A few month ago I discussed Emmanuel Todd’s most recent book:
In 1976 the French anthropologist Emmanuel Todd predicted the down fall of the Soviet Union. In After The Empire, first published in French in 2001, he predicted the (relative) decline of the United States.
In his latest (and last) book, La Défaite de l’Occident (The Defeat of the West), he laments the West’s inability to distinguish facts from wishes, as seen in its behavior during the war in Ukraine. Nihilism, a lack of values and of acceptance of reality, has infested western thinking:
Trans ideology is therefore, in my opinion, one of the flags of this nihilism that now defines the West, this drive to destroy not just things and people but reality.
Todd recently opened a substack where he is posting speeches and talks he has given.
Todd has just published a new preface for his book in which he sheds light on the consequences of the West’s defeat in Ukraine.
Here are some excerpts with highlights added:
I have always been hostile to the Russophobic policies of the United States and Europe, but as a Westerner committed to liberal democracy, a Frenchman trained in research in England, the child of a mother who was a refugee in the United States during the Second World War, I am devastated by the consequences for us Westerners of the war waged without intelligence against Russia.
We are only at the beginning of the catastrophe. A tipping point is approaching, beyond which the ultimate consequences of defeat will unfold.
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I now fear that our media will exacerbate our blindness by being unable to imagine Russia’s renewed prestige in the rest of the world, which has been exploited economically and treated with arrogance by the West for centuries. The Russians dared. They challenged the Empire and they won.The irony of history is that the Russians, a European and white people who speak a Slavic language, have become the military shield of the rest of the world because the West refused to integrate them after the fall of communism.
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I can sketch out here a model of the dislocation of the West, despite the inconsistencies of the policies of Donald Trump, the defeated American president. These inconsistencies do not result, I believe, from an unstable and undoubtedly perverse personality, but from an insoluble dilemma for the United States. On the one hand, their leaders, both in the Pentagon and the White House, know that the war is lost and that Ukraine will have to be abandoned. Common sense therefore leads them to want to get out of the war. But on the other hand, the same common sense makes them realise that the withdrawal from Ukraine will have dramatic consequences for the Empire that those from Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan did not have. This is indeed the first American strategic defeat on a global scale, in a context of massive deindustrialisation in the United States and difficult reindustrialisation.
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Imperial dynamics, or rather imperial inertia, continue to undermine the dream of a return to the productive nation state.In Europe, military defeat [in Ukraine] remains poorly understood by leaders.
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Unaware of the extent of the military defeat, they do know, however, that their own economies have been paralysed by the sanctions policy, especially by the disruption of their supply of cheap Russian energy. Cutting the European continent in half economically was an act of suicidal madness.
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A negative economic and social dynamic existed before the war and was already putting the West under strain. It was visible, to varying degrees, throughout Western Europe. Free trade is undermining the industrial base. Immigration is developing an identity syndrome, particularly among the working classes who are deprived of secure and properly paid jobs.More profoundly, the negative dynamic of fragmentation is cultural: mass higher education creates stratified societies in which the highly educated – 20%, 30%, 40% of the population – begin to live among themselves, to think of themselves as superior, to despise the working classes, and to reject manual labour and industry. Primary education for all (universal literacy) had nurtured democracy, creating a homogeneous society with an egalitarian subconscious. Higher education has given rise to oligarchies, and sometimes plutocracies, stratified societies invaded by an unequal subconscious. The ultimate paradox: the development of higher education ended up producing a decline in intellectual standards in these oligarchies or plutocracies!
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The war has raised European tensions a notch. It is impoverishing the continent. But above all, as a major strategic failure, it is delegitimising leaders who are incapable of leading their countries to victory.
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One of the interesting features of America today is that its leaders are finding it increasingly difficult to distinguish between internal and external issues, despite MAGA’s attempt to stop immigration from the south with a wall. The army fires on boats leaving Venezuela, bombs Iran, enters the centres of Democratic cities in the United States, and sponsors the Israeli air force for an attack on Qatar, where there is a huge American base. Any science fiction reader will recognise in this disturbing list the beginnings of a descent into dystopia, that is, a negative world where power, fragmentation, hierarchy, violence, poverty and perversity intermingle.So let us remain ourselves, outside America. Let us retain our perception of the inside and the outside, our sense of proportion, our contact with reality, our conception of what is right and beautiful. Let us not allow ourselves to be dragged into a headlong rush to war by our own European leaders, those privileged individuals lost in history, desperate at having been defeated, terrified at the idea of one day being judged by their peoples. And above all, above all, let us continue to reflect on the meaning of things.
I highly recommend to read, and reflect on, the whole essay.