01 September 2010
by Dovid Katz
The Foreign Secretary, William Hague, aptly wrote in his August 31st Telegraph op-ed, that “Human Rights are key to our foreign policy”. I am delighted to read that. At the same time, it is perhaps important to point out that the issue of human rights pertains not just to the Congo and North Korea. It is the responsibility of every one of us right here in the European Union, which has in recent years expanded to include states from the former Soviet sphere where things are not always as simple as they seem. Various national programmes are not seldom Soviet in form, ultranationalist in content, and Western in presentation to onlookers.
The problem is, in short, this. Far-right ultranationalist elites who are “as moderate as the rest of us” on nearly all other issues, are in command in much of the new-accession eastern reaches of the European Union, and they know how to present themselves as centrists. In what could be seen perhaps a nod to the BNP, they cannot openly rant against Jews, Russians, Roma and Gays (among others) as such in the EU, and so they have invented a political stand-in: the rewriting of 20th century history to delete the Holocaust and Hitlerism as unique category (without denying a single death), and proclaiming that a spurious new historical model called “Double Genocide” (in Eurospeak: “equal evaluation of totalitarian regimes”) must become the only available history in every textbook throughout the European Union. Between the lines are countless references to Russians and Jews as the villains of World War II history. This nonsense, implying that those who liberated Auschwitz are the same as those who committed the genocide there (even more nonsensical in my view: the claim that this single version of history is needed to “unite” Europe) was enshrined in the June 2008 Prague Declaration, which has been decried by the dwindling ranks of Holocaust survivors. The declaration claims that the Nazis and Soviets committed equal genocide. Its adherents routinely rubbish the entire anti-Hitler war effort of the Allies, including Great Britain, the United States and from 1941 to 1945, the USSR. Of course, the evils of communism need to be studied and exposed, and various noble European resolutions confront that reality head-on.
It was MP John Mann, founder of the All-Party Group against Antisemitism, who exposed the Prague Declaration even before it was proclaimed. Right after its precursor conference in Tallinn, Estonia, he rose in the Commons in January 2008: “On 22 January, in Tallinn, Estonia, five MEPs from five different countries met to launch a group called Common Europe—Common History. It has the same theme—the need for an equal evaluation of history. It is just a traditional form of prejudice, rewritten in a modern context. In essence, it is trying to equate communism and Judaism as one conspiracy and rewrite history from a nationalist point of view. Those are elected MEPs.”
Fast forward to 2010.
On March 11th, Lithuania’s independence day, hundreds of upscale fascists marched through the centre of the country’s capital, Vilnius, protected by police. Some sported “redesigned swastikas” and white armbands. The permit for this march was obtained by a ruling party member of parliament. On March 16th, their brethren in Riga, the Latvian capital, glorified the Latvian Waffen SS legion at the city’s Liberty Monument. And in Estonia, an analogous celebration was held on July 31st to commemorate the country’s Nazi SS division. That little bit of cleverness—the swastika modified —became quite unnecessary recently. A Lithuanian court ruled— to no public remark from foreign embassies —on May 19th that the swastika is part of the country’s historic legacy and not a Nazi symbol.
The Lithuanian government has still not withdrawn disgraceful kangaroo “war crimes investigations” into elderly Holocaust survivors who are heroes of the free world for fighting Hitler among the partisans in the forests of Lithuania. Two 88 year old women, Dr Rachel Margolis and Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky, are being sent to eternity as “war crimes suspects” neither charged nor cleared. It is a carbuncle on the face of European justice that must not be allowed to stand.
Western democratic values are the core issue. There was stunning silence when Hungary’s new right-wing government passed a law in June ordaining jail-time punishments for those who would deny or even downplay alleged Soviet equality to Nazi genocide. Within weeks, Lithuania’s parliament passed, and its president shamefully signed a similar law. To clarify, if I say “Soviet crimes were awful, but do not comprise Genocide within Lithuania, there was only one Genocide here, the Holocaust”, I am liable to arrest and conviction. What I can report, as a resident of Vilnius for most of the past eleven years, is that even if nobody is ever charged or convicted, the feeling of freedom of speech has been crushed. Every last one of my Lithuanian-citizen friends and colleagues who used to speak up has stopped speaking up. Some have suffered career damage or job loss, others have caved. Many opt for westward migration.
Let me not hesitate to say that during my eleven years living in Vilnius I have been treated splendidly by the delightful and good-humoured Lithuanian people. This is not about everyday folks, it is about a worryingly motivated, politically able and popular group of revisionists whose ultranationalist poison is spreading rapidly in the East, and now taking straight aim at us here in the West, starting with the Prague Declaration and the concomitant demand for all Europe to (in effect) replace Holocaust Remembrance Day with a new Red-Brown day on August 23.
Alas, the UK is not isolated from the spread of this new narrative, with the then Labour Government signing up to the OSCE’s ‘Vilnius Declaration’ peppered with Prague Declaration material in July 2009 and of course the Conservatives’ high profile dalliance with the European Far Right that led to Nick Clegg’s memorable ‘nutters and antisemites’ phrase in one of the general election leaders’ debates last spring.
Enough is enough. Let us here in Britain unite, right across the party divide, to tell our eastern EU partners that it’s just not on. We must speak up and encourage others to follow if we want human rights to remain key to our foreign policy.
Dovid Katz, chief analyst at the Litvak Studies Institute (Vilnius), has drafted an alternative to the Prague Declaration. His websites are: http://www.holocaustinthebaltics.com/ and http://www.dovidkatz.net/.
