“It's the end of the world. Again. Liberal-democratic Europe, having been abandoned by its American overlord, must now (so say its leaders) fulfil its destiny by vanquishing a twin-headed monster. The first head is the Trump-Putin dyad, united in their loathing of Ukraine and the European Union; and the second, the cabal of Silicon Valley predators threatening humanity. ‘The new axis of the world is Trump-Putin,’ declared Jean-Yves Le Drian. “The essayist Giuliano da Empoli's argument in brief is that authoritarian leaders are conspiring with the all-conquering tech oligarchs to introduce ‘an era of limitless violence’. Against such opponents, ‘defenders of liberty appear singularly ill-prepared.’ His regret over this perhaps draws on personal experience; before the ‘age of predators’, there was an Edenic era of social-liberalism and the ‘third way’, whose leading lights included Matteo Renzi and Romano Prodi, both advised by da Empoli. Their brilliance so delighted Italian ...
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51