Evil Empire 7The End of the End of History
Maximillian Alvarez
among the prizes at stake in the endless war of politics is history itself.
The battle for power is always a battle to determine who gets remembered,
how they will be recalled, where and in what forms their memories will
be preserved. In this battle, there is no room for neutral parties: every
history and counter-history must fight and scrap and claw and spread
and lodge itself in the world, lest it be forgotten or forcibly erased. All
history, in this sense, is the history of empire—a bid for control of that
greatest expanse of territory, the past.
The greatest act of empire, of course, is to declare the whole messy,
brutal process finished, to climb to the top of the trash heap and trumpet
one’s reign as the culmination of all history. The greatest act of history, on
the other hand, is to reveal such declarations to be always premature. Seneca’s
Pax Romana announced a history stilled by the glorious rise of Augustus,
the “sun that never set” shone on the image of time frozen at the height of
the British Empire—and the world spun madly on.
Nearly thirty years ago, American political scientist Francis Fukuyama
famously called the ball game once more. In a 1989 essay, which he expanded