“Victory has defeated you.” – The Dark Knight Rises
I once forgot the rules to chess, but they told me it was okay to check.
I just wrapped up Emmanuel Todd’s latest book, La Défaite de l’Occident (that’s “The Defeat of the West” for those of us that hate the metric system), and it lines up perfectly with what I’ve been posting about for years here. In fact, this isn’t the first time I’ve written about Dr. Todd, having written about his Family Structure/Geopolitics Theory.
The book isn’t in English yet, but somebody cut and pasted it into Google® to have it translated, and you can find it out there if you look.
In this book, Todd is using the Ukraine mess as a lens to autopsy what he calls the West’s self-inflicted doom. In Todd’s view, the collective West is collapsing, compared to “stable” powers like Russia and China. The West’s decline isn’t from bad luck or Russian super-spies, nope. It comes from the rotting foundations of the West itself.
Why did Princess Diana cross the road? She wasn’t wearing her seatbelt.
I’ve written extensively about the deindustrialization that’s left the economy hollowed out, so that should be familiar. Add to that a slide into nihilism stemming from the death of Protestant Christianity in the United States. Protestants used to stand for something, but the last time I went to a Protestant church it was very much them not wanting to be against anything and the female pastor went on a long “men are bad” speech.
On the other side, Russia, lagging on almost everything by about 50 years, is experiencing a resurgence in families, a religious revival, and an ethnonational cohesion that allowed them to (mostly) take the hit from sanctions and keep going. The Ukraine war? It’s the litmus test exposing our bluff: we’re great at low-intensity or short duration conflicts with things like coups, sanctions, and drone strikes on weaklings (Iran, Venezuela, you name it), but don’t have the industry for real, prolonged industrial slugfests.
One example: Russia can produce three million rounds of artillery a year, with one recent estimate that they produced seven million rounds last year. Even at the lower three million number, that is three times the amount that the United States and other NATO countries, combined can produce. And, yeah, Russia is fighting Ukraine and the United States has lots of amazing tech that nobody but people with top clearance or Chinese spies know about.
That’s why Ukraine keeps facing ammo droughts. The West’s “superior” economies are finance-bloated illusions where we just keep swapping pictures of silver for electronic dollars that we’re too cheap to bother printing anymore.
I am really good at predicting the scores of the Super Bowls® before they start. 0-0.
US manufacturing jobs? These dropped from 20 million in 1980 to 13 million today, with 80% of GDP now in services and Wall Street Pokémon® card swapping.
Russia simply isn’t the basketcase the MSM paints. Yes, their nominal GDP’s around $2T vs. the US’s $27T and EU’s $20T, but in purchasing parity (what their money can really buy them) terms, Russia’s at $6T, edging out Germany as the world’s fourth largest economy.
Why? The sanctions (starting in 2014) forced them to become independent. After nearly a decade, when the United States hit them with sanctions after their 2022 invasion of the Ukraine, well, they were ready to survive without trade from the West. Even though Russia has a much smaller population (roughly half) than the United States, Russia has more engineers aged 20 to 34 than the United States. Russia has 2 million, the United States around 1.3 million.
Once a European midget asked me to hide him. I guess I can cache a small Czech.
Contrast that with what Todd calls the West’s “shallow state” since it’s (his view) an oligarchic mess lacking soul or cohesion. Todd mainly blames this on religious evolution: Protestantism (Weber’s ethic of work, literacy, discipline) powered the rise of the West, but we’ve hit the stage where the United States is a secular void. Zombie Protestant churches linger, channeling energy into welfare states.
Now we find that culture in the West is pure nihilism: no morals, just primitive urges for pleasure, cash, and violence. Todd’s view is that the moral low point where we finally jumped the shark was around 2015. “Marriage for all” symbolizing the final shredding of Christian norms and rise of GloboLeftism. In Todd’s words, “If the people and the elite no longer agree to function together, the notion of representative democracy no longer makes sense: we end up with an elite who no longer wants to represent the people and a people who are no longer represented.”
This certainly defines the state of the West now. A huge majority of the people want all illegals gone, and some want legals gone, too. And yet, the illegals are here and we fight to make the line up and to the right in what is now, according to Todd, a “liberal oligarchy”. That leads to a national weakness.
This weakness is structural and has been building for decades as the United States in particular (and the West in general) worked as fast as it could to de-industrialize. This offshoring has consequences, and can’t be changed in a heartbeat. To rebuild, we have to build factories, build supply chains, build up a workforce, and remember how to make stuff. To explain how difficult this may prove to be, in 2024 China reached 10,000 Terawatt hours of electrical production. That’s more than the United States, Europe and India combined.
My favorite Asian stereotype is Sony®.
Back to Todd: “Producing the world’s currency, at minimal or no cost, makes all activities other than monetary creation unprofitable and therefore unattractive.” Why do we spend so much effort on finance in the United States? It’s just so profitable and so much easier than making stuff, which requires real effort.
Todd’s conclusion: Ukraine was a trap for the United States. The United States, flush from the victory over the Soviets was unbound. It could do whatever it wanted. The United States expanded its global reach from the early 90s to 2022. But we ignored Russia’s 2021 ultimatum because we thought sanctions would crush them like they did in 2014.
The opposite happened. Ukraine remains resilient but allowing 60+ year olds into the army isn’t really a sign that you expect when you’re winning. I expect the end of Ukraine’s resistance to be amazingly abrupt and to occur sometime in the next year, with August being a midpoint. Russia will win, and as near as I can see, their economy is stronger and more independent than it was before the start of the war.
