Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-07-04-Speech-2-015"
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"en.20060704.4.2-015"2
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"Mr President, ‘They must be stopped!’ So exclaimed the great young poet of my youth, Gustaf Munch-Petersen, when, as a volunteer soldier in the Spanish Civil War, he stood alone at the front while his comrades withdrew, confronted as they were by superior forces. Gustaf left his wife, child and family at home in Denmark. His action was neither defensible nor responsible and was unable to keep the plague of Fascism away from Europe. His lonely protest had no rationale behind it, but imagine if everyone had acted with the same courage. To die fearlessly was the last poetic offering of his life.
Most people remained passive when democracy was threatened and, in many places, displaced, until other courageous people put a stop to Nazism and Fascism.
For many here in this House, the liberation became a new occupation, involving the Iron Curtain and the Gulag. Today, let us remember the many people – courageous and otherwise - who died. Let us pay homage to those who, as volunteer soldiers in the Spanish Civil War, offered resistance, took part in the defence of democracy and displayed both courage and foolhardiness in underground armies established to oppose governments’ policy of appeasing the enemies of democracy. Many people active in resistance movements found their way into the political parties and also the movements that I have represented in this House for 27 years. They are almost all dead. As he was dying, my courageous neighbour, Hans – a blacksmith by trade – talked wildly about British bombs raining down on a French school instead of on the Gestapo’s headquarters. As an agent working for the British, Hans had supplied the illegal drawings. The mistake was not his, but the thought of the dead schoolchildren haunted him until the end.
I also wish to remember a young academic who travelled all around the country in order to create the first Danish resistance movement, while the government cooperated with the German occupying power. Frode Jakobsen subsequently became leader of the successful underground government, the Danish Freedom Association. After the war he became a government minister and took part in the European Movement’s great congress in The Hague in 1948, when the Council of Europe and European integration were got under way. For many years he was President of the European Movement and a Social Democratic member of the Danish Parliament. That being said, he voted ‘no’ in all the votes on EC and EU Treaties and initiated criticism of the EU on democratic grounds back in 1972.
We have named a prize after him. It is awarded each year to those who have shown unusual political courage and done something for people other than themselves at a time when to do so was not expedient or profitable or likely to further their careers. We have never had difficulty finding candidates. There are always people who show unusual political courage, and some of them have sought inspiration in the half a million volunteers and citizens of the world who travelled to Spain to say ‘No pasarán’. I would say thank you to those who displayed personal courage and died for our freedom. ‘El pueblo unido jamás será vencido’."@en1
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