Emmanuel Todd on the UK’s Russophobia: a crumbling nation needs a scapegoat

‘The Defeat of the West’ sees a UK in disarray and fumbling towards Europe post-Brexit

(This is the 5th 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 no other global region has undergone as counter-revolutionary a change in the last 35 years. 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 their clerics and intellectuals - the collapse of Protestantism and the creation of a mass minority of college-educated people who think a degree from Moneymaking U. makes them a brahmin and anyone else a Dalit. Todd would have done better to not pull his punches and titled 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.

Chapter 6 is titled “In Great Britain: towards a zero-nation (Croule (Crumbling) Britannia))”, and the dominant idea is a nation in “disarray”. While the pan-European project has desperately latched on to Russophobia as a unifying and distracting excuse, how can we explain why the UK has become the most pro-war, anti-Russian Western nation?

Todd begins with, “British bellicosity is at once sad and comic.” He could have added “predictable”.

In Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution he wrote that in the early years of World War I Russians made the same complaint/insult about the UK we hear today: “England warmed up slowly. In the drawing rooms of Petrograd and the headquarters at the front they gently joked: ‘England has sworn to fight to the last drop of blood… of the Russian soldier.’ These jokes seeped down and reached the trenches. ‘Everything for the war!’ said the ministers, deputies, generals, journalists. ‘Yes’, the soldier began to think in the trenches, ‘they are all ready to fight to the last drop… of my blood.’ The Russian army lost in the whole war more men than any army which had ever participated in a national war - approximately two and half million killed, or 40% of all the losses of the Entente.”

England has now sworn to fight Russia to the last drop of blood of the Ukrainian soldier - how their violent history keeps repeating itself! Trotsky noted how the average Russian conscript soon grasped that not just was England using him but also the Russian upper class, and he also reminds us of what a war-experienced nation contemporary Russia truly is. Nobody ever accuses Russia of fighting with other people’s soldiers.

Todd notes how - with rare leftist-inspired honesty about his own nation - the British bulldog has become merely an annoying yap dog: “Today the British army would not even be capable, like the French army, to lead operations in Africa and become detested for it.” Absolutely true - the British army cannot even fill a football stadium, or even put a brigade in the field, having less than 76,000 regulars.

So why on earth is it as Todd says: an inverse of 2003, when the US and Dubya Bush pulled the UK and Blair off to war? Well-known is the fact that in 2022 former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson persuaded Zelensky to not negotiate a peace plan when one was in sight. The UK has repeatedly been the first to send war materiel which were once red lines, thus inspiring their allies like France and the US to send the same.

Brexit: how can it be a mistake if the pan-European project fails?

Todd rejects the theory - which is a good one, yet rarely discussed in the Western media - that the UK is so hyper-involved as a reaction to the European isolation which they provoked via Brexit. This is a cultural-psychological explanation, but it’s a fact that the UK remains European even though it has enormous ties to non-European powers like the US, Canada and Australia. I think there’s much truth in this - mainly applicable for Remain voters - but it does ignore the class angle, as well as the long-standing British love for fomenting foreign wars, which Trotsky noted over a century ago.

Todd says he must admit that he was wrong about Brexit being an expression of national identity: “Brexit, in reality, flows from an implosion of the British nation.”

Before getting into Todd’s view, I stand by my analysis that Brexit primarily flows from the glaring failure of the pan-European project: The UK looked across the Channel in 2016 and saw a pan-European project racked by protests caused by ignoring democratic votes, strikes, austerity measures, a (still) unfixed debt crisis, the start of a migrant crisis in 2015 and got while the getting was good. Separating Brexit from years of pan-European failure is simply bad historicism because it makes the UK a complete island - it cannot be that isolated from the rest of the world’s events, and events which the UK was a part of.   

“We conclude regarding Brexit: it was definitely not the return of the nation but the result of its decomposition. The elderly expressed their nostalgia, the working-class voters expressed their anomie, the press oligarchs a preference for the Americanosphere.” He elaborated on this point by pointing out the influential prevalence of Australians like Rupert Murdoch who - along with Americans and Canadians - have a distinctly non-European view of history.

