While addressing the German parliament last week Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky invoked the well-known slogan “never again” in reference to the Holocaust
He suggested that German lawmakers were responsible for another holocaust, because they were not helping his country and were still buying Russian oil.
“I address all of you who heard politicians say every year ‘never again,’ but I can see these words are worth nothing. Now, our whole nation is being exterminated in Europe, why?” Zelensky said while being firm with the German Parliament, the Bundestag, and imploring them for additional assistance.
Information Liberation reports: Whereas Zelensky invoked September 11th, Pearl Harbor and Martin Luther King Jr. to lobby for the U.S. to spark WW3, in Germany he invoked the Holocaust and told German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, “Tear down this wall!”
From The Hill, “Zelensky cites Holocaust slogan in address to Germany: ‘Never again’ now ‘worthless'”:
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky invoked the well-known slogan “never again” in reference to the Holocaust while addressing German lawmakers on Thursday, CNN reported.
“I address all of you who heard politicians say every year ‘never again,’ but I can see these words are worth nothing. Now, our whole nation is being exterminated in Europe, why?” Zelensky said while being firm with the German Parliament, the Bundestag, and imploring them for additional assistance.
“I address the older people among you who have survived the Second World War, who were rescued during the occupation, who survived Babyn Yar, where President Steinmeier visited last year for the 80th anniversary of the tragedy, and where Russian missiles struck,” Zelensky said to the Bundestag.
“It was there that families were killed. Again, 80 years later,” the Ukrainian president added, emphasizing and comparing the current Russian attacks to the attacks during World War II.
“You are also behind the wall, a wall that separates you from Ukrainians that are dying in Ukraine with every bomb that is landing on our land,” Zelensky said, while also evoking images of the past Soviet occupation of East Germany and the Berlin Wall.
An Israeli reporter who visited Babyn Yar the day after Zelensky claimed it was bombed in a Russian airstrike found it was “unscathed.”
More from DW:
Zelenskyy had some harsh words for the German government over its economic interests with Russia. “We could see your willingness to continue to do business with Russia and now we’re in the middle of the cold war. And again this is something you have failed to see,” Zelensky told the Bundestag.
“You’re still protecting yourself behind a wall that does not make it possible for you to see what we are going through,” he added.
In Zelensky’s emotional address, he also appealed directly to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz saying “Dear Mr. Scholz, tear down this wall.”
By using the term “wall”, the president made a direct historical reference to a speech by US President Ronald Reagan standing next to the Berlin Wall in 1987, DW’s Chief International Editor Richard Walker explained.
The former US president famously pleaded with Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall,” an appeal Zelenskyy was making to Olaf Scholz.
“This was a theme Zelenskyy had in his speech, that there is a new wall in Europe,” Walker said, “suggesting that this was a wall Ukraine was on the wrong side of, that there is this in-group of NATO and there’s Ukraine on the outside, vulnerable to these attacks from Russia.”
