‘The Defeat of the West’ necessarily includes done and dusted failures in the US
Thanks to Saint Jimmy (Russian American) for recommending this article from Ramin Mazaheri. This is the last in a series. You can find the previous articles through the following links...
The Ukrainian suicide: Reading Emmanuel Todd’s French-only 'The Defeat of the West'
Eastern Europe’s pro-West shift is ‘inauthentic’ - Emmanuel Todd’s ‘The Defeat of the West’
‘The Defeat of the West’ necessarily includes done and dusted failures in the US
Emmanuel Todd has hard, obvious truths for why the US is leading Ukraine to ruin
Ramin Mazaheri
(This is the 7th part in a multipart series on Emmanuel Todd’s political it-book of the moment The Defeat of the West (La Defaite de l’Occident).)
In Chapter 1, “Russian Stability”, Todd explained why Russia has thrived despite the Western imposition of Iran-level sanctions: essentially, Todd asserts, Western analysts didn’t want to admit that all the readily available data on Russia’s economy, society and leadership was as good as it obviously was. In order to follow the actual thread of the data and conclusions Todd presented I suggested renaming Chapter 2 from “The Ukrainian Enigma” to the more honest “The Ukrainian Suicide”, and the article analysing that excellent chapter is found here. In Chapter 3 Todd turned to Eastern Europe and explained with one word the baffling and swift historical shift from a pro-socialist Bloc allied with Moscow into a Russophobic, liberalism-loving, 2nd-class citizen of Western society: “inauthentic”. The article analysing that chapter is found here, and it’s worth reading because I think we often forget that in the last 35 years no other global region has undergone as counter-revolutionary a change. In Chapter 4 Todd asked “What is the West?” and I noted how his book changed from realism to moralism: per Todd, the West is not just “unstable” but “sick”, and he blames it on the decline of Protestantism and on elitist college-educated intellectuals. Todd would have done better to not pull his punches and title his 5th chapter thusly: “The assisted suicide of Europe”. Or he could have hit upon my new phrase - the “EU-icide” - to quickly describe the obvious failure of the pan-European project, which is the biggest political story of this century. Chapter 6 is titled “In Great Britain: towards a zero-nation (Croule (Crumbling, not Rule) Britannia))”, as bitter Remainers latch on to Russophobia as a way to stay connected with Europe, but the dominant political force in this wayward island is mere “disarray”. In Chapter 8, “The True Nature of America: Oligarchy and Nihilism”, Todd bested by six months the US Democratic Party, which in rage, desperation or sudden enlightenment finally admitted that only an oligarchy was propping up the aged and senile Joe Biden, and which then nihilistically and undemocratically forced in Kamala Harris as their new candidate for November’s election.
Chapter 9 is titled, “Deflating the American Economy”, and it’s the second of three chapters on the US, both of which will be treated here. What is certain is that should Harris lose in November an avalanche of no longer falsified economic data will be dropped on the new Trump administration and the nation’s elite will pretend to be shocked to learn that the Covid lockdowns, the lack of permanent wealth redistribution programs and the inflation backlash from avoiding diplomacy in Ukraine have done permanent damage to everyone but America’s wealthy.
Todd begins with a fundamentally anti-free trade/economic liberalism stance, but its also simple honesty about what the US can and cannot build or produce: “We’re going to discover the dependence of the United States on the rest of the world and their fundamental fragility.”
This is an idea which is very hard for die-hard liberalists - or “neoliberals” or “globalists”, if you insist on confusing yourself via detaching yourself from the past 250 years of history - to reconcile with their own dogma and also the current reality: Outsourcing everything you can makes your country less independent, but this increased independence makes your country stronger… somehow?
At the root of this proposition is an assumption of total American hegemony: The entire world is going to follow the American model, and because we have followed our model the longest surely we will ultimately benefit the most. It’s based on the arrogance, faith-based insistence and intolerance of “the end of history” thesis which American elite became so attached to after the self-termination of the USSR by their elite.
It’s a good theory… if it actually worked in practice, which is what many said about the USSR. However, the economic success of China and the successful resistance of Iran prove that different methods can indeed be more successful than American-style-only capitalism. The US truly did all they could to intimidate the world into following their lead - and only their lead - but their cultural power has ultimately been sapped by one thing which many don’t fully grasp: American economic weakness.