He continues: “If in 2014 Ukrainians rejected Russia (and thus neutralised the oligarchs with whom they were so close) then in 2016 England chose the United States (and thus conserved the oligarchs with whom they were so linked). England was supporting the independence of Ukraine at the same moment they were losing theirs. Thus, how can we be surprised that their support is such a parody, when they are in the middle of forgetting what independence actually is.”

Todd adds the fact that much of England has lost its religion on top of losing its industrial identity, which was replaced with a awful multi-job service sector identity which only inspires frustration, resentment and rage.

Let’s ask the big question, which Todd does not: Was Brexit a mistake?

Well, that entirely depends on if the pan-European project succeeds, no?

If in 10 years there is no more EU - or an EU which is still annually racked with crisis - the British must be considered to have been ahead of the curve. If somehow, the pan-European project reverses its economic decline and anti-democratic trends, and British sovereignty is unable to thrive, only then can we deem Brexit a failure. In 2024 both areas are doing poorly - this does not make Brexit a failure, of course.

Returning to Todd: He is thus continuing with the overarching thesis of this book - that the West is committing suicide. Ukraine, the pan-European project, the UK - and surely he’ll add the US to this - all are committing hari-kari.

It must be noted that, indeed, nobody is attacking the West - not Muslim freedom-fighters, not hordes of Hun refugees who overwhelmingly seek anything but merely to do low-wage labor, not the angry colonised, nor pro-socialists, nobody.

The West is indeed failing since the Great Financial Crisis - entirely by their own lights - and this includes the UK. It’s too bad Todd sees Brexit as purely internal case of British collapse and not at all linked with the obvious failure of the pan-European project.

It is ironic that since Brexit media talk of the failure of the pan-European project has plummeted, when one would think that the successful Brexit vote would have had the reverse effect.

The UK is changing colours, sure, but their 1% isn’t changing their stripes

Todd reminds us that the United Kingdom originally became “United” around a common religion - Protestantism. In Chapter 4 he postulated that Protestantism has gone from an “active” religion to a “zombie” religion to a state of “zero” religion and, therefore, the British union has lost the moorings created by its original founding principle.

Todd reasserts that it was Protestantism - and not the French Revolution - which created the concept of a “nation”. (Of course this is already inaccurate: Native Americans, which have always called themselves tribal “nations” introduced this concept to the English colonisers. In the Western mind intellectual-political transmission with the Western hemisphere was entirely one-way, allegedly, but I digress…) Protestantism rejected the idea of a universal, egalitarian man inherent in Catholicism, and he reminds that Oliver Cromwell led the first true English revolution. The English Revolution (1639-51) was (Todd doesn’t stress enough) theocratic (“Christ, not man, is king”), deeply martial (imperialist, a concept the non-leftist Todd perpetually ignores) and one which penetrated the new church into daily British life far more than the Vatican ever did (I’m reminded of Trotsky’s quotation of Milton: “New Presbyter is but Old Priest writ large”). Being a leftist armed revolutionary for his time - as an anti-absolutist, anti-monarchist and pro-parliamentarian - Cromwell’s era is always downplayed in Western liberal democracy in favor of the equally pro-Protestant but entirely pro-monarchy/elitism/“globalist” Glorious Revolution of 1688, so kudos to Todd for not ignoring the importance of the Cromwell era.

I skip to this chapter’s penultimate paragraph, where he states his historically-based thesis on the UK most clearly: “If, in Protestant countries, national and religious tendencies are so intertwined, one suspects that the final collapse of religion may involve the collapse of national feeling. Protestantism-zero, to a great extent, or at least to an inert nation, defines a nation-zero.”

A modern British university student would likely assert that this is all useless ancient history because Protestantism doesn’t matter in 21st century Great Britain. Todd would respond with, “And this is why Great Britain is a zombie concept on the way to being totally dead.” Indeed, the 2014 Scottish vote for independence from Britain failed by a close 55-45% margin - the death of Great Britain is a very real historical trend.

