Let us start from the beginning. In the painting below a Soviet artist captures a very famous, to Soviet citizens of course, moment in Lenin’ s life. His house in Shushenskoe, a place of his exile, is being searched by the police. As an aside: Lenin is supposed to be 27 years old here. There are two versions of Lenin in the Soviet art- an angelic looking 3 year old and a wise elder, a sage. Nothing in between. Here he is a sage. In reality, Lenin looks older than he had ever lived. He died aged 53 years. Note a little detail in this painting: one of the policemen is paging through the books on the shelves. This was, according to the large Soviet corpus of writings on the subject, the so-called Leniniana, the main point of each of the many house searches performed by the Russian imperial police in Lenin’s houses. Search for forbidden books. What were they, those mysterious forbidden books? Texts of Karl Marx, or, at least, that is what the Soviet citizens and children were told. That seemed straightforward enough. Lenin was portrayed as ‘doing a revolution’, inspired by Marx’s writings. The essence of the revolution was to topple the monarchy to start with. So, hostility of the Russian imperial police and the censor to Marx required no explanation.
Surreptitiously, the Soviet Leniniana conveyed a point that the whole concept of forbidden books is ridiculous and only possible in the context of repressive regimes imposed on people. Certainly not under the Soviet system. Self-publishing, known as Samizdat, flourished in the Soviet Union , of course. Well, regimes change but bans on books remain. The ‘Economist’s overview of the banned books includes titles such as Rushdie’s ‘The Satanic Verses’ (banned by some Islamic countries; reason: mocking of the Prophet of Islam), Taslima Nasrin’s ‘Lajja’ (banned by Bangladesh; reason: describing Muslim violence against Hindus), Paek Nam Nyong’s ‘Friend’ (banned y South Korea for consumption by the military; reason: a compassionate account of the North Korean society, note that the military is not supposed to read accounts that weaken its desire to fight the enemy ). Even democratization and liberalisation do not protect against book banning. The naïve Western intellectuals find this news hard to stomach. There are softer forms of banning that can be very effective still. Removal from school libraries is one method and it is on the rise in the USA. Interestingly, ‘The Economist’ informs us the LGBT issue is not one of the most commonly occurring subjects that get the books removed from the school libraries, often at parents’ request, by the way. The most common subject is actually grief/death, followed by sex, race, drugs and mental health issues.
What an odd way to start a review of a new book on the past, present and maybe also future of the Western civilisation. Not really. It will become clear why before too long. The book is ‘La Defaite De L’Occident’. By Immanuel Todd, a French demographer and historian. This book is the last in the multi volume legacy of this remarkable scholar who thinks that cultures, including political cultures, are carved in the body of populations. The cultures reflect the demographic structures; they way people think and behave, and feel even, is shaped by the ways in which they live daily lives, their family size and structure, and the relationships and patterns in which they are born, grow, procreate, work, age and die. Todd, in other words, is a French intellectual of a special kind, with a lot of empirical proofs under his belt.
‘La Defaite De L’Occident’ is a title straightforward to understand for an English speaker. French and English are close enough to allow that. ‘The defeat of the West’-that is the book’s would-be title, it were ever translated into English from French, a language in which it was written. The reason I started this essay from Lenin and forbidden books is this: ‘The defeat of the West’ has not been translated into English. I do not know when this will change. And I do not know enough about the reasons for that. It could be that it is a genuinely undesirable book in the current political climate. Note though that the book was published in French in 2024 and translations into Spanish, Italian and Russian are already available. It could also be, however, that the absence of translation into English reflects the wishes of the author himself. The point is that the factual outcome of these competing scenarios is the same. What remains untranslated, remains unconsumed. The tremendous English speaking world cannot consume the book at present in a way that it was written and the fact that it has been in the meantime popularised by various book’s enthusiasts on YouTube does not compensate for that. It is a tremendously important book that needs to be read, and it deserves a detailed response from scholars and the interested public.
