Counter-Currents
A French View of the Empire of Nothing in 2002
Morris van de Camp2,497 words
Emmanuel Todd
After the Empire: The Breakdown of American Order
New York: Columbia University Press, 2002
In the immediate aftermath of the 9-11 Terror Attacks, the enraged American public, further goaded by the mainstream media and neo-conservatives in the Bush 43 administration, went into a fit of madness. This insanity was helped along by two pre-existing ideological worldviews that were widely known and understood at the time. The first was the view put forward by Francis Fukuyama at the end of the Cold War in his book The End of History and the Last Man (1992), that humanity had reached the point, prophesized (to put it simply) by Georg Hegel, where there would be no alternative political system to that of liberal democracy. So, anything a “liberal democracy” did would be successful. The second idea was that America, after the demise of the Soviet Union, had become a “hyperpower” which could end evil. [1]
Emanual Todd, a French political scientist who works at the French Institute for Demographic Studies, wrote a book-length critique on American policy circa 2002. Todd points out the problems of the two mainstream American narratives described above plus other viewpoints that were shaping America’s actions at the time. The ideas presented in this book are worth looking at. One can see that Todd influenced French policy at the time, and many of his ideas appear to have been taken up by the Russian Eurasianist Philosopher, Alexander Dugin. Some Americans came see Todd’s point of view when they started to reject neo-liberal economic ideas during the 2016 US Presidential Election.
A French View of les Anglo-Saxons
Emanuel Todd is Jewish, but his book is a case where the Jewish Question doesn’t apply. His remarks about America’s mad push to invade Iraq and end evil in the Middle East following 9-11 is from a perspective that the Marquis de Montcalm, Napoleon, or Charles de Gaulle would have shared. He isn’t really anti-American, but he has a healthy French wariness of les Anglo-Saxons. The French have always had a suspicion towards the projects of English speakers. In his excellent book, God and Gold (2007), Walter Russell Mead writes,
Long before President Jacques Chirac led U.N. opposition to the 2003 Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, it was France that had longest and most consistently opposed the Anglo–Saxon empire-builders; it is France that has thought hardest and most deeply about what is wrong with them, and it is France that has most often attempted to defeat or at least contain them. The modern rivalry goes back to the late seventeenth century, when England was the chief obstacle to Louis XIV’s plans to dominate Europe. The great Catholic preacher and theologian Bossuet denounced “La perfide Angleterre” in a sermon preached at Metz in 1682. Louis himself remarked dismissively that “England is a little garden full of sour weeds.” [2]
There Is No End of History
The first concept Todd destroys is Fukuyama’s End of History theory. Todd describes it as a “simplistic and easily digested reading of Hegel,” (p. 9). The End of History narrative was always false, bit it gave its name to the time between the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 until September 11, 2001. The day of the WTC attack was only the extremely noticeable end point of the era.
When viewed from the perspective of an American white advocate, the End of History had been coming apart throughout the 1990s. In America, the true end of the End of History really took place on February 26, 1993. This is when Salafi Jihadists bombed the World Trade Center the first time. It was also the day that Colorado State Police raided a Christian Identity church north of Fort Collins. Two days later, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms raided a church in Waco with disastrous results. Abroad, the End of History ended on June 27,1991, when Slovenia left the Yugoslavian union.
Rejecting the Clash of Civilizations Concept
Emanual Todd also rejects Samuel Huntington’s view of the situation after the end of the Cold War. In 1993, Huntington wrote an article in Foreign Affairs which grew into a book called The Clash of Civilizations (1996) which pointed out that the peoples of the world were divided into different civilizational blocs which mostly aligned with the ethos of the majority religion of their respective societies. These civilizational blocs were at odds with each other and there was bound to be wars and terrorist events that would make new history.
Huntington also dismissed the appearance of the End of History’s common global culture writing,
Somewhere in the Middle East a half-dozen young men could well be dressed in jeans, drinking Coke, listening to rap, and, between their bows to Mecca, putting together a bomb to blow up an American airliner. [3]
The Middle East is part of Huntington’s Islamic bloc. The United States and Western Europe, according to Huntington, are in a Catholic–Protestant “Western” bloc and Russia, Kazakhstan, and parts of Eastern Europe are in an Orthodox civilizational bloc, centered upon the religious foundation of the Eastern Orthodox Church. The Yugoslav Wars were waged between Western, Orthodox, and Islamic mini-states who all called for help from the larger nations within their respective civilizational blocs – this verified Huntington’s model.
