Tag Archives: Double Genocide

Films, Videos, Plays (completed or in progress to 2013)


 

• Rewriting History: Reviews; 2013 USA screening tour; Facebook page; SYD site. Background of Prague Declaration, the resistance to which led to the film.

• Prosecutors help neo-Nazis target women’s rights advocates (instead of standing with the victims); see also Lina Žigelytė’s essay.

• When Double Genocide means Single Genocide (Orwell?)

• Defending Holocaust History [release date: 23 September 2013].

• Saulius Beržinis and Ona Biveinienė on the Holocaust in Jurbarkas (Yurberik).

• Alicija Žukauskaitė’s An Elegy for Honey and Tar (on the Holocaust in Lithuania).

• Daiva Čepauskaitė’s Kaunas play, Day and Night.

• Liza ruft!

• CNN documentary: completed but never aired. . .

• Assorted clips.


Major New Film About Rescuers:

• The Pit of Life and Torment, by Lilija Kopač, Danutė Selčinskaja, Algis Liutkevičius and Anatolijus Tetiušinas, based on the life story of Moyshe Kukliansky and his family.

 

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Red-Brown Commission’s Newest Layer of Obfuscation: Are Names of Members Secret?

The Lithuanian government sponsored “International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupational Regimes of Lithuania,” known for short as the “Red-Brown Commission” has recently added a new layer of obfuscation and opacity to its activities.

Its website has deleted the names of the “Members of the Commission” thereby rendering it a kind of “secret society.”

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Instead of Truth about the Holocaust – Myths about Saving Jews


O P I N I O N

by Pinchos Fridberg


Editor’s note [updated 27 January 2013]:
Pinchos Fridberg, a native and resident of Vilnius, is a Holocaust survivor. He graduated from Vilnius University in 1961 and completed his PhD in theoretical and mathematical physics in 1965 and an additional doctoral science degree in radio physics in 1974. From 1961 to 1978 he was chair of the Laboratory of Theoretical Investigations at the Vilnius Scientific Institute of Radio Measuring Devices. In 1978 he joined Grodno State University, where he was named professor. In 1989 he became head of the Department of Theoretical Radio Physics at the Zondas Company in Vilnius.

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EU/NATO Ally Honors Holocaust Collaborator; Lithuanian Jewish Community Issues Protest; 3 US Congressmen Write to Prime Minister

Remains of 1941 fascist leader met by honor guard at Vilnius Airport on 17 May 2012 and reburied in Kaunas’s Church of the Resurrection on the 20th, as city’s mayor dismisses criticism.

Office of the prime minister, who signed off on government funding (€8,700 / US $11,000)defends reburial & honors of the 1941 Nazi puppet “prime minister” who personally signed the protocols confirming Nazi orders for (1) “all means” against Jews (but avoiding executions in public); (2)  setting up a concentration camp for Lithuanian Jews [euphemism for the carnage underway at the Seventh Fort]; (3) all Kaunas Jews to be herded into a ghetto within 4 weeks (English here).

SEE ALSO:

Collaborators Glorified section

Previous sanitization program

Archbishop  who praised  the wartime collaborator then officiated at the reburial, which was attended (and praised) by MEP V. Landsbergis and former president Valdas Adamkus. The Lithuanian Army Orchestra provided the music.

