interviewTodd

Anthropologist Emmanuel Todd and his controversial book, “I am not pro-Russian, but if Ukraine loses the war it is Europe that wins”
byDaniele Labanti


Italian translation of the French scholar's book accused of positions close to Putin is out. He will be in Bologna on Tuesday, Oct. 8

>Fazi is releasing the Italian edition of Emmanuel Todd's The Defeat of the West, published in France by Gallimard. The book has triggered a hornet's nest of criticism of the French anthropologist, who has been accused for a decade of holding pro-Putin positions. Todd will be at Librerie.coop Ambassadors on Tuesday to present the volume in dialogue with Carlo Galli.

>Professor Todd, it has been written in France that you want to “pass off your dreams as reality” and that what you claim has no scientific basis. What is your response?
“The question is not knowing what the French press writes about me, but knowing the facts that current history reveals. The fact is that the United States has not been able to produce the military equipment the Ukrainians need, because it is a fact that the power of its industry has been drained by financialization. It is a fact that the Ukrainian army is in retreat and it is a fact that it is struggling to recruit soldiers.

It is a fact that Western economic sanctions have done more damage to the European economy than to the Russian economy, and it is also a fact that the political stability of France is now more threatened than that of Russia. The restructuring of the Russian economy has been made possible by the fact that this country produces more engineers than the United States and by the fact that countries that are not allies or subjects of the United States have continued to trade with Russia. The comments of much of the French press about my dreams-“Le Monde,” “Libération,” “L'Express” etc. - suggest that it is you who are living in a dream. The success of my book in France also suggests the fact that this press is not always taken seriously by the French.”

>However, the volume is based on your theories on nihilism and religious decadence in Europe. Can you introduce us to their significance?

“The last traces of the social and moral structure of religious origin have disappeared. The zero state of religion has been reached. The absence of beliefs, norms and habits of religious character or origin, however, leaves one with the anguish of being a man, mortal, and not knowing what he is doing on earth. The most commonplace reaction to this emptiness is the deification of emptiness: nihilism, which leads to the impulse to destroy things, people and reality.
 A central symptom of this for me is the transgender ideology that leads our upper-middle classes to want to believe that a man can become a woman and a woman a man. This is a statement of the false. The biology of the genetic code tells us that this is impossible. I speak here as an anthropologist, as a scholar, and not as a moralist. We need to protect individuals who think they belong to a gender other than their own. As for the LGB part of LGBT ideology (lesbianism, male homosexuality, and bisexuality), these are sexual preferences that have my blessing. It is also surprising but significant that by accepting the inflexibility of the genetic code, science and the Church are now on the same side. Against the nihilistic assertion of the false.”


 >You argue that Europe has delegated the representation of the West to the United States and is now paying the price. How do you think this trend can be changed?

 “In the present state we can do nothing else. A war has begun. It is the outcome of this war that will decide the fate of Europe. If Russia is defeated in Ukraine, European submission to the Americans would be prolonged for a century. If, as I believe, the United States is defeated, NATO will disintegrate and Europe will be left free. Even more important than a Russian victory will be the halting of the Russian army on the Dnepr and the unwillingness of the Putin regime to attack Western Europe militarily. With 144 million people, a shrinking population and 17 million square kilometers, the Russian state is already struggling to occupy its territory. Russia will have neither the means nor the desire to expand once the borders of pre-communist Russia are reconstituted. Western Russophobic hysteria fantasizing about the desire for Russian expansion in Europe is simply ridiculous to a serious historian. The psychological shock awaiting Europeans will be to realize that NATO does not exist to protect us but to control us.”

>Do you think Europe took the final step toward this subordination during the conflicts in the Balkans, and especially with the Kosovo issue?

“No, it all started in Ukraine. During the Iraq war, after Kosovo, Putin, Schröder and Chirac held joint press conferences. This terrified Washington. It seemed that America could be expelled from the European continent. Russia's separation from Germany thus became a priority for American strategists. Making the situation in Ukraine worse served this purpose. Forcing the Russians into war to prevent Ukraine's de facto integration into NATO was, initially, a major diplomatic success for Washington. The shock of war paralyzed Germany and allowed the Americans, in general confusion, to blow up the Nordstream pipeline, a symbol of the economic understanding between Germany and Russia. Of course, in a second phase, that of American defeat, American control over Europe will be pulverized. Germany and Russia will meet again. This conflict is in a sense artificial. The natural thing, in a low-fertility Europe, with its aging population, is the complementarity between German industry and Russian energy and mineral resources.”

>Why do you take a pro-Russian position regarding the war in Ukraine and see this conflict as an example of the end of the West?
“I am an objective historian. I want to understand why we in the West provoked this war and lost it, and with this defeat we also lost our grip on the world. I am not pro-Russian. But I read Putin and Lavrov's texts and I think I understand their goals and their logic. If our leaders had taken researchers like me and some others more seriously, they would not have led us to such a disaster. An intelligent Putinophobe might use my book to fight Russia. On the other hand, when a newspaper like “Le Monde” hides Russia's economic and social recovery from its readers-the French elites-as it has done, it misinforms our leaders about Russian stability and power and serves Putin.”

>You introduce the concepts of “liberal oligarchy” for many European states and “authoritarian democracy” for Russia. Under which system would you prefer to live?

“Liberal oligarchy is not a practical problem for me. Don't forget that I was born into the French intellectual establishment. My grandfather Paul Nizan published with Gallimard before the war and had Raymond Aron as his best man. His wife, my grandmother Henriette, was a cousin of Claude Lévi-Strauss. My father Olivier Todd was a great journalist for the Nouvel Observateur. Basically, I am just a dissident member of the intellectual oligarchy. Also, I passionately love my country, France, and I will live there as long as the regime is not fascist or racist, and I don't have to become a political refugee. If I became a political refugee, I would not go to the United States as was the tradition in my family, because they are plunging into something worse than liberal oligarchy, nihilism. I have no taste for barbarism, I am too culturally conformist, too polite as they say in French. I think I would go to Italy, because everything is nice there, or to Switzerland because part of the country speaks French. What would I do in Russia?”