Todd immediately continues, “Before we go on to this radical critique, however…” and it’s important to separate what is likely the view of the reader of this series and the view of the mainstream elite whom a major, well-known thinker like Todd is addressing: The Defeat of the West is indeed a radical book because it seeks to force the West to admit many truths which radically overturn beliefs they have held for decades, and also admits the failed, real results of said beliefs. Of course you likely agree that American-style capitalism is disaster - the Western mainstream still does not, and kudos to Todd for trying to enlighten them.
Todd is thus dealing with the results brought on by the post-1991 “end of history” US liberal hegemonic policies, but he also questions the true motivations of US leadership: “The field of energy has brought to light one of the bizarre features of this war (in Ukraine): we ask without cease if the goal of the United States was to defend Ukraine or to control and exploit their allies in Europe and East Asia?”
Todd is referring to the way the US and Norway have seen their gas sales explode - at the expense of Russia, of course, but also at the expense of defending the economic and social stability of their European allies. He then refers to a shocking proof which has proven the inability of the US to militarily defend Ukraine: an inability to produce enough 155 mm shells, the NATO standard.
Todd asks how this is possible when the U.S. contributes 267% more GNP to the global economy than Russia… allegedly.
When economic numbers don’t get judged by reality when does the blowback become irreversible?
Just as Todd has the courage to say the emperor has no clothes regarding alleged Ukrainian-NATO successes on the battlefield, he has no shortage of data, proofs and observations which undeniably prove that American economic strength has become vastly overrated in recent years.
I am not saying that the US is not rich country - what often isn’t comprehended is just how less rich than others it has become since 2008. Simply go back to 2000: the US was the internet giant, with no serious enemies, with former ideological competitors who were rushing to adopt the American model - it had trillions of dollars available… to re-route back to their 1% via foreign wars, because America is a liberal democracy, of course.
“Globalisation, orchestrated by America itself, has sapped its industrial hegemony.” Todd notes that in 1928 American industry represented 45% of global production - in 2019 just 17%. It’s a problem for all of Western liberal democracies: France and the United Kingdom fell from 9% and 7% respectively to 2%. Germany was at 12% and is now the European “powerhouse” with just 5%. Relatively union-strong Italy saw not as bad a drop - from 3% to 2% over the same era. Russia is currently 15th with just 1% of global production.
And yet Russia is vastly outproducing the entire West and winning easily in Ukraine?
Todd suggests that Russia has developed a “stealth industry”, given the proof since 2022 of their superior industrial abilities. It’s an interesting phrase, but even though Russia reportedly has a sizeable shadow economy I really don’t think it includes military production? The true answer is obviously Russian willingness to use central planning for the benefit of the nation; the US uses central planning - whenever the US government implicates itself in their economy it is mainly via the Pentagon - primarily to enrich their military-industrial “oligarchs” (banker bailouts arrive when necessary).
Todd offers a new formula for calculating the true GNP of the US, one which he says will amuse the reader and should earn him a Nobel prize. He starts by pointing out a reality: health expenses represent 19% of US GNP and yet life expectancy has dropped? Therefore, the real value of these services is clearly overestimated - it’s hard not to agree with this logic. For a couple decades the US and Western Europe have been proudly touting their switch from industrial economies to service economies, but it’s truly much harder to put a correct value on the price of a service than it is to put a correct value on an ounce of gold, bushel of wheat or ton of toothpaste.
After some quick recalculations which take out some of their overvalued service economy Todd reduces US GNP per capita from $76,000 to $40,000. He says the proof in the accuracy of this estimation is that this amount is less than the $48,000 of Germany and the $41,000 of France, and especially that it now corresponds with the lower ranking of infant mortality rate of the U.S. as compared with those two countries.
There are certainly more accurate ways to recalculate US GNP per capita but Todd admits this is mostly back-of-the-napkin stuff. Where he’s different is that he’s an anthropologist - how many Western economists will incorporate infant mortality statistics into their economic calculations? A reminder here that in 1976 Todd famously predicted the fall of the USSR via increasing infant mortality rates. When we reflect on his choice: prioritising the survival of newborn babies is a pretty important indicator of how well a society is functioning, no? Many new parents of dead babies would surely insist it is the most important indicator!
