The Ukrainian suicide: Reading Emmanuel Todd’s French-only 'The Defeat of the West'

Analysing the political, Western-critical book of the moment in France

The West is losing all over the globe, but name their thinkers who will admit so much of their power is not just lost but irrevocably lost?

French historian Emmanuel Todd has been on the right side of, and indeed the forerunner of, so many issues: French Islamophobia, the absurd lie and faux-religious crisis of “Je suis Charlie”, opposition to the Maastricht Treaty, predicting the demise of the USSR in 1976 and the US in 2001, opposing Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilisations” - it’s a very impressive list. He has what’s being hailed as a ground-breaking, honest new book The Defeat of the West (La Defaite de l’Occident), available only in French and it’s being widely discussed here.

Probably the only English-speaker you’ve heard talk about it is (fellow Parisian/hard news journalist/nomad) Pepe Escobar, who wrote of the “minor miracle of (this) actually being published last week in France”. Surely the book will be available in English one day - maybe not until after the victory of Russia over Ukraine - but Anglophone intellectuals are generally not interested in self-criticism of the modern Western project that they mostly drew up.

So I thought a project which would be useful and interesting to others would be to read Todd’s book and give it a full analysis. Nobody else seems to have the interest, the journalistic objectivity or the language skills to bring the English-language and the French language audiences together. What good is it for the West if the Francophones are gaga over this “book of the moment” but the Anglophones cannot join the discussion?

I encourage you to check back here for future articles on Todd’s most salient and necessary points. Without further preamble:

Ukraine: It’s not a mystery, its a suicide

Todd is a brilliant and wilful thinker who goes where he wants, and yet I wonder if he is actually willing to go all the way: to give the controversial but obvious proofs implied by his book’s title?

Chapter 2 starts by saying this chapter will answer how a Ukraine known to be in an extreme state of decomposition was able to resist the more powerful Russian military, and… then he doesn’t return to this idea. Instead, the chapter is more like a post-mortem of a dead political experiment, and that experiment was an independent Ukraine. It seems impossible not to mutter to oneself multiple times in this chapter, “This is a place that’s getting partitioned….” Todd doesn’t answer his chapter’s initial question, nor either the title of this chapter: “The Ukrainian Enigma”. I will do so for him by advising a new title for Chapter 2, and based on his own work: “The Ukrainian Suicide”.

Can Todd go all the way - and still get published by a French titan like Gallimard - in total openness? Hmm, we’ll have to see, but Todd’s chapter explains not an enigma but the 30-year process of a failed state rushing headlong into a war which he repeatedly deems suicidal.

Todd resorts too often to highly speculative cultural anthropology and psychology - he’s as much an anthropologist as a historian - and the effects of these are often, as he humorously and humbly admits, quite “banal”. However, they can occasionally be interesting. It is, in my opinion, a part of the French style: to apply rigorous logic to the often illogical interior life; to bravely essay some ideas about the interior lives of a people and culture. It is very hit or miss, and he’s aware enough to remind it’s always just speculation, but it can be not just entertaining but elucidating.

Personally, my concern is not the “why” or the psychological “how” but the “what” that will happen: Yes, there are many reasons for anyone’s suicide, but what he describes is no enigma - this a state so very failed it is going to permanently lose part of its citizens and land, I predict.

Ah, how can I be so heartless regarding Ukraine, the West’s new hero?

That right there is already a real distortion of 21st-century history and a huge hindrance to contemporary political understanding: By taking on the Western enemy of Russia Ukraine was somehow transformed from unwanted problem child into the American Founding Fathers multiplied by the Enlightenment. Todd begins by reminding that from its very inception, with their 1991 referendum, an independent Ukraine has been the definition of a failed state.

A key question not explicitly asked by Todd should still be: How can such a badly failed state possibly ever right the ship? Todd actually gives a rather clear answer: Not Nazification, but Russophobia as the guiding societal precept. More on this later.

