“Strasbourg, 25.01.2006 – The Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly (PACE) today strongly condemned the massive human rights violations committed by totalitarian communist regimes and expressed sympathy, understanding and recognition for the victims of these crimes. The Assembly – which brings together parliamentarians from 46 European countries – said in a resolution that these violations included individual and collective assassinations and executions, death in concentration camps, starvation, deportations, torture, slave labour and other forms of mass physical terror. The peoples of the former USSR by far outnumbered other peoples in terms of the number of victims, the parliamentarians said. They also called on all communist or post-communist parties in Council of Europe member states which had not so far done so “to reassess the history of communism and their own past […] and condemn them without any ambiguity”. “

That last sentence in particular is well worth noting.

Hat-tip Eursoc, who has more, “The vote, which passed by 99 to 42 (with 12 abstaining), was ferociously opposed by western leftists. Spain’s supposedly moderate socialists opposed the resolution, while the absurd Belgian Communist Party described it as “”a violent attack on history, present and future of communism.” Various Greek factions condemned the resolution as “neo McCarthyism” and, laughably, “persecution.”

Belgian Communist Party?