield. Thus, military victories were imagined to be proof of the divine election—and thus legitimacy—of the king. Revelation adopts some of the parameters of the theology of victory, including the notion that a “victory” was required in order to legitimate the Lamb’s investiture as king. At the same time, Revelation radically refashioned this ideology by claiming that the Lamb’s victory consisted not of a military conquest but rather Jesus’ own bloody death. This subversion of the ideology of victory functioned as a counter-narrative to imperial claims of the divine election of the emperor.

Announcing victory in the Trojan War, the Herald has been seen as a cheerful character, thoroughly enjoying life. Why, then, does he dwell on his own grave from the moment of his arrival? Why does he attempt to silence lament and, unsuccessfully, any speech about his fallen companions? The Herald never directly mentions the afterlife and insists on treating death as the end of all ties to life. Nevertheless, his approach to his own death and to the war dead serves as indispensable background for the rest of the trilogy. The Herald’s traumatized approach to warfare and death contrasts with his official function. His attempt at guiding social memory excludes the dead as impinging on society’s profit (kerdos) or glory from war. He reckons them out of the account with the language of calculation and voting. We thus see individual and societal values being formed in response to death as closure, in ways the Oresteia will later overturn and complicate. Moreover, the Herald provides the first mention of heroes as worshipped beings, of Hades, and of the “unseen” forces that affect human fate.

The early caliphate adopted the political organisation predominant in the late antique Middle East – imperial monarchy, sanctioned by divine power – but with a distinctively Islamic ideology of leadership involving kinship, piety, victory and justice. The prime location for the performance of royal power was the court, particularly for caliphal accessions or successions. The warrior rulers filling the caliphal vacuum after 945 adopted Islamic means of legitimisation, including oaths of loyalty, honorific titles, robes of honour, and being named on coinage and in Friday prayers; while the ʿulamaʾ increasingly claimed spiritual authority as ‘heirs of the Prophet’. The new Turco-Mongol elites from the thirteenth century on found a role for military strongmen, incorporating the nomadic virtues of strong leadership, good fortune and royal genealogy into a fluid mixture of ideologies. Performance of power encompassed the hajj, hunting parties, public sessions dispensing justice and rituals designed to bind the palaces of the court more closely to the towns wherever they were based.

This chapter examines victory in the war as an object of commemoration in late-Stalinist Moscow with an eye toward the paradoxical features of postwar commemorative culture. In particular, the analysis attempts to square a persistent, all-Soviet variant of the war narrative with the simultaneous public veneration of key events and personalities from the prerevolutionary Russian past. Rather than an ideological symbiosis, which seamlessly linked the war and the celebration of tsarist and other prerevolutionary accomplishments in a patriotic “double axis,” the chapter argues that postwar Soviet patriotism is better understood as an assemblage of disparate and contradictory, and at times highly fragmented, themes and images. Where the celebration of the Russian national past functioned to redirect and contain nationalistic impulses lest they disrupt the hierarchical integrity of the friendship of the peoples, representations of the war as a pan-Soviet event provided an alternative means of social mobilization amid the early Cold War, one that offset appeals to ethnic difference with a vision of a homogeneous Soviet people.

This chapter explores ideological production and commemoration in the late Stalinist era through the lens of the fledgling myth of victory in World War II. Specifically, the chapter pursues the afterlife of Stalin’s oft-cited toast to the Russian people in both Russian and non-Russian contexts to tease out its rather inconsistent and ambiguous connection to the official war narrative. Far from a consistent Russocentric ideological rubric, this chapter shows that the Stalinist leadership refused to commit to an exclusively Russocentric understanding of the war. Rather, it allowed an “internationalist” paradigm to coexist with its Russocentric counterpart in discursive tension throughout the era. As Stalin’s toast was eliciting mixed reactions, party ideologues shaped a divergent set of postwar narratives geared toward mobilizing local populations along contrasting ideological planes. So long as the core ingredients of victory – Stalin’s leadership, party guidance, the Soviet system, the unwavering heroism of the Red Army and citizenry – remained in place, the myth’s articulators were free to promote a range of competing narratives, from accounts emphasizing a homogenous collection of Soviet people bound latterly in “friendship” to those stressing Russian “elder brotherhood" and ethnic diversity.