I asked Sydney “How do you get into that tight shirt?” and she said, “For starters, you could buy me a drink.”
Now, my two cents: Todd’s spot-on that West’s weakness is structural, not just spineless leaders. Pain is coming. NATO/EU has ceased to be a bloc; it’s a squabbling conglomerate with clashing interests and seems to have lost its will to live.
Todd’s book substantiates the politically incorrect that I’ve been championing forever: nationalism trumps globalism. The West is exhausted, defeated not by conquest but by its own nihilism leading to that most Evil philosophy of all: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.”
As for me? I still refuse to learn to speak or read French.
“Russia has more engineers aged 20 to 34 than the United States. Russia has 2 million, the United States around 1.3 million.”
Yeah, but we have more H1B’s and I’m sure that scares the heck out of Russia.
Yeah, we need to import them before Russia and China do . . . oh, wait.
John:
Thanks for the referral
Have put links to both your post and the Scribd machine translation over at the Mothership:
https://westernrifleshooters.online/2026/02/wilder-the-defeat-of-the-west/
As Mr. Churchill used to say: KBO.
CA
WRSA
Thank you! One B at a time!
Get thee to an authentic Eastern Orthodox Church.
How was Clean Monday?
Without the ability to defend one’s own viewpoint against other more aggressive ideologies then reasonableness and moderation could quite simply disappear. That is why we’ll always need an army.
No one on our side can grasp that simple quote…
Exactly. And when it comes to war, the only rule is to win.
The man who has faith in nothing will believe in anything.
The long march began in the seminaries.
it began in the Garden when Adam let Eve do the talking
Don’t know if it started ther, but seminaries were quick converts. Went to a Jesuit High School and you began to see this new kind of Jesuit show up in early Seventies — the hip Jesuit. Of course it helped that main Jesuit Seminar was in Bay Area. So these dudes were no different from Proffesors at Berkeley
My Junior English teacher had us reading “Siddhartha” .. a novel written by a German (Herman Hesse) about a man’s journey from Christianity to Hinduism
This left me confused so I asked my big brother about it …
Gee Wally, what does a book written by a German that deals with Hindu mysticism have to do with the English language? To which he replied, “Gosh Beeve, you need to stop asking these questions. Do you Dad to get in trouble again at work?”
The seminaries were infiltrated in the 1880’s. That’s not a typo. Our adversaries play a very long game indeed.
It did. So much rot.
Never to late for a hard purge.
God is sovereign. He predestinates, elects, chooses who he will save and that according to the good pleasure of His will. It just does not seem like there are very many left for Him to still save to reach the amount He has determined to have in the end…
He’ll win.
Funny, it was to see, when I became a Christian in 1975, to watch the Church as it was beginning even then, it’s long, slow, decline, caused by the communists coming in, and taking it to hell. I believe we’ll see the actual rebirth of this country when it has an actual revival in the Church, and one based on Christ only.
That time is coming.
I would lean toward the decline of demographics as opposed to religion as the catalyst for the collapse in the U.S. Protestantism hasn’t done much for Africa even in nations that are ostensibly majority Evangelical. You simply cannot have a first world nation populated by a large and rapidly increasing third world people. Even in the far more religious eras of the U.S. I would argue that religion was mostly cultural rather than something people were super serious about.
The problem has never been that the people in general aren’t serious about religion.
It’s that the religious leadership largely is not. The counter-examples are thriving.
Sadly, far too many of those latter feature a call to prayer from a minaret five times a day.
Show me a weak pastor or priest and I’ll show you a rotten church.
Or a shuttered one.
This is not by accident. It’s by malign design.
Agreed. But when the moral imperative allows women to murder their own children, why should they want to protect their country?
The young women who kill their babies will thrive when they must convert to Islam.
Bingo.
Women never protect a country. (Joan of Arc was a rather lonely exception that proves the rule. And they burned her at the stake.) And never should have been nominated to that task. Women protect their children. That’s their job.
Men protect their homes and families. Gather enough of them, and they protect the entire country by default.
But ask men to protect the women murdering their children in the womb, or having Chad’s kids and passing them off as marital offspring, and they rationally tap out of both tasks.
Yes.
Sadly, this corrupt, syphilitic-thinking country has embraced mammon, Ishtar, and Baal. The only thing which might change things would be a full-on Weimar meltdown. And the timing of that is anyone’s guess. Just keep in mind no one is coming to save America. Those of us who still hold the BOR sacred, religious liberty inviolate, and the keeping of our honest-earned wealth are on our own. Plan accordingly. Bleib ubrig.
We are the last hope. For now.
PC has been the Death of the West. And “Racism”. Via the Democrats.
The rot is internal. And ongoing, as long as the $$$$ flow into their stash.
Or all of the Epstein Files are released.
Yes. All of them.
Joining at the hip with Hymie.
Tell me more about all the blessings.
The body of Christ, the church not a church only flourishes under one scenario and that is persecution. And as the prophet whined to God that he was all that was left, God answered and said I have 7000 priests right down the way that have not bended knee to Baal.
God is in control and we are being judged.
Yes.
As long as we’re talking about Russia, here’s a recent interesting overview of what their version of “family” is like…
https://archive.is/D1T6E
Much more of a patriarchy there.
When I saw Elvis named in the Epstein files I concluded that kabucki theater has reached a zenith. There must have been bidding on name in or name out. Considering who has had control of these “documents” and for how long would make me hesitant to judge ANYONE being accused.
Why??? Because nobody has mentioned John Podesta.
Yup.