Is it really a forbidden book, then? Or have I invented it all -to make it sound more interesting than it actually is? You decide. It is, in my view, a forbidden book in effect because, as I said before, untranslated means unconsumed. Ironically, I published a graph from the book in the Israeli Hebrew-speaking discussion forum, dropping the word ‘forbidden’ there, as an aside, humorously. The following discussion mostly focused on the findings from the graph but , in less than five minutes, I was corrected by a ‘competitive reader’ that there is nothing ‘forbidden’ about it. Six minutes later, someone else translated the graph into Hebrew using AI and re-published it in the group. The first response was the usual way in which competitive academics engage with the obvious point conveyed by someone who is not them: they deny it plainly. The second response proved that translation is indeed vital to proper comprehension. Things remain inaccessible until translated.
So, what is this thing that Immanuel Todd dared to say to the world? (Below, I am translating, I myself read the book in Russian, and para-phrasing but only lightly.)
- That the Western civilisation is ill, it is experiencing a ‘health crisis’ of cultural disorientation.
- That the position adopted by the West in the context of the war between Russia and Ukraine (an enthusiastic and not very discerning pro-Ukraine position) is a reflection of this inner crisis.
- That West lost the war in Ukraine, and Russia emerged victorious.
- That the Western crisis has to do with the loss of religiosity, a very long and staged process that is culminating now.
- That the loss of religiosity, and nationalism-which is a related product that kept the Western civilisation afloat for a while- gives space to alternative visions.
- Yet, final and confident versions of these visions are not ready yet in the West. There is an unbearable vacuum.
- Vacuum needs to be filled by something but it cannot be filled at will. That something needs to mature first. Still, the vacuum is unbearable, and that situation produces all sorts of ideologies and alliances, in part these are counter-intuitive because our intuitions belong to a different age.
The book was written as a reaction to the realities of the Russia-Ukraine was but really the war, for Todd, was just a test that his earlier diagnosis of the Western crisis was correct. If the war did not happen, he would have written a similar book using a different point of departure. Chapter by chapter, he takes the reader patiently through his arguments. The Russian society, for Todd, is stable and confident, it has followed a path of recovery for the past quarter of a century at least. He uses statistics to illustrate that. The Ukrainian society, in the meantime, was collapsing and the American society was either stable in its crisis-like reality or deteriorating. He uses statistics to illustrate that too. Europe has become subservient to America in the meantime, and desperate to belong somewhere in the new and still uncharted world order. That is especially true of the former Soviet satellites. Eastern Europe is living through a drama that is different from the West but not entirely unrelated. It is living through an identity crisis.
Why to listen to Todd? Why to take him seriously? There have been very good reasons to take him seriously before. In ‘Lineages of modernity’, published in 2019, Todd, effectively, re-wrote human history , re-casting it through the lens of demography, and convincingly so. ‘Family systems’ shape everything we know in terms of culture-such as Todd’s take. But it is not just his ambition and the fact that it all ‘sounds credible’. Todd has something bigger to his name, and that is a predictive power: In ‘The Final Fall: An Essay on the Decomposition of the Soviet Sphere’, written in 1976, the time of human innocence for all purposes, Todd predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union. Todd based this prediction then on something as simple as the trend in the rate of child mortality. Soviet infant mortality in particular was rising at the time, the USSR has not been able to create a medical service that could come close to Western achievements in that area. That, in Todd’s eyes, was the beginning of an end. And so it was.
Where next with this? First, Todd has a Substack blog, and I link to one of his essays. Subscribing to that will also lead you to connect to others who interpret and process his work, for example Jeff Rich, a purveyor of global history with his impressive You Tube presence. He has a special playlist on Todd.
Something will also happen here, God willing. I will go through Todd’s book chapter by chapter, and try to work with his arguments. My emphasis would be on looking at the empirical foundations first. If we are talking about something as consequential as a civilisational collapse for some and a civilisational rise for others, we better be sure of the empirics that drive us to conclusions. My next move would be to assess the place of Jews and especially Israel against the backdrop of geopolitical and cultural developments in the West. If indeed there is a civilisational collapse for some and a civilisational rise for others, it is – kind of -important for everyone to pay attention. Not just the main protagonists, like Russia and the West. New realities, new alliances, new rules. Where does it leave Israel, and , more broadly, the world Jewry? I will be trying to figure this out.