Belarusian delegation raised the topic of glorification of Nazism at OSCE session, appealing to conscience of Western states
In his speech, the diplomat noted that people in Belarus, where every third resident died during WWII, are outraged and deeply offended by the footage featuring the honouring of a veteran of the 14th Galicia SS Division in the House of Commons of the Canadian Parliament
“We firmly believe that such a cynical attitude to the memory of thousands of innocent victims of Nazism is not a random incident, as the organisers of this show are trying to present it now. This is a kind of quintessence of the long-term consistent policy of not only the Canadian authorities, but also of a number of other countries of the collective West aimed at the concealing and whitewashing of Nazi criminals, deliberate connivance to attempts to rewrite history,” the Belarusian representative said.
The diplomat emphasised that it is not about gloating over the unacceptable mistake of a high-level state representative of the Western world, “We hope he has realised this mistake and taken moral responsibility for it. Today we are more concerned about the well-known feature of human memory to forget, to erase recollections of the cruelty and horrors of war, to abstract from the terrible lessons of history, to limit the personal world only to what is available to us in our immediate sensations. Philosopher George Santayana said once, “Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.” His words act not just as a warning today, but as a prophecy. How else can we explain that the topic of combating the lingering legacy of Nazism, the need to eradicate its new manifestations is perceived in the modern multilateral international discourse exclusively in a propagandistic way of opposing the political ideology of Western countries and the rest of the world?”
The diplomat wondered why – by justifying themselves for the incident – the Canadian officials in a special way speak of Jewish organisations, the Polish diaspora and the LGBT community, while not mentioning the peoples of the Soviet Union, and it is Belarus which is raising the issue at the OSCE Permanent Council session.
“The answer is simple. Canadian figures selectively justify themselves to their influential electorate. Meanwhile, it is easy for them to forget that the peoples of the former USSR represent one of the countries most affected by the crimes of Nazism. Today it is Belarus that raises this question, which is uncomfortable for many. This is because the memory of the past war is stored not in dusty archives in the republic, but in hearts of its people. We are not calling for public dishonor of the guilty. We appeal to the conscience of each of us," the diplomat said.
