DOUBLE GENOCIDE | EU | PRAGUE PLATFORM | PRAGUE DECLARATION | THE SEVENTY YEARS DECLARATION
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OPINION
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Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial
New Brussels Monument (‘An Echo in Time’): A Ruse to Bring Double Genocide Holocaust Revisionism to the Gates of the European Parliament?
Posted in Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, EU, History, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Politics of Memory, Prague "Platform"
Tagged An Echo in Time Brussels monument, Double Genocide, Red=Brown politics
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The Prague Declaration and the Double Genocide Theory
PRAGUE DECLARATION | DOUBLE GENOCIDE | HISTORY | LITHUANIA
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OPINION
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by Roland Binet (De Panne, Belgium)
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In his book Crisis, War and the Holocaust in Lithuania, which I recently reviewed on these pages, historian Saulius Sužiedėlis virulently attacked those who in the past had opposed the Prague Declaration of 2008. When I read the list of signatories to the Prague Declaration signed in 2008, it makes me think of prisoners or detainees becoming free after having spent 45 years between four closed walls.
Getting free in the outside world and knowing next to nothing that has happened in the world at large during their detention. Most of these signatories, people of esteem, some of them heroes in their fight against Communist yoke, have suffered greatly and they yearn for recognition as victims of totalitarian crimes. But the only tangible contemporary phenomenon with some kind of kindred inhuman similitude they want to equate it with is — the Holocaust. So, oblivious to the manifold scourges the twentieth century has known worldwide, they signed on to the conclusion that “both the Nazi and Communist totalitarian regimes should be considered to be the main disasters, which blighted the 20th century” and “recognition of Communism as an integral and common part of Europe’s common history.” The declaration contains the word “same” five times, in support of the declaration’s underlying thesis that Nazi and Soviet crimes are absolutely — the same.
Is it possible to be so self-centered on one’s suffering as to become blind to history?
Posted in Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, History, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, Prague "Platform", Roland Binet
Tagged Double Genocide, Prague Declaration (2008), Roland Binet
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Claims Conference Should Think Again Before Inadvertently Legitimizing East European Far-Right Holocaust Revisionism
OPINION | THE RED-BROWN COMMISSION | FANIA YOCHELES BRANTSOVSKY | YITZHAK ARAD | DOUBLE GENOCIDE | LITHUANIA | LITVAK AFFAIRS
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OPINION
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VILNIUS—Everybody makes mistakes, even august, storied and splendid international organizations. As in personal affairs, so in conference rooms, the secret is in the ability to say so and make a change, remembering the adage attributed to Mark Twain, along the lines of it being much easier to fool a person than to get them to admit they have been fooled.
The Claims Conference (Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany) has just allowed its vaunted name and logo to appear on the publicity for events in Palanga and Plunge, Lithuania organized by one of the major engines of East European Holocaust revisionism. That entity is the state-sponsored “International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupational Regimes,” which local diplomats have long dubbed for short “the Red-Brown Commission” starting in 2008 when the Commission reacted with utter silence to prosecutors’ launching of absurd and cruel kangaroo pretrial war crimes investigations into two of Vilnius’s most beloved Holocaust survivors, Dr. Rachel Margolis (1921-2015) and Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky (1922-2024). Please skim through the saga.
Posted in "Red-Brown Commission", Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky (Fania Brancovskaja): 1922-2024, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Opinion
Tagged Clemens Heni, Danny Ben-Moshe, Dov Levin, Efraim Zuroff, Holocaust in Lithuania, Holocaust Studies, International Commission for the Evaluation, Joseph Melamed, Marc Radomsky, Red-Brown Commission, Ronaldas Racinskas, Yehuda Bauer
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Antisemitism, Holocaust Revisionism, and Anti-Israelism in Modern Lithuania
OPINION | ANTISEMITISM | HOLOCAUST REVISIONISM | LITHUANIAN JEWISH LIFE
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by Arkady Kurliandchik
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Reflecting on the current situation in Lithuania, where open antisemites do not hesitate to reveal themselves as such, I am trying to understand the origins of such behavior.
According to some historians, approximately 20,000 people in Lithuania actively participated in the extermination of Jews during World War II. And those who did not personally engage in the killings but considered such extermination to be just and commendable numbered in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions.