Todd also admits he was wrong for believing the propaganda that the UK was pragmatic and reasonable even after joining the phony Gulf War II, and even after so many years of being the top neoliberal idiots in Europe. He credits the deeply discredited former Prime Minister Liz Truss for waking him up to the reality of British incompetence, but also what I would call the new form of elitism embedded in “wokeism”. (That concept - and also the criticism of said concept - are both so stupid that they are not worth my time, except to say: there is no Marxism in wokeism, sorry conservatives, and that identity politics are a liberalist staple.)

Todd cites how places like The Guardian were over the moon that Truss’ four top ministers were all non-White, elevating identity politics over ideology and competence. He correctly notes how such a thing could never occur in (Catholic, egalitarian, post-1789) France, where I can report that with one exception (Rachida Dati, a total sellout, who was Sarkozy’s Interior Minister for a couple years) the number of French Muslims who have been tapped to even be mere junior ministers can be counted on one hand. Todd’s complaint is not primarily racial: he notes how all of these non-Whites were rabid conservatives, and deluded to the point that they infamously tried to pass tax cuts for the rich, and without any corresponding budget cuts. This fiscal stupidity provoked a fall in the pound, total distrust in Truss and her resignation just 50 days after taking office.

Todd’s lack of leftism does makes him a bit suspect with these racial complaints, which range from very exaggerated to fair. An example of the latter is that in 2019 the probability of a White Englisher getting a college degree was 33%, compared to 49% for Blacks, 55% for sub-Continentals/Asians and 72% for those from Chinese heritage. Todd asserts that this is proof of discrimination in education as well as the discrimination in the political realm, as evidenced by Truss, but it’s far more to accurate to say it’s just more proof of Western suicide: ignoring the well-being of the masses.

Todd ends this section with more questionable questions: “We can simultaneously rejoice that British racism has disappeared (like German racism) and ask ourselves what is the historical object named the United Kingdom now that it is not exclusively governed by White Protestants? I would ask the same question of the United States.” Conservatives rejoice at such questions, but this is not much of a concluding question - so does the color and religion of those governing matter, Todd, or the ideology and competence of those governing?

Keep in mind that, despite his lamentations for the decline of Protestantism, Todd never actually proposes that the West actually enact laws which promote more Protestantism in governance or policy. The solutions of Cromwell or Khomeini are nowhere to be found in Todd’s ideology, so his complaints do come off as somewhat superficial and disingenuous.

However, his list of accurate proofs of UK collapse, incompetence and immorality are legion:

An explosion in shoplifting, a shameful plan to deport asylum-seekers to Rwanda, the treatment of Julian Assange (which Todd says officially confirmed the status of the UK as a mere satellite of the US - although this week Assange was shockingly and gloriously released), blocked salaries amid record inflation, reduced pensions, children so undernourished they’ve plummeted in global child-size rankings, bloody fantasies of victory in Ukraine: “Above all we can feel a zero-morality to which we could attribute the delivery of depleted uranium to Ukraine.”

As I noted Todd’s book went from political realism to moralism in Chapter 4: Todd truly believes that the lack of religiosity - i.e. Protestant values - is a major problem for the West. Todd’s thesis is that the death of Protestantism has provoked the defeat of the West, but as he’s not at all a religious fundamentalist who thinks solutions can be found by returning to the Good Book he is forced to take an essentially socialist view that liberalism (or “neoliberalism”, as he insists) promotes immorality in many different ways.

Immoral, un-Protestant and totally elitist Western Liberal Democracy

Losing Protestantism is bad, but the real cause of the demise of Britain is how they have added the immorality of liberalism:

“Above all, and quite simply because of its small size and weak power, neoliberalism has put it in a much more perilous situation; it doesn’t have the resources or the strategic depth of a country-continent.”

Those first two descriptions are undoubtedly true - just one city of over 5 million people; England has the same surface area as just the Parisian basin; they essentially rely on the US for their nuclear capability; with the looming exhaustion of the North Sea oil reserves they have no major natural resources. Now add in the fact that they have foolishly both deindustrialised and hyper-financialised their economy more than any Western nation, with privatisation exceeding any other nation in Europe.

