Bastille Day military parade
© @boazgu1
The ironic symbolism of this year's Bastille Day military parade was as rich as a French gateau, although the taste was rancid.

On the day that France celebrates the 1789 revolution, overthrowing a despised monarch, French President Emmanuel Macron was joined by an array of deeply unpopular European leaders to view a military parade that was meant to symbolize "unity and strength" against Russia.

European support for Ukraine was billed as the main motif of this year's Bastille Day. The Kiev regime's unelected leader, Vladimir Zelensky, was sitting alongside Macron and 30 other European heads of state to watch Ukrainian troops march down the Champs-Élysées with French and other European soldiers.

This is the same Ukrainian military that honors World War Two Nazi leaders. Among the dignitaries in Paris this week was Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, whose country suffered genocide by Ukrainian Nazi collaborators. Tusk must have the moral spine of a jellyfish.

French media hailed Bastille Day as a "wartime parade." Media pundits talked about European readiness for war with Russia. The event was reckoned to be the largest military display to mark July 14. What was particularly distinctive this year was the involvement of the militaries from across Europe. The optics and declarations of "power" and shared purpose were rife with chauvinism and provocation to Russia. Bastille Day has transmogrified into a war plan for Europe.

This is no longer about celebrating revolution, democracy, or liberation (it hasn't been for decades). More than ever, it is a rallying call for fascist control of society and militarism to subjugate democracy for an unfolding war. If ever a real Bastille Day uprising was needed, it is now.

Overhead, fighter jets from 11 European countries flew in formation. Among the aerial displays were warplanes from Germany's Luftwaffe. Eighty-six years ago, Nazi Germany goose-stepped down the same iconic French avenue to the Arc de Triomphe.

Meanwhile, a monster forest fire was raging south of Paris amid thousands of deaths in France and across Europe over recent weeks from blistering heatwaves. Talk about Nero fiddling while Rome burns.

Macron said the Bastille Day parade was to showcase European support for Ukraine in the nearly five-year NATO proxy war against Russia. The assembly of European leaders in Paris, including Britain's outgoing Prime Minister Keir Starmer, was also a show of coherent strategic unity against Russia.

The so-called Coalition of the Willing led by France and Britain announced the creation of an "anti-ballistic missile defense system" for Ukraine and Europe. Among the participants are Denmark, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, and Sweden, as well as France, Britain, and Ukraine.

As part of this joint rearmament plan, Ukraine struck a deal this week to buy 16 French-made Rafale fighter jets. It intends to buy a total of 100 Rafales. At €100 million per aircraft, that works out at around €16 bn. A similar number has been signed for Swedish Gripen fighter jets.

The rearmament plan also includes supplying the Franco-Italian new-generation SAMP/T air defense batteries, as well as licenses for Ukraine and its European allies to manufacture Scalp cruise missiles and the U.S.-made Patriot air-defense system.

Britain is getting in on the act, with London announcing that it is going to contribute to the €90 bn loan that the European Union is providing Ukraine, most of which is for military purchases. That will mean sales deals for Britain's BAE Systems and other companies. This is not a free loan supposedly to help defend Ukraine from Russia's air strikes. It is primarily a gargantuan racket of European taxpayers funding the subsidies to the military-industrial complex.

Russia denounced the turbo-charged Coalition of the Willing as a coalition of warmongers whose purpose is to ensure the biggest war in Europe since the Second World War is set to continue for years to come.

The organizing slogan in Paris this week was "Determined to Act." More accurately, it should have been "Determined to Agitate" for a full-scale war with Russia.

The militarism across Europe by warmongering elites is throwing trillions of Euros to try to salvage their bankrupt economies with massive injections of capital into military industries and reordering the public infrastructure around military objectives. European civil society is being crushed by this out-of-control militarism, which is rationalized by scapegoating Russia as an existential threat. Diplomacy to resolve the crisis in Ukraine, with its historical roots in NATO expansionism, is non-existent because European elites are diseased with Russophobia and political bankruptcy.

Perhaps nothing speaks more graphically than the fires raging across Europe and tens of thousands of deaths from extreme heat, while elitist rulers choose to waste resources on a futile proxy war against Russia.

Macron, Britain's Starmer, Germany's Chancellor Merz, Italy's PM Meloni, the unelected EU top bureaucrat Ursula von der Leyen, NATO's Mark Rutte, and so on - they are all increasingly held in contempt by their citizens as effete elitists who are driving Europe to a conflagration with no democratic mandate. Is that not fascism? And to boot, they are aligned with a corrupt dictator in Kiev who refuses to hold elections and press-gangs civilians for slaughter.

With his typical puffed-up buffoonery, Macron declared that the Bastille Day parade is a show of unity and strength. There is no strength in Europe, only abject delusions of grandeur. That weakness, however, makes for extremely dangerous decisions.

The only "unity" on display in Paris was the closing of ranks by despicable elites who are tempting fate with war or revolution because they're fiddling while Europe burns.