OPINION | FREE SPEECH AND DEMOCRACY | MEDIA WATCH | COLLABORATORS GLORIFIED
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by Andrius Kulikauskas
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Editor’s note: The following Letter to Colleagues shared by Dr. Kulikauskas is followed by his own follow-up letter in Lithuanian to the office to which he was directed.
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A colleague alerts us to the following anonymous presentation by the Lithuanian National Defense Ministry’s Strategic Communications Department and Public Relations’ Planning and Analysis Division on “The War for Hearts and Minds”, “Karas dėl širdžių ir protų”
This Department
There is also Strategic Communications Department in the Army, but that’s not the relevant one, it turns out. On page 43 (as PDF) of the the Lithuanian National Defense Ministry’s Strategic Communications Department and Public Relations’ Planning and Analysis Division publication The War for Hearts and Minds you will see that they use a photo of Evaldas Balčiūnas taken from Defending History.
Apparently, they are illustrating an argument made on November 2, 2015 by Vytautas Landsbergis that an article by Valatka about Noreika was plagiarized from Evaldas. Prof. Landsbergis also makes arguments that Pakalniškis’s testimony about Noreika’s lacks credibility.
What is curious is that apparently this presentation was reported to have been given by (then) Department Head Tomas Čeponis and historian Karolis Zikaras of the Planning and Analysis Division in Tauragė on October 15, 2015, which means that Prof. Landsbergis based his article on it, without attribution.
And on October 29, 2015, the Genocide Center’s certificate regarding Noreika came out. A specialist in the Department told me to write to info@mil.lt and to vis@kam.lt I include my letter below, in Lithuanian.