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More than three decades have passed since the fall of communism and the regime change, but it can be declared that communism is not dead, the director of the Institute for the Research of Communism told on an international conference on the victims of communism in Madrid on Thursday.

Rajmund Fekete, in his lecture "Against Forgetting: the necessity of historical truth", said that by the time the Soviet Union collapsed, the atheistic Marxism that formed the basis of communist ideology had fallen on fertile ground in the Western world, and was embraced by the Western intellectual elite.

They think faith in God is ridiculous, the nation is obsolete, history is finished, the family is negligible, and gender is interchangeable. It is an attempt to redefine identities in the same way that communism did

– he stated.

Rajmund Fekete recalled that Jean-Claude Juncker, as President of the European Commission, could inaugurate the statue of Karl Marx from Chinese money, and in his speech he excused Marx by saying that he was not responsible for the atrocities committed by those who claimed to be his heirs and followers. He pointed out that, also in Brussels, the leader of the European Green Party could quote Lenin in the European Parliament without any repercussions and in Strasbourg, too, Communist MPs could sing the Bella Ciao without any reprisals against Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who in '89 demanded the withdrawal of Soviet troops from our region. According to the historian, it is ironic that 60-70 years later, the West, still calling itself the free world, is applying the methods of communism: blacklisted books, "hate parties" of activists organised into riot squads, brigades of screaming, self-hating minorities terrorising more and more teachers and students in Western universities, forcing them to submit to the exclusive worldview of the thought police.

Political opinion terror now has institutionalised forms in most Western universities, which means that thousands of ideological supervisors are employed to ensure politically correct behaviour and speech

– he emphasized.

We owe it to the hundreds of millions of victims to confront the crimes of communism. But we also owe it to our children, he stressed.

It is not an exaggeration to say that we Central and Eastern Europeans are alone with the memory of communism. Here in the centre and east of Europe we know two types of modern - that is, destructive – lies

– he added.

The first was the promise of communism itself, which masked its true nature with a noble vision. The other modern lie is, unfortunately, not of the past, but the reality of our present. While in the Western world Nazism was rightly consigned to the stinking dustbin of history, both morally and intellectually, the debate about communist systems and the ideological nature of communism was not closed, but was and is still a legitimate ideology.

The call for an agenda of inhumane crimes falls on deaf ears and cold indifference in Western intellectual circles

– he stated.

In his presentation he spoke about the House of Terror Museum, which he described as a historic landmark,

because little more than a decade after the fall of communism, Hungary was the first country to have a museum and memorial site that juxtaposed the two totalitarian dictatorships imposed on us between 1944 and 1989 by the occupying powers.

He also recalled the heroes of the 1956 Revolution and Freedom Fight, praised all that the "lads of Pest" had done and drew attention to the brutal crushing of the 1956 Revolution and the retaliation by the Soviets. He said that the 1956 revolution and the freedom fight had exposed the true nature of the communists and thanked the Spanish for being the only ones who had shown a willingness to help the Hungarian freedom fighters,

which the other powers of Western Europe were not willing to do.