The Defeat of the West and Its Dislocation
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.
Todd recently opened a substack where he is posting speeches and talks he has given.
Two of those, a recent talk given in Russia (in French) and one given in Hungary (in English) make (mostly) similar points.
The downfall of the Soviet Union led to deep psychological and societal dislocations in Russia. The defeat of the West, or ‘liberal democracy’, is leading to similar consequences in Western societies.
While Todd had predicted the fall of the Soviet Union, he had not anticipated the consequences it would have for Russia:
But the collapse of Russia in the 1990s is something I would never have anticipated. The fundamental reason why I was unable to understand or anticipate the dislocation of Russia itself is that I had not understood that communism was not simply a means of organising economic activity in Russia, but also a kind of religion. It was belief that allowed the system to exist and the dissolution of that belief repre
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