At history’s edge
SOME time ago, it was quite a bit of fun to trash Francis Fukuyama. Fukuyama, we all know, had declared the end of history: the Berlin Wall had fallen, Germany’s once-genocidal halves had united, and the West had grown dizzy with success. Perhaps, he wrote, “centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again”.
At least he didn’t have to wait centuries, this writer said in 2016: “Donald Trump has been elected president. And history’s returned as nightmare.” Reading those words now, they seem misplaced: both too late and too early. Too late because history never left the scene: when Fukuyama was checking its pulse in 1989, Afghanistan’s mujahideen were about to turn their guns on themselves (courtesy Gen Aslam Beg); Iran’s young theocracy had spat on the West by calling for Salman Rushdie’s head, and then elevated a weeping Ali Khamenei to the top job; and defence secretary Dick Cheney was about to quote Isaiah while sending his first crusaders to attack the Middle East.
But those words were also too early, because of all that was yet to happen after 2016: Kabul would fall again. Pakistan’s Supreme Court, the one that had held Gen Beg responsible for rigging elections to return Nawaz Sharif’s party to power, would be made constitutionally redundant. And the West’s crusaders would re-attack the Middle East, this time with Khamenei in their sights.
What, then, has changed?
Perhaps, the nature of history itself has changed.
The nature of history itself, perhaps. The Cold War at least had the decency of symmetry; its terrors balanced by fear. The post-1945 world order didn’t sneer at peace. International law, considered a fancy fiction even back then, was still a chore to be dealt with.
All of that is over now. If there was a moment it was formally laid to rest, it was when five-year-old Hind Rajab was fleeing Gaza with her family, amid the collapse of the city’s health services. An Israeli tank slaughtered her uncle, her aunt, and her four cousins; Hind herself was martyred along with the two paramedics desperately attempting her rescue; 335 tank rounds had been fired into the car, in the full awareness it had screaming children inside it.
Because Zionism kills kids to steal land; there’s no more to the idea. And its assets have managed to lock the world’s most powerful military machine in a chokehold. That this desi conspiracy theory is now trickling into the Western consensus is no small feat: it took three million pages of Jeffrey Epstein, countless abused children, and a ring that ran all the way from Britain’s debauched royals to the constantly lying Clintons.
This is the core political reality of the last several years, as well as the salient moral cause of our time: that the holocaust of the Palestinian people was enabled by Joe Biden’s America. Trump’s, meanwhile, has now given Israel’s genocidaires another go at Iran. Hence, also, in times of war, the need for simplicity. The charges against Tehran are that it is repressive and regressive. The said charges are also irrelevant. The need for liberal throat-clearing — at a time when sovereign states can be invaded, maimed, and brutalised at the drop of a MAGA hat — is obtuse.
There are those who support the Zionist design, and those who oppose it. There is no third category. Making excuses for regime change, one driven by imperial outsiders, is the colonised mind at work: its major cheerleaders include ditzy diasporans, who prefer their people being tortured by the Shah’s Savak rather than the revolutionaries who overthrew them. Not least, if the Netanyahu tail continues to wag the Trump dog, Iran will hardly be the overnight decapitation Venezuela was: its geography, history, culture, and logistics all put paid to that. “The fulfilment of martyrological script,” Prof Mohammad Reza Farzanegan wrote for Al Jazeera recently, sees not a bitter collapse but idealised closure: political life made sacred “through sacrificial death”.
Far fewer are speaking of all that happened under Ayatollah Khamenei, and far more of him telling a child what a glory it is to live to 80 or 90, and embrace martyrdom. This he was gifted by the imperial hegemon; the Iranian people’s own verdict shall never be asked.
Next door, Pakistan may want to use its newfound appeal in Western circles to urge a ceasefire. And it may wish to deal with its own Kabul hostilities more pragmatically: if there’s to be kinetic action against the vile TTP, shouldn’t, also, the growing fissure between state and society — evident from the embassy killings — be closed? Shouldn’t political space be reopened in KP and the tribal areas be financially restored as promised?
The old order is dying. But the new one is looking worse.
The writer is an advocate of the Supreme Court.
Published in Dawn, March 3rd, 2026