Landes,
a medievalist and historian of apocalyptic movements, takes us through the
first years of the third millennium (2000-2003), documenting how a radical
inability of Westerners to understand the medieval mentality that drove Global
Jihad prompted a series of disastrous misinterpretations and misguided
reactions that have shaped our so-far unhappy century. These misinterpretations
in 2000, 2001, 2002, and 2005, contributed fundamentally to the ever-worsening moral
and empirical disorientations of our information elites (journalists,
academics, pundits). So while journalists reported Palestinian war propaganda
as news (lethal journalism), they were also reporting Jihadi war propaganda as
news (own-goal war journalism). These radical disorientations have
created our current dilemma of pervasive information distrust, deep splits
within the voting public in most democracies, the politicization of science,
and the inability of Western elites to defend their civilization, and instead,
to stand down before an invasion.
Drawing
on the dynamics of apocalyptic movements, Landes looks at the turn of the millennium in
terms of a radical mismatch between two millennial styles, an Islamist pre-modern
(Caliphators) and a Western post-modern (Woke). Due to a striking cognitive
failure, Westerners could neither see nor discuss the foe they faced, and
repeatedly, convinced they were bending the arc of history towards justice,
took sharp wrong turns.