It’s been a long time since I held in my hands a book as ignorant and silly as Emmanuel Todd’s Who Is Charlie?. The author invents reality that will fit his quite bizarre thesis and refuses to let facts stop him.
The erosion of Catholicism, he states, has led to the rise of nationalism and ethnic hatred. One example he gives is Western Ukraine where Catholicism supposedly died in 1991, turning people into Russophobes. This is absolutely ridiculous since any religion has been completely irrelevant in Ukraine for at least 70 years and there is no Russophobia anywhere in Ukraine except in the feverish imaginings of Putinophile propaganda.
In what concerns Putin, this weird author is a great admirer and invents bizarre and unsubstantiated justifications for his adoration of Putin’s regime.
Todd insists on justifying the actions of the terrorists who slaughtered the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo. The terrorists were mentally ill, he argues without a shadow of proof. Or upset about their low wages. Or upset over a cartoon of Mohammed looking like a penis. I saw that cartoon but did not notice anybody looking like a penis. Well, I guess a penis is in the eye of the beholder, and Todd is eager to fantasize about non-existent penises or equally non-existent liberties in Russia as long as he can argue that terrorists were the real victims in the slaughter they committed.
What a profoundly dishonest and ridiculous book.
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