Fukuyama and the end of the beacon

5 january

Open the newspaper and spot an article of Fukuyama. The feeling of being tired by guru’s that after getting it wrong, keep on writing and being… guru’s. Is there any prediction more arrogant and wrong than that “end of history”? Yet read the article anyhow. One should not believe Fukuyama, but should read it all the same. If anything, for the possibility of rethinking what we think we know.

And it is good reading. After getting over the unbearable arrogance of the North American pundits, that is. The title/punch line being that it took only one day for the rest of the world to look away from the USA.

Because that is what we, the rest of the world, do. Looking up to the USA.

Reading Fukuyama I remember one of the first things that really convinced me that Chavez and his followers were not only crazy and dangerous, but idiotic. They actually looked up (and still look up) to the USA as a reference. Like any other left-winger back in the seventies, when the USA was the reference to define against. And also, I realise again how disconnected from the rest of the world are many north American pundits, which apparently think that we all are still there, defining ourselves against -or in favour- the USA.

Let’s not get me started in people like Krugman, that is still predicting the fall of the Euro, never mind his economics nobel prize, and the rest of his very sharp and interesting columns. But let keep on thinking in the Fukuyama’s of this world, that apparently believe that the USA is that beacon from the hill signalling all of us for a better world.

Kind of funny, no?

Fukuyama article is about the riots of one year ago. Rightly so, he points that they mark one of the lowest points in the history of the USA democracy. And that is true, of course. It is true if you think that the democracy of the USA is only about the USA. But then again, it is long long time ago that the north American democracy stopped being a beacon, and became some sort of flamethrower, genocidal and crazed.

I suppose that for the generation of my parents Vietnam was a defining point. For mine certainly was the (not so) covert operations supporting the south American junta’s. And then Noriega, and then again, Iraq and Afghanistan. No beacon for good whatsoever, not for a moment. More like the crazed warrior that pursuing his own wars against others like him deformed, maimed and killed the rest of the world.

A crazed old warrior, that is now killing himself. Never mind the buffoons that have become presidents, but their crazed followers, piling up assault weapons to defend themselves… against what precisely?

A sad tragedy.

Fukuyama should know that long ago the USA gave away her charm, or her inspiration capacities. Long before january 6, 2021.