Todd cites Margaret Thatcher’s famous claim: “There is no such thing as society.” Certainly if that’s not evidence of Todd’s “zero-morality” nation then I don’t know what is, and Todd will eventually say the same.

(What Thatcher was saying, in context, is that there should be no such thing as government. This is the very essence of “neoliberalism”, which seeks to (I constantly remind) roll back the mere gains of social democracy (not the same as socialist democracy) earned in the West via the proletariat and peasant bloodletting of WWI and WWII. Thatcher was clearly saying that government only stands in the way of individuals and families - who should stand entirely on their own and require no social programs.

Liberalism has always been closely allied with the Western view of monarchism/absolutism/divine right that the elite owe their people nothing. Of course this is no defense of them, but Muslim monarchs do not entirely disregard a sense of responsibility and charity, as these are part and parcel of Islamic ideology.)

The problem is obviously liberalism: economically, democratically and culturally it has gutted Britannia more than moving from a “zombie” state (which Todd defined as religious involvement in only in the acts of birth, marriage and death) to a state of “zero” Protestantism.

Of course, to a non-socialist like Todd such clear conclusions must be avoided!

“But to impute the responsibility to neoliberalism would be insufficient.” That is how he begins a section titled, “Behind the economic disintegration, religious disintegration”. He then rationalises , “The first liberals, as was well-shown by Karl Polanyi, built the market; neoliberals destroy the economy. It’s very different.”

No, it isn’t.

Naturally, Liberalism had different necessities and goals 300 years ago than it does now, but the idea that an “invisible hand” and not the needs of the masses, should control public policy is just one of a long list of Liberalist tenets which are based around the competitive exploitation of the many for the privileges/elitism of the few.

Of course, in refutation to Polanyi, any leftist can easily note that the liberals of 300 years ago were unable to build “the market” without the distorting profits of imperialist wars, stolen slave wages, mass Native American genocides, puppet dictatorships etc. and etc.

Todd continues: “We return, once again, to the theory that the actors are sincere.” Todd is referring to his recent realisation, which I discussed earlier, that “Western idiots” are sincere in their Western idiocy… as if this matters! Todd coning with more rationalisation that “neoliberalism” is the problem and not “liberalism” (yawn… anti-socialists will always throw the book at socialist mistakes yet endlessly exonerate liberalist crimes). What Todd fails to see is that the elite class is entirely sincere in their self-interest and cupidity - this is precisely what socialism legislates against, thankfully.

Todd is asserting, as many do - from anti-state Bitcoiners to libertarians to apologists for capitalism of all stripes - that neoliberalism is drastically different from Liberalism. “The neoliberal conceptual revolution thus appears like the simple liberation of an instinct to acquire which is disassociated from all morality. The word that comes to mind is ‘greed’.”

Apparently Todd has never read Zola, who 150 years ago described incredibly inhuman greed inside France. Or studied a historical phenomenon which I have repeatedly accused him of having almost an apparent ignorance of - imperialism: does he know what Belgians did in the Congo for money? Has he read The Jungle about Chicago’s meatpacking plants in the early 20th century? My God, this list can go on and on! “Greed is good” was a line in Oliver Stone movie in 1987 but Wall Street was invented decades earlier, and the fostering of greed in capitalism-imperialism goes back hundreds of years before then. Todd writes as though greed is new?!

These foolish people - and I always try avoid personal insults, but here I cannot - who insist that “neoliberalism” is different from “liberalism” are actors who are sincere… as if this matters! What matters in our study of political science is that socialism is the only ideology which has proven capable of drastically reducing (not exterminating) the impact of human greed.

Todd does not explicitly go into the now-fashionable vaunting of the early liberal heroes of Smith and Ricardo (though he does fault neoliberalism for wanting a “non-Weberian capitalism”, i.e. one stripped of the Protestant work ethic), nor does he openly call for a return to the policies of that alleged golden era - what I call “liberal Salafism” - but his attempt to make a distinction between liberalism pre-1980 and post-1980 will only convince committed (deluded) capitalists.