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Coverage:  DH I, II; Ofer Aderet in Haaretz IIIIIIIV & V; Arutz 7BBC  News  Europe; Jewish Chronicle (London) I, II15min.Lt/BNS; Baltic CourseEuropean Jewish Press, IIRzeczpospolitaNewsweek PolandWprost.  Vilhjálmur Örn Vilhjálmsson on first Kaunas conferenceGeoff Vasil on 2nd Kaunas conference.  Edward Lucas on the Economist blog and in EuropeanVoice.comMore here.
Protests: PetitionJewish Community of Lithuania & Vilna Gaon Museum [not on museum's website] ◊ Lithuanian MPs V.P. Andriukaitis and A. SysasMP Andriukaitis takes on the foreign minister in parliamentB’nai B’rith International (Washington DC) ◊ European Jewish Parliament ◊ Milan Chersonski in DH.Com ◊ DH ◊ MEP Leonidas Donskis ◊ Dovid Katz ◊ Michael and Fausta Maass (ICEJ) ◊ Regnum.ruFederation of Russian Jews ◊ Darius Udrys in VilNews.ComVilhjálmur Örn VilhjálmssonGeoff Vasil in DH ◊ Efraim Zuroff in the Jerusalem PostWiesenthal Center (LA)Post-facto public letter ◊ 3 US Congressmen Write to PM.
Wobbles, teeters and set-ups:  Yale professor answers The Question, in VilniusHe and NY Yivo director are feted in Vilnius the same week, some say, to deflect attention; their symposium fails to mention the concurrent state-sponsored events to honor collaborator. An open letter.
Whitewash and glorification: Prime Minister; MEP Landsbergis I, IIformer President AdamkusForeign Minister; Culture Minister; Parliament’s PR office; Archbishop; Kaunas history professor (original); the “liberal” Bernardinai.lt, & II; Mayor of Kaunas; VilNews.com editor-in-chief; “Documentary”;  Far-rightist J. Panka in the Jewish Chronicle; open letter from 61 academicsVideo promo for “documentary film”. Stage 2 of the earlier attempt by A. Liekis at LAF-PG state glorification?
Deflection: Elite (international) symposium on the Lithuanian Holocaust, in Vilnius the same week, centered on “Bloodlands” and with no menti0n of the concurrent reburial ceremonies underway. Open letter in reply. One of the symposium’s participants went on (domestically) to trumpet the “drama of Lithuanian history” inherent for him in reburying a major Nazi collaborator, accusing “the Jews” of intimidating his university’s administrators “with a club”; but when it was all over, he went on to become John Hancock no. 1 of the “post-facto letter”
Debates:  MP Vytenis Andriukaitis vs. Foreign Minister Audronius Ažubalis on the floor of the Lithuanian parliament; Aage Myhre and Darius Udrys in VilNews. Dovid Katz replied to Edward Lucas.
More  coverage here and here.
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ABOVE: On the watch of the 1941 Nazi puppet “prime minister” Juozas Ambrazevičius (later Brazaitis): Local white-armbanders loyal to the “provisional government” surround Jewish residents (mostly women) in Kaunas on the march from their homes to humiliation and mass murder.

BELOW: Signature of Juozas Ambrazevičius (Brazaitis) on the 7 July 1941 protocol [English translation here]. The text includes: “By German order a ghetto for Jews will be established in Vilijampolė, to which all the Jews of the city of Kaunas must be moved within 4 weeks.”

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Heavily guarded Kovno Ghetto gate isolating the tens of thousands of the city’s citizens who were Jewish for incarceration, slave labor, humiliation and genocide. Provisional Government confirmation of the German order for the ghetto was signed by the puppet prime minister.

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This compromises Lithuania in the eyes of the world

— Dr. Shimon Alperovich, chairperson of the Jewish Community of Lithuania
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Vilnius’s Choral Synagogue was defaced on May 18th 2012. Milan Chersonski commented to Haaretz: “This was the unofficial supplementary program to honor the Nazi collaborator. If great eminences like the former heads of state Vytautas Landsbergis and Valdas Adamkus are parties to the honoring of a Holocaust collaborator, then hooligans in town feel able to make their own contribution too with a can of paint thrown at the synagogue. In their own way, they all have thrown paint in the faces of the small surviving Jewish community in the country.”  Police have made no arrests. PHOTO: MILAN CHERSONSKI.
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QUESTION: Will Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas maintain the deeply offensive lecture hall  name honoring the Nazi puppet prime minister who signed the protocols confirming Nazi orders for that very city’s Jews to be put in a concentration camp and ghetto? Are these the values being instilled in students at one of the best universities in the Baltics?

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DefendingHistory.com comments:

“Lithuania has her magnificent real heroes of 1941: the inspirational people who saved an innocent neighbor from the LAF and Provisional Government’s reign of genocide, starting with the war’s first week. They are that year’s heroes of history who should be honored. May their families live to see streets and squares named for them.”

