Prague “Platform”

Brussels (& Some Fine London Architects) Duped into “Double Genocide” Program of “Equalizing” Nazi and Soviet Crimes?

Posted on 9 April 2018 by Defending History

OPINION  |  PRAGUE PLATFORM  |  DOUBLE GENOCIDE  |  POLITICS OF MEMORY  |  BRUSSELS/EU

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Today’s edition of The Architects’ Journal (AJ) gracefully announces that Tszwai So, director of Spheron Architects, has been declared the winner of the “international competition to design a pan-European Memorial for the Victims of Totalitarianism.” Mr. So, named a rising star in British Architecture in 2016, is widely acclaimed as one of the most illustrious younger talents of European architecture in our time. Our team feels certain that he would be the first to wish to be apprised of an ulterior political program behind a seemingly neutral architectural project which will now be exploiting his reputation, and his firm’s, as well as his actual design, in promoting a political project that is vastly more controversial than meets the eye at first acquaintance.

Mr. So and Spheron Architects, like the other contestants, were most likely unaware that the sponsor of the competition, the  Prague-based Platform of European Memory and Conscience, known for short in Eurocircles as the Prague Platform, is the prime European engine for the far-right movement of World War II history revisionism that is increasingly becoming known as Double Genocide. That phenomenon was recently among the main points of a New York Times article by Pulitzer Prize winning correspondent Rod Nordland concerning the “Genocide Museum” here in Vilnius, which has close ties with the “Prague Platform” in the pursuit of  Double Genocide politics in the European Union.

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Posted in Arts, Belgium, Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, EU, Human Rights, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, Prague "Platform" | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Brussels (& Some Fine London Architects) Duped into “Double Genocide” Program of “Equalizing” Nazi and Soviet Crimes?

On the (Ab)use of Law to “Fix” Holocaust History

Posted on 1 December 2019 by Defending History

OPINION  |  DOUBLE GENOCIDE  |  FREE SPEECH  |  STATES’ MANIPULATION OF HISTORY

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by Dovid Katz

This comment appeared in Mémoires en Jeu (Memory at Stake), no. 9, (2010).

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In recent years, a number of eastern EU and NATO member states (plus Ukraine) have been constructing components of their official(and protected-by-law) national narratives on heroes who were collaborators, or even perpetrators in the Holocaust on the grounds that they were “anti-Soviet heroes.”1 These countries indeed had to face two Soviet occupations (1939/1940–41 and 1944/45–1991), and the occupation by Nazi Germany (1941-1944/5). The “liberating” state was also the author of major crimes such as repressions, deportations, forced labor and executions, and the statutes of post-Soviet Europe lacked a text on the crimes of communism. The ensuing moral problem is as follows: while these States would have legitimate heroes who struggled for freedom against dictatorial Soviet domination, they also honor those who participated in the Holocaust and even criminalize criticism against them.

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Posted in Collaborators Glorified, Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, Dovid Katz, Estonia, EU, Foreign Ministries: Holocaust Politics Abuse?, Free Speech & Democracy, History, Latvia, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Politics of Memory, Prague "Platform", State Glorification of Holocaust Collaborator J. Noreika | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on On the (Ab)use of Law to “Fix” Holocaust History

Rewriting of History in Brussels at a Strange New Museum: “House of European History”

Posted on 26 October 2020 by Defending History

OPINION  |    MUSEUMS  |  PRAGUE PLATFORM  |  EU  |  BELGIUM

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by Tord Björk

 

The Nazis wanted to exterminate a race and Karl Marx wanted to exterminate a social class. Our  guide at the House of European History museum (HEH) in Brussels is twisting her tongue as she tries to solve the task of simultaneously explaining that Communism and Nazism are the same thing, and yet, somehow not. Visually, the impression of the museum’s exhibition is overwhelmingly slanted toward the notion that they are fully, inexorably and inherently equivalent.

Towering above us in the ideologically most intense part of the museum are huge video screens tilted towards the visitor. These screens, on four islands in the room, are so large that in spite of the hall being generously spacious, they fill up the room. The spectator can feel small in their shadow. On the screens the masses march in honor of the dictator, people are violently oppressed and the imagery makes this museum’s point very clearly: the interwar period was marked by the very same conflict as that after the war until the Soviet Union collapsed and the Berlin wall fell. That single conflict that is posited as God’s-honest-truth-fact is between Western democracy and (any kind of) totalitarianism. The technically impressive format is meticulously balanced: two huge screens each for the horrific methods of Communism and Nazism. The similarity is indeed visually striking. Stalin and Hitler—in that order— are omnipresent in the midst of terror. As a climax, the hammer and the sickle are projected at the same time as the swastika in meticulously equal format.

