Memory Wars in the ‘New Europe’

Abstract

Seventy years since the start of World War II, revisionists across Europe have been arguing that Stalin was as much to blame for starting the war as Hitler. No historical fact, it seems, not even the one that every school pupil knows -that Hitler was responsible for the war — is any longer secure. At the same time, the British Conservative Party, the party of Churchill, has aligned itself in the European Parliament with a far-right grouping, the European Conservatives and Reformists Group (ECR), which includes the Latvian For Fatherland and Freedom Party and the Polish Law and Justice Party, whose former spokesman, Michał Kaminski, appealing to the old canard of Judeo-Bolshevism (Żydokomuna), explains the murder of Jews in Jedwabne in 1941 with reference to the ‘crimes’ supposedly committed by Jews during the period of Bolshevik rule in eastern Poland. As Adam Krzeminski rightly says, World War II is still being fought,2 and, we might add, more intensively today than at any point in the last seven decades.KeywordsEuropean UnionCollective MemoryGenocide ConventionHolocaust DenialHolocaust MemoryThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.