Todd rejects Huntington’s Civilizational Thesis, however. Instead, he describes the situation as one of modernity, where populations become more educated and less fertile. In Iran, for example, the society is more literate, but its birthrate has fallen. This frees up people to become more politically extreme because new ideas can spread across a population quicker. At the same time people have more free time and money due to less child-rearing responsibilities.
In Yugoslavia, the population had become literate. Therefore, the people in the area were influenced by ideological trends such as communism. Then the fertility rate fell, but not all at once. Todd writes,
Having moved toward lower birth rates…the Serbs and Croatians experienced slower growth and watched apprehensively the rapid growth of the Muslim population, something they perceived as a threatening demographic invasion. The ethnic obsessions of the post-communist era were exacerbated by these differing demographic dynamics. (p. 41)
The war in Yugoslavia, by the lights of Todd’s model, was a temporary event caused by the loss of equilibrium created by the different birthrates plus literacy. When communism failed in Eastern Europe, ethnonationalist ideology arose and spread across the literate population. Peter Brimelow, in his excellent book Alien Nation (1995), also described the importance of literacy writing,
Multinational and multilingual states (. . . polities) organized on other principles, like the Hapsburg Empire, did not survive into the modern, democratic age. And for good reason. The essential point is this: Modern society is organized around the free flow of information. So modernization inevitably puts a premium on linguistic unity. It doesn’t matter what language the people in the next village speak if you have no truck or trade with them. But if you do, it does. SPECIAL NOTE FOR ECONOMISTS: When you think about it, the emergence of the nation-state on the world scene is very much like the simultaneous emergence of the firm in developing capitalist economies. Both can be traced to lower transaction costs, efficiencies in the transmission of information and the superior economies of specialization. [4]
The religious underpinnings of the Croats, Serbs, and Muslims were less important than the family structures in the different groups. Anglo-Saxons have complete nuclear families, where man and wife make up an independent unit in which they raise their children while going on to interact with the wider society and economy. This is wildly different from the Russian and Islamic family structures of equality between brothers. This is when all sons get an equal share of the inheritance, and they are expected to cooperate in every way. Everywhere this structure existed during the Cold War, including parts of Italy, communism gained committed members.
America’s concern over communism during the Cold War and Islam during the “War on Terror” was really a defense of the nuclear family against a rival structure of equality between brothers. Looking at this situation the other way, communism and traditional Islam are political ideologies which defend the traditional folkways of their followers from capitalists who thrive in a nuclear family model. Archibald Roosevelt and Zygmund Dobbs, two anti-communists from the 1950s and ‘60s, also concluded that communism was a political ideology which supported a traditionalist feudal structure.
Todd also pointed out that in the Middle East, the equality between the brothers structure was reenforced by the tradition of cousins related along the male line marrying. Cousin marriage creates two things, the problems of in-breeding such as Pakistan’s low average IQ, and a society unable to come to terms with people outside the family. Democracy in Iraq was therefore impossible because the family structures that made up the base of society had no ability to cooperate.
After 9-11, Americans, thinking they were in a hyperpower nation, went to war in Afghanistan and then Iraq. The war in Afghanistan, at least the phase between the initial invasion and the killing of Osama bin Laden, was unavoidable since it was a just response to the WTC attack. The Iraq War was avoidable, but the mainstream narrative for the conflict turned out to be so powerful, that few in America saw the war as the disaster it would become in the leadup to the invasion and occupation.
The attack on Iraq was that of a major power targeting an isolated and militarily weak rival. This choice of targets was a marker of America’s declining status. The slide downwards started decades prior to 9-11. America’s industrial capacity after World War II was greater than any other nation. However, in 2002, America’s industry was completely outsourced. America needed the world, not the other way around. America’s economy was and is bolstered by foreign infusions of cash, especially in the form of foreign purchasing of Treasury Bonds. At the time, neo-conservatives saw this as proof “the world” wanted American security and paid for it by investing in items the US Treasury Department could apply to the US Defense Department.