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Seventy Years Declaration: Summary Coverage to 1 November 2012


The Seventy Years Declaration

Solemnly commemorates the Holocaust and reaffirms human rights of all people. Opposes the Prague Declaration and ‘Double Genocide’ politics. Rejects glorification of the Waffen SS of Estonia and Latvia and the Lithuanian Activist Front (LAF).

Lithuania’s foreign minister’s “moustache response” came within minutes of SYD’s release.

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TEXT AND LIST OF FOUNDING SIGNATORIES

PRESENTED TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT

UPDATE: DOCUMENTARY FILM RELEASED

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Tel Aviv’s Leivick House Releases 2009 Video of Ambassador Chen Ivri Apter

Israel’s Ambassador Chen Ivri Apter presenting Dr. Rachel Margolis with a certificate of merit at Leivick House in Tel Aviv. Dr. Margolis is seen wearing the medals won for her bravery fighting against the Nazis in the forests of Lithuania during the Holocaust. Her entire family perished.

Leivick House, one of Israel’s (and the world’s) last Yiddish-in-Yiddish cultural institutions, has released a video clip of the June 2009 visit to its Dov Hoz Street headquarters in central Tel Aviv by Israel’s then ambassador to Latvia and Lithuania, the late Chen Ivri Apter, at an event to honor Dr. Rachel Margolis. It is posted on YouTube (partial English translation here). The event itself was reported in DefendingHistory and the Leivick House website, among other venues.

Dr. Margolis, due to celebrate her 91st birthday next week, is a Vilna Ghetto survivor and anti-Nazi resistance hero who has been targeted by Lithuanian prosecutors, in effect according to some for “the crime of surviving.” Tributes to Dr. Margolis have come from around the world, including former UK prime minister Gordon Brown in 2011.

Ambassador Ivri Apter died last month at the age of 54 after a long battle with cancer that friends always said he never allowed to cloud his love of life and the day ahead.

His short speech at Leivick House is thought likely to go down in history for its courage and forthrightness at a time when his nation’s foreign policy was noticeably starting to tilt in a contrary direction.

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Lithuanian Foreign Ministry Planning to (Ab)use EU Presidency to Push Red-Brown Politics

In spite of the repeated visible damage to Lithuania’s standing emanating from previous attempts, the country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has now announced that red-brown politics in the service of Double Genocide would be one of the goals of its upcoming stint in the rotating presidency of the European Union.

There was diplomatic blood on the floor following the foreign ministry’s failed attempt to insinuate Double Genocide into the Stockholm Program in 2010 (reports here, here, and here).

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Baltic “Double Genocide” Discourse Slips into Naive American Jewish Articles on Lithuania


O P I N I O N

by Dovid Katz

Can history be bought up by even a small state’s nationalist government that has talked itself into the idea that revision of history and wide acceptance of that revision is somehow a national cause? It becomes a serious issue when that state is willing to invest heavily in the enterprise, at a time when the targeted influential foreigners are far from the issues at hand and easily manipulated.

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Lithuania Tries to Whitewash its Role in the Holocaust


O P I N I O N

by Olga Zabludoff

Note: The following letter to the editor appeared in today’s Baltimore Sun.  It is republished here by permission of the author. [Update of 2 May 2012: The editor of VilNews, in a 29 April article, said of the letter's author: "In this case, she goes too far." This in turn elicited a response from the editor of DefendingHistory on 1 May.]


 

In response to Ellen Cassedy’s “We are here” (April 18), I offer a second opinion.

Can there be hope for a country that claimed the highest percentage of Jewish deaths in all of Europe? More than 95 percent of Lithuania’s Jews were annihilated — most of them murdered by Lithuanian collaborators who began the frenzied executions of their Jewish neighbors even before the Germans had marched into Lithuania. Yes, there can be hope — if lessons are learned from their past and if the truth is faced by this nation which is now an EU/NATO democracy.

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The Red-Brown Commission in Vilnius and Its Role in the Double Genocide Campaign in Europe

Selection of Documents on the Role of the “International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithuania” (“The Red-Brown Commission”) in the Double Genocide Campaign in Europe

 





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Joe Melamed, Head of Association of Lithuanian Jews in Israel, calls on ‘Real Litvaks’ to Stay Away from Tel Aviv ‘Gala Sham’ on March 5th

Developments have started moving quickly in the ill-starred project to host the current foreign minister of Lithuania as “guest of honor” at a Tel Aviv “gala” at the Dan Panorama Hotel on March 5th.