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Posted in Belgium, EU, Museums, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, Prague "Platform" | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Rewriting of History in Brussels at a Strange New Museum: “House of European History”

Are Leaders of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania ‘Taking Advantage’ of Ukraine Tragedy? They Call on EU to Support Far-Right Holocaust-Obfuscating ‘Prague Platform’

Posted on 28 July 2022 by Defending History

Reports in Baltic Times and Delfi

For over a decade Defending History has exposed the far-right”Double Genocide” history-revisionist, Holocaust-obfuscating agenda of the “Prague Platform of European Memory and Conscience” which has repeatedly covered for East European efforts to glorify Nazi collaborators and perpetrators

“Putin’s criminal and barbaric invasion must be countered to the hilt and we must rally unfettered to the cause of Ukraine’s freedom. But for far-right double-genocider revisionists in the Eastern E.U. to take advantage of it for Holocaust obfuscation is just plain wrong.”

Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Efraim Zuroff is first to respond (in Times of Israel blogs)

Will Western leaders — and institutions dedicated to the history of the Holocaust and leaders in Holocaust education and commemoration — speak out and subject the “Prague Platform” to some long overdue scrutiny, and warn the European Commission about this “new initiative”? European citizens’ hard-earned euros continue to flow to the revisionists whose “unholy bible” is still the Prague Declaration of 2008… Defending History is proud to have helped provide the European parliamentary response, the Seventy Years Declaration…

Defending History’s statement on the war in Ukraine

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When Ottawa Citizen and The New York Times broke taboo on wartime discussion of East European state-sponsored Holocaust obfuscation

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But what is the “Prague Platform”?

 

Posted in 70 Years Declaration, Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, Estonia, History, Latvia, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Poland, Politics of Memory, Prague "Platform" | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Are Leaders of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania ‘Taking Advantage’ of Ukraine Tragedy? They Call on EU to Support Far-Right Holocaust-Obfuscating ‘Prague Platform’

The Prague Declaration and the Double Genocide Theory

Posted on 27 October 2025 by Defending History

PRAGUE DECLARATION | DOUBLE GENOCIDE | HISTORY | LITHUANIA

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OPINION

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by Roland Binet  (De Panne, Belgium)

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In his book Crisis, War and the Holocaust in Lithuania, which I recently reviewed on these pages, historian Saulius Sužiedėlis virulently attacked those who in the past had opposed the Prague Declaration of 2008. When I read the list of signatories to the Prague Declaration signed in 2008, it makes me think of prisoners or detainees becoming free after having spent 45 years between four closed walls.

Getting free in the outside world and knowing next to nothing that has happened in the world at large during their detention. Most of these signatories, people of esteem, some of them heroes in their fight against Communist yoke, have suffered greatly and they yearn for recognition as victims of totalitarian crimes. But the only tangible contemporary phenomenon with some kind of kindred inhuman similitude they want to equate it with is — the Holocaust. So, oblivious to the manifold scourges the twentieth century has known worldwide, they signed on to the conclusion that “both the Nazi and Communist totalitarian regimes should be considered to be the main disasters, which blighted the 20th century” and “recognition of Communism as an integral and common part of Europe’s common history.” The declaration contains the word “same” five times, in support of the declaration’s underlying thesis that Nazi and Soviet crimes are absolutely — the same.

Is it possible to be so self-centered on one’s suffering as to become blind to history?

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Posted in Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, History, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, Prague "Platform", Roland Binet | Tagged , , | Comments Off on The Prague Declaration and the Double Genocide Theory

New Brussels Monument (‘An Echo in Time’): A Ruse to Bring Double Genocide Holocaust Revisionism to the Gates of the European Parliament?

Posted on 13 June 2026 by Defending History

 DOUBLE GENOCIDE | EU  | PRAGUE PLATFORM | PRAGUE DECLARATION | THE SEVENTY YEARS DECLARATION

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OPINION

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VILNIUS—The Double Genocide movement’s long-held wish of major legitimization at or near the European Parliament in Brussels via a huge monument effectively equalizing Nazi and Soviet crimes has come a step closer. This journal’s opinion has been consistent for some eighteen years, since these issues were forced on to the European Parliament’s agenda by some eastern member states (normally, in democratic alliances of sovereign states, it is understood that freedom of speech and thought includes healthy debates on history within each state). Our take: 1. Brussels needs a major new monument to the victims of Communism and its brutality, including mass murder and horrendous crimes against humanity. 2. Brussels does not need a mix-and-match monument for victims of Nazism and Communism together which is a ruse of the red-equals-brown (Double Genocide) revisionism movement, emanating from the East European far right, and seeking to downgrade (and relativize) the Holocaust, criminalize those who joined the anti-Nazi resistance, and glorify local killers in the east as freedom fighters (they were after all “anti-Communist”). The effects of “Double Genocide” pressure on various European museums has been manifest for years.

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Posted in Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, EU, History, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Politics of Memory, Prague "Platform" | Tagged , , | Comments Off on New Brussels Monument (‘An Echo in Time’): A Ruse to Bring Double Genocide Holocaust Revisionism to the Gates of the European Parliament?