And the overall point is undoubtedly right: There is no doubt in my mind that the average French person is richer than the average American. Eighty percent of France takes home less than €3,000 per month - or about $41,000 - but they seem to get something like four times more value for their twice-larger average tax burden than the US (47% to 24% respectively): cheap health care, cheap higher education, unemployment insurance, paid vacation, top pubic services, etc. The idea that the average American is living a whopping 85% better and more stable than the average Frenchman totally beggars belief, but America’s reported economic data is obviously decoupled from reality.
Todd discusses an economic path which we can truly call taboo in the US mainstream: the fact that they buy (import) way more than they sell (export), and that this is only made possible by the exorbitant privilege of the overprinted dollar, which are privately held in tax havens in society-devastatingly high amounts in, that the day the dollar is no longer the global “gold standard" a bill will come due which not even the US army can fight off, and that when this bill comes due the US will finally understood how much they have squandered.
Todd adds a more important taboo, one which even an anthropologist can see even if Western economists cannot: the fact that the anti-liberalist measures taken to solve the above problems haven't worked, and because the problems are so far gone: "The most striking is the persistent increase in the commercial deficit in spite of an official protectionist reorientation started under Obama, reinforced by Trump and taken up by Biden. This supplemental mystery is going to help us understand the irrevocable decline of America."
Indeed, the US fled from liberal-style capitalism’s guaranteed crises (per Marx) in 2008 - the bank bailouts were socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor, and only idiot American “centrists” didn’t admit this. Their protectionist turn since then has been simultaneously denied and decried; the US has been undeniably schizophrenic (hypocritical) on the subject of free trade since 2008. The fact that China has been more pro-free trade than the US at the Word Trade Organisation cannot be denied and is proof of the switch in US policy on the ultimate stage of capitalism in the world. But since 2009 the US trade deficit has more than doubled, from $420 billion to $970 billion, proving how their protectionist efforts have not been able to stop the bleeding whatsoever. In 1991 their trade deficit was just $28 billion.
Todd notes the reduction of the US defense industry from 3.2 million employees in 1980 to 1.1 million today. Of course, Todd notes, this was all just healthy "consolidation" in US PR-speak… never mind the glaring deficiencies of material - and human - capital in Ukraine.
Todd notes what everyone under the age of 50 says in the US: I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness high finance. The US benefits from a global scientific brain towards them, but who decries their own domestic brain drain towards law, finance and business school? As this is a Western phenomenon Todd cites France’s statistics - 16,000 students in schools for commerce, management, accounting and sales in 1980, but 239,000 in 2021-22 - but how much worse must these look in the US? Of course, this has not been a good thing for the real economy but for the parasitical economy. Indeed, this is how the Great Financial Crisis occurred: Western geniuses not working for society but working for usurious, predatory high finance finding novel ways to surreptitiously rob and cheat their poor people/the Greeks.
This shift in educational priorities has undiscussed military implications: “Therefore it’s at the heart of the matter that the brain drain towards law schools and business schools threatens American military power. We don’t win a war by sending the enemy demands for payment or blocking their bank accounts. […] On the American side it’s the spirit of lawyers which leads the war.
And Ukraine still lacks shells.”
A bit dramatic - perhaps. Totally accurate - definitely.
Trump’s superb 2016 election slogan enraged the Deep State, their mainstream media, their average jingoist and a Democratic Party which couldn’t fathom that America’s election of a Black person didn’t automatically make everything 200% perfect in the US - “Make America Great Again”. This was far more serious than Reagan’s post-Vietnam, post-Iranian Hostage Crisis slogan - it’s “Morning in America” - because it openly admitted American decline. Many Americans are still in denial eight years later - even after record inflation, the worst social turmoil in 50 years and the losses in Afghanistan, Syria, Ukraine, Yemen, Gaza, etc. Therefore, Todd is entirely right when he writes of the banality - of the widespread acceptance - of the concept of American decline: “Looking ahead it’s not simply being capable of perceiving a decline. In the case of the United States such an exercise would be too easy; what’s left is to assure ourselves if the process is reversible or not.”
