Stop the 16 March marches and Latvians revising history!
at https://www.petitions.net/stop_the_16_march_marches_and_latvians_revising_history
Monica Lowenberg's introduction to her petition.
Since 1998 on the 16th of March and every year, in the very centre of Riga, Latvia, marches have been regularly held to praise the ‘heroism’ of the former Latvian Legion, i.e. Waffen SS veterans in their combat against the allies during the Second World War. Each year these events have received tacit (and sometimes very explicit and public) support from state authorities (in 2012 from the president himself) and have been attended by deputies of the Latvian Parliament, members of the Riga City Council and officials of the Ministry of Defence. In March 2014, for the first time ever, the Latvian government commendably banned any minister from attending the march and sacked Einars Cilinskis for insisting on participating. Nevertheless, in Riga, on March 16, 2015, a European capital, in the heart of NATO and Latvia; a country that at the time held the presidency of the rotating council of the European Union, two politicians and the minister for justice still attended the SS march ( despite the ban) and over 2,000 people including ultra nationalists from the UK. In 2016, under the new government the ban was lifted. German protesters were prevented from boarding a Baltic Air flight and five arrested on landing in Riga airport under section 61. See links below for full details.
The arrests were a Kremlin-aligned left-wing German political stunt. See our 020lowenberg:text=The%20monument%20is%20dedicated%20to,soldiers%20built%20outside%20of%20Latvia">about the monument, and Zedelgem website)
attempts to equate Nazi crimes with Stalin (Efraim Zuroff's "canard of equivalency") references to Richard Howitt's denouncement of Latvians (our 2014 review) name-dropping of neo-Nazi fringe extremists as if they were somehow representative of those who annually commemorate the Latvian Legion; these extremists are a global phenomenon; commemoration of the Legion for the last seventy-two years is not a contributing factor
- It was only after Russia launched its anti-Latvian propaganda campaign that the commemoration of the Legion, now observed for seventy-two years, became glorification of the criminal Nazi SS.
- It was only after Holocaust activists joined in denouncing the commemoration as glorification of the criminal Nazi SS that it began to draw (genuine) neo-Nazi attendees — turning a solemn, dignified commemoration into a crackpot-magnet media spectacle both extremists and activists distort to proselytize their causes, attack their political opposition, and advance their personal power and influence.
German "anti-fascist" protesters who were "immediately arrested" at Rīga airport (our review of the report in the press and investigation the arrests were a stunt) Zuroff calling those arrests “absurd” and “highly objectionable” — they were staged and propagandized to elicit exactly the kind of outrage Zuroff ignorantly expresses "swastika" dances at public events — the swastika is as ancient and revered in the Latvian culture as the Hindu culture; indeed no other culture has more ornate and varied variations on the swastika (The Elephant in the Room — Signs and Rhetoric) Latvian participation in the siege of Leningrad — Stalin invaded Latvia first; indeed, in announcing the invasion of the USSR, Hitler cited Stalin's annexation of the Baltic states, parts of Romania, and other territories as overstepping the intent of their agreed-to "spheres of influence" a host of snippets with links to outraged voices, including "ethnic Russians" as a unified community of opposition to the annual commemoration and a significant amount of content featuring Latvian Russians Tatjana Ždanoka and Josef Koren: Ždanoka sought to preserve the Soviet occupation of Latvia, which included Russian OMON (Black Berets) killing freedom demonstrators; Josef Koren is on the Kremlin payroll, paid to polarize and destabilize Latvian society. Latvian-Russian "anti-fascists" serve Russia's, not Latvia's, interests. To both these individuals, "anti-fascism" is a weapon to be wielded, not a cause to champion. Even Efraim Zuroff has cut his ties with Koren's Latvian chapter of Putin's World Without Nazism propaganda machine.
The petition continues with more allegations, links to denouncements, outrage over fringe extremist outsider attendees, denouncements of the Latvian Legion cemetery in Lestene, and defenses and dismissals by Latvian officials and politicians of all of the preceding. These all appear in some form or another in Lowenberg's packet of materials.
For perspectives from the Latvian side, our earlier annual reviews include
- How should we remember the 100,000? — Ojārs Kalniņš, Director, Latvian Institute (2006)
- To call us Nazi sympathisers is absurd — Roberts Zīle, Fatherland and Freedom party (2009)