In his book “The Last Fall,” published in 1976, the historian and anthropologist Emmanuel Todd correctly predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union, and he hopes – as the newspaper Le Figaro says at the beginning of an interview with him – that his “prediction” this time will be wrong, by diagnosing the defeat of the West in his latest book.
The interview – which was summarized by Alexander DeVecchio – began with a question about why Todd predicted the defeat of the West and when the “Third World War” would end, which he told the newspaper a year ago had begun. He replied that the war had not ended yet, but the West had emerged from the illusion of a possible Ukrainian victory, after the failure of the attack. counterattack this summer, noting the inability of the United States and other NATO countries to provide enough weapons to Ukraine, so “everyone will now agree with me on what I said.”
Todd explained that his observation of the West’s defeat is based on three factors, the first of which is the industrial shortage in the United States with the revelation of the illusory nature of the gross domestic product, due to insufficient engineering training and the decline in the educational level since 1965.
More profoundly – as Todd says – the disappearance of American Protestantism is the second factor in the fall of the West, because the rise of the West was based on the rise of the Protestant world of England, the United States, Germany, and the Scandinavian countries.
Intellectual decline
Protestantism produced a high level of education and comprehensive literacy, because it required every believer to be able to read the Bible for himself, with strong individualism and collectivism. Educational progress and work ethics led to great economic and industrial progress, before the worst forms of anti-black racism appeared in the United States. The United States and anti-Jews in Germany begin, leading to intellectual decline, the disappearance of the work ethic and the collective greed called neoliberalism, and the rise turns into the fall of the West.
The third factor behind the Western defeat is the preference of the rest of the world for Russia, which discovered secret economic allies everywhere, and conservative Russian soft power against the gay community took off when it seemed that Russia was able to withstand the economic shock, making it clear that our cultural modernity is completely crazy in the eyes of the outside world.
When asked: Can we talk about a world war and did Russia really win? The writer responds that the Americans will search for a status quo that allows them to hide their defeat.
But the Russians will not accept this, as they realize their direct industrial and military superiority, as well as their demographic weakness in the future, and therefore President Vladimir Putin wants to achieve his war goals and preserve the achievements of the stability of Russian society, but he knows that the Russians must overthrow Ukraine and NATO now, without… Give them no pause, according to Todd.
He adds that the West’s refusal to think about the Russian strategy, with its logic, reasons, strengths, and limitations, has led to general blindness. On the military level, the worst is coming for the Ukrainians and the West, because Russia wants to regain 40% of Ukrainian territory and neutralize the regime in Kiev, “and we still say that the front is stabilizing.”
However, it is not impossible that general hostility to the West builds and gives weapons to the Russian regime. By fomenting united patriotism, the sanctions have allowed the Russian regime to launch a policy of alternative protectionism on a large scale, a policy that would not have been imposed on the Russians without the sanctions, and would To give their economy a significant advantage compared to the European Union economy.
Zero stage
Todd’s book provides a description of Russian stability, then moves west and analyzes the mystery of the disintegrating Ukrainian society that found meaning for its life in the war, then moves to the contradictory character of the new Russophobia among the popular democracies, then to the crisis of the European Union, and finally the crisis of the Anglo-Saxon countries and the Scandinavian countries.
This march towards the West takes us, according to the expert, step by step towards the heart of instability in the world – as Todd sees it – it is diving into a black hole, after Anglo-American Protestantism reached the zero stage in religion, and produced this black hole, where the fear of emptiness turns. In the United States to the deification of nothingness, to nihilism.
When asked about linking the decline of the West with the disappearance of religion, especially Protestantism, the writer stated that he did not say this as a personal opinion, but as a religious sociologist, and he is happy to have an accurate indicator to determine the location of religion’s transition from a zombie state to a zero state.
It is highlighted here that the concept of the state of zombie religion is the disappearance of faith while the morals, values, and collective action capabilities inherited from religion remain, and this is often translated into ideological language, whether national, socialist, or communist.
But, according to him, religion reached zero at the beginning of the third millennium, which he understood by three indicators. In the case of zombies, people no longer go to Mass but baptize their children, and the disappearance of baptism means reaching stage zero. In the zombie stage, we bury the dead and obey the church’s refusal to burn bodies, but today, cremation has become widespread, and stage zero has been reached.
Finally, zombie period civil marriage had all the characteristics of ancient religious marriage, a man, a woman and children to be educated. With same-sex marriage, which has no meaning for religion, we are left with a zombie state, and thanks to marriage laws for all, we can date a new zero state for religion.
Although Todd – as he says – was raised to accept that all sexual tastes are natural, the problem of conversion is something else for him, and he demands the protection of the individuals concerned, noting that the focus of the Western middle classes on the issue of the extremist minority raises a social and historical issue, stressing that creating a horizon Socially, the idea that a man can truly become a woman and a woman a man is something biologically impossible, and it is a denial of the reality of the world, and it is a confirmation of falsehood, according to him.