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Lithuanian Foreign Ministry’s ‘Dual Track Jewish Politics’: At Home & Abroad

AT HOME. . .

♦ Foreign Minister’s remarks on Jewish conspiracies

An emergency Jewish Community board meeting with twenty-one members in attendance agrees unanimously on a letter of protest to the president of Lithuania; report

♦ Says moustache length is the one difference between Hitler & Stalin and calls eight parliamentarians ‘pathetic’ for signing the Seventy Years Declaration on the anniversary of the Wannsee ‘Final Solution’ conference

♦ Responses from Social Democratic MP Andiukaitis; Milan Chersonski; Roger Cohen in the New York Times; DefendingHistory.com; Adar Primor in Haaretz

♦ Leads Double Genocide moves

♦ Ministry hosts attack on Jewish anti-Nazi partisans

♦ When there’s no Jewish audience, the peoples of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania are Lithuanians, Poles, Belarusians. . .

♦ But the Ministry’s website professes endless love for Jews and Jewish culture

& ABROAD. . .

♦ Washington DC PR campaign

♦ Vassal ‘King of Litvaks’ anointed

♦ DC embassy’s ‘Sunflowers’

♦ Response

♦ Tel Aviv embassy’s ‘IsraeLita’

♦ Ambassador defends pro-Nazi ‘partisan’, misinforms about harassment of Jewish survivors who joined the anti-Nazi resistance

♦ Gala event to honor the foreign minister of Lithuania

♦ NY consulate awards Zimroth the ‘Millennium Star’

♦ Consulate attempts political takeover of Yivo

♦Response


♦ London embassy’s ‘Graywash’

♦ Response I

♦ Response II

♦ But former foreign minister, now EU ambassador to Afghanistan, tells WSJ that Nazi rule was a ‘respite from the communists’

♦ Wiesenthal Center’s responses I and II; the debate; German parliamentarians’ response

 

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The Seventy Years Declaration


The Seventy Years Declaration

on the Anniversary of the Final Solution Conference at Wannsee


 

On this the 70th anniversary of the formal adoption by the Nazi leadership of the “Final Solution of the Jewish Problem” we the undersigned

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The Seventy Years Declaration


O P I N I O N

by Danny Ben-Moshe

This comment appeared today in the Jerusalem Post and is republished here with the author’s permission.

 

On January 20, 1942, the Nazi leadership gathered in a villa on the outskirts of Berlin and adopted the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.” The Wannsee Conference, as this became known, from the suburb where the meeting was held, formalized the process that exterminated so much of European Jewry.

As we mark the seventieth anniversary of that 90-minute meeting in which fifteen people condemned millions to death, there are many crucial lessons to learn from the Holocaust. I wish to highlight two.

Firstly, the killing of a people begins not with violence, but through race-based hatred, progressing to institutionalized discrimination and only then culminating in murder. This is why antisemitism, racism and institutionalized discrimination must be addressed, for if left to fester the consequences can be tragic, severe and widespread.

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How the Zingeris-Račinskas Red-Brown Commission “Gently” Pushed Along the Conversion of Holocaust Studies into Double Genocide Studies


O P I N I O N

by Rachel Croucher (Melbourne)

Although not seeking to deny the Holocaust, the ultimate consequence of the movement to redefine genocide is the equalization of National Socialist and Soviet crimes. The characterization of Soviet crimes as genocide is a misrepresentation that hinders authentic remembrance of the Holocaust in Lithuania by helping to obscure the extent and nature of Lithuanian complicity in the killings of the local Jewish population.

The idea that the crimes of Hitler and successive Soviet regimes are in fact equal has been a growing force behind public discourse on the Holocaust since the formulation of the national Holocaust and Genocide Education Program at the sixth meeting of The International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithuania in June 2002.

