A fewer months ago I read the book “The Curse of the West” by French sociologist and historian Emmanuel Todd. To be honest, I haven't completely "digested" her yet. My first impression was: this time the author failed to show insight! Why “this time”? due to the fact that Todd in 1976, only on the basis of statistical data, predicted the dissolution of the USSR. Then everyone laughed at him. 15 years later, he was right. With the last book being the other – the defeat and decay of the West has been seen for many years, Todd had only the courage to say it out loud. But that's not what made me keep reasoning about that book. That's quite a few tiny details that I've seen most before, but the author throws a fresh light on them and explains them differently. I find it most fascinating to say that universal higher education is liable for the spread of "populism" (whatever to realize under this term). Todd writes about contempt, but I mean intellectual degeneration, which progresses despite an increase in education (apparently theoretical). The fact is, Western societies are stupid. In our country this debacle has reached an alarming level, but elsewhere it is not better. The only advantage of those countries is the existence of a very narrow group of people who deserve the name of intellectuals. This proverb is the last Mohican; Todd is surely 1 of them. We're the ones with the candle. Therefore, in our country there is no chance to print his book – there would be no audience. The “Mournament” of our society would not let us to accept the facts and considerations it contains. Our idolatrous attitude towards the West, especially to the US, does not let us to accept their fall – it would be besides much cognitive dissonance and shock. It does not let the improvement of China, Russia and the global South to be accepted. We simply do not think that the quality of life in present-day Russia (at least in cities) is higher present than in Western Europe. That despite the war censorship – which concerns only the war and safety of the country – freedom of expression in Russia is incomparably higher than in the West! We do not know that thousands of people emigrate from the West to Russia; most from France. It's interesting that Todd's book was published in a tiny Slovenia. I just happened to be on the author's foreword for the edition there. The author allows it to be distributed, so I do, due to the fact that I think it's worth it.
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Preface to the Slovenian edition of the “Deep West”
From defeat to decay
Less than 2 years after the French publication of the book La Défaite de l’Occident (The Curses of the West) in January 2024, the main forecasts contained in this publication proved to be true. Russia has survived a military and economical storm. The American arms manufacture is ruined. European economies and societies are on the verge of implosion. The Ukrainian Army hasn't broken down yet, but the beginning of the Western decay has already occurred.
I have always been opposed to the Russophobic politics of the United States and Europe, but as a man of the West, a Frenchman educated in England, the boy of a parent who during planet War II was a exile in the United States, I am devastated by the consequences for us Westerners, the war against Russia, conducted without intelligence.
We're only at the beginning of the crash. A critical point is approaching, after which the final consequences of defeat will be revealed.
"The remainder of the world" (or global south, or global majority), which has so far supported Russia by refusing to boycott its economy, now openly shows its support for Vladimir Putin. The BRICS countries are increasing by accepting fresh members and expanding their coherence. India, invited by the United States to take a stand on 1 side, chose independence: pictures of Putin, Xi and Modi gathering at the August gathering of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation in 2025 will be a symbol of this crucial moment. However, Western media proceed to represent Putin as a monster and Russians as subjects. These media were incapable to imagine that the remainder of the planet saw them as leaders and average people, carriers of circumstantial Russian culture and the desire for sovereignty. I am now afraid that our media will deepen our blindness, incapable to imagine Russia's renewed prestige in the remainder of the world, which for centuries has been exploited economically and treated with arrogance by the West. The Russians dared. They challenged the Empire and won.
The irony of past is that the Russians, European white people utilizing Slavic language, became the military shield of the remainder of the planet due to the fact that the West refused to integrate them after the fall of communism. I imagine that the Slovenians are peculiarly well prepared culturally to appreciate this irony, although as an anthropologist for household and religion, I know that despite the Slavic language, Slovenia is much closer to Switzerland socially and ideologically than Russia.
I can draw here a model of Western dislocation, despite the inconsistencies of Donald Trump's policies, the defeated president of the United States. I believe that these inconsistencies are not due to the unstable and undoubtedly overturned personality, but to the insoluble dilemma of the United States. On the 1 hand, the leaders of the Pentagon and the White home know that the war is lost and that Ukraine will should be abandoned. Thus, common sense prompts them to retreat from war. On the another hand, the same common sense makes them aware that withdrawal from Ukraine will have dramatic consequences for an empire that had no withdrawal from Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan. This is the first strategical defeat of America on a global scale, in the face of the mass deindustrialisation of the United States and hard reindustrialisation. China has become a global factory; a very low fertility rate will surely prevent them from replacing the United States, but it is besides late to compete with them in the field of industry.
