Comment by the Information and Press Department on the OSCE conference dedicated to the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II

Submitted on Sun, 09/06/2015 - 22:00

On September 2, the world celebrated the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II. An international conference is timed to coincide with this event in Belgrade, held at the initiative of Serbia's OSCE presidency. The conference will be attended by a strong Russian delegation led by Anatoly Viktorov, director of the Foreign Ministry’s Department for Humanitarian Cooperation and Human Rights.

We hope that the upcoming conference will make a considerable contribution to disseminating the historical truth about World War II and give an impetus to the common effort to oppose the ideology of Nazism and neo-Nazism in the world and connivance at revanchism and attempts to revise the results of World War II for opportunistic purposes.

In this context, we are compelled to note the more aggressive tone of related statements, including in connection with the so-called days of remembrance for victims of totalitarian regimes, made by various EU representatives. Brussels seeks to falsify the history of World War II, conceal its true causes and promote a thesis on the supposed equal responsibility of Nazi Germany and the USSR for unleashing the war.

It is clear that Brussels has sanctioned the substitution of notions and outright lies at the top level. This, of course, cannot hide the unseemly role played by the leading European countries that signed the Munich agreement in 1938, thus blessing the partition of Czechoslovakia, or the close contacts between Britain, France, Poland and the Baltic states, on the one hand, and the Nazi regime, on the other, before World War II. The policy of Western countries prevented an anti-Hitler coalition from being created in the prewar period and led to Nazi Germany’s treacherous aggression against the USSR on June 22, 1941.

By crushing Nazism in 1945, the USSR and its anti-Hitler coalition allies saved the world from the brown plague and liberated Europe.

The Nuremberg Trial and the decisions approved at the Yalta, Dumbarton Oaks, and Potsdam conferences, as well as the UN Charter, have both named those guilty of that unprecedented tragedy and laid firm foundations of cooperation and world peace in the postwar period.

But the dangerous game that Brussels is currently playing is fraught with the emergence of new threats in the future. Attempts to reformat the memory of entire nations can lead over time to a revival of new hotbeds of aggressive extremist ideology in Europe and prod it towards new bloodshed and self-destruction. In some European countries, particularly in the Baltic states and Ukraine, Nazism is already rearing its ugly head and, as before, is threatening both these countries themselves and their neighbours.

The EU leaders continue to pretend that nothing is wrong. EU countries abstained during a UN General Assembly vote on the resolution Combating Glorification of Nazism and Other Practices that Contribute to Fuelling Contemporary Forms of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, while the US, Canada and Ukraine voted against this document, enjoying unqualified support from the absolute majority of member-states.

Silence and criminal inaction against the backdrop of the distortion of historical truth and flirtation with neo-Nazism are inadmissible.

September 7, 2015