Showing posts with label France. Show all posts
Showing posts with label France. Show all posts

Saturday, August 8, 2026

The Slow Demise of France’s Enduring Colonial Currency System in Africa

There is a currency circulating across 14 African nations. Designed in Paris, printed in France, it required for decades that its users deposit up to half their foreign reserves in the French Treasury. Called the CFA franc (officially Communauté Financière Africaine, i.e. African Financial Community), it has operated continuously since 1945. The same instrument created to control and manage France's colonial possessions in sub-Saharan Africa still functions in many ways today. More than 155 million people use it; 14 formally sovereign nations depend on it. And the debate over whether it represents stability or subjugation has never been louder.

UEMOA + CEMAC + Comoros = CFA franc zone.
 
A country that controls another country's currency controls that economy. France understood this better than almost anyone. While the British pound zone dissolved France held on and the invisible scaffolding linking Paris to Dakar, Abidjan, Yaoundé and Libreville has never been dismantled.

Return to 1945. Europe lies in ruins. France, liberated from Nazi Germany, struggles to feed itself. Inflation spirals; the metropolitan franc loses value weekly. Across the Atlantic the Bretton Woods agreements establish the postwar financial order: the gold-backed dollar as global anchor, every nation required to declare its currency's value to the new IMF. France's shattered economy forces a sharp devaluation of the metropolitan franc against the dollar.
 
West African CFA franc—fiat bills with zero intrinsic value, backed
only by an ECB-mandated fixed exchange rate to the euro.
 
De Gaulle's finance minister Pleven applies different rates to the metropole and the colonies. In France the franc falls hard. In French West Africa, French Equatorial Africa, and the Comoros a new currency is born at a stronger rate: one CFA franc equals 1.7 metropolitan francs. By 1948 the ratio is two to one. The colonies suddenly possess a currency stronger than France's own.

Presented as generosity, the mechanics tell another story. A strong currency in a raw-material exporter that imports finished goods acts as an import subsidy and export tax. It cheapens French manufactures for the colony and makes the colony’s own goods less competitive abroad. From day one the CFA franc's pricing structure channeled African purchasing power toward French industry and quietly strangled the development of competitive local export sectors. Solid Rothschild architecture designed to endure.

A fixed exchange rate set below equilibrium creates excess demand for foreign currency
(Qd > Qs), which the central bank must cover by selling reserves to maintain the peg.
 
And its original name said everything: Colonies Françaises d’Afrique—French Colonies of Africa. No euphemism. Notes were printed then, and still are, in Chamalières by the Banque de France. Four pillars underpinned the system and proved remarkably durable: a fixed exchange rate with the French franc (later the euro) guaranteeing unlimited convertibility by the French Treasury; free capital movement between the CFA zone and France; and the operations account requiring the zone's central banks to deposit a large share of foreign-exchange reserves in the French Treasury.

At founding that share was 100 percent. By 1973 it fell to 65 percent; by 2005 to a 50 percent ceiling. Even at half, 'sovereign nations' handed over half their foreign exchange wealth to a former colonial power in exchange for a guarantee against currency collapse. Defenders cite stability: relatively low inflation compared with much of Africa, insulation from crises that wrecked Zimbabwe or Venezuela. Outside one massive 1994 devaluation the CFA franc has tracked the French franc and then the euro almost lockstep for nearly eighty years. But stability for whom, and at what cost?
Viral 2019 Italian TV clip of Giorgia Meloni (then opposition leader, now Prime Minister) holding a CFA franc note and calling it France's "colonial currency" to exploit resources via seigniorage and export controls.  
Pegged at 655.957 CFA francs to the euro, member states cannot adjust the exchange rate to their own conditions. They cannot devalue to boost exports, expand the money supply in a downturn, or set independent interest rates. Monetary policy—the core tool of any sovereign country—is outsourced to the European Central Bank, which sets policy for Germany, France and the Netherlands, not Senegal, Cameroon or Chad. In 2008 and again during the COVID-19 plandemic, countries with sovereign currencies printed money and cut rates; CFA countries could not.

