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Camilla Andersson's speech on March 18
20.03.2009
Ladies and gentlemen,
My name is Camilla Andersson, and I'm a founder and President of the IICC in Sweden - the Institute for Information of the Crimes of Communism. I'm pleased to be with you here at the gathering of so many people from all over Europe, especially during this symbolically important year, and I would like to thank the Czech EU Presidency for arranging this hearing.
This year we commemorate the liberation of Central and Eastern Europe and the Baltic States from almost half a century of Communist terror, occupation, oppression, environmental destruction and poverty.
When the countries of Europe today strive for democracy, cooperation, security and peace, this urge toward creating a new, better and united Europe is being spurred not only by these noble goals of democracy, cooperation and open societies -but also of the terrible experiences of Europe's totalitarian past - of totalitarianism, racism, militarism, war, genocide and destruction.
The vision of a new Europe, based on inclusion rather than confrontation; on solidarity rather than major powers versus smaller states; on common security rather than Realpolitik; and of celebrating the core values of European culture is a noble one.
But in order to reach this goal, we need to be vigilant against the resurgence of the destructive forces which have plagued our continent.
Knowledge of history is one of the fundamental building blocks when we build a new, united Europe together.
We can all now travel where we like, work where we want, and say what we want -but in order to truly understand each other, we need to be aware of the historical experiences which have formed the "other" half of Europe.
If we continue to deny fundamental parts of European history, then the future Europe, while seemingly united, will still carry within it the very seeds of totalitarianism, divisions and conflict.
I would like to quote from the introduction of the Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism, by the Senate of the Parliament of the Czech Republic, of June the 3rd, 2008:
"Bearing in mind the dignified and democratic future of our European home,
• whereas societies that neglect the past have no future,
• whereas Europe will not be united unless it is able to reunite its history..."
In order to truly achieve the reunification of Europe, we need to understand and respect each other; we need to learn from the experiences of totalitarian systems, and of the long struggle for regained freedom, which have shaped the lives of millions of people in half the European continent until very recently.
In order to learn the lessons of Europe's totalitarian past, we need to learn from those who were forced to experience it.
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Tomorrow's European citizens are the young people of today. They form their view of Europe and the world from the information which surrounds them. This basis of knowledge will directly affect the decisions they will take, and the choices they will make, in the Europe of tomorrow.
Those choices won't always be easy ones. Democracy and openness are not easy. They are hard. They demand our knowledge, our attention, our vigilance, and our commitment to values and principles.
The tragedies of colonialism, of the horrors of the Inquisition, of the religious and imperialistic wars that has swept our continent so many times, of the injustice of slavery, of serfdom, of unacceptable social conditions, of the aggressive and genocidal National Socialist totalitarianism - contrasted by the Enlightenment, the struggle for democracy, liberty, gender and race equality and for social change - these are all important events which now form integral parts of school curriculums, of the public debate, of films and of books, and thus of our understanding of European history and of our European identity.
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So what do young people in Europe today know of recent European history and of the Communist past?
Instead of speculating about this, I would like to present some facts concerning the knowledge of history among young people in my country, Sweden.
Communism was the ideological backbone of a brutal, totalitarian dictatorship, which claimed the lives of millions of innocent people and destroyed the dreams, hopes and loves of countless others.
It is a system which has generated Human Rights violations, misery, suffering, poverty, war and mass murder on a scale unparallelled in world history.
Yet, somehow, knowledge of these horricific crimes is still not an integral part of the European identity.
The realities of the Holocaust, and the hateful and twisted ideology behind it, is with us all - in the faces of the victims, in their names, in their eyes on photographs, in films and books, through memorials and remembrance, and by the respect, emotion, understanding and identification which their stories they have left us fills us with.
These were our fellow human beings, and they still talk to us through the distance of time.
In contrast, the realities of the crimes of Communism are not real at all. The tens of millions of victims of Communism are faceless - marked only by their absence and by silence - their untold suffering still literally untold.
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When I went to school, the schoolbook map of our region, the Baltic Sea area, was cut in half. On the western side of the Baltic Sea, there were real countries, with place names, borders, cities, people, identities, cultures and flags. On the eastern and southern side of the Baltic Sea, the map was blank or sparsely detailed. The countries and the people on the other side were given no mention in my history books at school, nor did I ever come across them on TV, in newspapers, in films or in books.
They were simply not there. They didn't exist. The crimes of Communism were given no mention. If Communism was mentioned at all in school or in the media, it was rather in a quite positive or forgiving context.
With this in mind, as part of our work in the IICC, we commissioned a statistic, nationwide survey among Swedish students in 2007, concerning the knowledge of recent history, of basic facts about our neighboring countries, and of the crimes of Communism.
Allow me to present you with a brief overview of the findings of the survey, which was performed by polling institute Demoskop:
90 percent of the 1004 Swedes aged 15-20 that polling institute Demoskop surveyed nationwide had never heard of the Gulag. (This is a an especially striking figure considering that Communists had occupied five of Sweden's closest neighbors for half a century). By contrast, 95 percent of respondents were well informed about the Holocaust.