Antisemitic propaganda did not originate in Germany, but before the war, it became particularly sophisticated there. Jews were portrayed as insects that needed to be exterminated. And then this initiative was adopted and further developed in Lithuania.
Viewpoint of a Jewish citizen in today’s Vilnius
Posted in Antisemitism & Bias, Arkady Kurliandchik, Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Žemaitaitis Affair
Tagged Anti-Israelism in Lithuania, Antisemitism in Lithuania, Arkady Kurliandchik, Holocaust in Lithuania, Holocaust Revisionism (Lithuania)
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Ukraine Needs the Vilnius Red-Brown Commission’s ‘Help’ Like a Hole in the Head
OPINION | RED-BROWN COMMISSION: PAGE AND SECTION
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by Dovid Katz
The sacred cause of democratic Ukraine’s success and brutal dictator Putin’s failure must not be comprised by attempted hijacks by far-right Holocaust revisionists who have worked for decades to rewrite the history into “two equal Holocausts” (“Double Genocide”), an insidious form of revisionism whose first corollary is glorification of local Holocaust collaborators and perpetrators (whether Noreika in Lithuania or Bandera in Ukraine, among numerous others). It is alarming to read this week (on the website of the Lithuanian Foreign Ministry) that Lithuania’s state-sponsored “Commission for the Evaluation of Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupational Regimes in Lithuania” (for short: “the Red-Brown Commission”), the cause of so much pain to the last Holocaust survivors and the remnants of Lithuanian Jewry, is now interloping in Kyiv, attempting to insinuate Double Genocide Holocaust revisionism right into the current noble struggle of the free states of NATO and the European Union to ensure the future of free and democratic Ukraine. Resignations over the years from the “Red-Brown Commission” (all on matters of principle) include Sir Martin Gilbert, Professor Konrad Kwiet and Professor Dov Levin.
Posted in "Red-Brown Commission", Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, History, Lithuania, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory
Tagged Clemens Heni, Commission on Nazi and Soviet Crimes, International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes, Leonidas Donskis, Michael Shafir, Red-Brown Commission, Ronaldas Racinskas, Simon Butt, Sir MartinGilbert, Ukraine & Holocaust history, Vytenis Andriukaitis, Yehuda Bauer
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Rwandan Genocide Remembrance Deserves Better than Being Lassoed into Baltic Holocaust Obfuscation Politics
OPINION | VILNIUS’S GENOCIDE CENTER | VILNIUS’S GENOCIDE MUSEUM | TUSKULĖNAI PEACE PARK | GLORIFYING COLLABORATORS | DOUBLE GENOCIDE | EVENTS
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by Dovid Katz
Published reports today provided details and images of the solemn, significant, and meaningful April 24th commemoration ceremony remembering the victims of the Rwanda Genocide of the Tutsi. The commemoration event was organized by a partnership that included Vilnius’s Genocide Center and the Embassy of Rwanda. Among the participants was the ambassador of Rwanda, HE Olivier J.P. Nduhungirehe, resident in the Hague, whose remit includes also Lithuania.
The Defending History community avidly supports remembrance of the Rwandan Genocide, and all genocides.
The problem here in Vilnius is that such events are often subtly (or not so subtly) part of a program to legitimize and cover up for systematic and institutional downgrade, relativization and obfuscation of the Holocaust — the genocide that happened “right here” and resulted in the massacre of around 96% of Lithuanian Jewry, one of the highest rates in Europe. Even more painfully, the same efforts usually extend to the (ab)use of vast budgets and corralled academic knowhow to find ways and means to perpetuate state-sponsored glorification of actual Holocaust collaborators and perpetrators, or, in the more public arena, to invest fortunes in Judaic, Yiddish and (indeed) Holocaust events to cover up for, and deflect from the same.
