I am old enough to remember the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the wave of excitement it unleashed. With the Soviet Union consigned to the history books, the world was going to become a better, safer place.
Liberals crowed that the West’s superior, democratic values had won out. Intellectuals like Francis Fukuyama wrote about the “end of history”: the triumph of free-market capitalism and a resolution of ideological struggle.
Nearly half a century on, the celebratory mood of that time looks not just misplaced but positively deluded.
The end of the Cold War brought not a peace dividend. Rather, it unleashed a surfeit of greed and hubris.
With the fear of mutually assured destruction behind it, the United States unveiled a new doctrine: “full-spectrum global dominance”, militarily and economically.
Fukayama’s vision of a world rallying to capitalism’s side ignored the fact that capitalism isn’t just a neutral, disinterested idea that everyone can subscribe to on equal terms.
It has a physical form too. Giant corporations that seek monopolistic control over other countries’ resources. And a gargantuan war machine headquartered in the US, but with 800 bases around the globe, that is ready to crush those who stand in the way of ever-greater wealth accumulation by a tiny elite of billionaires.
There could be no end of history because capitalism’s billionaire stewards are never satiated. They are driven to constantly entrench and expand their control, to amass more wealth, to buy more influence in our pretend-democracies, to be more ruthless against anyone or anything that threatens their dominance.
Fukayama forgot that capitalism isn’t socialism. It doesn’t seek the best for everyone. It doesn’t want to share the wealth. It doesn’t prioritise dignity over profit. Its lifeblood is exploitation – of individuals and of entire peoples.
Fukuyama forgot that capitalism without constraints would produce resistance.
War and profit are intimately tied together. The billionaires cannot secure their profits without war, or the threat of it – whether it is against workers at home or against other nations abroad.
The “end of history” has brought not a unity of interests, and end to struggle, but ever greater polarisation between the haves and have-nots, between powerful nations and weak ones.
War drums sound ever more loudly across the globe. Ask Venezuelans, Cubans, Greenlanders, Ukrainians, Russians, Palestinians, Lebanese, Iranians how the “end of history” is working out for them.
Ask Europeans and Americans too, now permanently mired in the politics of austerity. Ever more workers have been forced into the gig economy, with zero-hours contracts. And that is before an AI “revolution” makes swathes of jobs redundant.
The ever-growing arrogance of the Epstein class, however, is catching up with it. A mood of unrest is beginning to find its voice, recognising that we are already deep in a class war.
Meanwhile, Iran – by refusing to submit to US and Israeli aggression, and in realising its power to throttle global oil supplies – has shown that full-spectrum dominance was never as complete as the “masters of the universe” assumed. It has an Achilles’ heel, after all.
The truth is we should all have been terrified by the idea that our leaders might assume and behave as if history had come to an end.
In practice, it could mean only an end to constraints on capitalism – an end to any humanising limits on its reach, on its ambitions, on its cruelty.
Like King Midas, the Epstein class expected to monetise everything it touched. And like King Midas, hubris will be its downfall.
There are constraints, both immediate and long term, that even the billionaires cannot overcome.
A finite planet, with finite resources, cannot be plundered indefinitely. A delicately balanced biosphere, which evolved over billions of years to the point where it became compatible with higher life forms, cannot be abused, filled with our toxic detritus, forever.
Similarly, countries and peoples cannot be humiliated, turned into objects ripe for exploitation and humiliation, year after year, decade after decade, without a reckoning eventually.
The “end of history”, as Fukuyama should have foreseen, could lead to only one destination: enslavement. The end of struggle, the end of freedom. Only the colonial arrogance of the West could imagine that others would submit to such a fate.
In Gaza, in Lebanon, in Iran, we see peoples refusing – however imperfectly, however violently – to submit to their enslavement. In the West, with our colonial arrogance undimmed, we call it “terrorism”. We call any solidarity with it “hate”. We send our own truth-tellers to prison as criminals.
The genocidal abuse of peoples in Gaza and Lebanon – the chief victims of the “end of history” – serves as a reminder to westerners of what the system that triumphed nearly half a century ago is really about. What it requires. Where it is heading.
But more dangerously for the billionaires, the resistance to that abuse, the struggle against subjugation, against being disappeared, reminds western publics that enslavement is not inevitable, that dignity might still be possible, that another way can, at the very least, be imagined.
Struggle must continue because submission is death.
That is the message from Gaza and Lebanon. It is the reason our rulers are so desperate to crush any sense of hope. They need us to believe that history came to an end in 1991. Because otherwise, their days are numbered.
[Many thanks to Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]
Jonathan Cook is a British independent journalist, who has covered issues of Palestine and Israel for much of his over 20-year career. He formerly wrote for the Guardian and Observer newspapers and is a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism.
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