Part 2 The Mystery of Capital among the Indigenous Peoples of the Amazon. Violent Evictions at El Estor, Guatemala. Alive in Mexico: The Struggles of Mexico's Real del Monte Miners. Bagua massacre in Peru: witness Marijke Deleu - 1 of 2. What happened in massacre of Bagua in Peru: Ben Powless. A Place Called Chiapas. Factsheet on the Ogoni Struggle. The history at the end of history. Fifteen years ago in my book The End of History and the Last Man I argued that, if a society wanted to be modern, there was no alternative to a market economy and a democratic political system.
Not everyone wanted to be modern, of course, and not everyone could put in place the institutions and policies necessary to make democracy and capitalism work, but no alternative system would yield better results. While the End of History thus was essentially an argument about modernisation, some people have linked my thesis about the end of history to the foreign policy of President George Bush and American strategic hegemony. But anyone who thinks that my ideas constitute the intellectual foundation for the Bush administration's policies has not been paying attention to what I have been saying since 1992 about democracy and development.
To be sure, the desire to live in a modern society and to be free of tyranny is universal, or nearly so. A Tax on Witches in Romania? Curses! Edward Said's Orientalism: a Brief Definition. Edward Said [From Orientalism, New York: Vintage, 1979.] Unlike the Americans, the French and British--less so the Germans, Russians, Spanish, Portugese, Italians, and Swiss--have had a long tradition of what I shall be calling Orientalism, a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient's special place in European Western Experience. The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe's greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other. In addition, the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience.
Yet none of this Orient is merely imaginative. The Orient is an integral part of European material civilization and culture. It will be clear to the reader...that by Orientalism I mean several things, all of them, in my opinion, interdependent. Part 1 The Mystery of Capital among the Indigenous Peoples of the Amazon.