At a time when the French-language writer Boualem Sansal was dying in the jails of Algiers, the star political journalist of RTL declared on air on February 25, 2025 that France "made hundreds of Oradour-sur-Glane" in Algeria, and "that the Nazis behaved as we did in Algeria."

Faced with these astonishing statements, the easy thing would be to say that old age is a shipwreck. But they resonate in coherence with the thinking of a generation that hated its country so much that it must be taken seriously, that is to say in the literal sense of what it states. And if academic ethics are not at issue here, since this self-taught journalist has no scientific pretensions, these statements strangely echo the unfortunate tendency towards historical falsification imposed by the fashionable decolonial ideology.

For those who push themselves to crime, history is a basket from which it is legitimate to draw the materials most likely to accelerate the chaos of societies. How can we analyze in a few words the sallies of Aphatie in light of the comparative history of Nazism, colonization and our fractured societies?

Four perverse uses of history deserve to be highlighted, so much are they trampled underfoot by the sorcerer's apprentice of a generalized confrontation:

• anachronism and ignorance of historical facts in communication support: In history, the mortal sin is the anachronism that crushes facts, dates and contexts. Creator of chaos and intellectual confusion, it is fuel for ideologues, who shamelessly practice comparisons between distant historical moments, or like the wokes, judge the past according to the moral criteria of their time. Aphatie judges that the Nazis would have imitated the French: no need to gloss over the ignorance of the modalities of the French conquest of Algeria a century earlier by the Nazi soldiery; if the Nazis could have been inspired by the way of committing the genocide of a minority population, of hiding it and denying it, they only had to reread the history of the Armenian-Syriac genocide by the Ottoman Empire, when their military advisers co-led and assisted the Ottoman army from 1882 to 1918 (Colmar von der Goltz and Otto von Feldmann missions). Aphatie thinks that the Nazis copied the French to kill the villagers of Oradour, which would be a just return (?) for the country that created hundreds of Oradour in Algeria? As brutal and murderous as the conquest was, the peoples of the southern Mediterranean survived the colonization of the XNUMXth century (which was not the case for many American Indian peoples). Bugeaud was recalled from his command for three smoking and walling-in cases committed by his subordinates and judged in Paris. Nothing of the sort was ordered after the legal massacre of the Vendéens, of which there is no equivalent in Algeria.
• la reductio ad hitlerium which abolishes discernment and reason : Western civilization is obsessed with Hitler, who has become, against his will, the agent of its own self-destruction. Hitler has been removed from history, decontextualized, torn from the Great War and the 1930s, and has become a principle of disintegration of all culture, of all social and national construction in Europe. Even the nations that were victims of Nazism (France, Poland, the Netherlands, etc.) are accused of having encouraged its emergence, of having served as a model (Aphatie) and of having served it. Reducing the Franco-Algerian conflict to the standard of Nazism is an operation of criminalization and intimidation that prohibits thinking. Genocides and Oradour are now everywhere: absolute evil has become a trivialized evil. 
• the refusal to consider dictatorships and the suffering of the peoples of the South : refusing to think and understand the post-colonial military dictatorship is another specialty of France. From a self-centered perspective, southern societies have no autonomous existence: they are constantly "acted upon" from the outside by the West and its ghosts. On this point, southern dictators and northern ideologues agree: the West is a matrix that perpetuates a timeless domination over the South that abolishes time and space. Mental manipulation requires that evoking the dictatorship and suffering of the South leads to casting opprobrium on a Nazified West. This is the zero degree of knowledge of history and geopolitics. This tautological loop does not lead to consideration of the (non-existent) other but to self-denigration. Nazifying and colonializing the West allows us to conceal the dictatorial practices of the South, although they are the primary factor in one-way migration to the North.
• the conscious or unconscious desire to fan the flames of civil war in France : pulling Nazism out of its hat to evoke Algeria is to absolve the Algerian regime for its authoritarianism, to endorse its hostility towards France, and above all to fan the flames of a social and security situation that frightens all the services of the French State with its potential for violence. Not only does Aphatie not care, but he seems to want to push groups and communities into confrontation at the risk of breaking the fragile civil peace. Does he know that civil war is the worst evil for a people, and that no one would emerge unscathed?

Amazing, right?