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Lithuania Cannot Appease Both World Jewry and Far-Right Extremists

 


O P I N I O N

by Olga Zabludoff

 

I commend Didier Bertin’s knowledgeable and sensitive observations in his article “Lithuania and the Memory of the Holocaust.” My comments here are more in the form of a PS to Mr. Bertin’s words. My take-off point is his reference to the term “Double Genocide,” a government-endorsed concept that has been bandied about in Lithuanian political circles in recent times. But more about this later. Mr. Bertin borrows the term for application in a different dual context: the original genocide of the Jewish people and the current movement on the part of the Lithuanian government to neutralize if not to obliterate the remembrance of the Holocaust.

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A Strange Hearing at the European Parliament, and a Big Fish called Montero


E Y E W I T N E S S  R E P O R T  /  O P I N I O N

by Dovid Katz

Today’s “EPP Hearing on the Commission’s Report: The Memory of the Crimes Committed by Totalitarian Regimes in Europe” at the European Parliament in Brussels was a polished and triumphal affair that has reconfirmed — if reconfirmation is necessary — how right MEP Edward McMillan-Scott was in 2009 when he refused to accede to his then party, the British Conservatives, entering the political European Parliament tent of the far-right ECR (European Conservatives and Reformists), when the latter chose as leader a politician with a record of antisemitism and Holocaust Obfuscation, one for whom “Jewish apologies for communism” was a condition for recognition of the facts of the Holocaust.

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Professor Konrad Kwiet Quits the Lithuanian Government’s ‘Red-Brown Commission’

The Holocaust Obfuscation movement suffered a severe blow today with the public resignation from the Lithuanian government’s red-brown commission of Professor Konrad Kwiet, a major international scholar of the Lithuanian Holocaust. The resignation had been announced verbally at the recent ’Aftermath’ conference held in Melbourne at the Australian Centre for the Study of Jewish Civilisation.

Professor Konrad Kwiet (right) makes a point to Dovid Katz at the June 2011 Aftermath conference at Monash University in Melbourne. Photo: Ariella Leski.

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Litvaks and their Descendants Issue Public Letter Calling for Change in Lithuanian Government’s Holocaust Policies

 


Text of the public letter follows. Queries may be sent to Professor Danny Ben-Moshe at: Danny.Ben-Moshe@vu.edu.au.  UPDATES: Covered by JTA and the Jewish Chronicle.


We the undersigned Litvaks — Jews of Lithuanian origin and their direct and immediate descendants — hereby express:

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DefendingHistory.com announces Media Chronicle of Opposition to the 2008 ‘Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism’

DefendingHistory.com has announced the free availability of a frequently updated resource page that provides links for select major expressions of opposition to the 2008 Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism.  The page is available here or by visiting:

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‘Prague Process’ Crowd, with Lithuanian Jewish politician for cover (as usual), now proceeding with plans to ‘overhaul European history textbooks’ for Double Genocide and Holocaust Obfuscation

The Prague Declaration proponents in European Parliamentary circles, having renamed their movement the ‘Prague Process’, are triumphantly reporting on their latest initiative to bring to fruition yet another of the movement’s stated objectives: to overhaul all the history textbooks in Europe to reflect the supposed ‘equality’ of Nazi and Soviet crimes, in other words to continue with the far right’s revision-of-history project to downgrade the Holocaust in the course of Double Genocide ideology.

As ever, the group is able at critical moments to wheel out Lithuania’s right-wing Jewish MP, Emanuelis Zingeris, himself a signatory of the Prague Declaration, who publicly resigned from his country’s Jewish community many years ago, but continues to run the ‘Jewish track’ of a complicated double-game policy that has led, in 2011, to the absurdity of a year to remember the Holocaust as well as a year to commemorate some of its local perpetrators who are glorified as ‘anti-Soviet heroes’ (see here, here and here).

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Condemnation of Communism Does Not Require Submission to Double Genocide, Holocaust Obfuscation, or the Recent Deterioration in Civil Society and Free Speech in Lithuania




O P I N I O N

by Dovid Katz

NOTE: This reply to the Lithuanian Foreign Policy Review paper by Rokas Grajauskas first appeared on the website of LFPR (direct link here).

Rokas Grajauskas cites me in his recent article on these pages as invoking the notion Holocaust Obfuscation (a term I proposed at a London seminar in February 2008, then formally in 2009) to refer to “the efforts of the post-Communist countries to revive the memory of Stalin’s crimes”. Nothing could be further from the truth. My own website, DefendingHistory.com, although dedicated primarily to the battle against trivialization of the Holocaust and the concomitant racism and antisemitism of the new Far Right in Eastern Europe, contains a page on Soviet crimes, where I wholeheartedly embrace such Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly resolutions as 1096 (1996) and 1481 (2006), which wisely and rightly condemn Soviet crimes. It is vital that the full extent of these crimes be documented, the victims honored, the subject properly taught in international curricula, museums and memorializing institutions established, and justice pursued to the full extent of law. It is every bit as vital that Western commitment to Baltic security and independence remain unwavering, what with a huge unpredictable neighbor “with a certain past” (and unclear future) situated to the immediate east.

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Six Countries Try to ‘Slip in’ Double Genocide in the ‘Stockholm Programme’; European Commission says ‘No’

Lithuania’s Foreign Ministry had announced on 14 December 2010 that it was the initiator of a new demand from six East European countries ― Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania  — to Viviane Reding, European Commissioner for Justice, Fundamental Rights and Citizenship, that Double Genocide sentiments, and support for effective  criminalization of  the view that the Holocaust was a unique genocide, be incorporated in the new Stockholm Programme before the end of 2010. Less than a week earlier, Lithuania’s president took the same demand with her to a meeting in Brussels.

The Road from Prague to Stockholm (via Vilnius?)

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Opposition to the 2008 ‘Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism’

This page has moved here. Thank you.

NEW URL:

http://holocaustinthebaltics.com/prague-declaration/opposition

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Prague Declaration

Manifesto of the ‘Double Genocide’ and Holocaust Obfuscation movement

See also: Opposition to the Prague Declaration; Proposal for replacement; Statement on Soviet Crimes; The Seventy Years Declaration (+ Section).

The ‘Prague Declaration’ and its preceding and derivative European resolutions are based on ‘Double Genocide’: the proposed ‘equivalence’ of Nazi and Soviet crimes as revisionist history for the European Union. The theoretical constructs for the Double Genocide movement were developed by a number of historians in Eastern Europe, who have themselves on occasion been taken to task by courageous Lithuanian scholars who have exposed these works for what they are (see e.g. the classic review by V. Brandišauskas now available in English translation). Some of the bold dissenting voices from Lithuania are credited on this site’s Bold Citizens page.

The ‘Prague Declaration’ includes the following demands of the European Union:

‘recognize Communism and Nazism as a common legacy’

‘recognition that many crimes committed in the name of Communism should be assessed as crimes against humanity serving as a warning for future generations, in the same way Nazi crimes were assessed by the Nuremberg Tribunal’

‘ensuring the principle of equal treatment and non-discrimination of victims of all the totalitarian regimes’

‘a day of remembrance of the victims of both Nazi and Communist totalitarian regimes’

‘adjustment and overhaul of European history textbooks so that children could learn and be warned about Communism and its crimes in the same way as they have been taught to assess the Nazi crimes’

Chronological Outline of Developments (selection only)

Demands that the ‘Lithuanian suggestion to evaluate as equal crimes of Nazism and Stalinism’ be taken up by all EU countries (30 November 2007).

The precursor conference on ‘United Europe, United History’ in Tallinn (22 January 2008). 23 Jan. BNS report on the event, from the website of an Estonian MEP active in the movement (report now removed).

The ‘Prague Declaration’ (3 June 2008) at its own site [update of January 2012: declaration removed from this site which was reassigned to another Prague Declaration; see here for full original text; see here for a 2010 page capture of the original site); alternate link.

The 'Prague Declaration' on the website of the 'International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithuania'; in Lithuanian.

Lithuanian ambassador to the United States formulates the red-equals-brown position in a letter to an American Jewish newspaper (11 July 2008).

Over four hundred MEPs sign a declaration supporting the Europe-wide establishment of August 23rd as a 'European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism' (23 Sept 2008).

President of Lithuania predicts that Europe will 'equally' condemn Nazi and Soviet crimes (24 Nov 2008).

The European Parliament resolution (2 April 2009) recommends a single mixed 'Europe-wide Day of Remembrance for the victims of all totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, to be commemorated with dignity and impartiality' [item 15]. Alternate link.

