Anyone remember the “end of history”?
I do, and I thought it was one of the most idiotic ideas ever floated by the intellectual classes (which is saying something).
George Will offers a terse reminder that history has not ended again:
WASHINGTON — Asked in 1957 what would determine his government’s course, Harold Macmillan, Britain’s new prime minister, replied, “Events, dear boy, events.” Now, into America’s trivializing presidential campaign, a pesky event has intruded — a European war. Russian tanks, heavy artillery, strategic bombers, ballistic missiles and a naval blockade batter a European nation. We are not past such things after all. The end of history will be postponed, again.
Another European war. But it won’t be “the war to end all wars,” nor will it “end history.”
According to Will, the Ukraine may be next, and there’s little the United States can do other than look by impotently:
Russia supports two provinces determined to secede from Georgia. Russia, with aspiring nations within its borders, generally opposes secessionists, as it did when America, which sometimes opposes secession (e.g., 1861-65), improvidently supported Kosovo’s secession from Russia’s ally Serbia. But Russia’s aggression is really about the subordination of Georgia, a democratic, market-oriented U.S. ally. This is the recrudescence of Russia’s dominance in what it calls the “near abroad.” Ukraine, another nation guilty of being provocatively democratic near Russia, should tremble because there is not much America can do. It is a bystander at the bullying of an ally that might be about to undergo regime change.
Noting that the world is again swooning over a tyrannical country hosting the Olympics, Will concludes with a reminder that history didn’t end in 1934:
….Not since the Nazi’s 1934 Nuremberg rally, which Leni Riefenstahl turned into the film “Triumph of the Will,” has tyranny been so brazenly tarted up as art.
A worldwide audience of billions swooned over the Beijing ceremony. Who remembers 1934? Or anything.
Also acknowledging American impotence, Victor Davis Hanson sees the conflict in grimly realistic terms:
….Putin and Medvedev have called the West’s bluff. We are sort of stuck in a time-warp of the 1990s, seemingly eons ago in which a once-earnest weak post-Soviet Russia sought Western economic help and political mentoring. But those days are long gone, and diplomacy hasn’t caught up with the new realities. Russia is flush with billions. It serves as a rallying point and arms supplier to thugs the world over that want leverage in their anti-Western agendas. For the last five years, its foreign policy can be reduced to “Whatever the United States is for, we are against.”
The geopolitical message is clear to both the West and the former Soviet Republics: don’t consider NATO membership (i.e., do the Georgians really think that, should they have been NATO members, any succor would have been forthcoming?).
Heh. I always enjoy a good rhetorical question.
And I particularly enjoyed Hanson’s characterization of the moral bankruptcy of the Western Left:
The Russians have sized up the moral bankruptcy of the Western Left. They know that half-a-million Europeans would turn out to damn their patron the United States for removing a dictator and fostering democracy, but not more than a half-dozen would do the same to criticize their long-time enemy from bombing a constitutional state.
The Russians rightly expect Westerners to turn on themselves, rather than Moscow — and they won’t be disappointed.
Infuriatingly, the Russians seem to know us better than we know ourselves:
From what the Russians learned of the Western reaction to Iraq, they expect their best apologists will be American politicians, pundits, professors, and essayists — and once more they will not be disappointed. We are a culture, after all, that after damning Iraqi democracy as too violent, broke, and disorganized, is now damning Iraqi democracy as too conniving, rich, and self-interested — the only common denominator being whatever we do, and whomever we help, cannot be good.
I think the lesson here is that the Russians do a better job of learning from history.
What happened? Didn’t anyone tell their intellectual classes that history had ended?
What I can’t figure out is how come we always get stuck with the silly ideas.
UPDATE: My thanks to Glenn Reynolds for the link, and a warm, welcome to all!
Your comments welcome, agree or disagree.
Comments
28 responses to “You mean history hasn’t ended yet?”
When you have lost the Guardian you have lost the game.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/11/russia.georgia
This only confirmed what had been apparent for several years – that Russia is actively supporting secessionist forces instead of respecting its mandate and behaving as an honest broker. But it ripped away the final pretence that its role in Georgia is one of peacekeeping. Other steps of escalation quickly followed. Russia moved 400 troops into Abkhazia under the pretext of working on a railway project. Russian planes started shooting down Georgian aerial drones.
