For Adbusters, February, 2006

Francis Fukuyama's end-of-history proposed that all roads lead to global free trade and liberal (he meant neocon) democracy. When Communism ended with the crumbling of the Berlin Wall, he said, and the subsequent break up of the Soviet Union, and the swift emergence of democratic parties and governments in rejoicing Eastern Europe, this destination, this terminus, this broad, sunlit upland was finally reached, and all henceforth would be global, 'liberal', free and easy, and history would then pretty much end.

And he got it all so wrong. For global free trade did not prevail and Communism did not end. There are 1.4 billion Communists in China, India, Nepal, Vietnam, Cuba and Italy and in Russia of late a resurgent left-leaning tyranny run by a former Communist spook that looks, as time goes on, more and more like the original Stalinist one-party arrest-and-torture model, making 200 million more. China's command economy, moreover, is successfully besting on an unlevel playing field the 'freed-up' corporations of the West and out of its profits lending scores of trillions to the cash-strapped USA which it can presumably ruin any time it wants by foreclosing on, or buying up whole regions of, like Alaska and Hawaii. Which means that liberal democracy will not prevail but has lost the contest in this century at least with populous, unfree, buttoned-up, bureaucratic, secretive, repressive China and also, it now seems, with populous, leftist, bureaucratic, hard-working, newly ambitious India.

He was wrong too in his underlying view that humankind would be drawn to rational political outcomes and religion wither and fade. For religion is now on the increase, in Muslim families of seven or ten, and with it the suicide-bombing fanaticism, or 'terrorism', that is the Third World's response to global free trade. For 'terrorism' like global free trade heeds no borders, can smash communities anywhere, can lethally strike, dismay, derange, dismantle, destroy a targeted town or region and slither away unpunished, leaving smoking ruin and human anguish behind. Like global free trade does, whenever it can.

This process George Bush has called 'World War Three'. Which surely means that if World War Three is now happening, and he is in an interested party who ought to know, then history is not at an end at all but is again in crisis or, in George Bush's view, in fiery, bloodstained crusade and gotterdammerung.

Fukuyama took no heed in his famous work of human pride. The prideful Russians will not be bossed around by Condoleezza Rice. The prideful Shi'ites and Sunnis will not be humiliated in Abu Ghraib. The prideful South Americans will not cheer any more their greedy US colonisers. Prideful Europe will hate, and reject, and mock, George Bush's needless wasteful war. Prideful Iranians build their A-bombs anyway. Fukuyama should have known that people do not welcome with multitudinous cheers and splashing champagne their heathen colonisers. They call 'Empire' what he called 'liberal democracy', and they go to war with it.

He is asserting, now, that he never favoured the war in Iraq, nor 'pre-emption', nor busker-busting 'tactical' A-bombs, nor 'Shock and Awe' (as good a synonym for terrorism as I've heard), nor Bush's and Blair's defiance of the UN's desire to wait and see. But he never spoke against these things at the time. Like many others, Jack Straw and Murdoch and Christopher Hitchens included, he was cowed and abashed by Bush's brazen wish to smash up some heathens, and finish the job his dad had left unconsummate in 1991. Like any timid fellow-traveller of the new McCarthyism, the Second American Century, the New World Order, and America's willingness to nuke such countries as might have nukes and 'pose a danger to world peace', he held his tongue, and he looked the other way.

And he was wrong to do so. And how stupid he was to speak of the end of anything. Human tendencies are, and have pretty much always been, familial, tribal, territorial, patriotic and religious, and they do not readily change just because Condoleezza asks them to. The likelihood of Rwanda, of Dafur, of Kosovo, and Gaza, and the endless, factious fratricide of Shi'ite and Sunni and Kurd in Iraq, was always there for a good historian with clear eyes to see and learn from. But he is no such thing. He is a disaster. He should in all logic go to gaol under the new sedition laws of Britain, America and Australia for doing those things and saying those things that provoked and encouraged world terrorism. Or, failing that, he should be mocked, like the medieval flat-earthers eventually were, for the ignorant, simplistic, portentous, brown-nosing smart alec he has proved to be.