crimes committed by totalitarian regimes - Ministrstvo za pravosodje

Crimes committed by totalitarian regimes
2. Why else?
To learn from history, in the sense of the oft-proclaimed slogan: “Never again!?” I have serious
doubts about that. Experiences are not transferable. History does not repeat itself in the same shape.
For many young people, names like Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin are school-taught
abstractions, and the many totalitarian regimes around the world today are very, very distant. Still,
history and, above all, the histories of European nations, can help us all to grasp just what atrocities
people are capable of, and also grasp that, under totalitarian regimes (whether national or colonial,
ideologically driven or power driven, total or partial) all moral and cultural norms can simply be swept
away.
3. Again, why then?
Because we all, irrespective of our age, background or education, have some experience of how
humiliation, fear, discrimination and fanaticism affect us and how we must try to deal with that. This
is true even though today in Europe our lives are exposed to much less threat and danger. Becoming
aware of our own knowledge and experience of such powerful negative emotions could build a bridge
to the much more ferocious past and give hope for the future. This is a cultural approach – the basis of
my further deliberations.
4. For whom?
For all of us, then, in an intergenerational dialogue.
5. The ‘how?’
How do we confront the emotional legacy of totalitarianism? That depends on the individual’s
point of view. For me, personally, this view is open to the possibility of reconciliation. My parents
reconciled themselves to the fact that I could not be born on our family estate in Pomerania, and that my
godmother who lived there took poison because the Russians were said to be ante portas at the end of
World War II. When I was a small child the wonderful tales of my Russian-speaking grandfather evoked
my love for this wide, emotional and contradictory country: Russia.
In my experience, the most convincing ways of dealing with these very different totalitarian pasts are not
of an official or political or Sunday-sermon nature and should not be directed to reason alone. Humiliation,
fear, discrimination, fanaticism cannot be explained only rationally, neither yesterday nor today.
There are many supportive ways of nourishing this process of investigation and reconciliation.
The societies or nations involved must take the first steps. This is a mid- to long-term exercise, as
we have learned from the aftermath of totalitarianism in Western Europe; and the same will be true
for Central and East European EU Members, which have had less time to come to terms with their
totalitarian regimes. In this painful process, the European Commission has a very important supportive
and complementary role.
6. What measures are possible?
To erase the past by demolishing all totalitarian monuments and symbols is not the way forward.
Hate on the one side and destructive despair on the other are not good guides for the future. Like it or
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