Ukraine will not be next. The Ukraine conventional military is the equal of Russia. One of the reason Georgia was attacked was it’s military was no match to the Russian military. If Russia tries to chop off sections of the Ukraine they will be in a serious battle that they will probably lose. The Ukranians will freak out if Russia attacks and unlike Georgia they have the ability to defeat Russian forces.
Good word on the Ukranians and their defense forces- thanks for that bit of comfort, U. being next had crossed minds in this household.
I keep hearing we can’t do anything about Georgia. I have a question for those who keep saying that, and it is a relevant question …
How long after birth before the stub of umbilical cord left attached to the infant falls off?
NATO has already proved itself an unreliable organization–remember its refusal to invoke its own Article 5 (an attack against one is an attack against all) at our request shortly after 9/ll?
Article 5 was invoked:
http://www.nato.int/docu/update/2001/1001/e1002a.htm
The Russians would be fools to attempt an invasion of Ukraine. If they do, they’ll ignore this bit of history at their own peril and, very possibly, ignite a major European war:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_Insurgent_Army
As far as the U.S. being powerless, I wonder just how difficult it would be to ship several containers of Javelins and modern MANPADS to the Ukraine (and the Baltic states as well) and
establish permanent guest bases located on existing Ukrainian armed forces facilities?
We’re talking about dealing with a regime that kills ladies in elevators and doesn’t blink at spending thirty million dollars worth of radioactive poison in another country to kill. The Georgian exercise simply confirmed that the EU will preemptively reach for the KY and that western media will blame Booosh for anything the Russians decide to do.
Look for a series of two- week long “incidents” where Putin rearranges the political map of Europe, beginning next spring after he’s had a long look at the new U.S. president.
“They know that half-a-million Europeans would turn out to damn their patron the United States for removing a dictator and fostering democracy, but not more than a half-dozen would do the same to criticize their long-time enemy from bombing a constitutional state.”
What was it Marx said about capitalism selling communism the rope?
We have silly ideas because we have self-important people. Their thoughts are Weighty and Deep. Don’t you know that? Haven’t you been listening to them?
They have it all figured out. Their friends all agree with them. They’re The Smart People. They care. And the rest of us need to heed them.
They’re going to save the earth and end war with their superior morality, knowledge and wisdom. They have the narrative all worked out. The future is written in their minds and The Smart People win.
In other words: narcissism, groupthink, elitism, and delusions of grandeur.
If the West is unwilling to fight, it should lose.
What happened? Didn’t anyone tell their intellectual classes that history had ended?
I think the remaining intellectuals are allowed to think whatever Mad Vlad tells them to think. Many, if not most, of the Russian intellectuals have fled or are dead.
History hasn’t ended and neither has the Cold War. Same motives camouflaged behind new rhetoric. In the old days it was “revolution” and “liberation.” Today, it’s “humanitarian mission” and “stopping genocide.” Can’t blame the Russians, though. They’ve been playing this game for centuries and they’re very good at it.
And now two questions:
Libs, we need your advice and counsel on some issues:
(1) Why didn’t Russia go to the UN over the Georgia problem?
(2) If they completely ignore the UN, shouldn’t they be kicked out of the UN? Especially kicked out of the Security Counsel…in spite of their veto power? (Please don’t tell me we ignored the UN over Iraq. We went to them time and time again with our hat in our hand.)
“What was it Marx said about capitalism selling communism the rope?”
I’m not so sure the EU can be called capitalist any more. In any case, both Russia and the Soviet Union have been selling guns and bombs to Muslim nations for a very long time, many of which end up in the hands of Chechen terrorists. Meanwhile, the distinctly capitalist WTO has been imposing arms embargoes and trade sanctions on nations that misbehave, especially those that “nationalize” members’ assets. Interestingly, this has made them one of the few organizations that dictators like Mugabe and Chavez will actually back down before.
Thus, I submit that Marx, in addition to everything else he got wrong, got his most famous quote wrong as well. Capitalists are not, in fact, so greedy that they will sell the rope used to hang them. Rather, it is Russians (communist AND capitalist) that will do ao, and possibly Europeans in general.
