So a couple of decades ago, Francis Fukuyama famously pronounced:
“with the ascendancy of Western liberal democracy—which occurred after the Cold War (1945–1991) and the dissolution of the Soviet Union (1991)—humanity has reached not just … the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: That is, the end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government”.
Well, there’s one of those “didn’t age well” predictions. Frankly, after reading too much of the COVID-19 threads, and some other stuff about China and wokeness, I just had one of those moments: Western “civilisation” is done for. Undermined in its entirety and thrown on the scrapheap. Everything that the West has worked towards, on and off, for the last 2000 years or so, thrown under the COVID-19 bus. I’m posting this, I suppose, as a sanity check. Am I (as one poster suggested) stuck in a Russian propaganda loop? Just depressed? Or is this actually happening?
I’ve noticed a growing number of people - not just here but “out there” in the real world - who simply take The West for granted. They have no idea of the storied history and the winding path of philosophy that brought us freedom, technology, political stability, and relative peace. They are clueless about economics, science, math, ethics, or indeed any of the academic knowledge that dropped out of the Age of Enlightenment (and, to a large extent, the age of Socrates and Plato). In short, the West is about to descend into a new Dark Age of superstition, ignorance, fear, and demagoguery.
In the meantime, China is still on the ascendant. This really means only one thing.
They’ve won. It’s game over. All your base are belong to us.
Now, I would be slightly mollified if, somewhere in the back rooms, a letter from Xitler had made its way to various heads of State, along these lines:
"China has not forgotten, and today we will heap upon you the same ignominious defeat that you inflicted upon us, many years ago. Our nuclear capability is adequate to cause you great pain, and this we will do. We care nothing for our own people, who will in any case die willingly for the Motherland, and a nuclear attack on China would do little to make it look any worse. We therefore have no fear of your retaliation. You, on the other hand, have sentimental feelings for your subjects and will do anything to avoid nuclear war.
We therefore offer you the option of honourable suicide. You will destroy your own economies and societies, rendering yourselves incapable of supporting your own populations. You will then submit to us, and pay us fealty, as we paid you. You have your pretext, so we believe this will be easy. Now do as your emperor commands, and kneel before Zod."
But I don’t think any such letter was ever sent. Xi must be laughing his undersized bollocks off right now: never in his wildest dreams would he have imagined it was so easy. We did this, to ourselves.
Have I lost the plot? Or am I really staring at Lady Liberty keeled over in the sand?