{"id":6542,"date":"2026-06-09T17:03:16","date_gmt":"2026-06-09T15:03:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/?p=6542"},"modified":"2026-06-10T03:03:56","modified_gmt":"2026-06-10T01:03:56","slug":"like-midas-our-rulers-want-to-monetise-everything-they-touch-and-kill-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/2026-06-09\/like-midas-our-rulers-want-to-monetise-everything-they-touch-and-kill-it\/","title":{"rendered":"Like Midas, our rulers want to monetise everything they touch \u2013 and kill it"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"War and profit are intimately tied together. The billionaires cannot secure their profits without war, or the threat of it \u2013 whether against workers at home or against other nations abroad<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

I am old enough to remember the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the wave of excitement it unleashed. With the Soviet Union consigned to the history books, the world was going to become a better, safer place.<\/p>\n

Liberals crowed that the West\u2019s superior, democratic values had won out. Intellectuals like Francis Fukuyama wrote about the \u201cend of history\u201d: the triumph of free-market capitalism and a resolution of ideological struggle.<\/p>\n

Nearly half a century on, the celebratory mood of that time looks not just misplaced but positively deluded.<\/p>\n

The end of the Cold War brought not a peace dividend. Rather, it unleashed a surfeit of greed and hubris.<\/p>\n

With the fear of mutually assured destruction behind it, the United States unveiled a new doctrine: \u201cfull-spectrum global dominance\u201d, militarily and economically.<\/p>\n

Fukayama\u2019s vision of a world rallying to capitalism\u2019s side ignored the fact that capitalism isn\u2019t just a neutral, disinterested idea that everyone can subscribe to on equal terms.<\/p>\n

It has a physical form too. Giant corporations that seek monopolistic control over other countries\u2019 resources. And a gargantuan war machine headquartered in the US, but with 800 bases around the globe, that is ready to crush those who stand in the way of ever-greater wealth accumulation by a tiny elite of billionaires.<\/p>\n

There could be no end of history because capitalism’s billionaire stewards are never satiated. They are driven to constantly entrench and expand their control, to amass more wealth, to buy more influence in our pretend-democracies, to be more ruthless against anyone or anything that threatens their dominance.<\/p>\n

Fukayama forgot that capitalism isn\u2019t socialism. It doesn\u2019t seek the best for everyone. It doesn\u2019t want to share the wealth. It doesn\u2019t prioritise dignity over profit. Its lifeblood is exploitation \u2013 of individuals and of entire peoples.<\/p>\n

Fukuyama forgot that unrestrained capitalism would produce resistance.<\/p>\n

War and profit<\/h3>\n

War and profit are intimately tied together. The billionaires cannot secure their profits without war, or the threat of it \u2013 whether it is against workers at home or against other nations abroad.<\/p>\n

The \u201cend of history\u201d has brought not a unity of interests, and end to struggle, but ever greater polarisation between the haves and have-nots, between powerful nations and weak ones.<\/p>\n

War drums sound ever more loudly across the globe. Ask Venezuelans, Cubans, Greenlanders, Ukrainians, Russians, Palestinians, Lebanese, Iranians how the \u201cend of history\u201d is working out for them.<\/p>\n

Ask Europeans and Americans too, now permanently mired in the politics of austerity. Ever more workers have been forced into the gig economy, with zero-hours contracts. And that is before an AI \u201crevolution\u201d makes swathes of jobs redundant.<\/p>\n

The ever-growing arrogance of the Epstein class, however, is catching up with it. A mood of unrest is beginning to find its voice, recognising that we are already deep in a class war.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Iran \u2013 by refusing to submit to US and Israeli aggression, and in realising its power to throttle global oil supplies \u2013 has shown that full-spectrum dominance was never as complete as the \u201cmasters of the universe\u201d assumed. It has an Achilles\u2019 heel, after all.<\/p>\n

The truth is we should all have been terrified by the idea that our leaders might assume and behave as if history had come to an end.<\/p>\n

In practice, it could mean only an end to constraints on capitalism \u2013 an end to any humanising limits on its reach, on its ambitions, on its cruelty.<\/p>\n

Like King Midas, the Epstein class expected to monetise everything it touched. And like King Midas, hubris will be its downfall.<\/p>\n

Limits of power<\/h3>\n

There are constraints, both immediate and long term, that even the billionaires cannot overcome.<\/p>\n

A finite planet, with finite resources, cannot be plundered indefinitely. A delicately balanced biosphere, which evolved over billions of years to the point where it became compatible with higher life forms, cannot be abused, filled with our toxic detritus, forever.<\/p>\n

Similarly, countries and peoples cannot be humiliated, turned into objects ripe for exploitation and humiliation, year after year, decade after decade, without a reckoning eventually.<\/p>\n

The \u201cend of history\u201d, as Fukuyama should have foreseen, could lead to only one destination: enslavement. The end of struggle, the end of freedom. Only the colonial arrogance of the West could imagine that others would submit to such a fate.<\/p>\n

In Gaza, in Lebanon, in Iran, we see peoples refusing \u2013 however imperfectly, however violently \u2013 to submit to their enslavement. In the West, with our colonial arrogance undimmed, we call it \u201cterrorism\u201d. We call any solidarity with it \u201chate\u201d. We send our own truth-tellers to prison as criminals.<\/p>\n

The genocidal abuse of peoples in Gaza and Lebanon \u2013 the chief victims of the \u201cend of history\u201d \u2013 serves as a reminder to westerners of what the system that triumphed nearly half a century ago is really about. What it requires. Where it is heading.<\/p>\n

But more dangerously for the billionaires, the resistance to that abuse, the struggle against subjugation, against being disappeared, reminds western publics that enslavement is not inevitable, that dignity might still be possible, that another way can, at the very least, be imagined.<\/p>\n

Struggle must continue because submission is death.<\/p>\n

That is the message from Gaza and Lebanon. It is the reason our rulers are so desperate to crush any sense of hope. They need us to believe that history came to an end in 1991. Because otherwise, their days are numbered.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

War and profit are intimately tied together. The billionaires cannot secure their profits without war, or the threat of it \u2013 whether against workers at home or against other nations abroad.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6543,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[5,66],"class_list":{"0":"post-6542","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized","8":"tag-corporations","9":"tag-war-industries"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6542","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6542"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6542\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6547,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6542\/revisions\/6547"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6543"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6542"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6542"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6542"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}