European Parliament President Martin Schulz Just Says No to Latest Demands of Eastern “Double Genocide” MEPs



On 14 February 2014, Martin Schulz, president of the European Parliament, boldly turned down a demand from a group of right-wing East European “Double Genocide” MEPs for the EU to in effect equally ban Nazi and Soviet symbols. Nobody is calling for display of Soviet symbols and the move was seen as another in the long series designed to enshrine Double Genocide — the belief that Nazi and Soviet crimes must be declared equal on all counts — in the European Union.

The MEPs’ request includes a citation from the 2008 Prague Declaration and a subsequent 2009 parliamentary resolution: “Europe will not be united unless it is able to form a common view of its history, recognizes Nazism, Stalinism and Fascist and Communist regimes as a common legacy.” The notion that nobody in a free Europe can disagree with the “common legacy” approach for those who liberated Auschwitz and those who committed the genocide there is considered by some critics to be one of the most Orwellian and counter-democratic in the entire Double Genocide movement. In 2010, both Hungary and Lithuania passed laws effectively criminalizing the opinion that their countries suffered but one genocide, that perpetrated by the Nazis and their collaborators.

On one of the major Double Genocide websites, Reconciliation of European Histories, the European Union is now accused of “double standards” for failing to enact red-equals-brown legislation.

One of the right-wing MEPs listed from Lithuania is Laima Andrikiene, who continues to serve on the honorary board of the “Vilnius Yiddish Institute” in that country’s alleged instrumentalization of Yiddish studies as camouflage container for right-wing and Holocaust revisionist politics.

The European Union’s president, Martin Schulz, a Social Democrat from Germany, is himself one of the signatories on the Seventy Years Declaration (2012) which challenges the 2008 Prague Declaration.

In March 2012, President Schulz personally received a framed copy of SYD at his office in Strasbourg, presented by members of the Defending History team based from Vilnius.

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