Posted in "Tuskulėnai Peace Park", Collaborators Glorified, Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, Dovid Katz, Events, News & Views, Opinion, Vilnius's Genocide Center and the Genocide Museum it Manages
Tagged Arunas Bubnys, Genocide Center Vilnius, Genocide Museum Vilnius, Genocide of Tutsis, Olivier J.P. Nduhungirehe, Rwanda Genocide + Lithuania, Rwandan Genocide, Tuekulenai Peace Park, Tuskulėnų rimties parko memorialinis kompleksas
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Painfully, Yad Vashem Heads for Vilnius Event, Again ‘Legitimizing’ the ‘Red-Brown Commission’, an Engine of Holocaust Revisionism
OPINION | RED-BROWN COMMISSION (SECTION) | DOUBLE GENOCIDE | LITVAK AFFAIRS | LITHUANIA | YAD VASHEM & LITHUANIA | ISRAEL ISSUES (SECTION)
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Prof. Dina Porat of Yad Vashem will chair the Vilnius event on the Vilna Ghetto this Wednesday 20 Sept. featuring (among others) Ronaldas Račinskas and other officials of the state-funded “Red-Brown Commission” — one of Europe’s major engines of Double Genocide revisionism and the Prague Declaration.
VILNIUS—As long as Lithuanian Holocaust survivors were alive, they protested with their last breath against the motives and agenda of the Lithuanian government financed Red-Brown Commission (officially known, à la Orwell, as the “International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupational Regimes of Lithuania” or ICECNSORL). Readers can visit a page documenting these protests from 1998 onward, reports of the painful episodes and sagas over the decades, and perhaps most painfully, the heartfelt begging by the last survivors, asking Yad Vashem to resist Foreign Ministry pressure and have nothing to do with the commission. Perhaps the best known document is the September 2012 letter to Yad Vashem by the late Joseph Melamed, legendary chairperson of the Association of Lithuanian Jews in Israel, the world’s leading and last organization of Lithuanian Holocaust survivors.
UPDATE OF 22 SEPT 2023:
See now Yad Vashem chairman Dani Dayan’s dramatic and historic speech at the Lithuanian Parliament that turns a new leaf in the pained Lithuanian chapter
Continue reading
Posted in "Red-Brown Commission", Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, Israel, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Mažvydas National Library (Issues Arising), News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, September 23rd Commemorations, Yad Vashem and Lithuania
Tagged Dina Porat, International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of Nazi and Soviet Regimes, Ronaldas Racinskas, Yad Vashem and Lithuania
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For Vilnius’s 700 Year Celebrations, Antisemitic ‘Artists’ Launch Vicious New Holocaust-‘Justifying’ Souvenir
ANTISEMITISM | 700 YEARS OF VILNIUS CELEBRATIONS | POLITICS OF MEMORY | DOUBLE GENOCIDE
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VILNIUS—This commemorative envelope was purchased this morning, on Easter Sunday, on Pilies gatve, Vilnius’s historic Castle Street that has become the city’s center for souvenir stalls and shops. It is an older antisemitic envelope design seen many times before, picturing the Jews of Kaunas allegedly welcoming the Soviet army into town during World War II (i.e. blaming the Jews for the 1940 Soviet occupation as excuse for the genocide — the Lithuanian Holocaust — that followed a year later, wiping out some 96.4% of Lithuanian Jewry, with thousands murdered in late June 1941 before the Germans even took over).
The caption “explains” (in Lithuanian) that “on June 15, 1940, numerous crowds of Kaunas Jews welcome the occupying Red Army (archive photo)”. No mention of the vastly larger numbers of Lithuanians, Poles and Russians who turned out. No mention that this canard continues to be used to “explain” the Lithuanian Holocaust. No mention of the failure of the nation’s army to defend the country or the president’s fleeing the country. But plenty of room to link (in English) the antisemitic canard to the current 700 year Vilnius anniversary festivities. Are Western tourists presumed to be idiots?
Posted in Antisemitism & Bias, Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Vilnius
Tagged 700 Year Vilnius celebration, Antisemitism in Lithuania, Lithuanian Holocaust, Pilies gatve (Vilnius)
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Respectfully Disagreeing with Professor Timothy Snyder
[last updated]
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THE LATEST
Reviews of Bloodlands
Reviews of Black Earth
Instrumentalization?
