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.
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......