America also had and has an unsteady relationship with its allies. To use a historical analogy, America is an empire, but one on the Athenian model, not the Roman model. The Roman Empire extended citizenship so that eventually every person within the empire was equal to any other and all had a stake in the system. On the other hand, the Athenians defined their citizenship to only those in the Athenian ethnic group. Additionally, their relationship with their Delian League allies was exploitative and unequal.
According to Todd, America’s Athenian-leaning style of citizenship creates a boiling domestic racial situation. He also sees the increasingly tough naturalization rules as harmful to the American policy abroad. Todd doesn’t see “civil rights” as a hostile policy inflicted upon Anglo-European Americans by outsiders with citizenship. He also doesn’t see the large problem of paperwork-Americans directing foreign policy such as US support for Israel or committing acts of terror aided by a US passport.
Finally, the American military was (and unfortunately, is) positioned across the world in the same basic configuration as it was at the end of the Cold War. This situation keeps America overstretched militarily and many of the troops, such as those in Central Asia are potential hostages should they be faced with a major Russian offensive.
Meanwhile, Russia appears weak but has the potential to expand. Ethnic Russians predominate in the most fertile parts of northern Kazakhstan. Furthermore, Belarus and Ukraine are independent but have no long history of independence. Todd correctly predicted that Kazakhstan and Belarus will eventually align with Moscow. Ukraine will also likely return to the Russian fold.
In the Meantime…
Many of After the Empire’s ideas have been adopted by Alexander Dugin. He refers to America as a modern Athens which jealously guards its ethnic core and carries on exploitation of others through slavery and economic trickery. Dugan views Russia as the land-based Spartan rival to America’s Athens. Todd doesn’t seem to see the Great Replacement, but then the idea of it does imply a society seeking to defend its ethnic core, so his identification of the trend in 2002 is accurate. Both Todd and Dugin predict an expansive Russia along the Eurasianist ideological model. Todd also predicted greater cooperation between France and Germany through the European Union.
Todd viewed the future of Europe through rose tinted glasses in 2002. The Euro currency did get adopted across the continent, but its zone expanded to economically backwards areas of Europe and choked in 2008. Europe also lost Great Britain after the German Chancellor waved the EU’s refugee rules and allowed Muslim migrants to stampede in. Many of those Muslims turned to terrorism – fortifying Huntington’s thesis against Todd’s.
The American troops in Central Asia and Afghanistan have been withdrawn, but not until two decades after this book was published. Todd was wrong about the Russians holding Americans in Central Asia hostage, but the shambolic American withdraw from Afghanistan and President Biden’s obvious senility caused a failure to deter and the Ukraine War followed. Todd, therefore, was somewhat right. Ukraine’s tilt towards the West was underestimated by Todd, however. The nation remains free of Russia for now.
The idea that America is a declining power because she only attacked isolated and weak rivals should is wrong. Isolating a foreign country in the first place is a mark of power and diplomatic excellence rather than the opposite. Prior to the Ukraine War, Russia tried to separate Germany from Eastern Europe through the Nordstream 2 Pipeline and partially isolated Ukraine from the EU through various means. When the Russians attacked, Ukraine was not isolated enough. Its army, fortified with NATO weapons, managed to kill thousands upon thousands of Russians.
Americans have responded to the fact described in the book that America’s role in the global economy was to consume the products of others. During the 2008 recession, this issue caused many Americans to seek to re-industrialize. So far, America remains dependent upon the factories of others, but glimmers of hope for industrial independence have started to appear.
Notes
[1] These two ideas were fortified by the extreme veneration of the official World War II narrative. This held that the conflict was a good war and America’s role in it was just and valorous. Movies like Saving Private Ryan were tremendously popular. The books by historian Stephen E. Ambrose about the conflict were everywhere and influential. The miniseries Band of Brothers, based on the book by Ambrose of the same name, premiered on September 9, 2001. That show featured all-Americans doing feats of daring-do during the conflict and many Americans were inspired to do the same especially after the “Pearl Harbor” type attack on the World Trade Center.
