PHOTOS: Hungary marks the memorial day of the victims of communism

Csaba Latorcai, state secretary of the Prime Minister’s Office, commemorated the memorial day of the victims of communism in Kecskemét, in central Hungary, on Friday.

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”. In the afternoon, Latorcai addressed a ceremony held at the Budapest Gyorskocsi street prison used by the communist police. “The communists of yesterday, the progressives of today want to defend democracy from us; they serve foreign, pro-war interests through which they jeopardise our freedom, independence and peace,” he said.

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Istvan Balvanykovi, a Budapest politician for the Christian Democrats, told the commemoration “this is the past that is still alive, because there are many alive today who lived through the horrors of communist prisons. We must pay due respect to the victims of communism, because the crimes of communism will never lapse”. Bence Rétvári, a state secretary of the interior ministry, told a wreath-laying ceremony in Budapest that whereas Hungarians were paying tribute to the victims of communism, in the West “they are doing so for the ideology”.