As someone who studies and teaches Native American history, I’m like: Hold my beer. You wanna talk about historical myths unfairly miscasting regions and peoples as backwards, impoverished, and violent? You can’t even imagine. The Indigenous Americas featured numerous wealthy, art-laden empires. Large, orderly, planned Indigenous cities made European cities of even the 1800s seem like filthy, disease-ridden, shambolic wrecks by comparison. And all of that erased from popular historical memory so that colonial settlers and their descendants can ease their conscience with lies about primitive savages.
But whether histories are erased and ignored, like those of Indigenous empires, or studied to the point of saturation, like much of European history, the truth is we can only imagine the past. We can never relive it. Even if the past is recent and filmed, we can never be there, we can never participate. And even if we were there, even if we did participate and remember, memories aren’t as real as we think; they are reconstructions. Not merely subjective, memories are also limited and faulty.
And so it is that the past always has at least one thing in common with the future: it must be imagined.
Was this time and place a dark age? Is a dark age coming? Look forward or backwards, we cannot know for sure. And anyway, what do we even mean by “dark age.” Perhaps something about pervasive ignorance, the corruption of truth, and great difficulties in overcoming fallacies?
Certainly, some ages have been darker than others. And going forward, some will linger in shadows more so than the light.
I can imagine a dark age on the horizon. One that brings George Orwell’s 1984 to mind. Not in terms of the state oversight of individuals, which is a central and memorable feature of that book, and clearly reflected Orwell’s contemporary understanding of the Soviet Union and recently defeated Nazi Germany. Rather, it is 1984’s background geopolitics I’m thinking of.
A quick refreesher. In 1984, the world is divided into three large empires: Eurasia, East Asia, and Oceania. We learn about living conditions and governance with any detail in only Oceania, the home of protagonist Winston Smith. However, from the book’s narrative, we surmise that each of these empires is totalitarian, and locked in a three-way competition of occasionally shifting alliances. Oceania, and perhaps the other two empires as well, constantly pervert the truth and erase history to advance the most recent political agenda. The state that had previously been the bitter enemy? It was never an enemy after all, but always a loyal ally because it is the loyal ally now. And former allies were never allies, but always bitter enemies because that is what they are now.
Ukraine was never a weaker, poorer, smaller nation aggressively and unjustifiably invaded by Russia; they were the original aggressor who started the war and is completely at fault for everything that has happened since, because that lie is in line with the new foreign policy of Donald Trump. You get the idea.
Fascist state capture in the United States (ie. a bloodless or minimally violent coup) could lead to a new Dark Age that brings about something reminiscent of 1984’s tripartite totalitarianism. It would mean that the world’s two superpowers, China and the United States, are both committed to authoritarian rule and truth-destroying propaganda. And because the United States is by far the world’s wealthiest and militarily powerful nation, the fall (or severe perversion) of its constitutional system would very likely have a domino effect. India, Italy, and Argentina are already in the process of state capture. Turkey, Hungary, and of course Russia seem like lost causes for the foreseeable future. Brazil and the Philippines have recently escaped it, at least for now. France has come agonizingly close to electing a fascist government, and may yet do so. It’s difficult to imagine that the rise of fascism in the United States wouldn’t lead to, or at least complement, the rise of more fascism in Europe, South America, and Asia.
But just because I fear for the future does not mean I pine for the past. The Cold War was never the simple tale of Good vs. Evil that the competing sides, each in their own way, promoted. The United States was afflicted by racism, sexism, and endemic poverty at home, while it eagerly ran roughshod over foreign democracies to secure international capitalism. The West, led by the United States, was hardly the hero of freedom it loved to present itself as. But the Soviet Union and People’s Republic of China truly were totalitarian states that aggressively denied their citizens all sorts of rights, including the right to speak the truth. Every society puts limits on truth speaking, at least informally, to maintain social cohesion. However, the Chinese and Soviet communist regimes crassly erased truth, spread fact-defying propaganda, and imprisoned, tortured, and killed perhaps millions of their own people for the crime of defying that propaganda. Indeed, such approaches never ended in China, and have returned to Russia under Vladimir Putin.
