Latvia is making yet another attempt to rewrite the history of the Second World War. This time it is an attempt on people’s right to celebrate the sacred Victory Day holiday.
Riga Mayor Janis Birks says parliament might have to ban V-Day celebrations if the police find them threatening to public order.
Security considerations are just an excuse. Thousands of people are gathering on V-Day anniversary by the War Memorial in Riga to pay tribute to the memory of those who liberated Latvia and the rest of the world from the Nazis. But some radical circles in Latvia, who collaborated with the Nazis, their ideological successors and even politicians from a number of ruling parties stick to different values. They see soldiers who liberated their country from the Nazis as an “occupying” force and their sympathies lie with former members of Waffen-SS who fought with Nazi Germany. Political analyst Natalya Narochnitskaya comments.
Such attitudes, she says, fit well into the concept stubbornly pursued by the Baltic nations that the victory was in fact a defeat. Those who say so tend to forget that Lithuanians, Latvians and the Poles were to be servants to the Third Reich under Hitler’s plan. What was required of them in terms of education was to be able to read geographical signs in German in a country that would no longer be known as Latvia, Lithuania or Estonia but Ingermanland.
Glorification of Nazi collaborators and an attempt on the memory of the liberators is a crime and a cynical encroachment on common sense. Surprisingly, all this is happening in a country which is a member of the European Union. And its EU partners, who lost millions of lives in the war, say nothing to attempts to trample on the Allied Victory in the Second World War.