[2] Mead, Walter Russell, God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World, (New York: Vintage Books, 2007) p. 54
[3] Huntington, Samuel P., The Clash of Civilizations & the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996) p. 58
[4] Brimelow, Peter, Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster, (New York: Random House, 1995) p. 226
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13 comments
American power may have already, to a large degree, faded, but the image of American hyperpower still persists and is a very useful tool for getting people to side with Moscow/China (as the alleged smaller evil/center of resistance against a global tyrant).
America as The Empire That Never Ended [in their minds].
I doubt that overpermeations of rainbow noise and DIEversity hirelings in the bureaucracy is a hyperpower image flex to anyone. Normal amerikans are embarrassed by their own making a goddamn fool of themselves like your drunken relative at the wedding. The libdem luvey dovey tolerance extravaganza isn’t endearing to authoritarian machismo societies of color.
More importantly, American history since 1945 is a bit of a paradox – how and why did a nation that won a global war, reaching almost 36% of global GDP (in PPP no less!) at the moment of victory [1], manage to go into decline a few decades down the road, rather than become a sort of “Global Roman Empire” reigning supreme for the next couple centuries?
The key reason is that history never stops. The world is not like a computer game, where having a decisive advantage at one point means having it forever because the game mechanics are simplistic.
You have to continue making good decisions and actually implementing wise policies, and the „hidden factors“ powering your current success must be preserved. A country continueing to be competitive, socially functional and politically coherent is not a given – if these conditions are not met, the greatest nation on earth will fall into decline pretty quickly.
Given that 1945 was before the onset of the television era, before suburbanity, before globalization and computers, there were a lot of new „challenges“ waiting for all nations on earth. In other words, the „game“ was not over, so a country that managed to win often enough in the next couple rounds (e.g. Japan, China) would fare much better than one that, despite being dominant at the moment, was not well prepared to play the next rounds.
America basically became a global superpower “accidentally”, by being dragged into WWII against its own interests and better judgement. Hence the relative unpreparedness, lack of guidance, will and vision (etc), which is one reason why the US lost a lot of ground against Communism during the early Cold War.
[1] https://static.seekingalpha.com/uploads/2017/7/20/35536545-15006069600196524.png
How about Trump cuddling with Netanyahu and the Jewish lobby by announcing that Palestinians could be transferred to neighbouring countries, turning Gaza into a Riviera.
The Zionist Occupation Government’s empire persists. Zionism, including Christian Zionism, remains a powerful tool of domination. The schemes of the Zionist Occupation Government continue to set Whites against each other, fomenting hostile stereotypes, economic conflict, and war. We Whites continue to wither under this evil domination.
May Whites be saved from the evil empire. May it fall. May we learn our lesson and not repeat our errors.
Civil Rights amounts to an attack on the Empire’s core/founding ethnos. As does The Great Replacement. I don’t understand how those two things can be seen as the Empire protecting its core ethnos. Rather, they are destroying it.
What am I missing here?
An attack on the founding ethnos of the republic, which was designed in the late 18th century as a Classical Liberal republic for Masonic businessmen (hence the small state etc).
This original vision became more and more muddled over the later 19th century for a couple of reasons, with the World War era finally turning the US into a quasi-empire. This process was not spearheaded by the founding ethnos, which by the early 20th century was already in decline everywhere, but by newcomers from Eastern Europe and their allies.
So while America grew a big state (New Deal, WWII) and conquered parts of East Asia and Europe, it was, itself, in the process of (gradually) being taken over from within, its traditional elites and mores being replaced.
America as it existed in September 1945 was far from the new ruler’s ideal nation – it still had to be „processed“ extensively – and destroying American reputation and morale was a center piece of that strategy (hence Civil Rights, Counter Culture etc). Marginalizing the founding ethnos morally and demographically is part of that “processing” (which I liken to a home buyer radically re-constructing and re-decorating the property he bought to suit his deranged tastes).
Got it. The core ethnos ruling caste was replaced by a new core ethnos. Replacement migration, cultural genocide, demoralization, a social loyalty system and patronage network whose moral core is destruction of the dispossessed founding ethnos are the strategy to consolidate power. Ruthless and diabolical.