2012 2013 2014 2015 2016
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This journal holds leading historian Professor Timothy Snyder (Yale University) in the highest esteem, and trusts that this select list of reviews taking issue with aspects of Bloodlands of direct concern to DefendingHistory.com will not be taken amiss. It does not include reviews which have engaged in personal attack or pursued grudges, or which focus on other issues.
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Posted in A 21st Century Campaign Against Lithuanian Holocaust Survivors?, Australia, Books, Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, EU, Foreign Ministries: Holocaust Politics Abuse?, Lithuania, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, United States
Tagged Debates and Controversies on Timothy Snyder and Bloodlands, Timothy Snyder + Bloodlands + Holocaust, Timothy Snyder + Jewish issues, Timothy Snyder + Lithuania, Timothy Snyder Bloodlands, Timothy Snyder on the Holocaust
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Papers by Professor Michael Shafir (1944-2022)
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Please send additions and corrections to info@defendinghistory.com. Thank you.
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NOTE: In the months preceding Prof. Shafir’s untimely death in 2022, he had circulated draft chapters of his major book on these topics. One draft title he was considering: Competitive Martyrdom. The chapters were circulated to DefendingHistory.com as well as to academic colleagues in the field internationally. It is very sincerely hoped that his heirs will not allow this treasure to be lost for future scholarship and study, and that the book will indeed be published at the earliest possible time.
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Between Denial and “Comparative Trivialization”: Holocaust Negationism in Post-Communist East Central Europe
The Nature of Postcommunist Antisemitism in East Central Europe: Ideology’s Backdoor Return
Conceptualizing Hungarian Negationism in Comparative Perspective: Deflection and Obfuscation
Political Antisemitism in Romania: Hard Data and its Soft Underbelly
A Present Chiaroscuro: Review of Himka & Michlich (eds), Bringing the Dark Past to Light: the Reception of the Holocaust in Postcommunist Europe
Questions and Answers on the Holocaust-Gulag “Comparative Martyrology”
Einmal mehr zu einer Vergangenheit, die nicht vergeht
Posted in Antisemitism & Bias, Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, Michael Shafir (1944-2022), News & Views
Tagged Michael Shafir on Holocaust in Hungary, Michael Shafir on Holocaust in Lithuania, Michael Shafir on Holocaust in Romania, Professor Michael Shafir (1944-2022)
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Defenders of Truth of the East European Holocaust Mourn Sudden Death of Professor Michael Shafir
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We mourn the sudden and untimely death of our dear colleague, mentor and teacher
PROFESSOR MICHAEL SHAFIR
(4 January 1944 – 9 November 2022)
PHOTO: CAROLE LEMEE
The entire Defending History community mourns the untimely sudden death of the great Holocaust historian, who was in recent months putting final touches on the manuscript of his new book on the East European revisionist campaign, and its many Western and Jewish nochsheppers. Inspired by Randolph L. Braham (1922-2018), among others, Professor Shafir’s papers covering the whole swath of East European governments’ huge investments to “fix” the Holocaust made him the pioneer of the academic and intellectual resistance to state-sponsored Double Genocide revisionism. May his completed book and all his other writings soon be made accessible to scholars and the public alike. His works will live on and in time come to be recognized for their successful exposure of the vast and elaborately financed efforts to obfuscate the Holocaust. For an introduction, please read some of his seminal papers in the field.
Michael Shafir section in DefendingHistory.com
Under construction:
Papers by Michael Shafir
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Posted in Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, History, Hungary, Lithuania, Michael Shafir (1944-2022), News & Views, Obituaries
Tagged Professor Michael Shafir (1944-2022)
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Will Second Opinions be Heard at Yale-Fortunoff Nov. 9 Event featuring Professors Dieckmann & Snyder?
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Will Second Opinions be Heard at Yale-Fortunoff Nov. 9 Event?
