I
can't believe Eric Pickles supports Latvia's 'For Fatherland
and Freedom' party, which wants to rewrite a murderous history
The sight of SS veterans marching down the main avenue of the capital city of
a member of Nato and the European Union is hardly a sight
to bring joy to the heart of a British political leader.
Yet just a few days ago, Conservative chairman Eric Pickles
saw fit in an interview on Radio 4 to rush to the defence
of the Latvian "For Fatherland and Freedom" party which is among the staunchest supporters of precisely such an event that
takes place annually in Riga every 16 March.
The simple explanation is the hackneyed cliche that politics makes strange bedfellows,
and that Pickles felt obliged to defend his new partners
in the European Conservatives and Reformists group of the
European parliament in Strasbourg. In reality, however, Pickles's
knee-jerk response is probably the product of sheer ignorance
of the world-view of his Latvian political allies and their
distorted perceptions of the history of the second world
war, which no mainstream British political leader could possibly
support.
The controversy over the annual march
of the Latvian-SS Legion veterans in Riga has been raging
since Latvia regained independence in 1991. Its supporters
claim that the men in the Legion were soldiers who only fought
against the Soviets and had no connection to SS crimes. They
viewed their service as helping to defend Latvia and did
so for positive patriotic reasons and not out of loyalty
to Nazi Germany. Yet while it is true that the Legion as
such did not participate in Holocaust crimes, many of its
men were active participants in the mass murder of Jews before
the Legion was established in early1943. By this point, practically
all of Latvia's 70,000 Jews, as well as most of the approximately
20,000 Central European Jews deported to Riga and many tens
of thousands of Jews in Belarus, had been murdered by members
of Latvian security police units, many of whom subsequently
volunteered to join the Legion, among them numerous men from
the infamous Arajs Kommando, one of the most notorious Nazi
death squads.
As far as the motives of those joining
the Legion, a third volunteered (the rest were drafted) to
fight for a victory of Nazi Germany and its totalitarian
regime, which would have had unimaginably horrific consequences
for the future of Europe. And while these Latvians might
have thought that they were fighting for Latvian independence,
their German masters had no such intentions, making their
service on their behalf even more reprehensible.
The obsession of "For
Fatherland and Freedom" to pay public homage to the Latvian-SS Legion in contradiction to all historical
logic and sensitivity to Nazi crimes is not a product of
ostensibly harmless nostalgia as Pickles would have us believe,
but part of a rather insidious plan to gain recognition for
a perversely distorted version of European history which
will officially equate Communism with Nazism. In practical
terms, this will transform those eastern European nations
that had a high percentage of Nazi collaborators from perpetrator-helpers
of a genuine genocide to victims of a tragedy posing as a
genocide. It will also help them cover up their role in Holocaust
crimes and failure since independence to prosecute their
own Nazi war criminals.
The manifesto of this movement, the
Prague Declaration of June 2008, warns that "Europe will not be united unless it is able to reunite its history [and] recognise
communism and Nazism as a common legacy". Resolutions in this spirit which call for a joint commemoration day (23 August)
for the victims of Communism and Nazism are only the beginning
of a campaign to rewrite the history of the second world
war in a way that will whitewash the villains, dishonour
the victims, and rob the heroes of their well-deserved pride.
I cannot believe that Pickles and
the Conservative party really support such nonsense.
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