The Cold Cost of Freedom: A Witness's Reflection

✍️ A personal musing on truth, propaganda, and forgotten freedoms.

Dividing Lines

I was born in France the same year the Berlin Wall was built—a wall that did more than divide East and West. It split history. It fractured truths. It offered the illusion that freedom was a Western invention and tyranny a uniquely Eastern affliction. And that illusion persists to this day.

Let’s remember: both Paris and Moscow are in Europe, with Berlin lying roughly halfway between them. In fact, Paris and Moscow are geographically closer to each other than Washington, D.C. is to Los Angeles. Russia has been part of Europe’s cultural, intellectual, and spiritual fabric for centuries—long before the American continent was even known to us. Dostoevsky, Tchaikovsky, and Tolstoy are not foreigners; they are an inextricable part of my cultural heritage.

And yet, Russia is persistently treated as something "other," cast out of the European family—not because of its geography, but because of decades of narrative manipulation. The psychological, cultural, and ideological distance between these two historic centers has been artificially deepened over my lifetime—fueled by Western arrogance, sustained by American dominance, and paid for by the ordinary people of the former Soviet Union.

A Forgotten Victory

Let us begin with a truth that is too often omitted in Western history books: Russia played the most decisive role in defeating Nazi Germany. Not the United States. Not Great Britain. The Soviet Union—at an almost incomprehensible cost.

While the United States lost over 400,000 lives during World War II, the Soviet Union lost more than 27 million. That number includes over 12 million soldiers, and—perhaps most tragically—15 million civilians. Sacrificed in defense of a continent that, to this day, often refuses to fully honor the depth of that suffering.

It was the Red Army that broke the back of the Wehrmacht in Stalingrad. It was the Russian winter, the desperate defense of Leningrad, and the push through Eastern Europe to Berlin that ultimately shattered Hitler's vision. And yet, in the West, we teach our children that D-Day was the turning point. We craft a mythology in which America is the singular liberator of Europe. And the USSR? Recast as the villain in the postwar narrative, rather than the savior it was.

This is not merely revisionist history. It is theft—theft of sacrifice, theft of honor, and theft of the right to a seat at the moral table of the modern world.

The Price of Collapse

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the West declared ideological victory. In Washington, pundits spoke of "the end of history," as if liberal capitalism had triumphed once and for all.

But what followed was not liberation. It was economic devastation.

Instead of extending a hand of support, the West offered “shock therapy.” It sent IMF economists and foreign advisors to guide the rapid privatization of Russia's vast state assets. What they created was not a functioning democracy, but a free-for-all where the clever and connected became oligarchs, and everyone else queued in bread lines. State resources were looted. Social structures disintegrated. Life expectancy plummeted. Alcoholism soared. Suicide rates spiked. And a generation of children grew up in the psychological ruins of a society betrayed.

With the approval of Western governments and financial institutions, Russia was handed over to a mafia-style oligarchy. It was not democracy that arrived—but economic Darwinism, dressed up in the language of freedom.

And still today, the trauma of the 1990s resonates deeply in Russian society. That the West refuses to acknowledge its role in this suffering is not just an oversight. It is a moral failure.

Freedom, but for Whom?

We say the Cold War was fought in the name of freedom. But what freedom was actually delivered?

The freedom for billionaires to plunder? The freedom for foreign advisors to turn a shattered nation into a testing ground for neoliberal economics?

We continue to treat freedom as a brand, a trademark of the West—something only the United States can dispense. And yet, the very country that claims to defend democracy worldwide has repeatedly undermined it in practice.

Ask the people of El Salvador about the civil war and the U.S.-backed death squads.

Ask those in Angola, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Guatemala, or the Congo, where Cold War proxy battles ravaged nations and corrupted revolutions.

Ask Chile or Iran, where elected leaders were overthrown by covert CIA operations.

Ask Vietnam, Indonesia, Afghanistan.

I speak from direct experience. I have worked in nearly all of these countries. I have seen the cost of this so-called freedom with my own eyes.

The pattern is not subtle. The narrative that America brings freedom is not truth.

It is myth—maintained through selective memory, sanitized textbooks, and a media system more invested in ideology than inquiry.

