by Jeff Childers
Highbrow blogging site UnHerd ran a thoughtful Proxy War article yesterday headlined, “Emmanuel Todd: Nato will disintegrate if Ukraine loses.” The titular Todd is a French historian and a “public intellectual,” whatever that means, who publishes books critical of American hegemony. His most recent book The Defeat of The West argues that in Ukraine, America may have sheared away more than can be successfully reattached. In other words, we chopped our own d—k off.
Historian Todd made several observations with which most C&C readers would agree. For example, he thinks World War III has already started, that NATO will suffer irreparable shrinkage if Russia wins the Proxy War, that Western governments have been captured by what he neatly described as the “liberal oligarchy,” and that “Western economic sanctions have done more damage to the European economy than to the Russian one.”
My only quibble was he forgot to mention sanctions’ self-inflicted injury to the American economy. It also appears to have been drastically shortened. But I digress.
There was nothing particularly novel (for us) about Todd’s political analysis, except of course that it is the complete opposite of the government-approved, corporate media-sustained narrative. But I found the article’s closing paragraph stunning. Reporters interviewing Todd about his book provocatively asked him whether he’d move to Russia since he hates the West so much, and he declined. But look what he said about the U.S.:
Ouch! Touché, Frenchman. Indeed, nihilism is the danger we face. But the rest of the West also faces that danger, including France. Psychedelic nihilism is the last stop on the liberal oligarchy’s high-speed rail line.