The dedollarisation of the global economy has begun. Trump and his advisors cannot accept this due to the fact that it would mean the end of the empire. However, the post-imperial era should be the mark of the MAGA task (Make America large Again), which seeks to return to the American national state. But for America, whose production capacity for real goods is now very low (see chapter 9 on the actual nature of the American economy), it is impossible to quit life on credit, which is the production of dollars. specified imperial-monetary withdrawal would mean a sharp fall in the standard of living, including the convinced Trump voters. Trump's first word budget, “One large Beautiful Bill Act”, so remains imperial despite customs protection, which embodies a protectionist task or dream. OBBBA increases military spending and deficit. The budget deficit in the United States inevitably means printing dollars and a trade deficit.
Imperial dynamics, or alternatively imperial inertia, continues to undermine the dream of returning to an industrialised national state.
In Europe, leaders inactive do not realize military defeat. They weren't in charge of operations. It was the Pentagon who devised plans for the Ukrainian counteroffensive in the summertime of 2023 (in which I wrote the book "The Defeat of the West". The American armed forces, even though their Ukrainian ally led the war, know that they were defeated by Russian defence – due to the fact that they were incapable to produce adequate weapons and due to the fact that Russian armed forces were smarter than them. European leaders have only provided weapons systems, and not the most crucial ones. While unaware of the scale of the military disaster, they know that their own economies have been paralysed by sanctions policy, and especially by disrupting the supply of inexpensive Russian energy. The division of the European continent into 2 parts in economical terms was an act of suicide madness. The German economy is stagnant. poorness and inequality are increasing throughout the West. Britain is on the verge of falling. France is not far behind. societies and political systems are at an impasse.
Before the war, there was negative economical and social dynamics, which was already a burden for the West. It was visible to varying degrees throughout Western Europe. Free trade weakens the industrial base. Immigration leads to identity syndrome, especially among working classes that are deprived of safe and decently paid jobs.
More importantly, the negative dynamics of fragmentation is cultural: mass higher education creates societies divided into layers where people with higher education – 20%, 30%, 40% of the population – start surviving in their own circle, consider themselves superior, despise the working class and reject physical work and industry. Universal primary education (universal literacy) fostered democracy, creating a unified society with an egalitarian subconscious. Higher education led to the formation of oligarchy, and sometimes plutucracy, societies divided into layers, mastered by a subconscious based on inequality. The eventual paradox: the improvement of higher education has led to lower intellectual levels in these oligarchy or platoons! I described this series more than a 4th century ago in the book The economical Illusion, published in 1997. Western manufacture moved to another parts of the planet and, of course, to the erstwhile folk republics of east Europe, which, having freed themselves from the dominance of the russian Union, regained their centuries-old position of periphery dominated by Western Europe(imphasis on my). In Chapter 3, I am discussing in item this kind of interior China, where industrial workers are inactive numerous. However, everywhere in Europe the elite of people with higher education has led to the emergence of "populism".
The war has caused tensions in Europe. It leads to impoverishment of the continent. Above all, however, as a serious strategical failure, it undermines the legitimacy of leaders who are incapable to lead their countries to victory. The improvement of conservative social movements (generally referred to by the journalistic elite as ‘populist’, ‘extremely right’ or ‘nationalist’) is gaining momentum. UK improvement in the UK. AfD in Germany, Rassemblement National in France... Ironically, the economical sanctions that NATO believes would lead to a "change of regime" in Russia will shortly origin an avalanche of "change of regime" in Western Europe. The Western ruling classes lose legitimacy as a consequence of defeat at the minute erstwhile Russia's authoritarian democracy regains legitimacy through victory, or alternatively excessive legitimacy, as Russia's return to stableness under Putin initially ensured its undisputed legitimacy.
This is our planet on the eve of 2026.
Western change takes the form of a “hierarchical crack”.
The United States is losing control of Russia and, as I am increasingly convinced, China. Blocked by China for the import of samare, the uncommon earth component essential for military aviation, The United States can no longer dream of a military confrontation with China. The remainder of the planet – India, Brazil, the arabian world, Africa – is taking advantage of this situation and moving away. However, the United States has energetically turned against its European and East Asian "soyants" in its last effort to over-use and, to be fair, of pure malice. To escape humiliation, hide their weakness from the planet and from themselves, they punish Europe. The Empire eats itself. This is the meaning of the duties and forced investments imposed by Trump to Europeans who have become subject to a colonial shrinking empire alternatively than partners. The era of solidarity of liberal democracy is over.
