Vucic: Nation that does not know its past has no future

BELGRADE - A nation that does not fight and does not know its past cannot understand its present, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic said at the Russian House in Belgrade on Wednesday evening.

"Those who control the past control the future, George Orwell said a long time ago. And a nation that does not fight and does not know its past cannot understand its present and, most importantly, has no future. That is the very reason an unsparing, ruthless battle is going on between those who want to change their political positions in the future by altering facts from the past and those who, on the other hand, want to preserve facts and evidence of past events unscathed, regardless of the power and the might of political factors of the present and the future," Vucic said in a speech on Revision of Historical Facts and Resistance by Freedom-Loving Nations.

He said some historians tended to portray Serbia, as well as Russia, as being exclusively responsible for the outbreak of specific armed conflicts.

"Special challenges are present when it comes to the topic of WWII. While the genocidal character, the mass scale, the brutality and the territorial scope of the genocide the Croatian state committed against Serbs, Jews and Roma between 1941 and 1945 are openly being denied in many communities and societies, those communities and societies are denying, even more openly and more brutally, the scale and the character of the suffering of civilians and members of the armed forces of the Soviet Union, and the Red Army's decisive role in the ultimate, complete demise of the Third Reich and Nazi Germany," Vucic said.

He said the Serbs had never and would never remain silent in the face of denial or minimisation of the fallout of the Holocaust, given the shared fate and the suffering of the Serbs, Jews and Roma.

Vucic also said Serbia was deeply grateful to the Russian Federation for defending historical science in the UN Security Council - at the highest diplomatic level - from revisionist attacks.