Francis - you're history

[Joanne98]

Remember Francis Fukuyama? You probably don't. He's a purely historical figure now, from the distant past. But once upon a time he was famous as someone who wasn't an historian making pronouncements about history, rather in the way that Bjorn Lomborg was famous as a non-environmentalist pronouncing on the environment.

Well, Bjorn and Francis also have in common the distinction of being among the most wrong academics of the last 100 years. Francis of course became famous for pronouncing the "death of history" as a result of what he saw as the triumph of capitalism. This was as silly as if Cicero had announced the death of history as the Roman Empire became established. The establishment of the American Empire no more spells the death of history than did the establishment of any of the other empires that litter the pages of history books.

To Fukuyama it seemed, the triumph of the capitalist will had taken place in a kind of ultimate American Idol, in which the public voted for their favorite economic system week after week until only George Bush's trickle down economics was left standing. If you believed this then you should certainly read Naomi Klein's new book "The Shock Doctrine". A better title would be "An encyclopedia of all the things the mainstream media didn't tell you in the last 100 years." The American Idol being played out here was played out not with the triumph of good singing but with the brute force of superior weapons. As Naomi Klein shows, in detail, rumors of the death of history have been greatly exaggerated.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-horton/francis-youre-history_b_84121.html