Todd is clearly not a Cassandra but closer to a canary in the coal mine. In France throughout the 2010s I tried to do the same thing: report frantically that things are not adding up in the new pan-European project economically, politically or culturally. Todd notes how truly important reminders of glaring problems simply got ignored: the 2011 awakening of Occupy Wall Street, Thomas Piketty’s much-lauded Capital in the 21st Century, which proved that inequality is inevitable if politics does not get involved, rising Gini coefficients - nothing made a dent. If I recall correctly Todd does not make one significant mention of the every-Saturday-for-six-months bloodbath which was the Yellow Vests - what bigger reminder of glaring problems has there been in the West this century? Occupy lasted less than two months before caving to repression - some Yellow Vests are still out there every Saturday more than five years later, I can report. Truly, when we saw the repression of the Vesters - in a country which is as Western as any - we understood how no solution proposed by the average citizen would ever be tolerated.
For the US, Todd puts another novel label on a well-known problem: He writes that the dominance of the dollar is actually a case of “Super Dutch Disease” - the hypothesis that the unexpected growth in one sector (like natural resources) can actually impede a nation’s economic growth in other sectors. When there’s a problem - like in 2008 - the Fed easily saves the system by issuing as much cash as is needed to shut up Western high finance vultures. Of course another problem is that only 5% of money creation comes from the Fed, while 95% comes from private banks via loan creation - the US is so liberalist that even its own money has been privatised! Yet another obvious problem is the way the money is used so foolishly and corruptly - Todd writes greenbacks are printed so Ukrainian leaders can do their shopping in Western Europe.
“Producing the money of the world at a minimum or nil cost makes it unprofitable, and thus not very attractive, any activity other than money creation.” America’s smartest brains see this, and instead of producing things which could actually aid their war machine or their real economy they produce high finance geniuses bent on grifting and middlemen who send bills after adding a useless markup.
The system cannot be fixed and has become culturally embedded, agrees Todd: “The engineer is too far away from the sources of this prodigality; the manufacturer lives with an obligation of achieving a profit rate of, say, 15%, set by the people who make the money… (his ellipsis) A protection at the borders against foreign industry can’t be enough if the real competition comes from internal money printing, collective and demoniacal. The mechanism has a knock-on effect on the young people who choose training and careers.”
The Defeat of the West is an incredibly of-the-moment book because it treats the first quarter of the 21st century as though it was 200 years ago; so much has indeed been set in stone.
Allow me an analogy to impress upon you just how much things can change in a couple decades: Anytime an Iranian dissident comes up to me on the street and says that I work for a fascist, reactionary, unjust blah blah blah of a news media called Iran’s PressTV this is what I tell them now: “It’s time to admit the truth: it’s over. You lost. Twenty, thirty years ago you guys had a chance but it’s done and dusted - the popular revolution won.” I say this with indifferent certainty because I can see the difference in their eyes: 20 years ago they really believed the people’s revolutionary government would fail, but now instead of fire and confidence in their eyes there’s only ashes, doubt and sadness.
Why should I have pity - these people want to undemocratically subvert the will of the people? Why should I have emotion and not indifference - the legitimacy and stability of the Iranian revolution is so clearly decided now?
I bring that up because the same exists for the West: Twenty-five years ago nobody would have written a book titled The Defeat of the West and gotten a positive review in The New York Times but how things have changed! The proofs are all there, but some Westerners are as clueless as many Iranian dissidents - and I should note that the West’s biggest backers are awful Iranian dissidents.
The royal court of Washington: elites without titles but all the elitism
Todd’s third and final chapter on the US examines the particular social culture of Washington DC and is titled “The Gang of Washington”. This is something I’ll learn about as I’m headed there for a long stay in order to cover what my late mentor Andre Vltchek derided as the “United States election circus”.
Todd wants to dissect, as an anthropologist, what are the exact mores and morals which led these people - the establishment, “the Blob” - to insist on a war with Russia in Ukraine?
However, Todd continues with his totally stereotyped, class-ignoring, whitewashed thesis that all the US needs is the good old WASPs of the pre-Baby Boomer generation. He laments how few they have now: Biden and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan (Irish-Catholic); Antony Blinken and Victoria Nuland (Jewish); Secretary of Defence Lloyd Austin and Kamala Harris (Black; Catholic and Baptist/Hindu, respectively). It is quite amusing to see this retrograde insistence that ethnicity and DNA matter more than the ideologies these human brains operate with.