Some other key findings of the survey:
- 43 percent of the students believed that Communist regimes had claimed less than one million lives, worldwide, during the entire 20th century
- One-fifth of those surveyed put the death toll attributable to Communism at 0-10,000 (with the actual figure commonly estimated at around 100 million victims)
- 40 percent believed that Communism had contributed to increased prosperity in the world
- 22 percent considered Communism a democratic form of government
- 82 percent did not recognize Belarus as a dictatorship.
The survey also included questions about regional geography.
Here, only half of the respondents were aware that Berlin was the capital of a country on the Baltic Sea; even fewer were aware that Warsaw was one such capital, despite both Germany and Poland being only a short ferry trip from Sweden.
More, 90 percent of the students did not know which foreign capital city was located closest to Stockholm. (It is Tallinn in Estonia.)
The findings immediately sparked a firestorm of debate at all levels of Swedish society. Many members of parliament demanded urgent school reform, and the ministers of education and culture promised concrete measures to improve education.
Sweden's foreign minister, Mr. Carl Bildt, described the survey findings as "truly frightening" and remarked that the lack of knowledge was "massive."
The publication of the results triggered an unprecedented firestorm of debate on history in Sweden on all levels, from the Internet to local communities, to leading newspapers, to parliamentary debates, to statements by the government, and to actual changes in the school curriculum -where the teaching of the crimes of Communism is now mandatory.
The furious debate even spread to some neighboring countries, like Norway, where our survey was replicated, with similar results.
So we do have the numbers. They speak for themselves.
In order to change these statistics, we need to make the millions of silent victims of Communism come alive. We must let them speak to us, and we must listen and learn. We must allow them to, finally, tell us their stories. We must learn from their terrible fates, and we must understand how this, one of the greatest atrocities in human history, could come to pass.
We must learn as much as we can from its victims, in order both to pay our long overdue respect, and to safeguard our future from other and future forms of totalitarianism, hate, intolerance and simple solutions.
We must learn to identify and recognize the poison of totalitarian, hateful, anti-human ideologies, and we must reject the barbaric notion that the killing of certain groups of people motivated by certain ideologies, can _ever_ be justified.
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It has now been twenty years since the fall of Iron Curtain and of the liberation of the Baltic republics and of Eastern and Central Europe from Communist dictatorship and occupation.
When the process of European reintegration and reunification began, the hope was not only for liberty, security and the material reconstruction of society- the hope was also for recognition and respect - recognition and respect as fellow Europeans, with unique voices, culture and history.
It has now been twenty years since the golden opportunity to form a new Europe arose, and still Europe is in many senses a divided continent.
In order to create a truly united, democratic new Europe which can look to a different, brighter future, we cannot condemn one evil totalitarian system, whilst simultaneously allowing the millions of victims of another to stay unrecognized and unmentioned.
Doing so strips us of the dignity and civilization we aspire to have achieved.
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It is important to remember that the widespread knowledge of the crimes of National Socialism did not occur spontaneously or by chance. It is the result of dogged, concerted and continuous efforts of individuals, writers, journalists, publishers, film makers, institutions, NGO:s and governments throughout the world. It has taken unswerving conviction, and hard, focused work.
As an example, in 1998 the former Swedish Prime Minister Mr. Göran Persson took the initiative to form the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance, and Research.
Much work along these lines needs to be done to if we are to raise the level of awareness of the crimes of Communism and its victims. We consider the following to be some of first steps needed to be taken in an international, cooperative effort in this process:
- the formation of an International Task Force on the Crimes of Communism
- the carrying out of a Pan-European survey concerning the crimes of totalitarianism and level of knowledge of Europe and its recent history
- from the results of this survey, teaching materials can be produced, tailored to the needs and findings of the survey, containing basic facts of the consequences of Communist rule and personal stories of its victims
- the founding of independent institutions and platforms for the scientific study of totalitarianism and of totalitarian regimes, such as the proposed Platform of European Memory And Conscience
- the providing of resources and funds for outreach and education concerning totalitarian ideologies and their real-life effects
- the establishment of a European Day Of Remembrance of the Victims Of Communism
- the establishing of permanent monuments to the victims of Communism in all affected countries throughout Europe
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Even though speaking on a theme as horrible as the crimes of Communism, I would nevertheless like to end on a positive note.
From our experience in schools and among journalists, politicians and the media, we have been met not with complacency, lack of interest or arrogance, but quite the opposite. We have encountered a lot of curiosity, a thirst for knowledge, and a great moral engagement. Especially students see this subject as a very important from a moral perspective - once they are presented with facts and stories. In our opinion, this bodes well for our European future together.
People do want to know -we just need to give them a chance to learn. It's long overdue, and it's our duty both to the victims of Communism, to the young people of today, and to the coming generations.
The Czech EU Presidency has done very important work in raising this issue, and during the up-coming Swedish EU Presidency we pledge to continue the efforts to make 2009 become the year the crimes and the victims of Communism are finally recognized, and the year that Europe will finally be truly reunited.
I hereby invite you to join us in commemorating the 20th Anniversary of The Liberated And Reunited Europe in Stockholm in November.
Camilla Andersson
www.crimesofcommunism.org www.1989-2009.org