He encourages us to dig deeper than the obvious oligarchs and suggests that Ukraine’s societal failure is personified by its being the “El Dorado” of for-pay surrogate pregnancies: sadly, Ukraine has a dominating 25% of the global market on this “product”. It’s hard not to agree that, “As for surrogacy parenting becoming a financial transaction, I admit not being favorable to it for reasons of common morality and I consider that this economic specialisation is a sign of social decomposition.” He could have also mentioned that (prior to 2022) ads offering Ukrainian women in foreign arranged marriage seemed to have a similar market dominance - at least that’s the ads the algorithm sends me. The signs of Ukrainian failure and corruption are many and well-known and formerly often discussed in the West, but in 2024 I would imagine that if The New York Times ever did address the above issue it would be via advertisements to help sell these “Freedom babies”?

Another Western cheerleader fallacy Todd shoots down is that this is absolutely not the all-out war they depict: Todd notes that in 1914, with the same size of 12 million potential draftees aged 15-60, France recruited 2 million men, whereas Ukraine in the summer of 2022 only mustered a mere third of that - 700,000 men. Their current mobilisation drive is infamously unpopular as well. Obviously, it’s not just Russia which is limiting this to a Special Military Operation, no?

The West believes war is won by throwing money at it. Russia is closer to reality by insisting that wars are won by fighters and logistics. However, war is won by morale, above all. Was Napoleon a genius tactician or could anybody have looked bold backed by a French Revolutionary Army which was inspired to break the chains of feudalism? In 1980 Iraq attacked Iran at Khorramshahr, where having a pistol with three bullets was considered top weaponry, and lost. The Taliban, the Vietnamese, the North Koreans - the list goes on and on, but what’s clear is that morale wins wars.

How can a failed state produce a winning morale? We wait for Ukraine to provide what might be the first answer to such a question….

Ukraine could have been a real state, maybe, but it’s definitely never succeeded

In a plausible sign of intellectual fairness, in the chapter section “Ukraine is not Russia” Todd makes a fair case here. Smaller families, more individualism, freer women (subjective question, but I’m relaying what he lists): “It’s often said that the Cossacks were the origin of the first Ukrainian state. Or, Cossacks are ‘Kazakhs’ - it’s the world of the steppe.” This would be in comparison with more settled, non-nomadic Rus, with their snowy tundra limiting horse fodder and thus forcing a limit to the frontier of nomadic life. These are interesting but not numerous points. They are most interesting not because they are ammunition for argument but because it supports his overall idea that Ukraine could have been a viable, unique state were it not so very completely a failed state.

It must be added by Todd that Ukraine’s doom as a failed state, contrary to Western and Ukrainian ultranationalist claims, was not decided by Stalin:

In the section “A martyred country, and then a privileged country” he first correctly notes that in examining the two great famines of modern Europe English liberalism was far more bloodily efficient in killing: the English killed off 40% more of Ireland’s population (12% of the total population) than Ukrainians who died in the USSR’s multinational attempt at a great societal leap forward (8.5%).

Of course, England’s choice was willingly in thrall to the heartless logic of free-market, no-restrictions liberalism, whereas the initial problems countries have in switching to a socialist system (always done, as well, amid sanctions, foreign war, civil war, etc.) are often fraught with mistakes, accidents and even massive errors caused by mere over-enthusiasm - all this also happened in China’s Great Leap Forward, too.

Todd writes: “It would be an error, however, to stop the history of Ukraine with the Holodomor. If the country was indeed martyred by Stalin as a peasant nation, it was, on the contrary, favored by the regime after the Second World War. Ukraine then became one of the USSR's priority development zones, including the most modern aerospace and military facilities. […] The number of cities of more than 100,000 people went, from 1959-79, from 25 to 46. […] But in the entire USSR the Leninist theory of respect for national cultures and a hostility towards the principle of what Lenin himself referred to as ‘Great-Russian chauvinism’ had prevailed; and in spite of the brakes placed on the autonomies of national groups starting in 1935 because they realised that the use of several languages in the army was not very convenient. In 1991 a culture and a Ukrainian language existed and was growing, but, at the top level of society, culture and administration was expressed in Russian.”