Todd insists that he’s not decrying the arrival of non-WASPs, but merely anthropologically pointing out the demise of WASPs in the halls of US power and determining what that means sociologically. However, Todd truly seems to believe that these temporary, for-sale politicians represent the real height of power in the US, thus totally ignoring the role of the 1%, which was so clearly on view in the recent pushing out of Biden by the “donor” class, aka “oligarchs”. I read in the The New York Times that Kamala Harris is truly “in her element” when she’s among her (elitist, materialistic, segregationist) sorority sisters - this is someone who clearly loves to be around the rich, powerful and ambitious. These non-WASPs may not be White and Episcopal but their support for liberalism, capitalism and imperialism is just as unshakable as Winthrop and Muffy at the country club in 1938.
As a Jew himself Todd can get away with pointing out the obvious: Despite being just 2% of the US population Jews are greatly overrepresented in Biden’s cabinet (you should have seen Francois Hollande’s); they compose one-third of the board of directors on the prestigious Council of Foreign Relations think-tank; they comprise 30% of the top 100 fortunes, per Forbes in 2010. He concludes with a flourish: “We have the impression of being in Budapest at the start of the 1930s.”
It truly is a major sociological shift: Jews in America have gotten so incredibly entrenched in power, and so incredibly recently, and it so rarely commented upon, incredibly. To quote the most popular current US comedian Dave Chappell: “If they're Black, then it’s a gang. If they're Italian, it’s a mob. But if they're Jewish… it’s a coincidence and you should never speak about it.” CNN immediately condemned him as anti-semitic. Another simple fact of American culture was provided by Marlon Brando, talking about American movie depictions: "We've seen the nigger, and the greaseball. We've seen the chink. We've seen the slit-eyed dangerous Jap. We have seen the wily Filipino. We've seen everything. But we never saw the kike because they knew perfectly well that that's where you draw the wagons around." Maybe you’ve seen more movies than Brando and can provide him with the necessary examples of negative portrayal of Jews? Certainly, I think we can easily agree that there has been no shortage of negative portrayals of Muslims by Hollywood.
Todd discusses, again, the overrepresentation of East Asians in American universities but he doesn’t ask, interestingly: will this group acquire the same type of control as Jews did? Are we going to see East Asian-Americans all over US culture and power soon?
What Todd does discuss is the recent decline of Jewish influence in America, from which he cites a 2023 article from the Jewish magazine The Tablet titled "The Vanishing":
Its author, Jacob Savage, relates that at Harvard Jews have gone from 25% of the student body in the 1990s to less than 10% today; stunningly, 20% of federal judges have historically been Jews, but only composed about 8% of Biden’s 114 appointees; Savage cites a drastic decline in the number of Jewish politicians in key spots in their 2nd city, New York City, and Los Angeles; he discusses a decline of Jews among Hollywood’s top show runners, writers and directors. Savage says this is all due to anti-Jewish discrimination, but Todd - like others - dismisses that notion.
Todd has a better explanation: “The interpretation which is more likely is that, after a longtime advantage of a religion which favours education, Jewish-Americans are finally so well-assimilated that they have been sucked in by the American religious and intellectual decline. […] I talked of a zero-Protestantism, then a zero-Catholicism; why can we not conceive of in the United States (and elsewhere) of a zero-Judaism?” Don’t even ask such a question - it’s a coincidence and you should never speak about it.
Vulgar America’s royal court gets a most unrefined nickname - the ‘Blob’
Todd’s insistence that WASP leadership from 1945-65 was so beneficent, far-sighted, merciful and liberating (of Blacks, Jews, Catholics, Latinos and Asians - and these groups are all cited by Todd - none of them had the agency and people power to demand their rights, apparently) is simply too foolish to continue quoting. His belief that Catholic Joe Biden was so all-powerful - that there was apparently no monied power silently pushing him out of the rented liberalist throne; his belief that four-century-old money has no agenda or influence; his belief that the ruling class has no agency whatsoever, having been overrun by non-WASPs and Black-Hindus, apparently - this all beggars belief.
