Russian resistance, American precipice<\/strong><\/p>\nEmmanuel Todd was not at Davos. But it was the French anthropologist, historian, demographer and geopolitical analyst who ended up ruffling all the appropriate feathers across the collective West these past few days with a fascinating anthropological object: a reality-based interview.<\/p>\n
Todd spoke to Le Figaro \u2013 the newspaper of choice of the French establishment and haute bourgeoisie. The interview was published last Friday on page 22, sandwiched between proverbial Russophobic screeds and with an extremely brief mention on the bottom of the front page. So people really had to work hard to find it.<\/p>\n
Todd joked that he has the \u2013 absurd – reputation of a \u201crebel destroy\u201d in France, while in Japan he\u2019s respected, featured in mainstream media, and his books are published with great success, including the latest (over 100,000 copies sold): \u201cThe Third World War Has Already Started\u201d.<\/p>\n
Significantly, this Japanese best seller does not exist in French, considering the whole Paris-based publishing industry toes the EU\/NATO line on Ukraine.<\/p>\n
The fact that Todd gets several things right is a minor miracle in the current, abysmally myopic European intellectual landscape (there are other analysts especially in Italy and Germany, but they carry much less weight than Todd).<\/p>\n
So here\u2019s Todd\u2019s concise Greatest Hits.<\/p>\n
– A new World War is on: By \u201cswitching from a limited territorial war to a global economic clash, between the collective West on one side and Russia linked to China on the other side, this became a World War\u201d.<\/p>\n
– The Kremlin, says Todd, made a mistake, calculating that a decomposed Ukraine society would collapse right away. Of course he does not get into detail on how Ukraine had been weaponized to the hilt by the NATO military alliance.<\/p>\n
– Todd is spot on when he stresses how Germany and France had become minor partners at NATO and were not aware of what was being plotted in Ukraine militarily: \u201cThey did not know that the Americans, British and Poles could allow Ukraine to fight an extended\u00a0 war. NATO\u2019s fundamental axis now is Washington-London-Warsaw-Kiev.\u201d<\/p>\n
– Todd\u2019s major give away is a killer: \u201cThe resistance of Russia\u2019s economy is leading the imperial American system to the precipice. Nobody had foreseen that the Russian economy would hold facing NATO\u2019s \u2018economic power\u2019\u201d.<\/p>\n
– Consequently, \u201cmonetary and financial American controls over the world may collapse, and with them the possibility for the US of financing for nothing their enormous trade deficit\u201d.<\/p>\n
– And that\u2019s why \u201cwe are in an endless war, in a clash where the conclusion is the collapse of one or the other.\u201d<\/p>\n
– On China, Todd might sound like a more pugnacious version of Liu He at Davos: \u201cThat\u2019s the fundamental dilemma of the American economy: it cannot face Chinese competition without importing qualified Chinese work force.\u201d<\/p>\n
– As for the Russian economy, \u201cit does accept market rules, but with an important role for the state, and it keeps the flexibility of forming engineers that allow adaptations, industrial and military.\u201d<\/p>\n
– And that bring us, once again, to globalization, in a manner that Davos roundtables were incapable of understanding: \u201cWe have delocalized so much of our industrial activity that we don\u2019t know whether our war production may be sustained\u201d.<\/p>\n
– On a more erudite interpretation of that \u201cclash of civilizations\u201d fallacy, Todd goes for soft power and comes up with a startling conclusion: \u201cOn 75 percent of the planet, the organization of parenthood\u00a0 was patrilineal, and that\u2019s why we may identify a strong understanding of the Russian position. For the collective non-West, Russia affirms a reassuring moral conservatism.\u201d<\/p>\n
– So what Moscow has been able to pull off is to \u201creposition itself as the archetype of a big power, not only \u201canti-colonialist\u201d but also patrilineal and conservative in terms of traditional mores.\u201d<\/p>\n
Based on all of the above, Todd smashes the myth sold by EU\/NATO \u201celites\u201d \u2013 Davos included – that Russia is \u201cisolated\u201d, stressing how votes in the UN and the overall sentiment across the Global South characterizes the war, \u201cdescribed by mainstream media as a conflict over political values, in fact, on a deeper level, as a conflict of anthropological values.\u201d<\/p>\n
Between light and darkness<\/strong><\/p>\nCould it be that Russia \u2013 alongside the real Quad, as I defined them (with China, India and Iran) – are prevailing in the anthropological stakes?<\/p>\n
The real Quad has all it takes to blossom into a new cross-cultural focus of hope in a \u201cfragmented world\u201d.<\/p>\n
Mix Confucian China (non-dualistic, no transcendental deity, but with the Tao flowing through everything) with Russia (Orthodox Christian, reverencing the divine Sophia); polytheistic India (wheel of rebirth, law of karma); and Shi\u2019ite Iran (Islam preceded by Zoroastrianism, the eternal cosmic battle between Light and Darkness).<\/p>\n
This unity in diversity is certainly more appealing, and uplifting, than the Forever War axis.<\/p>\n
Will the world learn from it? Or, to quote Hegel – \u201cwhat we learn from history is that nobody learns from history\u201d \u2013 are we hopelessly doomed?<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Pepe Escobar is a veteran journalist, author and independent geopolitical analyst focused on Eurasia.<\/em><\/p>\n___
\nhttps:\/\/www.presstv.ir\/Detail\/2023\/01\/18\/696545\/world-sleepwalks-World-War-III<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"‘Fragmented world’ sleepwalks into World War III<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-155290","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155290","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=155290"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155290\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=155290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=155290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=155290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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