On June 3, 2008, a group of conservative Eastern European politicians and intellectuals signed the Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism in the Czech parliament. The signatories to this Declaration proclaimed that the "millions of victims of Communism and their families are entitled to enjoy justice, sympathy, understanding and recognition for their sufferings in the same way as the victims of Nazism have been morally and politically recognized" and that there should be "an all-European understanding ... that many crimes committed in the name of Communism should be assessed as crimes against humanity... in the same way Nazi crimes were assessed by the Nuremberg Tribunal." The signatories addressed their demands to "all peoples of Europe, all European political institutions including national governments, parliaments, [the] European Parliament, [the] European Commission, [the] Council of Europe and other relevant international bodies." (1)

The Prague Declaration contains a list of demands, including compensation for victims. There are also calls for the establishment of a European "day of remembrance of the victims of both Nazi and Communist totalitarian regimes, in the same way Europe remembers the victims of the Holocaust on January 27th." The Prague Declaration further advocates for the creation of a supranational "Institute for European Memory and Conscience" as well as increased support for memorials, museums, and national historical institutes charged with investigating the crimes of communism. Finally, the Prague Declaration demands the "adjustment and overhaul of European history textbooks so that children could learn and be warned about Communism and its crimes in the same way as they have been taught to assess the Nazi crimes." (2)

Over the next four years, and against a backdrop of growing social unrest in response to the global financial crisis and Eurozone instability in Spain and Greece, European leaders instituted many of the recommendations in the Prague Declaration. The "European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism" was created by the European Parliament in 2008, and it was also supported by the Organization of Security and Co-operation in Europe in the Vilnius Declaration of 2009, a declaration that also instructed the nations of Europe to create a collective policy on "the world financial crisis and the social consequences of that crisis." (3) The Platform of European Memory and Conscience was founded in Prague in 2011, and by 2013 this consortium of nongovernmental organizations and research institutes had forty-three members from thirteen European Union countries as well as in Ukraine, Moldova, Iceland, and Canada. (4) The United States is home to two organizations that are members of the European Platform for Memory and Conscience: the Joint Baltic American National Committee and the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. (5) The latter is an organization headed by Lee Edwards, the Heritage Foundation's "Distinguished Fellow in Conservative Thought," and "a leading historian of American conservatism." (6)

On January 20, 2012, the seventieth anniversary of the 1942 Wannsee conference that decided the Final Solution, the academics Dovid Katz and Danny Ben-Moshe presented the Seventy Years Declaration to...