An Open Letter to Holocaust Scholars and Educators in the Francophone World




OPINION  |  FRANCE  |  RED-BROWN COMMISSION  |  GENOCIDE CENTER

Dear Colleagues:

Re: Conference on the Lithuanian Holocaust scheduled for this week in Vilnius

The newest Lithuanian “Double Genocide Industry” outreach to the French speaking academic world of Holocaust and World War II studies, this week’s conference in Vilnius, combines a number of truly outstanding scholars and papers with a political agenda of finding Francophone legitimization for Baltic Holocaust revisionism. The French component includes outstanding personalities from Mémorial de la Shoah, from Institut d’Histoire du Temps présent, and from the French Embassy in Lithuania. The strategy has recently evolved following a protracted collapse of US/UK/Israeli confidence in both the “Red-Brown Commission” (page)  and the “Genocide Center” (page), both of which have been extensively exposed in recent months. Participants from Lithuania include one of the Double Genocide movement’s main “attack dogs” who makes fine hay of smearing local Lithuanian truth tellers as stooges of Moscow or useful idiots, especially when attempting to discredit honest multi-sided conferences (e.g. last April’s Vilnius conference).

Will the European Commission and the Claims Conference ever see the light on how their generosity is abused by Baltic nationalist Holocaust revisionism?

See for example the Commission’s executive director’s policy, and reactions to the Genocide Center’s most recent efforts to legitimize and glorify major local Holocaust perpetrators as “national heroes”. Such efforts are invariably covered up by clever insinuation into genuine Holocaust research and education. Foreign institutions and scholars unfamiliar with the toxic admixture of Holocaust studies and education with Double Genocide politics will have been caught unaware.

It can never hurt to be aware that there are two sides to an argument, not least when a purportedly academic open conference in the EU/NATO environment fails to invite a single dissenting voice. Those in Lithuania include Evaldas BalčiūnasSaulius BerzinisRachel KostanianAndrius KulikauskasJulius Norwilla, Liudas Truska, Ruta Vanagaite, and many more.

It is a sad irony that instead of being invited to the conference, Defending History staff writer Evaldas Balčiūnas is being dragged into court yet again, in effect for his articles protesting the glorification of Holocaust perpetrators, right smack in the middle of the conference. Please see our report.

Perhaps some conference members will consider taking a break this Thursday to attend Evaldas’s hearing? It might be just as important an event in the history of discourse of the Holocaust in the democratic societies of the eastern European Union as this scripted conference which seeks to entrap, manipulate and ultimately make fools of the top Holocaust-related institutions and scholars of yet another Western country.

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