The article <a href="https://scheerpost.com/2023/10/04/scott-ritter-no-end-of-history-in-ukraine/" source="Scheer Post" author="Scott Ritter">No 'End of History' in Ukraine</a> mentions Francis Fukuyama, citing him at length on what he meant by "the end of history". <bq>“Liberal democracy,” Fukuyama wrote, “replaces the irrational desire to be recognized as greater than others with a rational desire to be recognized as equal.” <b>“A world made up of liberal democracies, then, should have much less incentive for war, since all nations would reciprocally recognize one another’s legitimacy.</b> And indeed, there is substantial empirical evidence from the past couple of hundred years that <b>liberal democracies do not behave imperialistically toward one another</b>, even if they are perfectly capable of going to war with states that are not democracies and do not share their fundamental values.</bq> <img src="{att_link}we_ve_never_been_a_liberal_democracy.jpg" href="{att_link}we_ve_never_been_a_liberal_democracy.jpg" align="right" caption="We've never been a liberal democracy" scale="35%">This is all just fine, sound, and admirable reasoning, It's just that the elites in the U.S.---in their nearly unparalleled hubris---assumed that Fukuyama was talking about <i>their country</i>. In fact, given Fukuyama's premise and definition, the conclusion should be that the U.S. cannot possibly be considered a liberal democracy. It is, in fact and instead, an empire. It's like the nearly incessant babble about free markets: it's a good idea, <i>in principle</i>, but <i>inapplicable</i> because we don't have free markets. We never have. Ritter went on, citing Marx as counterweight to Fukuyama, <bq><b>Karl Marx, who famously observed</b> that, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. <b>The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.</b>”</bq> The "Fukuyama school of thought"---such as it is---is just something invented to ostracize official enemies. <bq>Political scientists in the Fukuyama “end of history” school view this conflict as being derived by the <b>resistance of the remnants of Soviet regional hegemony (i.e., modern-day Russia, led by its president, Vladimir Putin) over the inevitability of liberal democracy taking hold.</b></bq> It's an adorable fairy tale for an empire to tell itself, but it's an even more useful tool to convince its conquests to give up with less of a fight. These conquests know they're in for a lot of pain if they don't bend the knee. What better way to convince them to do it sooner than a fairy tale that will actually come true for a handful of elite members of the conquered? Instead of fighting the empire, the target of conquest ends up fighting against itself over table scraps. And so it goes.