This chapter considers the period of the war cult’s maturation (1960s–80s) as the victory myth came to eclipse alternative modes of patriotic expression. The chapter argues that late-socialist war commemorations, in line with the Soviet people doctrine, continued to dilute particularistic depictions of the Russian nation at war while channeling Russocentrism toward the contained outlets of prerevolutionary and early Soviet history, culture, and modernization narratives. But while authorities forced the most egregious claims about the Russocentric essence of victory underground, these ideas persisted at the margins of late-socialist culture, as well as outside the RSFSR, much as they had after the war. As the war cult grew in prominence, party-affiliated Russophile intellectuals occasionally contested the internationalist orientation of the dominant victory myth. In response, the Party promoted the war victory in a way that maximally overlapped with certain Russophile concerns (patriotism, love of the homeland, respect for tradition, anti-Westernism, etc.) while simultaneously enforcing the victory myth’s ideologically orthodox, pan-Soviet framing.

This chapter examines the festival’s stories, which explained why it was being held, who its multiple founders were and why a new cult was added at the end of the sixth century. These stories focus on the gods’ victory over the Giants as the reason for the festivities and on the founders Erichthonios and Theseus. They also explain the importance of the pyrrhiche and the apobatic contest, while another important narrative concerns the cult of Harmodios and Aristogeiton, the two men identified by Athenians as the slayers of the tyrant and the bringers of democracy. Collectively, these narratives make the Panathenaia a unified occasion as a victory celebration commemorating the gods’ martial success against the Giants, and they also bring out the importance of autochthony, democracy and what being an Athenian entailed; what narrative was told at what moment depended in part on what aspect was being emphasised. Together, these stories mark the Panathenaia as the most important occasion for working out and displaying Athenian identities.

As the end of the war approached, inter-Allied competition came more clearly to the surface, as did Italian Adriatic ambitions. This cast a shadow on the Peace Conference, and particularly on Anglo-Italian relations.

This chapter covers the formal end to the war in both Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, and makes some general conclusions about the nature of World War II and its outcome. Post-war meetings from 1945 to 1973. Historians debate the events of the war. Winners and losers: medium- and long-term gains and losses by the various participating countries. The role of each of the major Allied countries, and their interdependence. Relative importance of military and economic forces in the outcome of the war. Political factors, most notably the extravagant ambitions of the leaders of the Third Reich. The long-term transformative effect of Allied victory.

Learning how to think about limited war is a critical skill for American political and military leaders. Currently, the US is failing to win its war in Afghanistan, a war now being fought to preserve the Afghan government. The US has been fighting for seventeen years, and there is no indication that victory is at hand. One of the biggest rèasons for this is the Taliban’s possession of sanctuary in Pakistan. As long the Taliban has this, and is willing to keep fighting, the US cannot guarantee the survival of Afghanistan’s government. Additionally, the most likely type of war in the immediate future – and the most likely one that the US will face – is a war fought for limited aims. India and Pakistan have bitter, unresolved border issues, and China is a revisionist regional power determined to become a global one. The US cannot afford to continue making the same mistakes in regard to so-called limited wars that it has made for the last seventy years.

Beginning with Harry Truman and the Korean War, America’s so-called “first limited war,” too often US leaders have refused to admit that the US is at war, been unclear about what they want, and failed to seek victory. Helping drive this is broken ideas about limited war that intertwine all US thinking about war and poisoned the US ability to fight any war. We need a clear foundation for critically analyzing our wars. The only thing that provides this is the political aim. Do we seek regime change, or something less than this? Anything less is a limited political aim. Our definitions of and ideas about limited war are generally based upon the military means used, something too subjective to provide a basis for analysis. You must understand the aim to understand the nature of the war. If you don’t understand the nature of the war, it is hard to figure out how to win it. Cold War works on limited war also taught us to not seek victory, which injured the US ability to do just this. If you aren’t trying to win the war, you aren’t trying to end it. This leaves us with “forever wars.”