by Geoff Vasil
Lithuanian president Gitanas Nausėda has joined the chorus, the other two heads of state, the prime minister and the speaker of parliament, in declaring Lithuania has zero tolerance for anti-Semitism. At the same time, the state and the nation continue to glorify, lionize and commemorate, often enthusiastically, Lithuanian Nazis who were complicit in Holocaust crimes and responsible for the death of nearly every Lithuanian Jew.
The state-funded Lithuanian Academy of Sciences has removed the Jonas Noreika plaque on its walls “for repairs” even though permission was never granted by any state or municipal body to place the plaque there. Its latest incarnation was the work of enthusiastic Lithuanian neo-Nazis. Streets, schools and squares retain the names of known Holocaust perpetrators with commemorative plaques and statues to them scattered across Lithuania.
At the same time, the ruling coalition, aka the Lithuanian Government, has engaged in rank censorship for two and a half years now, along with a complicit media and law enforcement bodies. This has created a virtual atmosphere of full-fledged fascism and conformity in the country, with straight-up propaganda de rigueur on a range of topics.
Claiming zero tolerance for anti-Semitism doesn’t work when the state finances real Holocaust revisionism and distortion and allows and encourages the public veneration of Lithuanian Nazis who mass-murdered Jews, Gypsies, Communists, Soviet POWs and ethnic Poles, among others, based on ethnicity and ideology. Claiming Lithuanian Nazis and Nazi puppets were actually Lithuanian freedom fighters is Holocaust distortion and revisionism. It is also absurd, asinine and mendacious.
It’s not incumbent on Lithuanian Jews to take a loyalty oath and swear to the veracity of Lithuanian claims Russia is using anti-Semitism as a canard. It’s up to Lithuania to form a coherent picture of history which doesn’t distort the Holocaust and stops honoring the perpetrators. It’s up to Lithuania to demonstrate its loyalty to Western values, even if the nominal leader of the West is now engaging in some sort of deep neurosis or psychosis on the international political scene. Why now? the Lithuanian activists ask. Just before a NATO meeting! The truth is, it’s not “just now,” it’s a consistent problem which has been consistently addressed for decades by a number of Jews and Lithuanians inside and out of Lithuania, including but certainly not limited to Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff, popular writer Rūta Vanagaitė, South African Litvak Grant Gochin, Lithuanian-American writer Silvia Foti, the late Joseph Melamed, survivor and researcher Dina Porat, Yiddishist Dovid Katz, anti-fascist researcher Evaldas Balčiūnas, academic Saulius Sužiedelis, filmmaker Saulius Beržinis, censored newspaper publisher Aurimas Drižius, the writers Arkadijus Vinokuras and Sergejus Kanovičius, attorney and LJC chairwoman Faina Kukliansky, Jewish partisan and Holocaust survivor Fania Brancovskaja, the brothers Markas and Emanuelis Zingeris, writer and thinker Tomas Venclova, journalists Vilius Kavaliauskas, Vytautas Bruveris and Rimvydas Valatka, and many others too numerous to mention. here. Lithuania has consistently failed to address its schizophrenic take on history.
The NATO summit meeting in Vilnius in mid-July will not grant accession to Sweden and no special status to the Ukraine, and no consensus on the wisdom of poking the nuclear bear and/or attacking the nuclear dragon, and Lithuanian prime minister Ingrida Šimonytė will not be named the next secretary-general, but it’s not the Jews who are to blame, it’s just a reversion to some semblance of common sense.
The opinions expressed are those of the author.