Suicide is only driven by nihilism? Regardless, the West isn’t committing suicide, but homicide

However, Todd insists he will not stop at mere greed - he continues with his overarching thesis that what’s ruining the West is nihilism, and he says the spirit of nihilism abounds in neoliberalism.

He shares his analysis of Thatcher’s mind-boggling quote: “It’s difficult for me to see Margaret Thatcher as a major political philosopher of the end of the 20th century. However, this phrase, so extraordinary in its radicalism, reveals to us a hidden truth of neoliberalism: a pure and simple negation of reality. Unless she has a wish: the destruction of that which we deny exists, society.”

The difference between the far-right Thatcher and the centrist Todd is that Todd accepts that government simply must exist. What Todd fails to realise is that many Westerners want government to totally cease, and this is not new, nor is it nihilism but a long-standing Western political ideology for which there is plenty of proof:

Monarchists want the government to stop interfering with the rule of the king; 19th century slaveowners want the government not to interfere with how they run their plantation; 20th century Chicago meatpacker industrialists don’t want the government interfering with their poor working conditions and wages for Slavic immigrants; the American Libertarian Party’s 2024 presidential candidate wants to abolish the ministry of education because Libertarianism doesn’t want the government to interfere with an American’s God-given, alienable right to be stupid.

Destroying the government isn’t nihilism - it’s a political choice, and it’s one that has been completely accommodated during the Western shift from monarchism to liberalism precisely because liberalism is based around the elite not paying their fair share nor devolving their inordinate amount of political power.

Yeah, but I’m only describing neoliberalism - the old liberalism, that was the good stuff!!!

That is essentially the totally absurd claim of those who try to separate the two, which clearly should not be separated; the claim of those who refuse to accept that socialism is the break required for modern societies.

Todd cannot progress in his political science so he tries to progress in his unsatisfying socio-psychological explanation of nihilism, as he continues: “It’s not in the former debates of economists, such as those between Milton Friedman and his Keynesian opponents, that we will find the causes of this nihilism, of the disappearance of social morality, but of whether a society has an active, zombie or zero state of religion. It is time to apply to Great Britain the hypothesis of the final collapse and disappearance of Protestantism. The religious void is the ultimate truth of neoliberalism.”

Yeah, but that’s just neoliberalism - the old liberalism had that old-time religion!

They had morality… if we forget the genocides, the orchestrated famines, slavery, oppressed workers, no votes for those who don’t hold land and women, etc. and etc. And we must also forget that secularism - the explicit rejection of religious morality in governmental policy - is a vital part of liberalism (indeed, for many in today’s France it is the most important part of liberalism)!

Anyway, The Defeat of the West is the most wave-making Western political book of 2024 and it is certainly a work of political moralism. This says many things, and one of them is: the West realises they have a problem with morality. It’s a good book, and progress, even if the case for the ultimate progress - we need socialist democracy and not liberal democracy - is not made.

A lost, atheistic nation turns to Russia… out of anger

Is this not what the US already did? The ruling Clintonian oligarchy - still in power with Biden - successfully convinced their Democratic Party supporters that they lost in 2016 because of Russian interference and not their own corruption, incompetence, immorality, awful liberal ideology, unpopularity, etc.

In this sense I’d say that UK Russophobia is also another expression of how the British bulldog has become an American lap dog. Is not the UK just obeying - a few years later - the Russophobic orders of the US oligarchy?

What’s certain for Todd is that the UK is totally adrift: “Nothing of anything in the preceding describes a nation sure of itself or where it is going. Everything, on the contrary, reveals a loss of sense, an anxiety, which we can imagine starts to need scapegoats. The proletariat and the elderly had Europe. But the partisans of Remain - who do they have?

Russia was, in a sense, designated as the scapegoat at the disposition of the British middle class, with its children of oligarchs placed en masse in private English schools, and above all with their real estate investments in London, directly or under the cover of British dummy corporations. The purchase of the Chelsea football club by Roman Abramovich symbolised, almost by itself, Great Britain’s new status as a nation inert, switched off or prostituted.”

So while the ruling US oligarchy had to concoct a false scheme of Russian interference to explain away the arrival of the (relatively) anti-oligarchical Trump, Todd asserts that Russian influence in the UK is far more grassroots.

