Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-10-22-Speech-3-455"
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"en.20081022.24.3-455"2
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"(
Madam President, in 1932-1933, the authorities in the USSR started forcibly requisitioning food from collective farms in Ukraine, leaving the farm workers without food. This resulted in the famine known as the
and the deaths of millions of inhabitants of a country which had previously been a breadbasket. Given that the object of this operation, for which Stalin and his minions were responsible, was Ukraine’s farmers as a social group and as a nationality, the
meets the definition of genocide contained in the UN Convention of 1948.
The resolution we have drawn up for the 75
anniversary of the
is a compromise which largely concedes the truth of this crime. All it lacks is clearly calling the
a crime of genocide. This is the result of a number of groups in this House. During the compromise negotiations, I noticed that the group of socialists is generally opposed to historical debates. This is a fine stance to take when you consider how the European socialists are always eager to condemn Nazism and General Franco, while they emotionally refuse to do so in the case of the Soviet authorities or the Spanish republicans.
During these negotiations, I also heard how commemorating the victims involves deference, thereby avoiding words such as genocide. This kind of moralising and selective memory among the European socialists shows that historical materialism has been superseded by hysterical relativism. I remain hopeful, however, that this does not apply to all members on the left of this House.
I also heard that the socialists are against voting on historical truth. That is the honest truth. The problem is that here we are not talking about the truth of the
but only voicing the truth about our own selves. A resolution on matters of history is always an acknowledgment of values, while the lack of position is also, in itself, a position. It means that the phrases spoken are hollow. How is it possible to express one’s relation to values other than by assessing events from the past? Genocide is genocide, regardless of whether it was perpetrated by Hitler or Stalin, or of how the present Russian government sees it. If anybody today said that the victims of the Holocaust deserve less attention than the gas chambers, they would put their credibility in question. We are all equal before the law and the truth!"@en1
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"Holodomor"1
"Wojciech Roszkowski (UEN )."1
"th"1
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