Of course the question of “identity politics” is solved in socialist democracies and distorted/manipulated in liberal democracies, but Todd stresses - and this only makes their current failure so much more glaring - that the tools were there to make an independent Ukraine.

The middle-class trap: they wouldn’t kill off the Russophones, would they?

Todd is on the right-side of so many issues, but this kowtowing to the Western view of the USSR is part of why I cannot see a commitment to leftism in his book as of yet. Examine his primary assessment for Ukraine’s failure: “The fundamental reason of its failure (he is referring here to the ‘weakness of the young Ukrainian state”) seems to me to have been the general weakness of its urban middle class.”

This is a routine, flawed explanation for all Western political and cultural failures post-Great Financial Crisis - for Brexit, Trumpers, Yellow Vests, Canadian truckers, anti-lockdown Michiganders etc. Nor is his short defense of this idea convincing: his implication that a committed, patriotic urban class could have rallied together the rural west and the Russophone east sounds too similar to the failed plan of American coastal elites for “flyover country”. His faith in the superiority of the urban middle class says more about his view of the class struggle - still the sine qua non of leftism, along with the redistribution of wealth - than it does say why Ukraine failed. Surely the egg came after the chicken here: the urban middle class failed to inspire as a result of Ukraine’s overall, multi-class, multi-regional failure.

What is entirely convincing, however, is his noting that Ukrainian democracy became doomed when in the east much of the middle-class began to emigrate to Russia after Kiev began bombarding the Donbass in 2014. Their marginalisation and disappearance as a political force was obviously unsustainable for national unity. Thus, urban middle-class weakness is another failed result of - and not a symptom of - the failed Ukrainian project. Lenin certainly would not have agreed with Kiev’s “Little Russian chauvinism”, but this was precisely Kiev’s failed, anti-socialist, reactionary choice.

In one of the most striking passages Todd explains how decades of Moscow’s policy towards Ukraine depended precisely upon the welcoming of these eastern Russophones: Ukrainian Russophones were intended to be the very glue which kept the two neighbouring countries bonded. Of course, in liberal democracy and/or modern Western culture, ruled by identity politics, competition and imperialism, differences are cause for segregation and not for celebration.

“The disappearance of the Russian-speaking part of Ukraine as an autonomous political agent had not been anticipated, I think, by the Russian leadership, even if they are now necessarily aware of it. Their most likely scenario was quite different: as Ukraine failed to find its equilibrium while Russia recovered, we could have assumed that it would turn to Russia to join it. After all, Ukrainian industries operating in high-tech sectors, notably aerospace and military, were linked to Russia and located mainly in the east of the country.

I'm convinced that the Russians made this calculation, which is undoubtedly one of the reasons why, when the Soviet Union collapsed, they allowed Ukraine to become ‘independent’, without asking for the borders to be rectified in order to recover the Russian or Russian-speaking parts of the new state. The persistence of a Russian component was intended to ensure Russia's eternal hold on Ukraine. The Russian or Russian-speaking population would have served as a link.

This vision turned out to be too simple”

Why was it too simple? Because people like those, for example, in Russia’s second-largest political party - the communists - were wrong to assume that the evils of cultural chauvinism were fully, mercifully extinguished after almost 80 years of correct teaching?

No, it became so very complicated because Kiev has chosen its own death. By murdering Ukrainian Russophones the Ukrainian state is murdering itself, and Todd says this almost verbatim. Indeed, what else can we say when a country commits genocide or ethnic cleansing on a longtime part of the country: this is not just murder, but a country in hatred with its very self.

Moving on, a key idea Todd repeatedly stresses is “Ukraine failed to find its equilibrium”, and it is vital - if we are to find the social-psychological key to the motivations of this conflict - that this is contrasted with the parallel success of Russia.

Todd’s first chapter, Russian Stability, is chock-filled with proofs of Russian advancement since the 1990s, despite what American idiot nonpareil John “a gas station with nukes” McCain believed. I’m going to assume my readers are all well-aware of all this, so I don’t currently plan to recap this chapter unless there is some big demand.