Economists have long argued the franc is chronically overvalued relative to the productive capacity of its users. Overvaluation makes imports cheap and exports expensive—fine for comprador elites buying luxury goods in Paris, devastating for farmers selling cocoa or cotton against competitors with weaker, flexible currencies. The structural result is a permanent tilt toward importing rather than producing and deep dependence on foreign capital. This is a design feature, not an accident.
 
Olympio, murderedlike Kennedyby the small hat money printers in 1963.
 

Sylvanus Olympio, first president of Togo, was elected in 1961 and immediately pushed to leave the CFA system and establish a national central bank. He saw monetary and political sovereignty as inseparable. On January 13, 1963, less than three years after independence, he was assassinated in a coup led by a French-trained sergeant. The new government proved far more amenable to French interests; Togo remained in the CFA zone. Leaders who challenge French economic control tend to meet violent ends or removal; those who cooperate enjoy long, French-supported tenures.

Thomas Sankara, revolutionary leader and president of Burkina Faso, addressing the United Nations General Assembly in New York on October 4, 1984. His speech remains a definitive manifesto for anti-imperialism, global solidarity, and self-reliance.
Sankara—radical anti-imperialist, pan-Africanist and austere leader
prioritized self-reliance, massive social reforms, and integrity.
Murdered by the small hat money printers in 1987. 

The most iconic case is Thomas Sankara. In 1983, aged 33, he seized power in Upper Volta and renamed it Burkina Faso—"land of upright people." He ran mass vaccination campaigns, planted over ten million trees against desertification, banned female genital mutilation, appointed women to high office, refused air-conditioning, drove a modest Renault 5 and cut official salaries including his own. His greatest offense in Paris's eyes was open challenge to the CFA franc and Françafrique—the web of political, military and economic ties binding former colonies to France. On October 15, 1987 he was assassinated in a coup led by his deputy Blaise Compaoré, who then ruled the country for 27 years and reversed the anti-French course. In April 2022 a Burkinabe military tribunal convicted Compaoré and associates in absentia; Compaoré, living in exile in Ivory Coast, received a life sentence. The tribunal confirmed French agents were in Ouagadougou the day after the coup. Sankara's family formally accused France of masterminding the killing. Macron pledged in 2017 to declassify related documents; they have not been fully released.

Françafrique operates on a larger scale still: French bases, advisers inside ministries, preferential access for French firms to African resources, and the CFA franc as monetary backbone. Comprador elites enjoyed convertibility that let them move wealth to Paris, an overvalued currency that made luxury imports affordable, and French political and military protection. Ordinary citizens faced scarce credit, interest rates dictated by European conditions, import competition that crushed local firms, and capital mobility that functioned largely as a one-way valve outward.

France confronts rising anti-French sentiment in West Africa—Bamako,
Mali, 2020: "France get out" demonstration against French, EU and UN forces. 

By the late 1980s the franc was severely overvalued. Commodity prices—cocoa, coffee, cotton, oil—were falling while the French franc appreciated, dragging the CFA with it. On January 12, 1994 the CFA franc was devalued 50 percent overnight. The decision was taken in Paris, not in any African capital. French Prime Minister Édouard Balladur later confirmed it was done at France's instigation "to help these countries in their development." Overnight the purchasing power of roughly 150 million people was halved. Prices of imported food, medicine and fuel doubled; urban poverty surged; foreign-currency public debt effectively doubled. The cost fell entirely on African citizens who had no vote and no veto. The event laid bare the system's reality: sovereign in name, monetary dependencies in fact.

When France joined the euro in 1999 the CFA franc was pegged at 655.957 to the euro—a rate that still holds. The anchor changed; the dynamics did not. Monetary policy is now set by the European Central Bank for a union of wealthy European states with zero representation or accountability to the African economies bound to it. Notes continue to be printed in Chamalières; until recent reforms the operations accounts still funneled reserves to the French Treasury; French representatives sat on the boards of the BCEAO in Dakar and the BEAC in Yaoundé.

 
By the 2010s a new generation of African intellectuals and leaders challenged the system with growing force. Senegalese economist Ndongo Samba Sylla called the CFA franc "an anachronism requiring orderly elimination." In 2015 Chadian President Idriss Déby declared that a "cord preventing development in Africa" must be severed—everyone knew which cord. In 2019 Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni held up a CFA note on television and accused France of exploitation, an accusation that resonated widely.
 
