Martinez (NI), in writing. – (FR) The real subject of the resolution I have voted in favour of is not only Auschwitz but also Dachau, Mathausen and those 23 concentration camps that give chilling and resounding echo to the nature of mankind, characterised as we are by oceans of darkness, as well as of light. Clarity and divinity were, however, what was really needed for a genuine moment of truth to emerge.

Clarity was needed, without the verbiage that covered three pages’ worth of resolution; clarity, without the mediocrity of dismissing Christendom as just one more belief system; clarity, without the indignity of forensically listing the nationalities of martyrs or, above all, of hunting for a name to describe the executioners – a process that has seen plenary carefully weighing up oral amendments that proposed ‘Nazi’ as a designation, as if the Holocaust could be reduced to a handful of ‘B’ movie villains, with no account taken of the blame attached to the tide of descendants of the Goths, Visigoths and Ostrogoths who, under the name ‘German’, have made others experience the brutality of their thoughts and vices.

Divinity, that of the breath and of the Spirit, was needed because what was really necessary here, as in the European Constitution, was reference to God, not as an object of belief but as a higher law independent of Man, who clearly has a dual mentality: part reptilian, making a Hitler out of one Austrian; and part divine, making a Mozart out of another.