> There was an article a while ago that said that American history since the civil war made much more sense if you assumed the South won, and made a reasonable case for them actually winning the peace, even if they technically lost the war.

Do we have enshrined slavery and a system of states' rights so strong that the national-level government apparatus is vestigial? No? Then the South didn't win. This is awful revisionist history for the author to sound "smart" purely through cynicism.

You could make the argument that the fundamental mistake Americans made was in assuming that Reconstruction (aborted as it was) made enough of a dent that after a couple of generations, it would vanish. Then again for the civil rights movement in the 60s. It's become clear enough that American never "solved" the problem of getting everyone to agree on what rights and liberties the Constitution protects, but that's not the South winning, that's just complacency.

That isn't the South winning, it's the nature of government. Without "permanent revolution" which constantly keeps issues at the forefront to change their state of affairs, they are eroded. If you wanted to make another cynical, smart-sounding argument, it would be that rights in America make much more sense if you assume that conservatives are Trotskyists. The conservative party (Democratic, then Republican after the party flip) never accepted that the status quo was the final state of affairs.

> I'd guess a similar argument could be made for the Nazis.

Did the Nazis get Lebensraum, depopulate the East, form a 1000-year Reich, return the "Germanic people" to their ideal state as farmers on the land, etc? No? Then they did not win.

> It's easy to look back and think the North had our modern values, and were fighting against 19th Century racists, when really it was (broadly speaking) 19th century racists vs 19th Century racists, so it's not surprising that the 19th century racists won.

This is an argumentum ad absurdum when there were concrete differences between the factions.

> Similarly, Nazi Germany wasn't being fought by modern liberals, it was being fought (from the west) by people who were generally more positive about Hitler destroying trade unionists than they were about the Russian Revolution deposing monarchs.

As above. It was also being fought by people who were initially unwilling to believe that another European conflict would be prosecuted so soon after the last one -- a war which France's population numbers still had not recovered from -- at a time where information was far less democratized. It is not a reasonable position to assume that the West knew the extent of Nazi Germany's crimes or activities, particularly before the war. Even where intelligence reports gave some indication, it was harder to verify.

> So, it's not really a surprise that the corporate-rich-military complex 'won', because they were on both sides. Though for a few decades afterwards, the average man in the street was needed to fend off wars, so got treated a little better than before, which could have seemed like massive and inevitable progress.

There was not a corporate-rich-military complex on either side. The Nazi economy's only "complex" was plunder with "pie in the sky" budgeting from every direction which the financials did not support. The West developed a strong military-industrial complex only after the war, and even then, there was a strong push that the fruits of that labor should be free to the public. Eisenhower's warning was meant as a canary in the coalmine, not a statement of how things already were.

Do not say "which could have seemed like massive and inevitable progress" and devalue the accomplishments made and gains achieved. Progress is not inevitable, but the decisions made (the NHS was founded while the UK was bankrupt, Johnson's passage of the Civil Rights Act consciously surrendered the presidency, etc) and the sacrifices/struggles of the litany of people involved in the Civil Rights movement in the US, codification of many rights by the Warren Court, and a million other things. It was not an illusion. It was a not a completion, either; like Jim Crow appeared post-Reconstruction, the "emergency" mindset faded from the public eye, and some common acceptance of the notion that it was "solved" now pervaded the national consciousness.

That we have taken these as a given rather than something which must be constantly asserted does not mean they did not happen, that it was window dressing to ensure a supply of soldiers (the overlapping timelines of the Department of Defense realizing that drafted troops were nowhere near as effective as volunteer troops and the Warren Court expanding guaranteed rights is undeniable), or that it was an illusion.

It means only that manipulative actors can follow the same playbook as Goring's famous Nuremburg quote from Nuremburg of "why of course the people don't want war...", or Niemoeller's "first they came for..." eligy