In his book “The Final Fall,” published in 1976, historian and anthropologist Emmanuel Todd accurately predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union, and he hopes – as Le Figaro newspaper begins an interview with him – that his “prediction” this time will be mistaken, with his diagnosis of the West’s defeat in his latest book.
The interview – summarized by Alexandre Devecchio – opens with a question about Todd’s reasoning behind predicting the West’s defeat and why the “Third World War,” which he told the newspaper a year ago had begun, has not yet ended. He responded that the war is far from over, but the West has been disillusioned with the prospect of a Ukrainian victory, especially after the failed counter-offensive this summer, noting the inability of the United States and other NATO countries to supply Ukraine with sufficient weapons, asserting, “Everyone will now agree with what I have said.”
Todd clarifies that his observation of the West’s defeat is based on three factors, the first being the industrial shortfall of the United States revealed through the illusory nature of the Gross Domestic Product, attributed to the lack of sufficient engineering training and the decline in education levels since 1965.
More profoundly, Todd notes the disappearance of American Protestantism as the second factor in the West’s fall. He argues that the rise of the West was founded on the rise of the Protestant world — England, the United States, Germany, and the Scandinavian countries.
Intellectual Decline
Protestantism produced a high level of education and comprehensive literacy because it required that every believer be able to read the Bible independently, which, coupled with strong individualism and collectivism, led to significant economic and industrial progress. However, this was before the rise of the worst forms of racism, with anti-black sentiment in the United States and anti-Semitism in Germany, marking the start of an intellectual decline. The disappearance of work ethics and the collective greed dubbed neoliberalism transformed the rise into the fall of the West.
The third factor behind the Western defeat is the rest of the world’s preference for Russia, which has discovered secret economic allies everywhere. Russian soft power, with its conservative stance opposing the LGBTQ+ community, has emerged strongly when Russia seemed capable of withstanding economic shocks, highlighting our cultural modernity as utterly insane in the eyes of the external world.
When asked whether we can talk about a world war and whether Russia has indeed emerged victorious, the author believes the Americans will seek to maintain the status quo that allows them to conceal their defeat. Yet, the Russians will not accept this, as they recognize their direct industrial and military superiority, as well as their demographic weakness in the future. President Vladimir Putin, according to Todd, seeks to achieve his war objectives and maintain the achievements of the Russian society’s stability but is aware that the Russians need to take down Ukraine and NATO now, without any respite.
Todd adds that the West’s refusal to consider Russian strategy, its logic, reasons, strengths, and limitations, led to widespread blindness. Militarily, the worst is yet to come for the Ukrainians and the West, as Russia aims to recapture 40% of Ukrainian territory and neutralize the regime in Kyiv. Still, we continue to say that the frontline is stabilizing.
However, it’s not impossible that the West’s general animosity is building and providing weapons to the Russian regime, through the stirring of a unified patriotism. The sanctions have allowed the Russian regime to launch a wide-scale alternative protectionism policy, a policy that could not have been imposed on Russians without the sanctions, potentially giving their economy a great advantage over the European Union’s economy.
Zero Stage
Todd’s book presents a description of Russian stability before moving westward to analyze the enigmatic decay of Ukrainian society, which has found meaning in its life through war. It then addresses the contradictory character of newfound Russophobia in popular democracies, the European Union crisis, and finally the crisis of the Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian states.
This westward journey, according to the expert, takes us step by step toward the heart of instability in the world – as Todd sees it – plunging into a black hole, having reached the Zero Stage in religion. The American Protestantism produced this black hole, where the fear of emptiness in the United States turns into the deification of nothingness and into nihilism.
Responding to a question about linking the decline of the West to the disappearance of religion, particularly Protestantism, the writer reminds that it’s not a personal opinion but rather, as a sociologist of religion, he is glad to have an accurate indicator to determine the transition from a zombie religious state to the Zero Stage.
The concept of a religious ‘zombie’ state involves the disappearances of faith while retaining the morals, values, and collective working abilities inherited from religion, often translated into ideological, nationalist, socialist, or communist language.
However, a religion, Todd says, reaching the start of the third millennium, enters the Zero Stage, distinguished by three indicators. In the zombie state, people no longer attend mass but still baptize their children; the disappearance of baptism signifies the arrival at the Zero Stage. When zombie stage people buried the dead and obeyed the church’s rejection of cremation, today, the spread of cremation means reaching the Zero Stage.
Finally, civil marriage in the zombie stage maintained all the characteristics of the old religious marriage: a man, a woman, and children who must be educated. With same-sex marriage, which is meaningless for religion, we move beyond the zombie state. Thanks to ‘marriage for all’ laws, we can now date the new Zero State of religion.
Todd, who grew up accepting that all sexual tastes are natural, argues that the issue of transitioning is something else for him, demanding protection of the concerned individuals. He points out that the Western middle classes’ focus on the extreme minority issue raises a social and historical question. Creating a social horizon for the idea that a man can truly become a woman and a woman a man is biologically impossible; it represents a denial of reality, highlighting a falsehood, in his view.
