A reply to President Putin
The European Parliament and Vladimir Putin are distorting the lessons of World War II, writes Philip Zelikow
Read the full story at The American Interest
This year, Americans have been preoccupied with several crises. One is their own public debate about history and public memory, especially involving the Civil War and the legacies of slavery and racism. Meanwhile, though, another large historical debate has been going on, in Europe. It is a debate about the origins and lessons of the most terrible cataclysm in world history. Americans should care about that debate too.
On Friday, December 20, 2019, Russian President Vladimir Putin sat at a round table in St. Petersburg at a summit meeting. With him around the table were eight other heads of government from the Commonwealth of Independent States, formed from some states that had been part of the Soviet Union. For more than an hour, Putin then delivered an intense, angry lecture about the history of the Second World War.
A few months earlier, in September, the European Parliament had passed a remarkable resolution on this very subject. This document proclaimed that Germany and the Soviet Union were jointly responsible, co-authors, for World War II, the most catastrophic episode of European and global history.