The Cold War wasn’t unadulterated awfulness. The communists and the Western democracies counterbalanced each other to some degree. T he United States’ imperfect commitment to a free press and free speech pressured, belittled, and exposed communist propaganda; West Berlin’s existence within the Eastern Block is an prime example. Meanwhile, communist class consciousness pressured the United States to address some of its worst racial policies; the poor treatment in Washington, D.C. of African diplomats whom the United States wanted to woo is a classic example of generating such pressure. And the West really did create unprecedented wealth and technological innovation, while the communist states made real advances against the worst depths of systemic poverty.
However, I would never glorify the Cold War; on the whole, it was a shit show. And anyway, the Cold War victory was never more than incomplete. The Chinese government’s 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown made it clear that the Chinese government had no appetite for democracy, even as many Western thought- and policy-leaders carried on the century-old delusion that freedom of markets would lead to other freedoms, with economic prosperity magically producing individual rights and freedoms. As if fascism had never happened. As if empires had never existed. As if there were not ample historical evidence that a society can be restrictive and even totalitarian, while maintaining at least some commitment to free markets. Yes, China has embraced many elements of free market capitalism since then. No, it did not become a democracy, or even remotely close to one.
Furthermore, the Cold War’s demise in the early 1990s led to a global economic uniformity (neoliberalism) that has not worked out well for most humans. I’m old enough to remember the exuberant optimism following the Soviet Union’s collapse. For example, there was talk of a supposed peace dividend (the money saved by ending the arms race). And then there was the wild popularity of phenomenally stupid books such Francis Fukayama’s The End of History, which whiggishly argued that human history had been a march towards liberal democracy all along.
Yup, we’re all just marching towards liberal democracy.
I mean, it would be laughable if it weren’t so wrong.
I believe that the spread of capitalism (or various versions of it) across the globe after the Cold War is one of the important factors leading us to this current moment when right wing authoritarian movements and governments are on the rise. Neoliberalism pushes for profits, not education. It tends to the needs of shareholders, not citizens. It cares only for the freedom of capital; the freedom of voices and presses are secondary to whatever governing system can ensure stable markets and access to resources. Is a Middle Eastern regime a brutal patriarchal monarchy? That’s fine, so long as it keeps pumping oil. Are postcolonial sub-Saharan democracies vulnerable to military coups? That’s fine, so long as the continent’s rich resources are still available to big business. But if Cuba or Venezuela nationalizes potentially profitable sectors of their economies? Boy, do we have a problem then.
Untrammeled markets have led to: the trampling of social and cultural norms around the world; the abandonment of native-born, blue collar workers in developed economies; the displacement of rural populations in developing economies; massive global migrations; environmental degradation; climate change; escalating public health crises amplified by industrial animal farming; and for-profit companies cutting back on low-profit vaccine R&D. The list need not stop there.
Yet even as societies endure more and more social crises that are at least amplified, if not created, by capitalism, no more left wing solutions are allowed. Only right wing solutions. People are pissed off, and are repeatedly told they can only look to the right for answers; so how far to the right will they go? We’re starting to find out.
If the United States takes a full fascist turn, which seems increasingly possible, and perhaps even likely, things will go very badly. I say that not simply as an American who fears for his nation, but as someone who recognizes the enormous influence the U.S. economy and military have on the rest of the world. If Russia, China, and the United States all sport various shades of totalitarianism, and Europe fractures over it, the world may very well enter a new Dark Age. One that could last a few years or many centuries. One that future people will imagine was violent, brutish, and bereft of truth. Whereas you and I will not have to imagine it. We will be here, watching all the lies cascade down upon us.
I was never your friend. I was never to be trusted.
This essay was first published at 3 Quarks Daily.