[SpanishConf]

>This old VC written article reminds me of Francis Fukuyama's 'end of history' thinking at the end of last century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Las....

That recently many historians have began to consider this line of thinking "wrong" because of the rise of illiberal democracies, i.e. Russia, Hungry and the success of China as a Pseudo-Capitalist Dictatorship.

[toyg]

The demolition of Fukuyama’s delusions can actually be pinpointed to a single day in 2001.

[icebraining]

I don't see why. 9/11 was shocking, but ultimately doesn't seem to have caused major change in the political systems of any Western countries, nor any significant movement in that direction.

[nickpsecurity]

The Patriot Act essentially nullified the bill of rights, allowed indefinite detention without charges, and put power in the hands of secret people/programs answering to secret courts with secret interpretations of law. They were also grabbing people to put on torture flights. That's a police state. Unlike those that inspired it, it selectively uses its Gestapo powers against tiny segments of the country... far as we know... where most people never see it. That lets 99+% of people go through normal processes (eg courts). Then, they started connecting police-state surveillance to main, enforcement agencies with parallel construction to hide targeting methods. So, more of their opponents might be eliminated through trumped up charges on top of folks that are actually bad. The Dual State continues.

You bet 9/11 had huge effect on our political system. Went from a corrupt democracy with cops and courts that went too far sometimes, but occasionally reigned in, to a police state where folks could be kidnapped and tortured with criminal immunity on those doing it. The few times they've gotten caught on this stuff, like with the leaks, nobody running the programs did time, Congress often gave them retroactive immunity, and some were expanded. That's so bad that blackmail is about the only explanation I can come up with at this point for how they're behaving. Surveillance programs make that easier to do, too, esp if running in black programs. J. Edgar Hoover situation possibly repeating but with wider net.

[icebraining]

I just don't see how that's categorically different from COINTELPRO (which murdered people with impunity), ECHELON, etc. Even the FISA courts were established 23 years before 2001, and in 2017 there were actually fewer FISA warrant requests approved than in 2000. Who got busted for this stuff before 2001?

[nickpsecurity]

COINTELPRO was a program in one, government group acting rogue from a long time ago that got shutdown. The current activities involve every branch of executive government with Congress's blessing.

ECHELON was an unlawful surveillance program that intercepted satellite/radio traffic with a focus on foreign personnel. Patriot Act allowed surveillance of Americans on all mediums with financial penalties or imprisonment for non-compliance with backdoors (see Core Secrets where FBI "compels" companies to "SIGINT-enable" products).

NSA management used to limit what was collected on Americans specifically to avoid trouble with Congress and FISA courts. After 9/11 and Patriot Act, they were told 9/11 couldn't happen again. They're maximizing what they collect on Americans with more cooperation between them and organizations that imprison Americans.

The differences between the isolated cases you pulled out of decades of government and the total, officially-blessed elimination of our rights today is difference between day and night. Hell, a good chunk of America votes in favor of what's in the Patriot Act. They're willing to give up their freedoms for false claims by NSA etc that they'll stop terrorists. I'd have never seen it coming back in school after reading on all the progress activists made before that time.

Also reminds me of The Siege. Mainly, the fact that they'd declare a state of emergency that suspends the bill of rights due to terrorist actions in New York. Which they did. They renew the state of emergency annually, which keeps specific executive orders going.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzLQOc-B0Ys

EDIT: I don't have my old write-up on CoG. The link below which was in top of Google has a lot of the same info, though. I haven't fully vetted this source so obviously fact-check anything on there.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2010/11/peter-dale-scott/continu...

[Aeolun]

We were moving towards an open, inclusive society pretty much since the Berlin wall fell and germany reunited. 9/11 inverted the progress we were making, and now we’re slowly sliding away towards facism again.

That’s how it feels to me anyway. Europe certainly has it’s growing share of racists.

