Trump’s perversity is unfolding in the Middle East, NATO’s warmongering in Europe. [...] Such is our world as we approach 2026. The dislocation of the West takes the form of a ‘hierarchical fracture’.
» One of the fundamental concepts of the West’s defeat is nihilism. «
[...] Cutting the European continent in half economically was an act of suicidal madness. [...] The rage resulting from defeat is leading each country to turn against those weaker than itself in order to vent its resentment. The United States is turning against Europe and Japan. France is reactivating its conflict with Algeria, its former colony. There is no doubt that Germany, which, from Scholz to Merz, has agreed to obey the United States, will turn its humiliation against its weaker European partners. My own country, France, seems to me to be the most threatened.
[...] One of the interesting features of America today is that its leaders are finding it increasingly difficult to distinguish between internal and external issues, despite MAGA’s attempt to stop immigration from the south with a wall. The army fires on boats leaving Venezuela, bombs Iran, enters the centres of Democratic cities in the United States, and sponsors the Israeli air force for an attack on Qatar, where there is a huge American base. Any science fiction reader will recognise in this disturbing list the beginnings of a descent into dystopia, that is, a negative world where power, fragmentation, hierarchy, violence, poverty and perversity intermingle.
So
let us remain ourselves, outside America. Let us retain our perception
of the inside and the outside, our sense of proportion, our contact with
reality, our conception of what is right and beautiful. Let us not
allow ourselves to be dragged into a headlong rush to war by our own
European leaders, those privileged individuals lost in history,
desperate at having been defeated, terrified at the idea of one day
being judged by their peoples. And above all, above all, let us continue
to reflect on the meaning of things.
(from the preface to the 2025 Slovenian publication of La Défaite de l'Occident)
Emmanuel Todd, one of the last phenotypical old-school French intellectuals, is a historian, sociologist, demographer, statistician, anthropologist and political scientist at the National Institute of Demographic Studies (INED) in Paris. A prominent critic of the US, globalization, and European integration, he is best known for predicting the collapse of the Soviet Union (La Chute Finale, 1976), After the Empire (2002) and his 2024 book The Defeat of the West.
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