What’s far more interesting is his concurrent thesis that it’s caused a by a decline of religious feeling in the US - in Protestants, Catholics and Jews (in the previous part of this series I pointed out that Todd - absurdly, wrongly - views non-mainline Christianity in America as “heretical”, and probably because they provide the exception to his rule of zero religious activity across the West). It is by this lack of religion, and not by the absence of WASPs that the following quote makes any sense: “Today the village of Washington is nothing but a collection of individuals totally stripped of a common morality.”
Todd asserts that without any collective conscience those in Washington, swimming in a bath of cash, act thusly, and it’s very interesting: “In fact, these individuals only exist in relation to themselves. They don’t determine their acts and decisions via reference to exterior, and above all superior, values: religious, moral, historical. Their only conscience is local, like a villager. The observation is very worrying: the individuals who compose the group of leaders in the most powerful country in the world don’t obey a system of values which transcends them but which reacts to the impulsions which come from the local network they belong to.” Todd began this paragraph by stressing, “I don’t speak of a ‘village’ by chance.”
What Todd is describing here absolutely sounds like the apex of individualist identity politics, which is based upon a totally anti-socialist tribalism which forbids the importance of that greatest tribe: the working and lower classes.
However, how different is Washington from any other royal court? How much did Louis XV care or know about peasant life in France’s Vendée region, which would then foolishly go on to be the most recalcitrant domestic rebels against the French Revolution? We can lament a loss of religion, unity and collectivism in the city of Washington, but we should not overestimate how much of that ever really existed in the context of a liberal democracy which has always sought to sideline the working class.
Todd cites a chapter titled “Life in the ‘Blob’: A Sense of Community” from Stephen Walt’s book The Hell of Good Intentions: America's Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy. Todd describes people like Christine Lagarde, who is not mentioned explicitly. Lagarde, the head of the European Central Bank, has zero experience as a banker, yet this longtime lawyer has proven to be the perfect puppet who would do the bidding of Western capitalists whose economics she doesn’t understand, and thus can’t possibly challenge. This type of person, described by Todd, is hell-bent on advancing their own vision of the world: one which is totally governed by their job. Give these ladder-climbers a job - any job - and they will do that job to the utmost… without questioning what they hell they are even doing because that’s how you climb the ladder in the for-sale government which liberalism offers.
“The Washington Blob such as Walt presents definitely corresponds with my vision of a leader group totally ideologically or intellectually unattached to anything beyond themselves.”
It’s gratifying to think of the US royal court as being so immoral as to be totally willing to favor the highest-paying intellectual ideology, but it’s statistically impossible for everyone in Washington to be a true sociopath. Thus, this is mere demonisation; this insistence that the West’s problem is “nihilism” is simply unsatisfying intellectually even if some find it emotionally satisfying. The reality is that Washington is totally attached to the ideology of American liberal hegemony - and this is quite different from nihilism.
“Walt confirms here what I remarked earlier: In a world where ideologies are disappearing, the state remains, of course, but even more so jobs. Journalists who, in the past, adhered to opposing ideologies, have become about “the Journalism”, with its own ethics and preoccupations and with, we note, its own preference for war, because it’s a spectacle. The same goes for the police or army.”
What Todd could have added is that rolling back social democracy’s mere social safety net has - as intended - made workers as dependent on their boss-masters as in the pre-WWI and WWII-era. In an America without religion and extended families - and increasingly without friends, clubs and associations - and in an economic context where missing a pay check means homelessness, “the job” has indeed become their everything, but by necessity.
In those 30 glorious, WASP-led years, before Western social democracy had been gutted by “austerity”, people had more leeway to put their ethics and morals above “the job”, but not in these precarious times. Therefore, doing “the job” - whatever the circumstances - has become elevated as the highest morality and especially in the US. This is what the Nazis said in many ways - at Nuremberg, at the gate of Auschwitz (where “work will make you free” was engraved) and in various other “machine-society” ways (to use Todd’s earlier description of modern Germany) - and it would be simply another way liberal democracy has subsumed some of the values of fascism, which also existed in pre-industrial slave societies like America.
