The Defeat of the West: Emmanuel Todd By Chris Knight (Florida)

French intellectual Emmanuel Todd, has just published La Défaite de L'Occident (The Defeat of the West), and the work could be viewed as a successor to Spengler's work on the decline of the West. Todd, addresses the present Ukraine war, and proposes that the West, NATO, is set to lose badly on this one. The problem is just not in backing a bad and corrupt nation, the Ukraine, but lies in what could best be described as the spiritual collapse of the West. Todd sees this in the way woke ideologies such as transgenderism have moved to centre stage, even though trans individuals are a tiny minority. Todd sees this ideology as a continuation of the feminist/homosexualist critique of traditional masculinity. Both Russia and especially China have resisted going down this road, particularly in their respective militaries. Thus, their forces remain tough and strong, while the West has become soft and flabby. Not just metaphorically either, as military fitness levels in the West have fallen, and have been lowered to accommodate women, just for delusional "equality." While some might suppose that today technology decides all, the Ukraine war is one where individual soldiers with rifles constitute the bottom line.

But the military decline is only one major part of the story, and the West is facing national breakdown in both economy and society, arising from the spiritual vacuum at its heart. Can this process be reversed? We do not know, but the aim of the Freedom Movements is to give it their best shot in trying to undo at least 100 years of Leftist rot and decay.

https://sputnikglobe.com/20240118/how-the-west-was-defeated-1116245840.html

"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.

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.

8. Todd's sharp critique of the spirit of 1968 would merit a whole new book. He refers to "one of the great illusions of the 1960s – between Anglo-American sexual revolution and May 68 in France"; "to believe that the individual would be greater if freed from the collective". That led to an inevitable debacle: "Now that we are free, en masse, from metaphysical beliefs, foundational and derived, communist, socialist or nationalist, we live the experience of the void." And that's how we became "a multitude of mimetic midgets who do not dare to think by themselves – but reveal themselves as capable of intolerance as the believers of ancient times."

9. Todd's brief analysis of the deeper meaning of transgenderism completely shatters the Church of Woke – from New York to the EU sphere, and will provoke serial fits of rage. He shows how transgenderism is "one of the flags of this nihilism that now defines the West, this drive to destroy, not just things and humans but reality."

And there's an added analytical bonus: "The transgender ideology says that a man may become a woman, and a woman may become a man. This is a false affirmation, and in this sense, close to the theoretical heart of Western nihilism." It gets worse, when it comes to the geopolitical ramifications. Todd establishes a playful mental and social connection between this cult of the fake and the Hegemon's wobbly behavior in international relations. Example: the Iranian nuclear dear clinched under Obama becoming a hardcore sanctions regime under Trump. Todd: "American foreign policy is, in its own way, gender fluid."

10. Europe's "assisted suicide". Todd reminds us how Europe at the start was the Franco-German couple. Then after the 2007/2008 financial crisis, that turned into "a patriarchic marriage, with Germany as a dominant spouse not listening to his companion anymore". The EU abandoned any pretention of defending Europe's interests - cutting itself off from energy and trade with its partner Russia and sanctioning itself. Todd identifies, correctly, the Paris-Berlin axis replaced by the London-Warsaw-Kiev axis: that was "the end of Europe as an autonomous geopolitical actor". And that happened only 20 years after the joint opposition by France-Germany to the neocon war on Iraq.

11. Todd correctly defines NATO by plunging into "their unconscious": "We note that that its military, ideological and psychological mechanism does not exist to protect Western Europe, but to control it."

12. In tandem with several analysts in Russia, China, Iran and among independents in Europe, Todd is sure that the US obsession – since the 1990s - to cut off Germany from Russia will lead to failure: "Sooner or later, they will collaborate, as "their economic specializations define them as complementary". The defeat in Ukraine will open the path, as a "gravitational force" reciprocally seduces Germany and Russia.

Before that, and unlike virtually any Western "analyst" across the mainstream NATOstan sphere, Todd understands that Moscow is set to win against the whole of NATO, not merely Ukraine, profiting from a window of opportunity identified by Putin in early 2022. Todd bets on a window of 5 years, that is, an endgame by 2027. It's enlightening to compare with Defense Minister Shoigu, on the record, last year: the SMO will end by 2025.

Whatever the deadline, inbuilt in all this is a total Russia victory – with the winner dictating all terms. No negotiations, no ceasefire, no frozen conflict – as the Hegemon is now desperate spinning."