Trumpism is “white populist conservatism”. What appears in the West is not solidarity between populist conservatives, but a breakdown of interior solidarity. The anger resulting from defeat makes each country turn against the weaker of itself to vent its dislike. The United States is turning against Europe and Japan. France again warms up the conflict with Algeria, its erstwhile colony. There is no uncertainty that Germany, which from Scholz to Merza agreed to submit to the United States, will return its resentment to weaker European partners. In my opinion, my homeland, France, is most threatened.
One of the basic concepts of Western defeat is nihilism. I explain how the “zero state” of Protestant religion – secularization in its final form – not only explains the collapse of American education and industry. Zero states besides open a metaphysical void. Personally, I am not a believer and I do not advocate going back to religion (I do not think it is possible), but as a historian I must note that the failure of social values derived from religion leads to moral crisis, to the drive to destruct things and people (war) and yet to effort to abolish reality (for example, the phenomenon of transsexuality for American democrats and the denial of global warming for Republicans). This crisis occurs in all completely secularized countries, but it is more serious in those in which the dominant religion was Protestantism or Judaism, which are absolute religions in their quest for transcendence than in countries where Catholicism prevailed, which is more open to the beauty of the planet and earthly life. It is in the United States and Israel that we see the improvement of parody forms of conventional religions, which, in my opinion, are nihilistic.
This irrational dimension is the crux of failure. This failure is so not only a “technical” failure of power, but besides a moral exhaustion, a deficiency of a affirmative existential goal that leads to nihilism.
This nihilism is behind the drive of European leaders, especially from Protestant Baltic countries, to extend the war with Russia through constant provocations. This nihilism is besides behind the American destabilization of the mediate East, which is the eventual expression of the anger resulting from America's defeat in the clash with Russia. First of all, let us not be overly simplistic in concluding that the Netanyahu government in Israel acts independently on the issue of genocide in the Gaza Strip or the attack on Iran. Zero Protestantism and zero Judaism surely tragically combine their nihilistic effects in these outbreaks of violence. However, throughout the mediate East it is the United States, delivering weapons and sometimes attacking directly, they are yet liable for chaos. They push Israel to act as they pushed the Ukrainians. Trump's first presidency established the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem and Trump was the first to imagine Gaza transformed into a seaside resort. I realize that in order to prove this thesis, a book would be needed to break down the first interactions between the various actors. However, as a professional geopolitic historian for half a century, I believe that, like NATO Europe, Israel has ceased to be an independent state. The problem of the West is actually the programmed death of the national state.
The empire is vast and decays into an atmosphere of sound and fury. This empire is already polycentric, divided in terms of goals, schizophrenic. However, no of its parts are truly independent. Trump is now its ‘centre’; it is besides its best ideological and applicable expression, combining a rational desire to retreat to the immediate dominance region (Europe and Israel) with nihilistic impulses conducive to war. These tendencies – withdrawal and force – besides express themselves in the American heart of the empire, where the rule of hierarchical division works internally. More and more Anglo-American authors are calling for civilian war.
American plutacracy is pluralistic. There is simply a plutocracy of financiers, a plutocracy of oilers, a plutocracy of Silicon Valley. Plutocrats supporting Trump, Texas oilmen and fresh supporters of Silicon Valley despise the educated elites of East Coast Democrats who in turn despise the white supporters of Trump from the center of the country, who in turn despise black Democrats and so on.
One of the interesting features of today's America is that its leaders are increasingly hard to separate interior and external issues, despite the MAG's attempts to halt immigration from the south with a wall. The army shoots at boats leaving Venezuela, bombards Iran, enters the centers of democratic cities in the United States, and assists Israeli air force to launch an attack on Qatar, where there is simply a immense American base. all discipline fiction reader will have no problem recognizing in this worrying list the beginnings of falling into dystopia, a negative planet in which power, fragmentation, hierarchy, violence, poorness and perverseness mix.
So let's just be ourselves outside America. Let us preserve our perception of what is interior and external, our sense of harmony, our contact with reality, our thought of what is right and beautiful. Let us not let our European leaders, those privileged people lost in history, desperate for failure and terrified think that 1 day they will be judged by their citizens, drag us into a hasty war. Above all, let us proceed to reflect on the importance of events.
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