Humanity must remember the Holocaust and the horror of fascism

 

26 January 2024, AKEL C.C. Press Office, Nicosia

The 27^th of January is the day in 1945 when the Soviet Red Army liberated the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz in Poland and the hell of the Holocaust ended. This is precisely why it was chosen by the UN as the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust.

AKEL commemorates the memory of the millions of Jews who were the main target of the Nazi killing machine, as well as the thousands of others who martyred in the concentration camps: communists, anti-fascists and socialists, intellectuals and trade unionists, Roma and ethnic minorities, homosexuals, people with disabilities and so many others who were targeted by fascism.

Humanity must remember the ravages of fascism, the Holocaust, the crematoria, the concentration camps, the atrocities committed by the Nazis in the occupied countries, the hunger and misery of World War II. Humanity also remembers that Nazism used anti-Semitism as a poison in society and as fuel to bolster its power, beginning by spreading slanderous conspiracy theories, launching persecutions and pogroms.

This is why the modern attempts underway aiming at historical revisionism, denial and/or the trivialization of the Holocaust and all the other Nazi crimes, and even the efforts to turn Nazi collaborators into heroes in various European countries are an insult to history and a danger for humanity’s future. Also worrying is the fact that against the backdrop of the war raging in Gaza an increase in cases of anti-Semitism, as well as Islamophobia, reproducing violence and hatred, is being noted.

At the same time, the deliberately attempts at distortion by the Israeli Government and its allies to portray the anti-war demonstrations, the solidarity being expressed with the Palestinian people and any criticism of the occupation policy being implemented by the State of Israel as anti-Semitism is completely unacceptable. It is precisely this vile propaganda that tens of thousands of Jews – who for months now have been demonstrating all around the world against the crimes being committed by the Israeli State against the Palestinians –refuse to accept, while the European far-right and the political descendants of the Nazis have sided with Netanyahu and his barbaric war.

AKEL stresses that anti-Semitism and every inhumane racist ideological concept such as Islamophobia, sexism, homophobia, but also anti-communism are constituent elements of neo-fascism and the far-right which are again threatening democratic freedoms, peace, working people’s gains and human rights today.

27.01.2024