by Arkadijus Vinokuras
I read the ramblings of MP professor Arūnas Gumuliauskas, the title of which should have been “How I Love Lithuania Tortured by Her Enemies.” He writes like a professor. I say “like” because there is doubt on the quality of the text itself. Because his entire long text could be expressed in a single sentence: “Everyone who thinks otherwise is an enemy and an agent of the Kremlin.” Back in Soviet times a CP member would have written it like this” “Everyone who thinks otherwise is an enemy and an agent of Washington.”
The generalized “all” dominates in the text, probably stemming from the elementary fear of naming specific liars and agents. Because it might turn out some of these unnamed critics aren’t lying. And they aren’t any kind of agent. Hence the author would be dressed down naked in court for libel. The professor had a good command of this sort of jargon back in Soviet times, in 1987 when he defended his doctoral thesis “Activities of the Lithuanian Communist Party in Developing the Theater Arts in the Republic.” That was the same year the Lithuanian Freedom League held a meeting under the Adam Mickiewicz statue in Vilnius. Forgive me, I’m not trying to joke around, but it is seriously difficult to impossible to think about Gumuliauskas as some sort of sincere nationalist. But this is not surprising, he is, after all, a member of a party which doesn’t confess any ideology, not even basic political morality.
So sometimes the Lithuanian Peasants/Green Union pretend they’re on the left, sometimes on the right, but its members agree on one thing at least: democracy is just stage decoration which can be toyed with as one likes. So it’s also no surprise that the search for and discovery of enemies lurking around every corner is programmed into this part. Gumuliaksuas is no exception.
