© AFP 2023
Emmanuel Todd, historian, demographer, anthropologist, sociologist and political analyst, is part of a dying breed: one of the very few remaining exponents of old school French intelligentzia - a heir to those like Braudel, Sartre, Deleuze and Foucault who dazzled successive young Cold War generations from the West down to the East.
The first nugget concerning his latest book,
La Défaite de L'Occident ("The Defeat of the West") is the
minor miracle of actually being published last week in France, right within the NATO sphere: a hand grenade of a book, by an independent thinker, based on facts and verified data, blowing up the whole Russophobia edifice erected around the "aggression" by "Tsar" Putin.
At least some sectors of strictly oligarch-controlled corporate media in France simply could not ignore Todd this time around for several reasons. Most of all because he was the first Western intellectual, already in 1976, to have predicted the fall of the USSR in his book La Chute Finale, with his research based on Soviet infant mortality rates.
Another key reason was his 2002 book
Apres L'Empire, a sort of preview of the Empire's Decline and Fall published a few months before Shock & Awe in Iraq.
Now Todd, in what he has defined as his last book ("I closed the circle") allows himself to go for broke and
meticulously depict the defeat not only of the US but of the West as a whole - with his research focusing in and around the war in Ukraine.Considering the toxic NATOstan environment where Russophobia and cancel culture reign supreme, and every deviation is punishable, Todd has been very careful not to frame the current process as a Russian victory in Ukraine (although that's implied in everything he describes, ranging from several indicators of social peace to the overall stability of the "Putin system", which is "a product of the history of Russia, and not the work of one man").
Rather, he focuses on the key reasons that have led to the West's downfall. Among them: the end of the nation-state; de-industrialization (which explains NATO's deficit in producing weapons for Ukraine); the "degree zero" of the West's religious matrix, Protestantism; the sharp increase of mortality rates in the US (much higher than in Russia), along with suicides and homicides; and the supremacy of an imperial nihilism expressed by the obsession with Forever Wars.
Comment: Zelensky is not in control of himself, needless to say, the country. Trump will scare the hell out of him.