The Anti-fascist Victory of the Peoples demands: No tolerance to the far-right and revival of fascism!
AKEL C.C. Press Office, 8 May 2019
74 years have passed since the Red Army raised the flag of Victory over the Reichstag, in the heart of Berlin, crushing on the ruins of the Chancellery the Nazi monster. For Humanity to attain the Anti-fascist Victory, enormous sacrifices were demanded on battlefields, in the Hitlerite concentration camps, but also among the civilian populations.
Honoring the Victory of the Peoples today, we pay tribute to all those who fell in the fierce struggle against Nazi backwardness, as well as to all those who struggled on numerous fronts so that fascism/Nazism didn’t impose its world domination and didn’t carry out the inhuman plans for plunging human civilization into the nightmare of barbarism.
We are duty bound to make a special reference to our fellow veteran compatriots, both Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots, who fought on the battlefields on the side of the Allied Forces. AKEL, with its members and militants, contributed to this titanic mission with the well-known decision of the Central Committee of the Party of 16th June 1943, which issued a call for the Cypriot people’s mass, conscious participation in the anti-fascist war.
The victory against Hitler-fascism belongs to all the forces and peoples who formed the anti-Hitler Alliance, the main burden of which was assumed by the Soviet Union, counting tens of millions of dead, injured and victims. In the Russian steppes the bulk of the Nazi forces were completely destroyed, and the Battles of Stalingrad and Kursk were the milestones that changed the course of the Second World War, marking the Red Army’s mission of liberation in Europe and constituting the forerunner of the crushing of Nazi Germany.
This historic truth, written with the blood of millions of Soviet citizens, remains deeply entrenched in the memory of the peoples, and the falsifications and distortions being promoted by the contemporary anticommunist and far-right circles can neither alter, nor exonerate the Nazi ravages and atrocities.
It is the Anti-fascist Victory of the Peoples that created the preconditions for having a Europe of peace, democracy, cooperation and solidarity, something that demands a great deal of effort and struggle.
Honoring the Anti-fascist Victory of the Peoples, AKEL stresses the need and imperative duty of vigilance and waging struggles against both the vulgar ghosts of the extreme-right and fascism that are reviving and issuing threats today, as well as against the neo-liberal policies that are fostering and perpetuating them. The Anti-fascist Victory of the Peoples calls upon us all to continue the anti-fascist struggle, while at the same time imposing the need for the further rallying of the peace-loving forces against imperialism.
The Central Committee of AKEL, honoring the anniversary of the Anti-fascist Victory of the Peoples is organizing on 9th May at 18:00 p.m. (in front of the PASYDY building) in Nicosia a ceremony to lay wreaths at the Monument in honour of the Cypriot Fallen of the Second World War, followed by a discussion at the PASYDY conference hall on the subject: “Vigilance and struggle against the extreme-right and fascism“.
