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Thursday, March 10, 2005 |
My regular readers will know that I consider Fukuyama's phrase 'the end of history' to be wrong. If anything, history is repeating itself and nothing has changed for the better, on the contrary. That one system is desperately trying to force its outlook on the rest of the world does not mean the end of history. It is only the beginning of the downfall of that empire or that last utopia.
Eric Hobsbawm: "Did perestroika herald 'the end of history'? The collapse of the experiment initiated by the October Revolution is certainly the end of a history. That experiment will not be repeated, although the hope it represented, at least initially, will remain a permanent part of human aspirations. And the enormous social injustice which gave communism its historic force in the last century is not diminishing in this one. But was it 'the end of history' as Francis Fukuyama proclaimed in 1989, in a phrase that he no doubt regrets?
He was doubly wrong. In the literal sense of history as something that makes headlines in newspapers and TV news bulletins, history has continued since 1989, if anything in a more dramatic mode than before. The cold war has been followed neither by a new world order, nor by a period of peace, nor by the prospect of a predictable global progress in civilisation such as intelligent western observers had in the mid-19th century, the last period when liberal capitalism - under British auspices in those days - had no doubts about the future of the world.
What we have today is a superpower unrealistically aspiring to a permanent world supremacy for which there is no historical precedent, nor probability, given the limitation of its own resources - especially as today all state power is weakened by the impact of non-state economic agents in a global economy beyond the control of any state, and given the visible tendency of the global centre of gravity to shift from the North Atlantic to the zone of south and east Asia.
Even more questionable is the wider - almost quasi-Hegelian - sense of Fukuyama's phrase. It implies that history has an end, namely a world capitalist economy developing without limits, married to societies ruled by liberal-democratic institutions. There is no historic justification for teleology, whether non-Marxist or Marxist, and certainly none for believing in unilinear and uniform worldwide development.
But did perestroika bring about a second Russian revolution? No. It brought the collapse of the system built on the 1917 revolution, followed by a period of social, economic and cultural ruin, from which the peoples of Russia have by no means yet fully emerged. Recovery from this catastrophe is already taking much longer than it took Russia to recover from the world wars."
When the US set up and armed the Afghan Taliban against the Soviet Union they not only created a problem for that region but also one that would continue to haunt the US and the world till this day and many years to come.
Chalmers Johnson: "Today, the world awaits what is almost certain to happen soon at some airport - a terrorist firing a U.S. Stinger low-level surface-to-air missile (manufactured at one time by General Dynamics in Rancho Cucamonga) into an American jumbo jet. The CIA supplied thousands of them to the moujahedeen and trained them to be experts in their use."
Remember Vietnam? And the worldwide protests? Well, they too are here again. March 18-20 is your chance to revisit history. The world says End the war.
AlterNet: "Recent polls show 59 percent of Americans are in favor of withdrawing troops from Iraq." Good old America!
12:01:29 PM 
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