In December 2019, under pressure, Macron and Ivory Coast's Alassane Ouattara announced reforms in Abidjan: the West African CFA franc would become the Eco; the 50 percent reserve deposit requirement would end; French board seats at the BCEAO would disappear; the operations account would close and reserves return to Dakar. Headlines called it historic. The fine print was more cautious: the fixed euro peg remained, French convertibility guarantee continued, and France retained a backup credit line. The most symbolically offensive features were removed; the macro-economically decisive peg stayed.

Muammar Gaddafi's African gold dinar was a 2009-2011 pan-African initiative to introduce a single, gold-backed currency aimed to replace the US dollar and the French-backed CFA franc across Africa, allowing nations to sell oil and resources for gold to achieve complete financial independence from Western systems. Murdered by the small hat money printers in 2011.
Critics call it rebranding. The name Eco had already been chosen for a broader ECOWAS common currency that would have included Nigeria; a francophone-only Eco complicated that project. The reforms covered only the eight West African states. The six Central African users of the BEAC franc—Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon—still deposit 50 percent of reserves in Paris and still have French board representation. As of today, the Eco has not launched; the latest ECOWAS target of 2027 is viewed with widespread skepticism.

Meanwhile the Sahel transformed. Coups between 2020 and 2023 toppled governments in Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Guinea, each fueled in part by anti-French sentiment over military presence, European and US sponsored Jihadist terrorism, economic extraction and the CFA franc. In 2024 Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger left ECOWAS and formed the landlocked Alliance of Sahel States, explicitly rejecting French influence and discussing exit from the CFA franc toward national or shared Sahelian currencies. Chad and Senegal demanded withdrawal of French troops, Niger the retreat of the French and Americans. 
 
» The slave that cannot carry out his own revolt deserves no pity. «
Ibrahim Traoré, President of Burkina Faso.
 
Senegal's president Bassirou Diomaye Faye and his prime minister Ousmane Sonko campaigned in 2023 on economic sovereignty; Sonko declared in 2025 that the CFA franc is "both a symbolic and an economic problem." The cry "La France dégage" (France, get out!) has echoed from Niamey to Bamako to Ouagadougou to Dakar, encompassing French military bases, mining concessions and, above all, monetary sovereignty. The CFA franc had become the most visible symbol of unfinished decolonization.

» Jub, Jubal, Jubanti. «
(Be upright, act with integrity, and rectify what is crooked.)
Faye, elected president of Senegal in 2024, had expelled French troops by March 2025 and was
elected Chairman of ECOWAS in July 2026; however, Senegal has not left the CFA franc. Hello Eco...

What replaces it remains complicated. Exit without credible alternatives requires building central-bank capacity, reserve management, monetary-policy frameworks and market confidence from scratch. Countries that left earlier—Guinea in 1960, Madagascar and Mauritania in 1973—faced significant turbulence. Yet defenders must confront the system's record: the 14 CFA countries include some of the world's poorest; Niger, Chad, the Central African Republic and Burkina Faso rank near the bottom of the UN Human Development Index; per-capita GDP remains a fraction of the global average. Eighty years of promised stability have not delivered development, poverty reduction or structural transformation. The question is no longer only whether these countries can afford to leave, but whether they can afford to stay.
 
Dual world map showing each country's largest trading partner (exports + imports) in 2000 vs. 2024 among the US, EU, and China. In 2000, the US led most of the Americas, parts of Asia-Pacific, and some of Africa; the EU dominated Europe, much of Africa and Asia, and parts of South America; China led only a few smaller economies (e.g., Myanmar, Mongolia, North Korea, Oman, Sudan, Yemen). By 2024, China dominates nearly all of Asia, much of Africa, and most of South America; the US retains North America and select South American countries; the EU leads much of Europe and nearby regions but with reduced global reach. China’s total trade rose from $474B (2000) to $6.2T (2024), surpassing both the US and EU.
Why would-should-could all these countries remain in the CFA franc zone? 

A monetary system whose notes are printed in France, whose reserves have historically been held in the French Treasury, whose exchange rate is set by a European institution, and in which the actual users long had no meaningful say, was designed under colonialism, preserved through co-optation, coercion and violence, and maintained by institutional inertia and the complicity of local comprador elites who benefit. 
 
