[1] According to Volker Berghahn, "as Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski later put it in their classic analysis of the totalitarian paradigm that came to sweep the board in Western ideological discourse in the 1950s, Nazism and Stalinism were "basically alike" and represented very modern and brutally destructive versions of twentieth-century dictatorship.
In its introduction, Stéphane Courtois argued that communism and national socialism are slightly different totalitarian systems, that communism is responsible for the murder of about 100 million people during the 20th century, that the National Socialists adopted their repressive methods from Soviet methods, and that "a single-minded focus on the Jewish genocide in an attempt to characterize the Holocaust as a unique atrocity has [...] prevented the assessment of other episodes of comparable magnitude in the Communist world".
[4] An increased emphasis on the crimes of communism after the end of communism resulted in the 2006 Council of Europe resolution 1481, which condemned the "individual and collective assassinations and executions, death in concentration camps, starvation, deportations, torture, slave labour and other forms of mass physical terror" perpetrated by communist regimes,[5] and in early 2008, the European Union initiated the European Public Hearing on Crimes Committed by Totalitarian Regimes.
"[8] The remembrance day was endorsed by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe in its 2009 Vilnius Declaration, which said that "in the twentieth century European countries experienced two major totalitarian regimes, Nazi and Stalinist, which brought about genocide, violations of human rights and freedoms, war crimes and crimes against humanity" and condemned "the glorification of the totalitarian regimes, including the holding of public demonstrations glorifying the Nazi or Stalinist past.
"[11] The Greens–European Free Alliance argued that "the Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism should be the common basis for the research on and evaluation of communist regimes in all countries in East-Europe.
There were isolated critiques of the Prague Declaration in 2009 by (in chronological order of appearance in print): Dovid Katz, formerly professor of Yiddish at Vilnius University, who founded the web journal Defending History in part to oppose the Prague Declaration; Israeli activist Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Israel office; British MP John Mann, who termed it a "sinister document", Anti-German[13] political scientist Clemens Heni, and others.
[15] However, there has also been support for the Prague Declaration from Israeli academics such as Barry Rubin[16] and Lithuanian centrist politician Emanuelis Zingeris, a former honorary chairman of that country's Jewish community.
The Declaration also opposes various alleged East European attempts to glorify Nazi collaborator organisations, specifically mentioning the honouring of the Waffen SS in Estonia and Latvia, and the Lithuanian Activist Front in Lithuania.
The foreign minister's "moustache comparison" resulted in individual letters of praise from British MP Denis MacShane[citation needed] to each of the eight Lithuanian signatories, and to reportage in the New York Times.