Hopefully, families of Connecticut area Holocaust survivors will be included at the event, 5 PM at Luce Hall (room 202)
More on history of the Lithuanian gov. financed “Red-Brown Commission” of which the Yale-Fortunoff speakers are long-standing members
Two truly gifted and prolific scholars are featured on Nov. 9. But both have been extensively instrumentalized by the Lithuanian government for years. Both are veteran members (one for 25 years?) of the state-sponsored “Red-Brown Commission” that has been the engine for Holocaust revisionism in the spirit of Double Genocide and the Prague Declaration in the European Parliament. The commission has caused Holocaust survivors huge pain from day one. The other was brought to Vilnius a decade ago to help cover for (and deflect from) the reburial with full honors of the 1941 Nazi puppet prime minister. Please attend and ask both about the Lithuanian government’s vast “history fixing industry” coming clean on:
(a) the thousands of Jews murdered by Lithuanian Activist Front (LAF) butchers before the first Germans arrived or took over and the state effort to “cancel” this “little fact” from the historical record and narrative;
(b) the state’s current glorification of Holocaust collaborators and perpetrators via street names, plaques, sculptures, and museums;
Posted in Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, News & Views, Politics of Memory, United States
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Yet Again, Naive Foreigners in Awe of Annual PR Show by ‘Red-Brown Commission’ (and its Director who Supports ‘War Crime Investigations’ of Holocaust Survivors)
OPINION | RED-BROWN COMMISSION | MR. RAČINSKAS ON THE HOLOCAUST | LITHUANIA | DOUBLE GENOCIDE
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VILNIUS—With nearly all local Holocaust Survivors now gone, or effectively out of public circulation, Lithuania’s “Red-Brown Commission,” a major European engine for the downgrade of the Holocaust via far-right “Double Genocide” history revisionism is again in the forefront of PR efforts to bowl over naive foreign visitors and delegations to this city, particularly on September 23rd each year, with “moving Holocaust elegies.” For Lithuanian Holocaust survivors, the very choice of Sept. 23 (day of the 1943 liquidation of the Vilna Ghetto by the Germans, two years after the murder of the majority of Lithuanian Jews in hundreds of towns across the land) was seen as a decoy. The day each of them had etched in the heart in perpetuity was June 23rd, when in 1941, violence against Jews broke out in hundreds of locations, with murder documented in around forty — before the first German forces arrived or managed to set up their authority. It was the day when six hundred years of peaceful, harmonious coexistence turned overnight, under Hitlerist propaganda, to dehumanization, humiliation, plunder, rape, injury and murder. To this day, an industrial grade revisionist industry continues to obfuscate or outright deny the history of the First Week (i.e. the last week of June 1941). Indeed, June 23rd is celebrated by far-right government historians each year as the date of a supposed “uprising” against the Soviets by the white-armbanded Jew killers who did not “rebel” until the Soviets fled in disarray from Hitler’s invasion, when they began to murder Jewish neighbors across the land unleashing the Lithuanian Holocaust, in which 96.4% of Lithuanian Jewry perished. In 2020, Dr. Arunas Bubnys, the chief historian of the second “Holocaust entity financed by the state,” the Genocide Center, celebrated the “holiday ” alongside banners of two major Holocaust collaborators. He was rewarded a year later with directorship of the Center.
Posted in "Red-Brown Commission", Double Games, Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, Events, Holocaust Policies of Mr. Ronaldas Račinskas and the State-Sponsored "International Commission" (ICECNSORL), Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Media Watch, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, September 23rd Commemorations
Tagged International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes, Red-Brown Commission, Ronaldas Racinskas
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Are Leaders of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania ‘Taking Advantage’ of Ukraine Tragedy? They Call on EU to Support Far-Right Holocaust-Obfuscating ‘Prague Platform’
Reports in Baltic Times and Delfi
For over a decade Defending History has exposed the far-right”Double Genocide” history-revisionist, Holocaust-obfuscating agenda of the “Prague Platform of European Memory and Conscience” which has repeatedly covered for East European efforts to glorify Nazi collaborators and perpetrators
“Putin’s criminal and barbaric invasion must be countered to the hilt and we must rally unfettered to the cause of Ukraine’s freedom. But for far-right double-genocider revisionists in the Eastern E.U. to take advantage of it for Holocaust obfuscation is just plain wrong.”
Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Efraim Zuroff is first to respond (in Times of Israel blogs)
Will Western leaders — and institutions dedicated to the history of the Holocaust and leaders in Holocaust education and commemoration — speak out and subject the “Prague Platform” to some long overdue scrutiny, and warn the European Commission about this “new initiative”? European citizens’ hard-earned euros continue to flow to the revisionists whose “unholy bible” is still the Prague Declaration of 2008… Defending History is proud to have helped provide the European parliamentary response, the Seventy Years Declaration…
Defending History’s statement on the war in Ukraine
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When Ottawa Citizen and The New York Times broke taboo on wartime discussion of East European state-sponsored Holocaust obfuscation
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But what is the “Prague Platform”?
Posted in 70 Years Declaration, Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, Estonia, History, Latvia, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Poland, Politics of Memory, Prague "Platform"
Tagged Holocaust Revisionism, PRague Declaration (Holocaust revisionism), PRague Platform of European Memory and Conscience
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Video Released of Marius Ivaškevičius’s Interview with Dovid Katz
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VILNIUS—Famed Lithuanian playwright Marius Ivaškevičius interviewed Dovid Katz as his Vilnius apartment on 20 March 2017 as part of the filming for Tzvi Kritzer’s documtentary “The Last Sunday in August” about the slaughter of the Jews of Malát (today: Molėtai) Lithuania. The much more general interview offers sweeping discourse on the Lithuanian Holocaust and its legacies, and sundry difficult related issues. There was a cameo appearance by the film’s producer Tzvi Kritzer. The footage released is unedited but not complete. Unfortunately, the beginning, with Marius’s detailed opening statement and set of questions, is missing from this footage. The documentary, released in 2018, is on youtube.
Posted in Arts, Bold Citizens Speak Out, Christian-Jewish Issues, Collaborators Glorified, Debates on the Postwar "Forest Brothers", Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, Dovid Katz, Film, History, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Malát (Molėtai), News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory
Tagged Dovid Katz, History of Holocaust in Lithuania, Lithuanian collaboration in the Holocaust, Lithuanian-Jewish discourse, Lithuanian-Jewish relations, Malat (Moletai), Marius Ivaškevičiux
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Yitzhak Arad, World War II Partisan Hero, Veteran of Israel’s War of Independence, Former Leader of Yad Vashem, Dies at 94
Yitzhak Arad (1926-2021)
Yitzhak Arad (originally Rudnitzky), a native of Svintsyán (Švenčionys, Lithuania, some 90 km north of Vilnius) passed away peacefully in Tel Aviv on Thursday. He was laid to rest Friday at Kibbutz Einat near Tel Aviv. His dramatic career included fighting the Nazis as a bold partisan in the forests of Lithuania, fighting with equal heroism in the air and ground forces that won Israel’s war of independence, rising to brigadier general, becoming a major Holocaust scholar and author, serving as director general of Yad Vashem for two decades (1972-1993), and, in the twenty-first century, becoming the first of a series of Holocaust survivors who joined the anti-Nazi resistance to be publicly accused by Lithuanian prosecutors of “war crimes” (with not a shred of evidence) as part of a massive campaign of Holocaust revisionism and inversion emanating from the state and its lavishly sponsored “genocide center” and “red-brown” commission as well and numerous elite operatives in the media, academia and literature.
The Holocaust revisionist who started the campaign against Arad in 2006 (in an infamous interview in the antisemitic Respublika representing the state’s “Genocide Center“) is today the nation’s Minister of Defense (!). It was, it turned out, the opening salvo in a years’ long saga that came to include Dr. Rachel Margolis (1921-2015), Ms. Fania Brantsovsky (1922- ), and other heroes of the anti-Nazi resistance regarded as “war criminals” by the far-right revisionist history units financed by East European states and their centers, professors, press maestros and operatives on an industrial scale.
Arad was the first Jewish partisan veteran to be libeled (in 2006) by kangaroo prosecutions of Lithuania’s “history fixing” units in the effort to revise Holocaust history. One major component of the multilayered effort, epitomized by Lithuania’s state-sponsored “Red-Brown Commission” and its Genocide Research Center, has entailed painting Holocaust victims who survived by joining the resistance as perpetrators and perpetrators (particularly of the atrocities of 1941) as victims. Follow the ins-and-outs in Defending History.