Incumbent chairman of the European Parliament thanks the Baltic states for educating the West via the red-brown resolutions (28 April 2009).

Elements of the ‘Prague Declaration’ (ambiguous ‘double genocide language’) inserted into the OSCE’s ‘Vilnius Declaration’ of 3 July 2009 [see p. 48, points 3 and 10].

Elements of the ‘Prague Declaration’ presented to the European Parliament session of 14 October 2009 (BNS report of 13 October 2009).

Proposal in Brussels at a European Parliament conference by the director of the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, Czech Republic (14 October 2009). The speaker of the Lithuanian parliament insisted that Europe adopt ‘a single view on the crimes of totalitarian regimes’.

Lithuania’s major news portal Delfi.lt  attacks Israel’s president Shimon Peres for differentiating Nazi and Soviet crimes, providing this graphic (14 November 2009).

The spirit of the Prague Declaration is inserted into the ‘Stockholm Programme 2010-2014′ with a provision on ‘equality’ of totalitarian regimes (report of 8 Dec 2009).

Attempted academic justification for the Prague Declaration by Rokas Grajauskas in Lithuanian Foreign Policy Review, 2010 (2): ‘Is there a chance for a common European culture of remembrance?’

After the EU’s Dec 2010 repudiation of attempts to insinuate Double Genocide in the Stockholm Programme, the Prague Declaration movement regroups in 2011 under the banner of: The Prague Process, announcing plans for 29 March 2011 meeting and funding under the ‘Europe for Citizens’ program, as well as plans to (abuse) the Hungarian and Polish presidencies of the EU for the red-equals-brown movement.

In 2012, the Lithuanian foreign ministry announces that pursuing in the EU the proposed unification of European history in a red=brown framework would be one of the formal goals of Lithuania’s 2013 rotating presidency of the EU.

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I’m Suffocating


O P I N I O N

by Tomas Venclova

This authorized translation of the Lithuania original which appeared today in Bernardinai.lt was prepared by Geoff Vasil for HolocaustInTheBaltics.com [= DefendingHistory.com] and approved by the author. The section on current Lithuanian Jewish issues is here.


Tomas Venclova

423 years before Christ’s birth, Aristophanes’ comedy The Clouds was performed in Athens during the festival at the Great Dionysia. It only won third place, Cratinus’ comedy The Bottle (about the dramatist’s own battle with alcohol) taking first place, and Ameipsias’ play, about which we know almost nothing, placing second. These other comedies haven’t survived, but we are still reading The Clouds today. In terms of literature, this is probably Aristophanes’ greatest work, with a superb poetic chorus—and it’s undeniably funny.

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Prague’s Declaration of Disgrace. A European attempt to equate Communism with Nazism will falsify history.


O P I N I O N
by Dovid Katz
Reprinted from the Jewish Chronicle (London), 21 May 2009


Not many have heard about the Prague Declaration, which is currently making the rounds at the European Parliament. Proclaimed last June in Prague (but cooked up in the Baltics), its innocuous theme is “European Conscience and Communism”. Now who would oppose that? The heinous crimes of Communist regimes clearly merit full exposure. Victims deserve recognition. When the grand jamboree of freedom, fun and prosperity got under way for us lucky westerners in 1945, entire nations ceded to Stalin were condemned to totalitarian rule.

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Concept Inflation and the Criminalization of Debate


O P I N I O N

by Leonidas Donskis

This English version of the essay (the original Lithuanian text appeared in Lietuvos aidas, 28 November 2008) first appeared in the English edition of Jerusalem of Lithuania (Oct-Dec 2008, PDF here) and is republished here with the editor’s permission.


 

I have already written that we live in a period of not only monetary inflation, but of concept and value inflation as well. In our time oaths have become worthless, while formerly a person who broke one lost not only all of his own power, but the capacity to represent his values and to participate in the public sphere as well. Nothing, other than his own person and his private life, remained. He no longer had the right to speak on behalf of either his group, his nation, or his society.

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Posted in Antisemitism & Bias, Democracy, Double Genocide, History, Human Rights, Leonidas Donskis, News, Opinion, Politics of Memory | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off