Misremembrance of Things Past

[Geee]

National Review:

Smarter conservatives winced when Francis Fukuyama made his declaration that the closing decade of the 20th century marked the “end of History.” But their disquiet was nothing compared with the sheer wretchedness of those who had spent the prior decades hoping history would progress ever leftwards. When Fukuyama pronounced the endpoint of History, classical liberals publicly accepted the compliment while privately affirming that nothing on this earth is permanent; at the other end of the spectrum, the Marxists looked disconsolately at the emerging storyline and saw that it was dominated by the conceits of their enemies.

In defeat, though, comes opportunity. Some were troubled by the very presence of a zeitgeist in which a man might announce to much acclaim that it was time to accept the “universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government,” and they understood Fukuyama’s quixotic assessment as a call to arms. “What do we do now?” they asked. “Well, the same thing we do every night, Pinky,” was the answer. “We try to take over the past!”

The Howard Zinn/Noam Chomsky/Oliver Stone Account of Things Past — let’s call this “Zinnism” for brevity’s sake — bubbles up from time to time. The latest contribution to the canon is filmmaker Oliver Stone’s new ten-part documentary, An Untold History of the United States. Stone’s series suffers from the dual afflictions of being neither “untold” nor a “history,” but, given that neither deficiency impedes its purpose, this doesn’t really matter. Propaganda need not be pure.