At no point in history has the CFA franc been closer to its demise, just coinciding with the scheduled 2027 rollout of the
Eco—the proposed new ECOWAS common currency, directly pegged to the Euro. Again. One couldn't make this up.
And it just sounds, looks, and smells as fantastic and promising as the Euro...
 
The CFA franc is a monument to the idea that independence can be granted with one hand while economic sovereignty is withheld with the other. The most effective control is not always exercised with guns and borders; sometimes it is exercised with exchange rates, reserve requirements and banknotes printed thousands of kilometers from the pockets that carry them.
 
Whether or when the CFA franc system collapses, adapts once more as the Eco, national sovereign currencies, or something else remains open. What is clear is that a reckoning is already under way across the Sahel and beyond. A new generation asks the question Sankara asked four decades ago: "If a nation does not control its own money, can it truly call itself free?"
 

Saturday, July 25, 2026

Brittany’s Giant Megalithic Menhirs: Who Built and Moved Them—and Why?

The Broken Menhir of Er Grah—also known as the Grand Menhir Brisé—is the largest known monolith ever transported and erected by Neolithic humans. Located in Locmariaquer, Brittany, France, this 300-ton granite pillar, measuring 21 meters in length, was put up some 6,000 years ago, more than 2,000 years before Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid of Giza.
 
The Grand Menhir Brisé (Brittany, France) is the largest single stone block ever transported and erected by Neolithic humans.
The Broken Menhir of Er Grah.

The pillar did not stand alone; it was part of an alignment of 19 megaliths. Today, it lies shattered on the ground in four distinct sections. While an earthquake was once suspected to be the cause, researchers now believe it was intentionally pulled down and broken around 4300 BC during a period of ideological and religious shift. What makes it even more remarkable is its origin. The stone was quarried across the Gulf of Morbihan, near the Auray river estuary 10 kilometers away, meaning it had to be moved over land, then by water, and then over land again. Even with modern technology, that's no small task.  
 
 
Dragging is out of the question—the friction would have made it impossible. The only realistic method is rolling: a massive platform supported by dozens of wooden rollers, distributing the weight step by step along a prepared track? But that raises another challenge—how to load 300 tons onto a boat? What kind of vessel could even carry it? These weren't primitive people. They planned, tested, and organized. If they could move the stone a few meters, they could move it kilometers—repeating the same process over and over. And yet, most explanations focus on symbolism. The real mystery is far more concrete: How did they actually do it?
 
Some have suggested that all these megaliths were transported on ice, but the ice sheets had retreated roughly 15,000 years earlier, leaving no glaciation 6,000 years ago. Moreover, Neolithic farming and livestock societies required a stable, ice-free climate capable of supporting the workforce needed for such projects. Physically, heavy stones would grind into ice rather than glide across it, becoming embedded within a few meters. 
   
The menhir of Kerloas, also called menhir of Kervéatoux, is located in Plouarzel in the department of Finistère in France. It is considered to be the highest menhir currently standing, with its 9.50 m above ground.
Kerloas Menhir (Menhir de Kervéatoux) in Plouarzel.
 
The Kerloas Menhir, another giant cucumber-shaped granite monolith in Finistère, weighs an estimated 150 tons. Standing just under 10 meters tall—originally 12 meters before a lightning strike broke its tip—it rests on a high, flat plateau 130 meters above sea level and remains visible from 30 kilometers away. The Kerloas Menhir's purpose remains uncertain, but its prominent position suggests it also served as a territorial marker. Its transport was itself a remarkable Neolithic undertaking: the 150-ton granite block was moved two kilometers from the nearest outcrop and hauled up a 100-meter incline to reach the elevated plateau, unlike many megaliths that were moved along downhill routes. 
 
Located in Plourin, Brittany, the Neolithic Kergadiou menhirs include France’s second-tallest standing stone (8.75m) alongside a fallen 11-meter megalith in the background.
Kergadiou menhirs in a farmer's field in Plourin.

A few kilometers away sit the Kergadiou menhirs. The taller surviving stone reaches 8.75 meters and weighs around 50 tons, standing on a coastal plain 63 meters above sea level and visible from the sea. Beside it lies a fallen menhir measuring 10 meters in length and weighing roughly 60 tons; if re-erected, it would rank among the tallest in France and the world. 
Carnac stonesover 3,000 menhirs, alignments, dolmens,
and tumuli
the world's largest megalithic complex.
Local legends long associated menhirs with fertility and healing. Women pressed their bellies against the stones—sometimes using specific postures to conceive a boy or girl—or stood on opposite sides with their husbands. Single women performed rituals hoping for good marriages, and the sick touched ailing body parts to the stones for magical healing.
 
 
As Christianity spread into Celtic and pagan regions between the 5th and 7th centuries, the Church often absorbed rather than destroyed these sacred sites, gradually Christianizing megaliths whose origins had already been forgotten in order to redirect existing rituals toward Catholic worship. An 1867 engraving by Félix Benoist shows the Kergadiou menhir topped with a small Latin cross. The cross vanished, but a drilled socket at the flattened peak remains visible.

The Menhir of Saint-Uzec in Pleumeur-Bodou, Brittany, is one of France’s best-preserved examples of the Christianization of a prehistoric monument. This 7-meter, 80-ton Neolithic granite monolith was transformed in the 17th century into a calvary, with detailed reliefs of the Passion of Christ carved into its surface and originally painted to redirect local devotion toward Christianity. The Saint-Uzec menhir’s southern face depicts the Passion of Christ, including the instruments of the Passion, the Virgin Mary, and the cockerel symbolizing Peter’s denial. Uniquely, it also features human-faced sun and moon motifs. In the 17th century, Jesuit missionary Padre Maunoir transformed the monument to counter perceived pagan revival and strengthen Catholic devotion during the Counter-Reformation. A stone cross still crowns the menhir, while vertical grooves on its northern side show possible prehistoric origins and later modifications.
Saint-Uzec menhir in Pleumeur-Bodou.
 
Other menhirs underwent similar transformations. The Champ-Dolent menhir once featured crosses, including a version flanked by two figures. In the 1970s, researchers used this site to test ancient construction methods, successfully raising a large menhir using ropes, steel cables, and wooden A-frame bipods for leverage. Meanwhile, the Saint-Uzec menhir was heavily re-carved with a cross and relief scenes of Christ's Passion, including the ladder and pliers. 
 
The Ring of Brodgar is a Neolithic henge and stone circle on Mainland, Orkney, Scotland. Built between 2600–2400 BC, it predates Stonehenge and forms part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Ring of Brodgar, Orkney Islands, Scotland (2600 to 2400 BC).

 
The Ġgantija Temple Complex is a Neolithic megalithic monument on Malta’s Gozo Island. Built between 3600 and 3200 BC, it is one of the world’s oldest free-standing religious structures, predating Stonehenge and the Egyptian pyramids, and has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1980.
Ġgantija megalithic temple complex, Gozo Island, Malta (3600 to 3200 BC).
 
Human remains found at the bases of menhirs span from the Bronze Age and Iron Age through the Middle Ages, revealing centuries of changing use, while dolmens  and burial tumuli—stone and earth mounds covering central chambers—showed less frequent reuse.

Friday, May 8, 2026

From Nazi Race Theory to Today’s Russophobia | Constantin von Hoffmeister

Europe's history has become a battlefield of lies where the Western powers twist facts to fuel their obsessive Russophobia. They equate liberators with aggressors and cast Russia as the eternal enemy, all to justify their proxy war against the heart of Eurasia. This serves their ambition, not the truth. Real understanding requires confronting the brutal Nazi Eastern project and recognizing its direct continuation in today's Western crusade against Russia.

April 30, 1945: Soviet soldiers raise the Red Flag atop the Reichstag in Berlin.

The past of Europe lies before us like an open book, yet petty men rip its pages in a vulgar shouting match, hurling one crime against another as if the mountain of horrors could cancel itself out and leave truth untouched. This path leads only to darkness. What matters is the shape of the ideas themselves
the maps of power, the theories of blood, and the savage dreams of empirethat drove nations before the guns thundered. To see our way forward, we must stare without flinching at the plans and words that existed before the smoke of total war swallowed everything.

At the center is the Second World War, a cataclysm that remade the continent in fire and ruin. It did not erupt from nothing. It sprang from cold ideological programs and strategic visions created years earlier, each carrying its own brutal blueprint for Europe's future. The Eastern Front became the true heart of the struggle, where rival systems collided with steel and with fanatical doctrines of race, territory, and destiny. Any serious reckoning with Europe's past and future must begin here, where theory turned into organized slaughter and abstract creeds spilled real rivers of blood.
 
2025 Victory Day Parade, held on May 9 in Red Square, Moscow, honoring the 80th
anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany and the end of World War II in Europe.
 
Modern discourse has abandoned an honest examination for cheap myth-making. Twentieth-century figures and governments are stripped of context and recast as cartoon emblems of power, villainy, or resistance. These symbolic lies flood online spaces, turning history into a circus of identity, emotion, and aesthetic posturing. Real analysis cuts through the fog and returns to what was written, planned, and executed, basing every judgment on hard documents rather than fevered fantasy.

The central truth of that age stands naked and hideous: the Eastern program formed the black heart of the Nazis' geopolitical vision. 
Generalplan Ost spelled it out with machine-like brutality: a vast apparatus for the transformation of Eastern Europe through expulsion, slave labor, and the systematic mass death of Slavic populations. It called for the deportation or outright elimination of some 30 to 45 million Slavs, the seizure of their fertile lands, and the resettlement of ethnic German colonists in their place, forcing the survivors into permanent serfdom. These policies were a settled doctrine long before the war erupted. They filled secret memoranda, planning papers, and strategic outlines that declared one merciless purpose: to carve a colonial empire out of the living bodies of other European peoples, and to install a racial hierarchy of masters and 'subhumans.'

 
Nazi language itself was a weapon of conquest. Slavs appeared in their texts only as barriers to be smashed, vermin to be cleared, raw material to be worked to death or discarded. Eastern Europe they named Lebensraumliving spacea territory marked for conquest, massacres, and a total reordering under German domination. The Nazis modeled their design openly on earlier Western empires: the cold administration Britain forced onto India, the ruthless westward march of the United States that exterminated native peoples. Thus the logic of Western colonialism turned inward and devoured Europe itself, reducing millions of fellow Europeans to helots in a new racial order.

In the contemporary liberal West, a foul equivalence flourishes, placing the Soviet Union and the Third Reich on the same moral plane as twin totalitarian evils. This lie distorts the facts and erases every trace of responsibility. It ignores the Soviet Union's colossal sacrifice: twenty-seven million dead. The Soviet Union bore the main burden of the land war, shattered the Nazi war machine, and tore open the road to Europe's liberation from a supremacist regime. That sacrifice was decisive. To smear these distinct realities into one stain weakens all judgment in the present. This grotesque revisionism arms today's Russophobes with a convenient myth that delegitimizes the very power which broke the back of fascism. It prepares the intellectual ground for fresh aggression against Russia, the direct heir and guardian of that victory.
 
Colonisation of Eastern Europe, carried out through systematic genocide, extermination, 
massacre, mass starvation, chattel labour, mass rape, child abduction, and sexual slavery.
 
This same venomous spirit rages ever more strongly, sharper and more hysterical since the Ukraine conflict started. The Western powers have unleashed a pathological Russophobia, painting Russia as the eternal Asiatic barbarian that must be broken at all costs. Western media and governments treat the Russian people with the same colonial contempt once reserved for all Slavs. They shrugged or made excuses for the Odessa burnings of May 2, 2014, when dozens of men and women were trapped in the Trade Unions House and burned alive for the crime of opposing the Western-sponsored Maidan coup. Flames consumed the victims while Western-backed forces watched and cheered. The same Western powers now arm the Ukrainian forces and whitewash every atrocity committed against the Russian population. 

The continuity is unmistakable and damning. The Nazi racial hierarchy has merely changed its vocabulary. Today it speaks in the smooth language of "European values," a so-called "rules-based order," and "universal norms" while pursuing the identical goal: the subjugation, fragmentation, and destruction of the East so that the global hegemon may rule without challenge. Russia, the vast heartland, now occupies the exact place once assigned to the Slav on Nazi maps. This is no coincidence but the direct heir of that old colonial hatred, now dressed in humanitarian rhetoric and enforced by sanctions and proxy armies. The burning of Odessa and the shelling of the Donbass are fresh monuments to the same spirit that once drew up Generalplan Ost. The Western powers cannot tolerate a strong, sovereign Russia at the center of the Eurasian landmass, for its very existence refutes their claim to universal rule.

» The West would do well to remember how the Second World War truly ended. «

A healthy future rejects this madness with contempt. Stability arises only through open recognition of plurality. A multipolar order grants every great civilization its rightful space. Russia is the indispensable pole of Eurasia, anchoring a continental balance that prevents any single power from strangling the world. The lessons of the past are merciless: ideologies that elevate one people by crushing another breed only endless war and ruin. Europe and Eurasia form one organic body linked by geography, history, and heritage. True strength lies in their unbreakable union from Lisbon to Vladivostok, not in fresh crusades launched from Washington and Brussels against the Russian core.

The West would do well to remember how the Second World War truly ended. No Allied nation suffered even a fraction of what the Soviet Union endured. Russia's way of remembrance is superior: it honors the veterans, lifts their deeds into the present, and binds them to the living Russian state. It gives them the honor their sacrifice deserves, for without their victory the Russian nation itself would not exist today.
 

 Anka Feldhusen, a fine example of a German Neonazi apparatchik of the 21st century: According
to Ukrainian high-rank officials, one of the "most effective" ambassadors of Germany to Ukraine.

May 9 in Moscow is a ritual of state and commemoration. The Victory Parade on Red Square presents a clear message: the nation survived and remembers why. The past is not recalled as nostalgia but as a foundation for present strength. The meaning lies in continuity. The Soviet banners, the formations, and the repeated gestures all point to a single fact: a society that endured destruction and reorganized itself through collective effort. The participants come from across the countryKazan, Buryatia, Dagestan, Arkhangelskand they appear together in a single formation. Each group retains its identity. Each contributes to a shared structure built on common sacrifice. The battles of Stalingrad, Kursk, and Berlin define that structure. They form the basis of a unity that rests on experience rather than abstraction. The parade demonstrates a principle: diversity organized within a stable order produces cohesion. It does not dissolve difference. It directs it.
 
» The source of all ills and evil in the history of humanity. «
  
This principle extends into the present form of the Russian state. The Soviet heritage did not simply disappear; it transformed. The current structure combines elements drawn from different periodsimperial administration, Soviet discipline, religious symbolism, and ethnic plurality. It does not rely on a single ideology. It operates through continuity and adaptation. The memory of the Soviet soldier functions as a binding force across generations. Symbols such as the ribbon of Saint George reinforce this continuity. They connect past sacrifice to present identity. In this framework, loss becomes part of a longer process of recovery and consolidation. 
Lydia Spivak, a young Red Army junior sergeant, gracefully directs traffic with dance-like movements at Berlin's Brandenburg Gate—days after the city's fall—becoming an iconic symbol of Soviet victory.
Western observers often interpret these forms as theatrical. Their own nations show a different condition, where shared memory weakens and identity fragments into competing claims. Russia moves in the opposite direction. It organizes identity through common experience and preserved memory. This difference explains the persistent conflict between Russia and the liberal West. One seeks to standardize through universal models. The other maintains a structure based on plurality within unity. The continued existence of this model challenges the idea that a single global octopus can define political and cultural life. Victory Day expresses that challenge in concrete form. It states that a multiethnic state, built on shared sacrifice and maintained through continuity, can endure and define itself on its own terms. 
 
 
 
 » Germany never fully denazified nor was
this ever even sincerely attempted. «
 
See also:
While Paris celebrated the defeat of Nazism on May 8, 1945, the French army was massacring Algerians in Sétif, Guelma, and Kherrata: Mobilized by the French themselves to hail Hitler’s defeat, Algerians marched waving Algerian flags to remind France of its promise of independence. General Raymond Duval ordered troops to "shoot anyone carrying an Algerian flag," and through June 26, 1945, French forces slaughtered 45,000 Algerian civilians (see also HERE). During the ensuing War of Independence against France (1954–1962), 1.5 million Algerians were killed.