By Vestnik Kavkaza
The head of the Council of the EU Donald Tusk thinks that the European countries are facing the same evil as they did ahead of World War II. According to UNIAN,he said this today in Gdansk during a political discussion of the lessons of WWII. “I am sure that Europe is different today, and the Europeans can feel responsible for the whole continent, rather than for their separate nations,” Tusk said. He pointed out that European politicians were aware of the consequences of their acts, reminding that only a few would go to the Russian parade in Moscow. “We begin realizing what kind of a victory the initiators of the parade mean,” the permanent critic of the Russian authorities said. President of Poland Bronisław Komorowski urged “the West and the rest of the world to resist the aggressive plans of the Russian Federation.”
Meanwhile, Moscow considers the victory over fascism as a common victory and wants to use it against all forms of nationalism. Anna Talyzina, director of pre-university education and educational work with the students and the laboratory of theoretical and methodological problems of historical education of the historical faculty of Lomonosov Moscow State University, told Vestnik Kavkaza that “unfortunately, many people currently are not aware, for example, of the role played in the victory by the Transcaucasian region and Central Asia. There is a perception that these regions are remote from places of hostilities, that these regions were not in the zone of occupation, regions which did not survive, seemingly directly, the horrors of war, the horrors of fighting, they may not have contributed to the victory. Obviously, it was a common victory, a major factor in this victory was our unity.”
According to Talyzina, “it was stressed in historical sources, it was stressed in the documents of the German command, that in fact the main mistake that was made were stakes on nationalism. That is, the German government did not expect that the Soviet Union was a multinational country, multi-religious. The country is huge. The country seemingly was not united by anything but formal political boundaries, yet could act as a single political force. I think, really, it was the unity, that unity, which led us to our common victory, and it seems to me, in this unity, in fact, there are a lot of historical perspectives.”
Talyzina is sure that the cause of nationalism is a lack of knowledge or perverted knowledge: “If people know their own history, the history of their country, it is my deep conviction that sooner or later they have to come to the conclusion that nationalism brings nothing but sorrow and misery to their own people. I think the main historical lesson that we should learn is exactly this lesson. And the most important cure for nationalism is knowledge of history.”
