PM Office’s state secretary marks memorial day for victims of communism

Addressing the ceremony, he said the memorial day observed on February 25 was an occasion not only to remember the victims but to highlight the importance of solidarity and responsibility to one another.

“Unsuspecting European citizens are these days getting attacked not from the East, as it was the case under communism, but from the West,” Latorcai, the acting secretary general of the allied ruling Christian Democrats, said. Now Western liberals seek “to force down the throats” of EU member states and citizens a plan of a “European superstate” that respects neither faith nor the human individual, he said.

“Hungarians had the tough experience of how it feels to live in fear; our parents and grandparents lived through times when there had been expulsion, discrimination and persecution of religion,” Latorcai said. “And now, at the beginning of the 21st century’s third decade, we have to face the reality that we are again living in the age of fear”.

He said at stake was whether Europe remains a community of free nations with roots in Christian culture, or becomes “a united states of Europe”, “an empire” populated by ethnically and culturally mixed groups of people and “dominated by the West”.

Under a parliamentary decree, February 25 has been observed as a memorial day of martyrs of Communism since 2000. On this day in 1947, leader of the Independent Smallholders’ Party Bela Kovacs was illegally detained and deported to the Soviet Union.