About the Book
A global war of ideas is unfolding before our eyes. Yet we have not fully grasped that it is directed against our most fundamental values: democracy, pluralism, human rights, freedom of expression. From Moscow to Beijing, from Caracas to Tehran, our enemies seek to dismantle Europe and destroy the West. To better understand this threat, the journalist and researcher Frédéric Martel travelled widely, conducting fieldwork and « face to face » with the intellectuals of Xi Jinping, the ideologues of Vladimir Putin, the propagandists of Hamas – but also with advisers to Donald Trump. Over the course of an eight-year investigation, carried out in fifty-two countries, he interviewed nearly two thousand protagonists – witnesses and actors alike – in the vast disorder of the contemporary world. This "larger than life" book reveals the hidden side of our current history. It tells the story of our age and its obsession with the « West » – rejected by those who, like China or Iran, seek to annihilate it; glorified by others, from Russian and Hungarian to American and Brazilian populists, who claim to exalt it. There is no longer a single West, but many « Wests » – projected, imagined, often contradictory. In the end, those who demand « more » West converge with those who want « less » of it: a convergence of extremes and, in both cases, the same illusion. The same pathology. Such is the subject of this book: the West and its enemies. Our enemies.
