Millenarian change brings about a time warp, and scum from the past resurfaces. As the second millennium rang to a close, every literature began ‘pastizing’ grand theories. We heard of end of history, end of modernity, end of author, end of geography. A bizarre endless end seemed to have engulfed the world of academics. Francis Fukuyama theorized that totalitarianism was dying, that democracy was the future. Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, in contrast, plumped for a surprise return of totalitarianism. Samuel P. Huntington, the expert on ‘political decay’, adduced civilizational ruptures in Asia. A.G. Frank censured this as continuation of Eurocentrism: western alarm bells being sounded against new bogeymen, Islam and China—the yellow peril once again. Benjamin Barber detected a globalizing centripetal ‘McWorld’ tendency counterposed to antagonizing, centrifugal, jihad tendencies. The orient/occident dyad goes back even to the Greek period. The crusades were, in a way, a reaction to oriental onslaught. Anthropologists encouraged the notion that contemporary backward societies represented human beings arrested at an earlier stage of evolution. To conquer and brutalize the world was an exceptional superiority of the westerner’s civilization. Racism and pan-Asianism soon collided in world politics, leading to the upheaval of the 1930s. Japan, which had emerged strong, unbalancing the western balance-of-power system, and was expelling ‘hakka’ (white peril) from imperial outposts in Asia, had to be taught a lesson without mercy: atom bombs were used the only time in history against an Asian country. The western powers also move multiple simulacra, like the state of Israel and apartheid, to keep the awakened orient at bay. Apartheid in Southern Africa imparted the message that the rest of the West was no more racist. The Soviet Union merely became a sub-hegemonic partner of USA and checked the sedimentation of oriental unity by hijacking the ‘East’.
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