Todd will go on to stress just how terrible baby-export leader Ukraine has done in comparison with Russia and make psychological speculations, but the key takeaway is the upward trajectory of Russia since the terrible 90s and the continued turmoil of Ukraine.

3 Ukraines, all disasters: Ultra-nationalist, anarchic and collapsed

Todd excellently divides up Ukraine into three regions. The west - “ultranationalist Ukraine” -, Kiev and the center - “anarchic Ukraine” -, and the southeast - “collapsed Ukraine” (Here he uses “l’Ukraine anomiqe”, from the sociological term “anomie”. In sociology, anomie is described as a social problem defined by an uprooting or breakdown of moral values, standards or guidance for individuals to follow.)

Todd lists the origins of the top 50 leaders of Ukraine in 2023, from politics, oligarchs and the army, noting that Ultranationalist Ukraine is over-represented in politics, Anarchic Ukraine is over-represented in the military, and Collapsed Ukraine is over-represented in oligarchs, “…who, for the most part, have been marginalised or checked since the start of the war.” It’s an interesting breakdown of the division of labor in the west and center’s obvious ganging up on the east.

It all rather makes sense, too: the right-wing nature of the anti-Russian war requires idiot far-right politicians who aren’t even being touched by the war, while a war entirely dependent on US and EU funds is going to be controlled by the over-empowered, borderline anarchic armed forces in the capital who receive the funds and guns first.

‘De-Nazification’ was never an adequate explanation

The final section, “Towards anti-Russian nihilism” Todd’s gets at the sociological, ideological and - if we must, as he’s French - psychological failure of the Ukrainian state. In short, Todd writes that Ukraine’s raison d’être today - due to its obvious failure since 1991 - is a sort of resentment, rage and rejection of Russia’s infinitely better success since their troubled 1990s.

“The war revealed sociological and historical processes that had never been seen before, or had never been considered before. In a Ukrainian society in need of balance, resentment against Russia has finally become a guide, a horizon, and one might even be tempted to write: an element of social structuring.

Russia continues, in fact, to inhabit the Ukrainian psyche and to regularise it, but in a negative mode. If economic reconstruction was not possible, the war (financed by the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union) could become a reason for living. And a means to an end. […] But what Putin failed to consider was that the disintegration of the USSR and the communist economy had produced a negative fixation on Russia in the Ukraine.”

This is precisely what Moscow’s explanation for their Special Military Operation should have been back in February 2022: Russophobia, not de-Nazification.

In March 2022 I published “The Russian ‘denazification’ PR disaster: How, why and what to do”, and it was among the most controversial articles I ever had on The Saker.

But even back in 2014, while covering Ukraine-Russia diplomatic talks in Paris, I wrote a column for PressTV titled, “Ukraine: The Rise of the ‘Nalis’” - a unique (and still unpopular) combination of rabid Nationalism and far-right Liberalism (in economics, politics and in anti-socialism).

I encourage the rereading of The Saker article because it was right then and it’s right now. Todd agrees with my take on this Russian mistake: “…I don't think the neo-Nazi question is the right formula, or at least a sufficient one, to describe the Ukrainian situation.” Indeed, Ukraine is not a failed state merely because of neo-Nazis, and Moscow’s reliance of harkening back to their “Great Patriotic War” evinces many faults, lazy thinking and an inability to stand behind, morally and ideologically, their decision to fight. De-Nazification was something worthy of a liberal democracy… which many Russian elite were in January 2022. Todd comes to the exact same conclusion I did: “More than the neo-Nazism of western Ukraine, it's the Russophobia that spread throughout Ukraine before the invasion that is the new phenomenon and needs to be understood.”

Russia clearly had plenty of time to get this right, and plenty of time to understand Godwin’s Law - that the use of “Nazi” shuts down all discussion in the West - but they did not. Indeed, Chapter 7 in my book on the Yellow Vests and French history, Where the West is stuck: The fascism of the 1930s and the ‘fascism’ of the 2020s”, aimed to clarify the West’s stupidity, mislabelling and historical revisionism… and then Russia went all-in with something as inadequate as “de-Nazification”! It’s another obstacle in understanding, indeed….

