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.

Please contact elected officials asking them to write to the European Parliament to object to this latest outburst of Holocaust history revisionism which encompasses, in the specific context of Eastern Europe, well understood far-right, ultranationalist and antisemitic overtones.

BACKGROUND: Defending History section on ‘Double Genocide’; on the ‘Prague Platform’ (emanating from the ‘Prague Declaration’ — DH was proud to contribute to the European parliamentary response, the Seventy Years Declaration, which eight very courageous Lithuanian parliamentarians signed); DH editor’s papers, see esp. paper on Double Genocide revisionism imposed on museums and monuments and paper on (ab)use of law to redefine the concept of genocide in Eastern Europe for the express purpose of ‘equalizing’ Nazi and Soviet crimes. In the view of the Defending History community, the Brussels monument project represents Eastern Holocaust obfuscation being exported to the West in well-disguised palatable packaging. MP John Mann (now Lord Mann) of the UK, founder of the Inter-Parliamentary Coalition for Combating Antisemitism (ICCA), was the first to see it all coming back in early 2008. He was soon followed by Lithuanian philosopher Leonidas Donskis.