Zoltán Kovács, State Secretary for International Communication and Relations, has marked a memorial day of political prisoners and forced laborers deported to the Soviet Union. “Communism had no heroes, only victims,” he said.
“It is our obligation to remember the victims every year and from day to day, because failing to do so would be committing the greatest sin, the sin of omission,” the state secretary said.
During a memorial to the victims of Soviet occupation held in Budapest’s 3rd district, the state secretary highlighted that absent of remembrance, “it is impossible to build proud and coherent communities that preserve their traditions and persistently follow them.”
According to MTI, Kovács said communism was the most merciless dictatorship, affecting the largest number of countries around the world, and killing more than 100 million people. In Hungary alone, more than 800,000 people suffered from its consequences, he added.
The state secretary said that on this day in 1953, some 1,500 people were allowed to return home from political exile and labor camps.
Kovács said that the ideology which prepared the ground for communism “has undergone a renaissance in many places that consider themselves to be part of the western and enlightened world”. He cited the example of Jean-Claude Juncker, the European Commission’s outgoing president, who inaugurated a statue of Karl Marx in Germany last May.
Photo credit: Magyar Hírlap