Lastly, it’s worth relating Todd’s correct noting that the West’s appalling nonchalance and dismissal of neo-Nazi troops, signs, etc. is “inadmissible”, and also completely hypocritical when one considers their innumerable commemorations of the Judeocide/Holocaust/Shoah.

It’s bigger than Nazism or nihilism - it’s suicide, the death of all thought

Todd admits that his explanation for why the state of Ukraine did this - why they failed so badly, and so repeatedly and and so violently - is all very speculative but it is nonetheless worth reporting to you.

“The suicidal irrealism of Kiev's strategy suggests a paradoxical Ukrainian pathological attachment to Russia: a need for conflict that reveals an inability to separate."

He continues by noting that Russia's peace demands were easy to fulfil: they keep Crimea, the Russian population of the Donbass get treated acceptably (a small thing, one would think) and that Ukraine commits to remain neutral in violent geopolitical machinations.

“A Ukrainian nation sure of its existence and destiny in Western Europe (his emphasis) would have accepted these conditions; it would even have got rid of the Donbass.”

Of course, the West and Western Europe has never, ever wanted the failed state of Ukraine. All of their belated talk about even letting Ukraine into just NATO (forget about the EU) get immediately walked back, even as recently as NATO’s 75th birthday gathering.

But Todd is searching for an answer as to why after 2014, instead of concentrating on a properly “Ukrainian” state - this thing that they claim to believe in so fervently - they persisted in war against Donbass and Crimea? It was so clearly a suicidal war, if only because they sought to claim sovereignty over the mistrusting populace of (what’s now) a different nation, and even though this nation was far more powerful than itself. The war aims of Ukraine: these are not generally questioned in the West, of course.

“In the conscious, rational world of international relations, the project was, I repeat, suicidal, and today's reality shows that Ukraine is committing suicide as a state.”

It’s certainly true. However, to me it ends there. Todd’s Frankish psychology then falls short for me: by refusing to separate with Russia and trying to reconquer Donbass and Crimea Ukraine “continues to be Russian in the general sense of the term, and this includes Little Russia and Big Russia”. So Ukraine is actually Russian, per Todd.

He goes even further: Ukraine actually doesn’t want to be this new, successful, independent state called Ukraine or joined with Europe - it wants to be deeply tied with Russia, even if they have to remained tied via force. Why else are they insisting on this suicidal war they have never had a chance of winning, either on the ground or in the hearts and minds of Donbass and Crimea? Speculative - obviously. Interesting - somewhat. Accurate? Ask God, or at least a Ukrainian or Russian who knows the society in question more than I do.

(Todd somewhat failed here, I believe: if the West had embraced Ukraine immediately and fully, would this conflict have been avoided? He does not address this point. Perhaps it’s because Ukraine had no reason - and still has no reason - to ever be “sure of its existence and destiny in Western Europe”.

In a pure hypothetical: Could a Ukrainian state have succeeded if it was invited to be a definite part of the EU and not Russia? Is Ukraine trying to “become European” by hacking off its Russian-ness by attacking the Russophones in the southeast? Is Ukraine still “Ukraine” without any Russian-ness? The answers you give me would be so convoluted as to result in: “This is a place that’s getting partitioned….”)

On a practical level - could Ukraine have not gone down the path they have chosen?

Absolutely, and easily - but it is a failed state, with a failed ideology, structures, goals, etc and etc. Todd accurately stresses how the proofs of this suicide are legion. What else can we call but suicidal Kiev’s decision to keep courting a totally uninterested (and rapacious, I’d add) EU instead of Russia, with whom its major industries were already linked? A “victory” there is economic suicide, unless they can vastly expand the production of surrogate babies. What can we call the elimination of the Russian language, church and culture - all inextricably linked and seemingly dialects of the same concepts - but more suicidal self-hatred? “At the heart of the Ukrainian government's general policy, one senses a vertigo, a flight towards the precipice, a destructive impulse of what is without envisaging what could be.” Todd says this is all too much for “de-Nazification”, continuing with his repeated claim of a suicidal state: “The concept that comes to mind is certainly nihilism.”