It’s a blob with a plan, and the plan is more than mere nihilism
No European essayist/writer/thinker worth anything could ever talk about 21st century US foreign policy without referring to Victoria “F— the EU” Nuland, whom he uses as an example of the incestuous interconnectedness of the Washington village. She married into the infamous Kagan family - a family, I note, which has a very real, very clear, very explicitly reactionary ideology and cannot be considered to be some sort of nihilistic, totally non-intellectually motivated, malleable Washington Blob-ians.
Todd says he’s doesn’t ignore discussing the reality of an American “Deep State” - another positive outcome of Trump’s rise - he simply prefers to call it the “Shallow State”. It’s another novel phrase from Todd and apt in many ways.
My complaint is that he doesn’t include any sort of class analysis along with it, and instead makes psychological-moral-emotional assertions which are satisfying only momentarily, and which offer much support to the pro-religion bent of his book but which doesn’t offer much in the realm of political science: “(The American apparatuses of the state) are peopled with individuals who, for the most part, respect the hierarchical principle. These bureaucratic monsters are straddled by a small gang of semi-intellectuals who live in the Blob, an under-village of Washington.”
Truly, most people everywhere respect the hierarchical principle.
How many people are truly willing to go against the crowd? Let’s be fair, or at least clear-eyed about how few truly revolutionary people/nations there are in the world.
However, when we combine this trait with a thirst for war and economic inequality - and when if concede to Todd’s insistence of rampant, open nihilism, then we have something greatly reminding us of Nazism. Only the most wilfully blind won’t accept a reminder of the facts of neo-Nazis among US allies in Ukraine.
Todd notes that in reconstructing the main actors of the Ukraine war he was surprised to find so many Jews hailing from the former Russian empire or its margins (Nuland, Blinken, the Kagans). It certainly makes sense to me: any war on Cuba will involve those Cubans who detested left-wing politics and fled to Miami; a war in China will have reactionary Taiwan as its base; Iranian exiles in Los Angeles and Washington DC have a lot of money for you if you want to go film yourself in the Tehran subway chanting “death to the dictator” - all these groups will be at the center of such counter-revolutionary activities. It’s the same reason why the Biden administration expressly prioritised allowing in Venezuelans, Cubans, Nicaraguans and Haitians for refugee status? The official claim of “humanitarian grounds” is a joke, and of course you’ll never read the real reason: they need more staff for the ongoing cold and hot wars against these three leftist-inspired governments, and another country so permanently oppressed that any group fighting for their sovereignty will never be termed anything but a “gang”. From the margins of the USSR to around the world - the US wants your huddled masses yearning to… destroy leftism.
This is the obvious reason, but not one which Todd hits upon. He tries to explain their Russophobia with two options: a state of zero-religion or a state of zero-memory, because modern Russian anti-Semitism actually began with the pogroms in Kiev in 1881. They were so widespread that tsarist efforts couldn’t stop them, and Todd write that it’s hard to understand the Blob-ians affection for Ukraine: “A complete absence of historical consciousness could explain why Ukraine’s past doesn’t trouble neither Blinken nor Nuland. These two political leaders are just two more Americans without a memory, totally indifferent to the anti-Semitic past of Ukraine, and the symbolic neo-Nazism of today’s Ukrainian nationalism.”
The stupidity of Blinken and Nuland is clear, but their real motivation is that America’s leaders have a higher overarching principle to serve: pro-imperialism and anti-leftism. Todd, we must note, is not a leftist.
Todd concludes his three-chapter review of the US by explaining their Russophobia with a third option: These neoconservatives truly want to destroy Ukraine. Of course they do - they are imperialists, a concept and word which does not feature in this otherwise excellent book.
Thus Todd leaves the American wonderland and returns back to the totality of the world - and reality - with his final chapter before his Conclusion: “Why the Rest of the World Chose Russia”.
Ramin Mazaheri is the chief correspondent in Paris for PressTV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Mexico, South Korea, Switzerland, Tunisia and elsewhere. His latest book is France's Yellow Vests: Western Repression of the West's Best Values. He is also the author of ‘Socialism’s Ignored Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism’ as well as ‘I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China’, which is also available in simplified and traditional Chinese. Any reposting or republication of any of these articles is approved and appreciated. He tweets at @RaminMazaheri2 and writes at substack.com/@raminmazaheri
Source: Ramin Mazaheri’s Substack
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