Speech of the Prime Minister of the CR, Mirek Topolánek given at the solemn meeting on the occasion of the Holocaust Memorial Day on 26th January 2006
Dear ladies, dear gentlemen,
I admit it is very difficult for me to give a speech here, at all; to give a speech on the day, when one should just remember quietly. Remember quietly and concurrently, from the bottom of one's heart, to be afraid of shoa repetition. I do not think the world has changed to such an extent, that people have learned from their mistakes, so that we could forget for ever those horrible death factories; that rational exterminatory tool, which served irrational hatred.
Anti-Semitism is still alive. Europeans regard the Jewish state as perhaps greater risk for the international peace, than the risk that terrorists pose. It is a shame of the old continent that lots of its inhabitants think like that sixty years after their ancestors allowed holocaust.
I would say that it was perhaps the greatest lapse of so called multiculturalism. We are trying to show deference to foreign cultures, which do not often treat us friendly, in spite of our help, we provide them. And we do not have space enough in our hearts for brothers that we allowed to be hurt so much.
When I visited the new museum of shoa in Jerusalem, I was thinking of those generations that had formed the European culture. I was thinking of impossibility to remove Jews and Judaism from this culture – Nazis have failed to manage it either. I was considering the fact that in case we do not protect our values, which are basis of our civilization, our culture will perish again.
The first and the most important value of our civilization is freedom. As soon as we allow a spirit of collectivism to suppress individual freedom – and it makes no difference whether it would be a fascist, communist, Islamic, Maoist Kim Ir Sen´s collectivism, or some other – we will set out for a journey to a new holocaust.
We saw it in a documentary of the Czech TV about the meeting in the Wansee Castle, where Nazi celebrities debated on the best way how to reach final solution of the Jewish issue. They were educated people, generally lawyers and they were solving a task in the framework of planned economy. The fact, that the task was aimed at the fastest and cheapest death of millions of people, was not nearly mentioned during the debate.
And this is the problem. As soon as social engineers, these cold, human or rather inhuman calculators, are given the floor, a free individual cannot be certain of his property or life. Impersonal wheels of this system will destroy mercilessly everybody, who would oppose; including its authors.
Hatred and envy are bad, but unfortunately such human points, which cannot be uprooted. Real dread comes only in the time, when individuals, because of hatred and envy, relinquish their own freedom in favour of the benefit of a collective; because after that get to governance pragmatic people eager for power, for whom a human life is nothing but a statistical figure.
Monuments of shoa remind us, not only Jewish, of that lethal statistic. Each of us may be in their shoes in the future. Let us remember what caused horrors of the past, let us fight actively against threats of the present time, so that we would not have to be afraid of the future.
