In his latest essay Emmanuel Todd compares the various -isms of foregone and current times:
Hitlerism, Trumpism, Netanyahuism, Le Penism, Macronism
Two of many good points deserve to be highlighted. The first in on Trump’s active service for Zionism which is in fact anti-semitic:
In my opinion, Trumpism’s radical pro-Israel stance masks a visceral and vicious anti-Semitism: the identification of all Jews with Netanyahuism, a truly monstrous historical phenomenon and a cancer in Jewish history, will only serve to renew the Nazi conception of a monstrous Jewish people. I am talking here about anti-Semitism 2.0.
Another, totally different point to highlight, is his analysis of European centrism à la Macron:
Some European middle classes between the [world] wars went mad. The working class was more reasonable. But are today’s middle classes, particularly the upper middle classes, reasonable? Are they peaceful? What are their dreams?
They are crazy. The construction of a post-national Europe is a delusional project when one considers the diversity of the continent. It has led to the expansion of the European Union, cobbled together and unstable, into the former Soviet space. The EU is now Russophobic and warmongering, with its aggression renewed by its economic defeat at the hands of Russia. The EU is trying to drag the British, French, German and many other peoples into a real war. But what a strange war it would be, in which the Western elites have adopted Hitler’s dream of destroying Russia!
The comparison by social class therefore allows us to make a major intellectual breakthrough. Europeanism, and therefore Macronism, fall, through their external aggressiveness, on the side of nationalism, on the side of the pre-war far right. If we add to this the increasingly massive and systematic violations of freedom of information and popular suffrage within the EU, we come even closer to the notion of the far right. Founded as an association of liberal democracies, Europe is mutating into a far-right space. Yes, the comparison with the 1930s is useful, even indispensable.
In the grandiose Europeanist project, we find a psychopathological dimension already observable in Hitlerism: paranoia. Europeanist paranoia focuses on Russia. Nazi paranoia made the Jewish threat a priority, without however neglecting Russian Bolshevism (known as Judeo-Bolshevism).
Todd goes on to expand on that by looking at the irrational European Union reaction to the war in Ukraine. A bizarre reaction that is destined to destroy the EU itself.
In his latest part of his argument on why the EU needs to be dismantled Thomas Fazi makes a somewhat related point:
It is worth stressing that the European Commission, led by von der Leyen, played a crucial role in devising the sanctions regime against Russia and ensuring the bloc’s alignment with (or better, subordination to) the aggressive US-NATO strategy. By using the Ukraine crisis to surreptitiously broaden the powers of the Commission, at the expense of the Council and member states, von der Leyen was able to assume the role of de facto “commander in chief” of the Union, ensuring a much more hawkish response — and a much more destructive economic blowback — than a more consensual intergovernmental approach would likely have led to. In other words, the search for the underlying structural causes of the EU’s lack of competitiveness leads us once again right back to… the EU itself.
The question left about the EU is how to peacefully end it.