Posted in A 21st Century Campaign Against Lithuanian Holocaust Survivors?, Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, History, Human Rights, Israel, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Obituaries, Politics of Memory, Yitzhak Arad
Tagged Holocaust in Lithuania, Jewish partisans in Lithuania, Yad Vashem, Yitzchak Rudnitzky (Arad), Yitzhak Arad (1926-2021)
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Monuments to Nazi Collaborators in Eastern Europe and — Recent ‘Exports’ to the West
[UPDATED]
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Armenia. Estonia. Latvia. Lithuania. Macedonia. Slovakia. Ukraine.
Our take? The export of East European Holocaust revisionism is best exposed and countered now, before it becomes the pillar of the twenty-first century’s incarnations of Holocaust denial: Double Genocide, Holocaust Obfuscation, and glorification of the perpetrators as being (simultaneously) “heroes”…
This page was developed with the generous help of Lev Golinkin whose 26 January 2021 project in the Forward supersedes this page (see particularly his Lithuania section).
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JUMP TO:
Latvia → Belgium
Lithuania → USA
Ukraine → Canada
Ukraine → USA
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Posted in Collaborators Glorified, Debates on Juozas Lukša, Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, EU, History, Human Rights, Latvia, Lithuania, News & Views, Politics of Memory, Zedelgem in Belgium
Tagged Adolfas Ramanauskas, Alfons Rebane, Aqif Krosi Recani, Bauska Monument to Waffen SS, Ellenville, Estonia, Estonian Waffen SS, Garegin Nzhdeh, Hungarian Free Press, Jonas Noreika, Jozef Tiso, Juozas Ambrazavicius-Brazaitis, Lagedi, Latvian Waffen SS, Lev Golinkin, Lihula Monument, Miklós Horthy, New York, Roman Shukhevych, Stepan Bandera, Symon Petliura, United Macedonian Diaspora (UMD), Wroblewski Library of Sciences
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Our Take on Furore over Parliamentarian Gumuliauskas’s “Holocaust-Fixing” Proposal
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JTA on Scandal Emanating from Lithuanian Parliamentarian Gumuliauskas’s Proposed Bill to “Fix” Holocaust History
PEACEFUL DEMO PLANNED AT LITHUANIAN EMBASSY IN TEL AVIV ON FRIDAY 24 JAN, 11 AM; FB; HEBREW POSTER; LITH. PRESIDENT CANCELS ISRAELI TRIP
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Defending History’s take:
The proposal is not in line with Poland’s earlier debacle, but infinitely worse. However, Lithuania should not be held accountable for the rants of a single member of parliament (though it is disturbing to note the utter silence from his committee members including the one “official Jewish parliamentarian”).
Posted in Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, History, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory
Tagged Gumuliauskas + Holocaust, Holocaust in Lithuania, Holocaust Revisionism
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On the (Ab)use of Law to “Fix” Holocaust History
OPINION | DOUBLE GENOCIDE | FREE SPEECH | STATES’ MANIPULATION OF HISTORY
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by Dovid Katz
This comment appeared in Mémoires en Jeu (Memory at Stake), no. 9, (2010).
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In recent years, a number of eastern EU and NATO member states (plus Ukraine) have been constructing components of their official(and protected-by-law) national narratives on heroes who were collaborators, or even perpetrators in the Holocaust on the grounds that they were “anti-Soviet heroes.”1 These countries indeed had to face two Soviet occupations (1939/1940–41 and 1944/45–1991), and the occupation by Nazi Germany (1941-1944/5). The “liberating” state was also the author of major crimes such as repressions, deportations, forced labor and executions, and the statutes of post-Soviet Europe lacked a text on the crimes of communism. The ensuing moral problem is as follows: while these States would have legitimate heroes who struggled for freedom against dictatorial Soviet domination, they also honor those who participated in the Holocaust and even criminalize criticism against them.
Posted in Collaborators Glorified, Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, Dovid Katz, Estonia, EU, Foreign Ministries: Holocaust Politics Abuse?, Free Speech & Democracy, History, Latvia, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Politics of Memory, Prague "Platform", State Glorification of Holocaust Collaborator J. Noreika
Tagged Dovid Katz, Freedom of speech in the Baltics, Holocaust in Lithuania, Holocaust in the Baltics, Law and the Holocaust, Mémoires en Jeu, