“It’s West Europeans that want to distinguish themselves from us, they don’t have a monopoly on “Europeanness”… We are even more European than they are.”

-Former Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev

Growing up in the 90s in Italy, we were taught from the 5th grade on about WWII. The Holocaust, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, the valiant partisans, and of course “the liberation”. Photographic and moving images from the archives are constantly played, repeated every year, perhaps dangerously, to the point of banality. The moral of course was that this was the war against wars and therefore the last. A strong “West” united against barbarity would make sure that history would not repeat itself; the raison d’être of the modern European project.

Today, images of civilians executed by Nazis for accepting provisions from the Russian military, and blatant war crimes against prisoners of war are promptly labeled as “Russian disinformation”.  Nothing discovered on the ground in Ukraine could be as dark as what the West could manufacture from their media rooms armed with “satellite images” demonstrating Russia’s innate appetite for expansion and violence. 

All great reasons to attempt to destabilize Russia through sanctions. The second-rate European ruling classes obediently dragged their economy, kicking and screaming, toward “The End of History”. In total denial of the disintegration of the Atlantic hegemon, while ignoring the integration unfolding on the very continent on which they live, Eurasia.

It is possible that the fatal concoction of hyper-globalization, digital reality, woke cancel culture and biomedical security has caused unprecedented amnesia of modern history on the Western masses. The crucial eight decades after World War II and its resulting rules-based world order relegated to the darkest annals of memory.

The second of May 1945, as such, is a conveniently neglected historic fact. It is the day Berlin fell to the Red Army, finishing Nazi Germany. More than one month before the arrival of American and British forces. Equally important is that every move after the Potsdam Berlin conference in 1945 by the Western winners of the war was targeted specifically at isolating the USSR, trashing previous agreements.

Shortly after, in February 1946, on the propaganda front George Keenan’s “Long Telegram”- hit piece on the Slavic soul, cold and incapable of modernizing with Western civilizations - was instrumental in creating the rhetoric to “other” Russia, and facilitated the creation of consent around what would become the Western bloc’s “containment” strategy toward the Soviet Union.

If one simply examines the dates of key events such as: 

1. The Deutsch Mark reform on 17th June 1948 and the Blockade of West Berlin on 24th June 1948; 

2. Proclamation of the Federal Republic of Germany on 23 May 1949 and the proclamation of the German Democratic Republic 7th October 1949;

3. Proposal for a free, demilitarised West Berlin refused on 27th November 1958, and the Berlin Wall construction beginning on 13th August 1961.

The West made every move first, for which there was a Soviet response, not the other way around. Ignoring the Yalta agreements that occupied Germany would be controlled under mutual agreement under unified command of the three winning powers, and Potsdam conference article 14: “during the occupation period Germany will be treated as a single economic entity.”

But still, in the years connecting the Potsdam Berlin conference and the construction of the Berlin Wall, Moscow continued to ask for negotiations, proposing several maneuvers that could end in a peace treaty for all Germany. It was reported that crickets could be heard on the western front. 

The German reparations promised to Europe (including of course to the USSR) under the auspices of Yalta and Potsdam would be replaced with the American credit scheme Marshall Plan, keeping the USA war-time economic boom moving, through the reconstruction of battered Europe- its economy now under direct control of the international monetary institutions created at Bretton Woods in 1944; namely, the IMF and World Bank. The Marshall Plan (which was offered to USSR, but was quickly rejected) through its various industrial and economic re-incarnations, such as the ECSC (European Coal and Steel Community), and the ACUE (American Committee for the united Europa) evolved into the European Union. 

No wonder Russians have always seen Europe as a total colony. They shouldered the reconstruction of their territory, sacrificing abundance for independence while watching NATO/American bases swallow Europe from their front yard. 

So what is the trouble with Europe today? The European project in reality is very transparent, with a hierarchy designed specifically to have a single center of power within Europe securing the hegemonic interests of its master abroad, while still living in the intoxicating fumes of the fantasy surrounding the Berlin Wall.

Coming out of the 1929 market crash, the United States revitalized its economy weaponizing the allied war effort in the old continent. The cost of their help was 120 NATO/USA bases and 40 American nuclear bombs in Italy alone, the homogenization of “European identity”, and the territory’s transformation into America’s missile launching pad and buffer zone. 

Turning its back on institutionalized Nazism in Ukraine for America’s imperialistic goals, West Europe is becoming the moral sick-man of the world. While quickly descending into economic and cultural chaos it is irreparably losing the trust of the neighbors that count. If “European values” mean only speaking and never listening as in the past 500 years, then one can only hope that if anything at all is left of Homer and Cicero that they will be preserved in that land lost in the translation of Dostoyevsky and Gagarin. 

There is a small break in the clouds of the Western end of Eurasia with discerning eyes gazing east, eager to revive civilized dialogue along the routes where globalization started. 

But first, a remedy is required, only time will tell the prescription.