Voice from Europe

By Alyn Smith MEP.

Alyn Smith is one of Scotland’s six Members of the European Parliament. He is a member of the European Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee and Scotland’s representative on the Agriculture Committee.

Can you imagine the bravery it would take to stand up to evil despite knowing it could well mean your own life? The sheer force of will it would take to channel your energy into trying to resist and rescue instead of being crushed into terrified apathy? The strength of character it would require for you to keep saying ‘no, that’s wrong’ in word and deed? Inhumanity, malevolence or outright stupidity aside, can you imagine the sheer arrogance that it would take to believe that you’ve uncovered a vast conspiracy to “pretend” that the Holocaust happened?

As a general rule, Holocaust deniers go in the same “ignore pile” as spambots and people who believe the CIA is controlling people through their fillings, but they seem to have been more emboldened lately. It’s an uncomfortable, upsetting subject, and that’s exactly why we need to make sure we talk about the Holocaust and both the human and political stories surrounding it.