The West, Guns and Nothingness

Marcello Veneziani discussing Emmanuel Todd's book

The West has destroyed the foundations on which it rests: Christianity, the sovereign state, the civilization of law, critical thinking and history. It is no longer the leader of the world, it is defeatist internally and bellicose externally, it believes it can save itself with the force of arms and the intermittent use of the rights of peoples and nations. It has lost the intelligence of reality, the ability to understand the world and life, abdicating in favor of a radical individualism enslaved to technology and finance. It has lost the critical thinking that knows how to distinguish and the founding thinking that knows how to generate.
I have read and shared The Defeat of the West by Emmanuel Todd , published by Fazi, and I will draw from his merciless analysis some decisive ideas for understanding the state of things. Todd is a French historian, anthropologist and sociologist, author of important books.
Getting involved in the Russian-Ukrainian conflict and even favoring it, supporting it, participating in it was for Todd the fatal error of the West; Russia has remained stable, it will not give in on Ukraine, which is losing, as Viktor Orban had the courage to say to the European Parliament. Flattened by NATO and the United States, Europe is offering the spectacle of "assisted suicide". While the rest of the world increasingly clearly prefers Russia to the West at the feet of the USA. Todd makes an interesting historical comparison: "Communist Russia had found an ally in the Western proletariat, the one that has become conservative today would still find its allies in the working classes of the West, who have also become conservative (more than populist or far right)". The Washington-London-Warsaw-Kiev axis is today the main axis of American power in Europe. Furthermore, in his opinion, the butchery carried out in Gaza by the State of Israel, especially with American weapons, and accepted by Europe, has pushed the entire Islamic world, including Turkey and Iran, to the side of the Russians. Not to mention the other open fronts. Todd points out that “the West’s immorality on the Palestinian issue has only served to reinforce the hostility of the rest of the world.”
The Ukraine that the West would like to adopt, with its independence in 1991 – after centuries of belonging to first Tsarist and then Soviet Russia – had already lost millions of inhabitants before the war through emigration, dominated by oligarchs and corruption, to the point of appearing like a country for sale with a power that eliminates dissent, a non-aligned press and disgraced hierarchs with methods no better than those of Russia. The disappearance of our ability to conceive of the diversity of the world, he notes, prevents us from having a realistic vision of Russia.
Todd observes that the hypothesis of a military-industrial recovery of the United States is to be excluded due to the scarcity of engineers at their disposal, compared to the Russians (and the Chinese) and because of their predilection for the production of money rather than machinery.
The moral and social collapse derives in his opinion from the collapse of Protestantism, which makes the American decline irreversible and opens the USA and the entire West to the fate of nihilism. As a student of Max Weber he observes that if Protestantism was the matrix of the take-off of the West and of capitalism, now it is its death that causes its dissolution.
Meanwhile the nation-state dissolves and globalization triumphs; individuals are now deprived of any collective belief. The collapse of religion has swept away the national feeling, the work ethic, the concept of a binding social morality, the ability to sacrifice oneself for the community. Todd distinguishes other phases before reaching the “zero stage” of religion where values ​​no longer count and attests to its arrival through the observation of practices that have quickly fallen into disuse in baptisms, deaths, participation in Sunday services, but above all with the equalization of homosexual marriages to those between men and women.
We had been told that the individual would be greater once freed from the collective and from social ties; instead the opposite has happened: the individual, says Todd, can only be great within and through a community. “We are becoming a multitude of mimetic dwarves who no longer dare to think with their own heads but who prove to be as capable of intolerance as the believers of old.” What remains is intolerant bigotry, not the use of critical intelligence.
Currently, Todd notes, Europe is engaged in a war that is contrary to its interests and self-destructive; the European Union has disappeared behind NATO, now more than ever subservient to the United States, with a rate of obedience close to 100%, in a totalitarian climate. Russia, note, does not represent any threat to Western Europe: as a conservative power, today as at the time of the Congress of Vienna, in 1815, its desire is to create an economic partnership with Europe, in particular with Germany. It is in its interest to have a European shore.
The Union appears to Todd as a heavy and complex system, unmanageable and literally irreparable; "the dark side of the desire would be that war would free Europe from itself". After all, a nation is a people made conscious by a collective belief and an elite that governs it based on these beliefs. Only the people remain. And he concludes by noting that in the era of zero religion, a primary need for violence grows. Hence the diagnosis that I have inevitably summarized: the West is affected by nihilism which is a rejection of reality, a need for destruction of oneself and others, a denial of truth and of any reasonable understanding of the world. The analysis is trenchant, perhaps too much so, even if supported by much data and convincing arguments.
In my opinion, it is not a question of going back, an impossible undertaking, nor of surrendering to autocratic, theocratic and despotic regimes, and adapting to their unacceptable models. Instead, it is about thinking about the new, the sacred, sovereignty, the social bond, starting from the relationship between elites and people, with the former now reduced to self-referential oligarchies and the latter to a global mass.
And to give oneself a mission, compatible with the reality and legacies of civilization.
Todd's "The Defeat of the West" risks falling into the thriving apocalyptic vein that for a century now has announced the decline of the West. But it helps to awaken abruptly from the sleep of reason, which generates monsters and pushes the advance of nothingness in the West. Armed nothingness.

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