I think we’ve been mixing up two different processes, because one gradually faded into the other over the course of the 20th century:
One: Replacement of the Old Stock Boston Brahmin-like elite by another group
Second: Conflicts of interests between the general white American majority population and the new elite
The thing is that white Americans in the late 19th century as a whole were very disunited (denominationally, ethnically, culturally), and basically only one subgroup (upper strata “Yankees” like the Boston Brahmins) could be called culturally/politically/economically dominant. Other Old Stock groups like the Appallachians, Southerners or Mormons weren’t very influential and (in most cases at least) didn’t like the Yankees. And then there were A LOT of European immigrants who had arrived with large immigration streams and more or less directly settled in the Midwest and West (Germans, various Scandinavians etc) or formed urban ethnic enclaves in the cities of the East Coast (Irish, Italians etc).
The only thing that could provide unity was Americanism, which is a non-ethnic ideology that could not exclude any technically white immigrant group.
^ I think this helps explain why the new elite could become so powerful, how it managed to punch so much above its weight in 20th century America.
Got it. This is great thank you. The emergence of new technologies of mass media and unprecedented, scientifically tested psychological manipulation techniques also came into play.
The Regime is going to double down on Americanism now. J.D. Vance’s speech in Munich the other day was full of talk of, “our values”, “democracy”, and “liberty.” We will find out over the next 18 months if mass deportations and demographic restoration are the plan or if they too want to incorporate a mass of new consumers to perpetuate growth.
The Regime has a lot of genies that it let out of the lamp that probably can’t be stuffed back in, particularly if it can’t offer the one thing that held it together – the salve of affluence coupled with the remains of white high trust society and loyalty to something that is now gone.
Nice essay. Thank you for clarifying the subtle references and points for me. I appreciate it.
You say that Todd’s Jewishness doesn’t affect his outlook, but it seems like it clearly does based on your discussion of his writing on US immigration law and his failure to point out what you call “paperwork Americans” directing US policy. Any discussion of the Iraq War that doesn’t place the Israel Lobby at the center is not to be taken seriously. The Project for the New American Century dreamed that war up, basically xeroxing Israel’s Clean Break memo.
As for the implication that US immigration and naturalization policy was too exclusionary (“Athenian”) in 2002 – give me a break.
I also see a Jewish perspective in Todd’s overcomplication of the reasons Iraqis were unfit for democracy. All this largely irrelevant talk of marriage folkways when the obvious answer is that the concept of democratic government is peculiar to the white race. Anywhere outside of Europe that democratic government exists in the modern world, it was brought by whites. Even functioning nonwhite democracies such as Japan tend to have one party rule.
The wiki early life reveal always in some form or another goes against the interest of Whites. You say that Todd’s Jewishness doesn’t affect his outlook, and yet todd’s ilk gets fiercely defensive by rote against the most negligible sleight whenever his origin is dare mentioned. We see nothing and his uncle swears we’re virulently antisemitic for not seeing a column of Panzerkampfwagens in his driveway. It’s so exhausting. Decapitations for cartoons are a strike against qualifications for truly democratic anything. The end of ‘democracy’ as a placard is a good start for disposing this sham concept-symbol as a sleep aidgent for the masses.
“The war in Yugoslavia, by the lights of Todd’s model, was a temporary event caused by the loss of equilibrium created by the different birthrates plus literacy.”
Yugoslavia broke up along the former imperial borders. Empires are civilizations.
Slovenia had been part of Austria. Croatia had been an autonomous part of the Hungarian kingdom. Serbia had been part of the Ottoman empire. After WWI there was an attempt to assemble new states from the debris left over from the explosion of old empires. But when former imperial borders cut through a country, shared language is not enough to keep it together.
Czechia was part of Austria, Slovakia was part of Hungary.
Ukraine.
(Romania?)
Even in countries where ethnic homogeneity was achieved — by ethnic cleansing and ruthless social engineering– old imperial borders are still visible on maps of politics, and much else.
As for the war, its primary cause was temperament/national character, and without Western interference it could have been over in a few weeks. But the US played the usual tiresome game: ethnic group “A” is allowed to secede from country “B” on grounds of ethnic self-determination, but ethnic group “B”, who live in one block on the wrong side of the newly drawn border, are not allowed to secede from state “A” because… insert reasons. In the Yugoslav case the reason was that the Serbs were friends of Russia.
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