Vladimir Tismaneanu on concentration camps and the Gulag

During the Angelus prayers at Castel Gandolfo, his summer residence, Pope Benedict XVI last Sunday described the Nazi concentration camps as "symbols of hell on earth". He should have mentioned the Soviet Gulag as well, writes political expert Vladimir Tismaneanu in the daily Evenimentul Zilei: "23 August is the seventieth anniversary of the fateful embrace of Bolshevism and Nazism, namely the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (in reality the Hitler-Stalin pact). This was not a temporary, opportunist alliance, but a more profound one ... . The Prague Declaration proposes declaring this fateful day 'A day of memorial for the victims of Stalinism and Nazism'. ...The signing of the Prague Declaration seems to me a necessary gesture of solidarity with those who suffered under the repressions. Equally we do not have the right two decades after the revolution of 1989 to forget what these two totalitarian dictatorships meant, the twin brothers of genocide, communism and fascism. European conscience has an obligation to confront ... the memories of the camps, the prisons, the mass deportations and to remember the millions of victims of these totalitarian experiments. ... In the Gulag the masses were not liquidated using technology as they were in Auschwitz, Treblinka and Bergen-Belsen, but by starvation, physical exhaustion and the systematic destruction of their power to resist. Both systems gave rise to hate and were based on contempt for individuals and their rights."

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