The problem is that liberalism always sells itself to the highest bidder, and a Russia well-risen from the ashes of the 1990s bought into Britain similarly to how Japan in the 1980 bought into the US - and provoked a major backlash, per Todd.

However, to me the key phrase is, “the partisans of Remain - who do they have?” Just as the Democratic Party has become the pro-war, pro-imperialist party in the US, so Remainers represent the same hypocritical, intolerant, lapsed-Protestant, pro-capitalist segment of the UK’s society. Remainers are angry at leaving the EU and are turning a 10-year conflict in the Donbass into something it’s not: a question for the pan-European project to handle.

Todd concludes this chapter by returning to Cromwell, his New Modern Army, and the vibrant Protestantism described in William Blake’s poem Jerusalem:

I will not cease from Mental Fight,

Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand:

Till we have built Jerusalem

In England’s green & pleasant Land

Todd uses this poem as a way to describe his idealised, Paradise Lost-view of the UK - the “propaganda that the UK was pragmatic and reasonable” (to quote myself). It’s a view of the UK as a worthy adversary to the French; the view of the UK as truly deserving champions and conquerors. It also shows the how the religious fanaticism of Protestantism is a great unstated motivation among Westerners.

With segregationist and elitist Protestant fanaticism no longer an option, modern England would do well to accept the non-Abrahamic hardworking conservatism found in Confucianism, which also encourages ceaseless mental fight. Too bad the UK would prefer war with China instead - after war with Russia, of course.

A brief coda on Scandinavia

I could end this article there, but Todd says the same problems also exist in his subject of Chapter 7, which is titled: “Scandinavia: feminism and belligerence”, so it makes sense to include his analysis here along with the UK.

He begins by noting the similarities between the two regions: “One of the surprises of the Ukraine war has been the appearance of a belligerent Protestant pole in Northern Europe.” Thus we see the cultural and historical links between the UK and their Scandinavian brethren, which became even stronger with the rise of the Germanic-American ideology of racism, Aryanism and the rewriting of European history which occurred in the second half of the 19th century.

The few illustrative points:

• Todd writes that when Sweden abandons its profitable historic neutrality to join NATO out of fears that Russia will attack them “delusion” is the appropriate analysis (should we prefer to ignore class analysis, as Todd always does).

• As their assistance with US spying on Angela Merkel proved, Denmark is a de facto member of the Anglophone Five Eyes club. This dovetails with Todd’s earlier point that Norway is also totally allied with the US, to the point that these two countries are the logical culprits behind the destruction of Nord Stream 2. Scandinavia is essentially Anglophone/in the Americanosophere, to use Todd’s phrase, and no longer tied with the Germanic or Slavic worlds.

• The Truss regime showed a fake-leftist victory of identity politics via ethnicity. Scandinavia’s recent ascension to the most feminist region of the world provides another example of a fake-leftist victory of identity politics - via gender - because it has been combined with a concomitant rise in Russophobia and an explosion in martial belligerence. “We're faced with a contradiction. Let's try to solve it, or at least a hypothesis. Could it be that feminism, in this case, far from encouraging pacifism, actually promotes warmongering?” The problem is that feminism in liberalism is laced with elitism, segregation and the adoption in women of the toxic masculinity of their males, whereas feminism in socialism promotes equality, respect of differences and respect for both untoxic masculinity and untoxic femininity.

To paraphrase Todd: End of Protestantism = national, religious and cultural crisis. Thus Todd’s analysis of Scandinavia, the Angles and Scots is the same.

For tiny Scandinavia the zero-status of Protestantism has provoked an “anxiety of national origin” and that explains their rush into NATO even though nobody has never, ever really wanted to take the trouble to invade this isolated region way up by the North Pole.

Thus Todd ends this chapter by explaining Scandinavia’s hysterical Russophobia with, “it's a raw need to belong.”

But it’s not a need to belong: it’s the West’s compulsion that you must be like them. Nowhere is this need stronger than in the United States, the final subject of Todd’s already-defeated West.

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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