Alyaksandr Lukashenka has signed a law banning the rehabilitation of Nazism, Prosecutor General of Belarus Andrei Shved said on air of the TV channel ‘Belarus 1.’
According to the law on the prevention of Nazism rehabilitation, it is forbidden to glorify or justify the Nazi ideology. The document expands the term “Nazi symbols and attributes.”
“The law specifies the organizational and legal forms and methods of counteraction and prevention. That is, the law is so balanced that it allows all available forms and methods in any legal state to identify and prevent attempts to rehabilitate Nazism,” said Attorney General Andrei Shved.
The document also deals with the main ways of preventing the spread of the banned ideology. As for counteraction measures to Nazi ideas, they are similar to measures in the sphere of counteraction to extremism.
The struggle against Nazism can become the struggle against dissent.
In April, the Prosecutor General’s Office of Belarus opened a criminal case about the genocide of the Belarusian population during the Great Patriotic War and in the postwar period. Authorities asked state museums and archives to look for evidence of such crimes. Belarusians are actively encouraged in social networks to send all the information in this regard. The Prosecutor General’s Office is reporting about “a new stage in the fight against the rehabilitation of Nazism,” “historical and social justice,” and “strengthening the constitutional order and national security,” because, according to Prosecutor General Andrei Shved, some European states still pursue an aggressive policy against Belarus.
“There was a genocide of Belarusians under the WRW flag,” Lukashenka said in Khatyn and urged to “go and look” at Khatyn and other burned villages. Fakes about the white-red-white flag are sent out in Minsk utility bills and so on.
Why do the authorities need the genocide case now?
“The authorities need it to distract the attention of both the domestic audience and the international community a little bit from the state terror which they themselves are implementing today, and largely by similar methods, in the same land. And also in order, guided by their pretentious logic, to provide a more solid ideological basis for the large-scale repressions on purely ideological grounds than it is now. After all, anything you want can be written off as “the struggle against the rehabilitation of Nazism,” since in our conditions, it is a very “rubber band” wording. There is an attempt to present the national white-red-white flag without any justification as a Nazi flag. Based on this, there is repression against those who appreciate,” historian Alyaksandr Pashkevich earlier told Belsat.