[SpanishConf]

>That’s how it feels to me anyway. Europe certainly has it’s growing share of racists.

As a Spaniard, here thankfully not really, thanks to (I'd claim) our disunity as a "Nation" or State.

We love to hate each other more than hate foreigners or whatever.

[huac]

the security state in the US has grown substantially since 9/11 and created very significant changes in american politics and society.

ICE is a very easy example, pre-9/11 it would have been unthinkable to keep migrant children in cages; the power that that agency has has grown immensely. there's also been significant expansion of other apparatuses, e.g. NSA surveillance of the internet, FIVEEYES, etc. the increased military investment in drones is also a direct result of 9/11 (well, technically more from supreme court decisions regarding Guantanamo prisoners, which, also, direct result of 9/11!).

[icebraining]

> pre-9/11 it would have been unthinkable to keep migrant children in cages

Pre-9/11, you had the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America..., which actually targeted citizens.

Sure, there was an expansion of surveillance and drones, but I don't see how that's categorically different from what was already happening; it's still the same system, as far as I can tell. I mean, pre-9/11 US had COINTELPRO, ECHELON, McCarthyism, and all that stuff described in the Family Jewels report: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Jewels_(Central_Intelli...

[toyg]

Fukuyama basically argued that the end of the Cold War marked a point of no-return after which all countries would have slowly but inevitably converged towards globalised, market-based, open societies. All the stuff you mention pre-dates that.

The worst we got in the Clinton era, when Fukuyama was writing, were the crypto wars and the Clipper chip, which look incredibly tame today and were both resolved in the public's favour.

So yeah, in the '90s, a lot of people thought "the West" had turned a corner. Fukuyama went beyond that and posited that the world had turned a corner. And instead, we fell right back into fascist nightmares as soon as we were attacked by a bearded guy on dialysis that we ourselves had armed a few years before; the Russians and Chinese decided that not starving was preferable to being "democratic", whatever that might mean; and most of the Middle East, Israel included, doubled down on its eternal fervour for holy war.

That was my point - history never "ends" and nothing is inevitable, including a return to feudal rule. Many progressive movements tried to tell the elites that, by singing a triumphalist note for late-stage capitalism, we were planting seeds for a massive backlash. They were ignored, like they would be ignored in 2003 on the risks of war and again today on the risks of ignoring global warming and rejecting migrations. Sooner or later, chickens will come home to roost, and it won't be pretty.

[icebraining]

I only read the essay, not the book, but that doesn't seem quite what I got from him. He's not saying liberal democracies can't have times of turmoil, with such fascist nightmares, but that those are not an alternative ideology pushing for a different system. And I think that's true - people pushing for more surveillance or voting for Le Pen and Bolsonaro are not idealists trying to forge an alternative to capitalist western liberalism, they just want it tilted some way or another. Western democracies always had underclasses, and people are fighting to change which those are, not pushing to overturn the bedrock.

Regarding the Middle East and Isreal, he writes:

> In the contemporary world only Islam has offered a theocratic state as a political alternative to both liberalism and communism. But the doctrine has little appeal for non-Muslims, and it is hard to believe that the movement will take on any universal significance.

and

> There would still be a high and perhaps rising level of ethnic and nationalist violence, since those are impulses incompletely played out, even in parts of the post-historical world. (...) This implies that terrorism and wars of national liberation will continue to be an important item on the international agenda. But large-scale conflict must involve large states still caught in the grip of history, and they are what appear to be passing from the scene.

And both of these seem true to me; there's no great spread of Islam ideology, nor of Zionism, they are isolated ideologies that can affect others, but not actually compete ideologically with Western liberalism.

history never "ends" and nothing is inevitable, including a return to feudal rule.

Maybe not - and in fact, like Fukuyama, I hope not; as he writes, "[t]he end of history will be a very sad time" - but I'm also not convinced that we've actually seen evidence of that. As of now, it seems possible.

[Maro]

Hungary