FINROSFORUM // The Finnish-Russian Civic Forum strives to promote cooperation between the peoples of Finland and Russia by supporting civic initiatives for democracy, human rights, and freedom of speech.
I want to thank the organisers of this event for inviting me to take part. I am delighted to be here in Finland and to speak about a subject, which is important to the Baltic people, which is known in Finland also, but which is less known in the rest of Western Europe. That subject is Soviet Communism and its legacy today.
"Russians should not bury Lenin until they uncover his lies," writes Walter Rodgers, former senior international correspondent for CNN, in Christian Science Monitor. Russians must face up to Lenin’s brutal legacy – as Germans did Hitler’s, he says. "Burying Lenin would be terribly dishonest. It would risk erasing the brutally violent communist legacy he spawned. His strain of socialism bankrupted Russia morally and economically, leaving it in many respects a third-world country – even today," Rodgers opines. "When new nationalist saviors like current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin appear on stage, flaunting the same arrogance Lenin practiced with his messianic vision, Russians ought to be able to look at Lenin’s tomb for a chilling reminder that rigid, intolerant ideologies are usually flawed and destructive beyond imagining," Rodgers writes.
[Today] many countries mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day, established by the UN in 2005. Yet at the same time, there is a movement afoot to proclaim another day to commemorate the victims of the Nazis, but in this new movement to commemorate them along with the victims of Stalinism.
There is ground for deep concern about repeated attempts to equate the Nazi regime's genocidal policies [...] with other murderous or oppressive actions, an equation that not only trivializes and relativizes the genocide of the Jews perpetrated by the Nazi regime, but is also a mendacious revision of recent world history.
[There] was brutal and murderous oppression [in the Soviet Union], but not genocide either toward [the Jews] or toward the other ethnic groups. [...] A certain proportion of the persecuted [...] had in fact been Nazi collaborators. However, to compare this with the murder of many millions of Europeans by the Nazi regime is a distortion of history.
The greater threat to humanity was Nazi Germany; [...] the Soviet army liberated [...] and saved Europe from the Nazi nightmare. [...] World War II was started by Nazi Germany, not the Soviet Union, and the responsibility for the 35 million dead in Europe [...] is that of Nazi Germany, not Stalin. To commemorate their victims equally is a distortion.
If today East Europeans can enjoy membership in the EU, it is due to the fact that they were oppressed and ruled for 45 years by a basically inefficient, corrupt and barbarous dictatorship, but not by the Nazis. They were liberated by the Soviets. The West recognizes that, and so do many East Europeans.
One certainly should remember the victims of the Soviet regime, and there is every justification for designating special memorials and events to do so. But to put the two regimes on the same level and commemorating the different crimes on the same occasion is totally unacceptable. Not only to Jews.
http://www.jpost.com/Features/InThespotlight/Article.aspx?id=166904
Nazi terrorism. This is exactly how we should call the problem facing our society today. For many people, ultra-rightist terrorism is a relatively unfamiliar, new and to a great extent incomprehensible phenomenon. That is why bureaucrats, politicians, the media, the security forces, and the expert community mostly prefer to ignore the real problem, presenting it instead as a series of isolated, unrelated excesses. For those who monitor the situation attentively, however, it is obvious that, over the past few years, neo-Nazis have made the qualitative shift from street violence to the tactics of terrorist groups supported by a well-developed infrastructure of extreme rightists. It suffices to analyze ultra-rightist internet resources and the statistics of nearly daily crimes to understand the scale and nature of the problem. Repressive methods are powerless to tackle complex phenomena of this sort: the Nazi milieu, which has been actively growing in recent years, is capable of successfully reproducing itself. In order to really combat the ultra-rightist underground we need to destroy this movement’s well-developed infrastructure, in particular the convergence between Nazi terrorists and state officials.
http://chtodelat.wordpress.com/2010/01/14/january-19-committee-neo-nazi-terrorism-in-russia-today/
