Chapter –XXIII

The End of History

Der Staat ist als die Wirklichkeit des substantiellen Willens, die er in dem zu

seiner Allgemeinheit erhobenen besonderen Selbstbewusstseyn hat, das an und

fuer sich Vernuenftige. Diese substantielle Einheit ist absoluter unbewegter

Selbstzweck, in welchem die Freiheit zu ihrem hoechsten Recht kommt, so wie

dieser Endzweck das hoechste Recht gegen die Einzelnen hat, deren hoechste

Pflicht es ist, Mitglieder des Staats zu seyn.

G.W.F. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts.

George Bush's inaugural address of January 21, 1989, was on the whole an eminently
colorless and forgettable oration. The speech was for the most part a rehash of the tired
demagogy of Bush's election campaign, with the ritual references to "a thousand points of
light" and the hollow pledge that when it came to the drug inundation which Bush had
supposedly been fighting for most of the decade, "This scourge will stop." Bush talked of
"stewardship" being passed on from one generation to another. There was almost nothing
about the state of the US economy. Bush was preoccupied with the "divisiveness" left
over from the Vietnam era, and this he pledged to end in favor of a return to bipartisan
consensus between the president and the Congress, since "the statute of limitations has
been reached. This is a fact: The final lesson of Vietnam is that no great nation can long
afford to be sundered by a memory." There is good reason to believe that Bush was
already contemplating the new round of foreign military adventures which were not long
in coming.

One thing is certain: Bush's inaugural address contained no promise to keep the peace of
the sort that had figured in his New Orleans acceptance speech back in August.

The characteristic note of Bush's remarks came at the outset, in the passages in which he
celebrated the triumph of the American variant of the bureaucratic-authoritarian police
state, based on usury, which chooses to characterize itself as "freedom:"

We know what works: Freedom works. We know what's right: Freedom is right. We know how to

secure a more just and prosperous life for man on Earth- through free markets, free speech, free

elections, and the exercise of free will unhampered by the state.

For the first time in this century, for the first time perhaps in all history, man does not have to

invent a system by which to live. We don't have to talk late into the night about which form of