What we are calling freedom is, in many cases, privilege in disguise—the comfort afforded by someone else’s suffering.

Borrowed security, dressed up as an inalienable right.

And still, the voice of my mother echoes in me:

“Your freedom stops where that of others begins.”

A Manufactured Enemy

And so the myth continues: Russia is the eternal enemy. Ukraine is the innocent victim. The West is the noble protector.

Yes, the war in Ukraine is real, and the suffering immense. But the narrative is not nearly as black-and-white as it is presented. The roots of the conflict run deep—through decades of NATO expansion, broken promises, and the West’s unwillingness to see security as a shared responsibility. It is a failure to recognize that true security must be mutual—a win-win, not a win-lose proposition.

In 1985, Sting sang “I hope the Russians love their children too.”

It wasn’t just poetic. It was a quiet rebellion against Cold War fear-mongering—a reminder that behind the political masks are human beings, with the same dreams, the same fears, the same love. And that truth still holds.

The current portrayal of Russia as a singular villain is not only naive—it is dangerously dishonest. It is the continuation of an old war by new means, reinforcing a worldview that benefits only one actor: the United States.

In demonizing Russia, the U.S. ensures, through its propaganda and influence, that Europe remains dependent—militarily, economically, ideologically. In doing so, it disrupts Europe’s ability to think and act independently.

And here lies the deeper truth:

The greatest threat to democracy today is not coming from Moscow. It is coming from Washington.

A False Binary: Capitalism vs. Socialism

One of the most enduring ideological manipulations of our time has been the conflation of capitalism with democracy—and the simultaneous framing of socialism as inherently oppressive or totalitarian.

Yet socialism, as a doctrine, is rooted in the primacy of human beings over capital. It prioritizes collective well-being, universal access to healthcare and education, the equitable distribution of resources, and economic systems designed to serve the many—not just the privileged few. It is unapologetically value-driven, asking: What kind of society do we want to live in?

Capitalism, by contrast, is structured around the primacy of capital—money, markets, and profit. While it has undeniably fueled innovation and growth, it also tends to reduce people to consumers, labor to cost, and human well-being to a market variable. And it is now killing the planet, life itself.

The irony is stark: the system designed for people is dismissed as impractical or dangerous, while the system designed for profit is normalized—even when it clearly dehumanizes.

It’s as if we’ve replaced the soul of our society with a spreadsheet.

And let’s be honest: the masks are falling. The beast that once hid in plain sight now parades openly, overconfident, no longer needing to conceal itself—because it believes it has already won.

After all, Karl Marx predicted this trajectory: that capitalism would concentrate wealth into fewer and fewer hands, ultimately rendering the system unstable, unsustainable, and primed for collapse.

Sound familiar?

A Call to Remember

I am a French-American citizen, now living in Los Angeles. I was raised in France until my mid-twenties, during a time deeply shaped by the Cold War. And yet, in our culture, we never feared socialism. We openly explored and debated Marx’s critique of capitalism with intellectual seriousness and philosophical rigor.

That is what we called freedom of thought.

I hold a postgraduate degree in Political Science, with a specialization in Development Economics from La Sorbonne. But my education didn’t end in the university halls. My life has taken me far beyond Paris—into the refugee camps of Mozambique, the war-scarred hills of El Salvador, and the conflict zones of Iraq and Afghanistan. These experiences haven’t given me all the answers, but they have grounded me in lived reality. And they have earned me the right to question the oversimplified, sanitized narrative the West continues to project upon the world—a narrative that has far more in common with cheap cable news propaganda than with truth.

Today, on my birthday, I offer this reflection not as a condemnation, but as a gift. A gift to memory. A gift to truth.

We must remember the Russian lives lost for our shared freedom.

We must remember the promises made—and broken—after the Wall fell.

We must remember that democracy is not delivered through bombs or banking reforms, but through dignity, honesty, and shared responsibility.

The West has failed to deliver the freedom it once claimed to champion. And until it can look honestly at this failure, it holds no moral ground to preach to others.

Let us be done with the lies.

Let us write a new story—one that honors complexity, takes responsibility for its shadows, and walks boldly toward a more honest, more human future.

With Infinite Love