Nihilism: the useless ideological obsession of Europeans, and many Westerners, for a century. It’s the rejection of life and also of socialism - to reject socialism (societal cooperation) is indeed the rejection of life and peace. Nietzsche is the godfather of German Nazism and American libertarianism, with its insistence that all government is evil and that unfettered individualism is somehow a net good for society. Nihilism is simply uninteresting to me on every level, and obviously unworkable for anyone outside of an insane asylum.

Suicide is workable, however - even profitable. This is what imperialism is - the forced, prolonged suicide of others for the benefit of rich, far-away capitalists.

Todd’s lack of using “imperialism” or “socialism” as a lens is thus critically lacking here - wallowing in the cesspit of nihilism as an answer is totally insufficient as a socio-political explanation for the unrest in Ukraine.

France has - infamously - not come to terms with their colonial past; Europhiles cannot come to terms with the idea that the EU is a neo-imperialist project (which I repeatedly stress) where the poor, White areas of Europe are being colonised by the richer, White areas of Europe. Todd isn’t a rabid Europhile, but without socialism and imperialism as a magnifying lens his explanation of Ukraine is insufficient.

Why not posit that Ukraine is committing suicide out of foolish Russophobia and intelligent EU-phobia? The pan-European project has been a total, obvious failure (which I repeatedly stress). Therefore, formerly communist Ukrainians should know that joining the EU is economic and cultural suicide - they’ll be drained of wealth far worse than Greece was post-2009. Thus Ukraine hates their only two options and has chosen the third option of suicide? This is, to me, far more coherent than mere nihilism, but I digress.

Ukraine is suicidal? Sure appears that way. But is it because of their own nihilism and rabid Russophobia? I find it hard to believe: simply look at how the Muslim world is routinely described as merely nihilistic, anti-Christian/anti-White and anti-rational… but only by analysts who never want to discuss the role of imperialism and capitalism.

Since 1991 Ukraine “never really functioned”, but has Western Liberal Democracy, either?

His final section is “An unidentified political purpose”, and he defines the current Ukrainian state not as a liberal democracy but as a Western-funded mere magic trick.

Forget “No taxation without representation” (US - 1776), “Liberty, equality, fraternity” (France - 1789), “Work, bread or lead” (Europe - 1848), “Peace, Land, Bread” (Russia - 1917),  ]“Neither East nor West - Islamic Republic” (Iran -1979) - Ukraine has nothing remotely similar.

“None of this applies to the war-torn Ukraine. There is no longer any political representation of the citizens as a whole, except at most, perhaps, of the inhabitants of its central and western parts, but even that is not certain. And, in any case, the resources of its military and repressive apparatus now come from outside, from various Western powers, mainly denominated in dollars and euros. “

Ukraine is a country which is unrepresentative, and which cannot fulfil the most basic proofs of a functioning government, and which has already seen mass migration, and which has even been partitioned. The West always accused Ukraine of being a “puppet” for Moscow - this country under martial law and which dodged planned elections is clearly being controlled by the West.

“Ukraine is therefore not a liberal democracy, and the ideological journalistic theme of Western liberal democracies coming to the rescue of a nascent Ukrainian liberal democracy is obviously absurd.”

It’s not even that interesting a statement or conclusion: who cares about Western liberal democracy? Talk about the part of the world on their way down…. It is interesting, however, that Todd ends by promising to go even further: “the West is no longer a world of liberal democracies.” That will be interesting, but critiques are never as interesting as solutions - such as socialist democracy for liberal democracy.

It’s only by looking at the broader historical picture - which reveals the catastrophic overreach, covetousness inequality and immoralisation of Western liberal democracy’s capitalism/imperialism since they lost the socialist democratic USSR to keep it remotely honest - that we can really understand how Ukraine’s suicide, imperialist desire for a land full of people who don’t want to join them and their culture based around demonisation of the other, identity politics and self-worship isn’t all that unique.

The choice of suicide isn’t just Ukrainian, it’s Western - isn’t that the point of The Defeat of the 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, Tunisia, South Korea 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