Emmanuel Todd, historian, demographer, anthropologist, sociologist and political analyst, is part of a dying breed: one of the very few remaining exponents of old school French intelligentzia – a heir to those like Braudel, Sartre, Deleuze and Foucault who dazzled successive young Cold War generations from the West down to the East.
The first nugget concerning his latest book, La Défaite de L’Occident (“The Defeat of the West”) is the minor miracle of actually being published last week in France, right within the NATO sphere: a hand grenade of a book, by an independent thinker, based on facts and verified data, blowing up the whole Russophobia edifice erected around the “aggression” by “Tsar” Putin.
At least some sectors of strictly oligarch-controlled corporate media in France simply could not ignore Todd this time around for several reasons. Most of all because he was the first Western intellectual, already in 1976, to have predicted the fall of the USSR in his book La Chute Finale, with his research based on Soviet infant mortality rates.
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Good essay and probably good book but how do these guys not know that the West has been infested with parasites, conquered by them, and thus cannot but suffer defeat? ‘Intellectual’ reasons for defeat are little more than the trail of slime left behind by the parasites who are eating us alive. The defeat of the West can only be understood on a much longer timeline of over 100 years. Infestation and parasitic proliferation require decades to slay and digest such a large beast as the West. Demise on that scale has been brought about by military-grade, deliberate, premeditated, organized, violent, ruthless and relentless asymmetric and clandestine warfare and not a bunch of ideas. Come on guys, every single institution in the West has been taken over by this process, which has been violent. It’s as obvious as the nose on your face.
I am not talking about Escobar or Todd, but generally it is true that Western intellectuals who have survived the parasitic purges, who have survived the decades of violence, are uniquely immune to understanding what has happened because they have benefitted from it. They owe their status to their natural rivals who were more realistic having been taken out along the way, having been destroyed. Just as the West is an empty shell of its former self, so our ‘intellectuals’ for decades have been seated in an empty room, lecturing to a vacant audience. The best of them were destroyed. ABN
American Buddhist Net 