The ‘End of History’ thesis is one of the stupider ideas to ever come down the pike. Almost as dumb as that thesis whose collapse inspired it. Back when I first saw that book around 1993, my first thought was, “This guy doesn’t read SF.”
I had the (dis)pleasure of listening to Fukuyama (try to) defend his thesis in late 1999 at a professional meeting I attended. He was the invited speaker who finished up the banquet and awards ceremony.
His thoughts then appeared to be that somehow we had all learned that it was not nice to be beastly to one another and that all future disagreements would be resolved via negotiation, mediation, and compromise, all of which would be facilitated by large international bodies. No use of icky force would be necessary.
He received a *very* warm reception from the academics present.
This olympics isn’t the first time Westerners have been easily impressed by totalitarian pyrotechnics. Just as visitors to the 1930’s Soviet Union thought they’d seen the future, the Munich ’36 redux in Beijing is prompting people like David Brooks at the New York Times to gush over this latest ‘superior Asian strain’ of capitalism. (See also: Japan, Singapore, Korea)
He credits a government that isolated and impoverished China for decades, murdering tens of millions of its citizens, for the country’s recent renaissance — when, in reality, the adoption of Western investment, economics, trade, finance and a dash of personal freedom were far more necessary factors.
In other words, typical clueless member of our so-called leadership classes.
To reflect the changing times, the US should withdraw from both the UN and NATO, and create our own replacements.
Instead of the UN, there should be an organization of Democracies only (which will enable us to exclude China and Russia). Also, voting rights should we weighted, to some degree, by population, just as the US electoral college is. Thus, the US and India will quit getting a bad deal like they are in the UN.
For defense purposes, we should make a new organization of :
US
Canada
UK
Australia
Poland
Denmark
India
Japan
Taiwan
South Korea
Israel
Iraq (yes, we want them here).
We should also work to get Brazil and Mexico into it over time.
When ‘the end of history’ was first articulated, I thought it was such a blatantly stupid idea that I have not paid any attention to Fukuyama since. Ever. I don’t respect him enough to disagree with him.
File it under ‘so dumb only an intellectual would take it seriously’.
‘The end of history’ caught on at the end of the Cold War. For some people, perhaps it provided a placebo for the idea that the state will wither away and we will all live happily ever after.
I’m with Vinny. The United Nations has always labored under the mistaken notion that nation-states can organize themselves into a super state. The appropriate mechanism for relations between disparate nation-states are treaties. We should abandon the UN Security Council and set up a colateral institution headquartered in London called the Treaty of Nations. Non-market-based democracies need not apply. It’s 2008, and it’s time to move history forward by only recognizing free-market constitutional democracies as real countries.
…Non-market-based NON-democracies need not apply, that is…
“What was it Marx said about capitalism selling communism the rope?”
Actually it was Lenin who said it.
“The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.”
Of course one of the problems with totalitarian regiemes is that they can’t even make their own rope.
“What I can’t figure out is how come we always get stuck with the silly ideas.”
Okay, possible paranoia follows.
Russia puts them there? They find enough willing Americans who already hate the US to knowingly promulgate the ideas under benign guises to naive people just to bring about the downfall of the US and the whole of Western Civilization?
Yes, I know. McCarthyism, witch hunts, etc. But what if it’s true?
Cheer up, it was Russia that got stuck with the supremely silly (and evil) idea of Communism in power. We in the USA have not, up to now, been anywhere near that stupid, though some of the Euros have.
Putin and his fellow Kremlin-crawlers are loathesome filth. So what else is new?
Ben White, you may like the “American Tribes” series over at my site.
GK – Good list. Notice that with the exception of Poland and Denmark, there is a strong Anglosphere component to all of them.
Mexico, Brazil on deck – yup. I might also add the economically savvy (though distressingly unmilitary) Norway, Iceland, Ireland, and New Zealand to the discussion, and the Baltic countries should get a look.
“and New Zealand to the discussion”
If we are dumping the social dem western Euros we might as well dump them too. Like Germany, its like Mike Moore writes their press and is their mainstream.