Emmanuel Todd's Bestseller "The Curses of the West" (Paris 2024) exposes all mistakes and failures of the West. The author clearly states that the West overestimated Russia's full war due to the fact that he believed in the ridicule of stupid John McCain, who considered Russia "a gas station on caterpillars".
Meanwhile, as Todd writes: from 2000 to 2017, about from the beginning of Putin's rule, the death rate for alcoholism in Russia fell from 25 to 100,000 citizens to 8; from suicide, 39 to 13; from murder, 28 to 6. As regards baby mortality, which for a long time was the main determinant of the country's improvement level, under Putin's regulation it fell from 19 to 1,000 live births to 4.4. Todd cites UNICEF to note that the American indicator is presently 5.5 per 1000.
And how did the Russian economy last sanctions?? Todd lists respective sectors in which Russia has made stunning advancement over the past 20 years (agriculture, net access), after which it speculates how Russia, eclipsed by the United States in per capita income statistics, is able to keep pace during the war and produce as much weapons as the United States. An interesting clue is that 23 percent of Russians survey engineeringcompared to 7 percent in the US. The consequence is that Russia, with a much smaller population, produces more engineers than the US, which helps it keep pace with Goliath.
Finally, geopolitics and ideological issues. The West (US) underestimated how much it hated the alleged global South with its ideological agenda. Reviewing “The American Conservative” book “The Curse of the West”, an American publicist Scott McConnell “ 1 of Todd’s main arguments is that the Washington-led West simply has no thought how much of the planet rejects the strategy of values of modern globalist neoliberalism. With arrogant assurance that he embodies global morality, the West “did not realize that he had become a fishy to most of the world, which is patrilinear, homophobic and in fact opposes the Western moral revolution.” Accusing Russia of scandalous anti-LGBTQ actions is on Putin's hands. Russia knows that its homophobic and anti-transsexual policy "gives it considerable soft power" (soft power). The revolutionary soft force of Russian communism, which erstwhile spoke to a large part of the European working class, "has given way to the conservative soft force of Putin's era".
And McConnell concludes: “Todd follows the moral collapse of the United States in the fall of the WASP establishment, which formed and led him through most of his history. Protestantism shaped America; Todd follows Max Weber, attributing to him the dynamism of capitalism. For any reason, he disappeared as a dominant belief system. The fresh American ruling class, late ethnically diverse, has no peculiar attachment to the American people. This is an argument resembling the thesis of the late Christopher Lasch, who at the end of his life concluded that The American advanced class fundamentally detached from the American people. At 1 point, Todd wonders about the cultural origin of various key American decision-makers supporting the war in Ukraine – Victoria Nuland, Anthony Blinken – and it seems to be spreading his hands in stunningness.”
Opp. JE
