The Allure of Fascism (Vol. II), Part 2
Two years before the Soviet Union’s collapse, and at a time when commentators were beginning to announce the end of the Cold War, Western scholars like Francis Fukuyama proclaimed we had reached “the end of history.” Having triumphed over “bolshevism and fascism” and the USSR’s “updated Marxism that threatened to lead to the ultimate apocalypse of nuclear war,” he wrote, the West could proclaim “an unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism.” Fukuyama noted a “total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism”—a “triumph of the West, of the Western idea.” The “end of history” had arrived because the world had apparently reached “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”1
In the early 1990s, Western liberals believed their governments had foreclosed all credible political alternatives. Frank “Bifo” Berardi would later write of the “slow cancellation of the future” that characterised this time.2 Mark Fisher would famously cite Fredric Jameson in his Capitalist Realism, writing “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”3 History was over, people asserted. Liberal capitalism would prevail for the rest of time. One could no longer envision the end of the “present world” of “relations of domination.”4
Fukuyama, however, added an important and oft-ignored qualifier to his proclamation of history’s end. The “victory of liberalism has occurred primarily in the realm of ideas or consciousness,” he wrote. It “is as yet incomplete in the real or material world.” It was an ideological triumph—not a material or even fully political one.
Now, nearly forty years on from his statement, we know that the victory would remain incomplete. That the “real” and “material” world would assert itself against this intellectual and imaginative closure, breaking it open and forcing people to realise that history never really ended.
Time appears to stand still for an unopposed superpower. But as Étienne Balibar once said, “Even if politics in the strong sense of the term no longer existed, time would still pass.”5 If history had apparently ended for the US in the 1990s, it raged on elsewhere in the world.
Long before the millennium’s end, America positioned itself as an enemy of terrorism around the world. In the 1980s, Reagan declared America’s first “War on Terror.” Soviet-sponsored terror, his administration argued, was the greatest threat faced by the United States and its allies.6 But to “kill the ‘virus’” of socialism,7 to use Nixon’s words, the US engaged in its own terroristic actions.
In Nicaragua, they supported the right-wing extremist Contras in their war against their leftist government during the ’80s, which killed tens of thousands of people.8 In the same decade, the CIA also recruited, trained and armed “the most extreme Islamic fundamentalists it could find to fight a ‘Holy War’” against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.9 These operatives would later engage in terrorist activities against the countries that trained them, including the first World Trade Center bombing in the United States.
Even after the collapse of the USSR, President Clinton’s administration continued the Republican ‘War on Terror.’ They supported Turkey’s violent ethnic cleansing of the Kurdish population by supplying an enormous volume of weapons to the state to crush the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, who they classified as a terrorist group. Clinton also bombed Sudan’s Al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in 1998. This action deprived the country of key medicines, leading to thousands of preventable deaths. Sudan retaliated by releasing two terrorist suspects who were later found to be al-Qaeda operatives.10
Even before Reagan, though, the US government deployed the instruments of terror against its own people—namely, Black individuals. Radical groups like the Black Liberation Army were classified as terrorist organisations, while governments both Democratic and Republican authorised, orchestrated and tolerated acts of extreme violence against Black people before, during and after the Civil Rights movement, the assassination of Black Panther Fred Hampton being only one of the most prominent examples. The 1985 aerial bombing of the Black liberation organisation MOVE, where Philadelphia police dropped a satchel bomb on a residential neighbourhood in West Philadelphia, killing six adults and five children and destroying the MOVE house and 61 neighbouring homes, is another.11 This terrorism continues today through regular police violence against Black individuals. With the rise of for-profit prisons and legal reforms like Clinton’s “three-strikes” laws, the US has imprisoned millions of Black individuals in recent decades. On the streets, police have killed hundreds and hundreds more.
History never ended in the 1990s—white America just stopped paying attention.
Twelve years after Fukuyama’s statement, two planes flew into the Twin Towers.
Housing some of America’s most powerful financial and media companies, the destruction of the World Trade Center buildings on 9/11 annihilated a central symbol of American hegemony—money, culture, corporate life, soft power. As in the Jornada del Muerto desert on July 16th, 1945, another Ground Zero emerged in the American imaginary. Another opening onto the abyss.
Little now needs to be said again about this day when groundlessness erupted at the heart of American empire. But 25 years after the Twin Towers fell, it seems 9/11 was the moment when, like the legacy sitcoms now owned by private equity investors, the future was rapidly uncancelled, revived, syndicated once more.
A fast reboot of the future. A short description, perhaps, of fascism.
Endnotes
See After the Future.
In this period of history where capitalism had totalised itself, to imagine its end was, in a metaphorical sense, to imagine the end of the world. Fanon said that abolishing racism would require the end of the world; the same goes for capitalism.
9/11: Was There an Alternative?, p.23.
9/11: Was There an Alternative?, p.49.
9/11: Was There an Alternative?, pp.77–85.