The international community s response to the massacres was shameful.

They considered the growing gap between military spending and official development assistance to be scandalous.

The results of Iran s recent municipal elections were humiliating for Ahmadinejad and his supporters.

In the war, Sweden ignominiously lost Finland, which became a Grand Duchy in the Russian empire.

Major oil companies and other big corporate interests also are playing this game, and have financed disreputable public relations campaigns against climate science.

Bloggers from the Middle East and North Africa expressed their sympathy, with one Bahraini Twitter user wryly noting that the tear gas team was leaving in a scandalous manner.

Moreover, the supposedly powerful Uganda army was ignominiously defeated on three occasions, most notably in the martyr city of Kisangani.

Clinton, meanwhile, shamefully abandoned Somalia after the deaths of American soldiers in Mogadishu and did nothing in the face of Rwanda s genocide.

In recent years, the role of the traditional spouse has been, most visibly, to stand by (or not) while some excruciatingly embarrassing foible or betrayal by one s husband is publicly aired in mortifying detail.

Democracies make shameful mistakes, but they eventually correct them, or at least apologize for them. And they dethrone those who got them into trouble.

In any case, China s crackdown on straightforward reporting and discussion of events taking place in that country is not the suppression of a discredited political ideology, but of open and informed political debate.

To be sure, Britain s Neville Chamberlain and France s Edouard Daladier signed a shameful treaty with Hitler and Mussolini in Munich. But when Hitler breached the treaty, both Chamberlain and Daladier lost popular support, and, by the start of WWII, neither was still in office.

But Germany also appears to be increasingly uneasy about having to continue supporting Israel even when its policies are clearly reproachable. Seventy years after the liberation of Auschwitz, can the bilateral relationship withstand the rising tide of anti Israel sentiment in Europe?