The warmongering “tam tam” has reached new communicative heights. Here are the words of Federico Rampini in the Corriere of 8 June:

«More than four hundred thousand Americans died in World War II. Twenty-nine thousand in the Normandy landing operation alone. The defeat of Nazi-fascism was possible because a generation of young Americans paid a very high price in a European conflict that did not directly threaten them (…) Faced with Putin's aggression in Ukraine, the American president never “incited” the Ukrainians, he did not use them at all in a “proxy war” (…) Perhaps one day in schools it will be useful to focus on the meaning of D-Day in Normandy, addressing the following question. Would Europe have been freed from Nazi-fascism if a generation of Americans eighty years ago had refused the call to arms and had instead chosen to march in pacifist marches against Hitler?

At your place:
The surrender of Stalingrad (2 February 1943) inflicted on Germany mortal damage comparable to cutting the carotid artery, with the effects of the bleeding spread over time until the final capitulation. In the Tehran conference (28 November 1943), Roosevelt Churchill and Stalin already discussed the partition of Europe at the end of the war. The Bretton Woods conference (1 July 1944) began a few days after the Normandy landings (6 June 1944), and already shaped the global financial structure following the end of the war, with the pegging of European currencies to the dollar (+ Japanese yen).

Placing the Europe of 1944 and the Ukraine of 2024 on the same level, as Rampini does, is embarrassing for a journalist of his rank. We really need to be desperately looking for useful “tam tam” arguments to compare a destroyed continent, but with enormous cultural, social and industrial skills, with a “black hole” like Ukraine, a failed country even before the Russian invasion.

Rampini seems to invoke the direct involvement of our soldiers, taking sides in a fratricidal war that began long before February 24, 2022, and which American foreign policy has constantly harassed, provoked and teased like a bubble in the plaster. Stating that Biden would never incite means arguing that the decision to incorporate Ukraine into NATO (June 2021, six months before the Russian invasion) was a democratic and collegial decision, where one is worth one: Latvia = United States, Ukraine = Germany. Everyone helpful, no one responsible.

Ignoring the correlation between Ukraine's inclusion in the Atlantic Alliance and the subsequent Russian invasion is like that tribe that never understood the correlation between coitus and pregnancy.

With the European elections behind us, the risk is to see the “tam tam” turn into military mobilization. The historian Christopher Clark created the metaphor of the European sleepwalkers who in 1914 unleashed the First World War without their knowledge, in a sort of half-asleep of reason. With thousands of Russian nuclear warheads aimed at Europe, the one in 2024 would be remembered (not by us, but by the stunned ET watching us from above) as the mobilization of zombies.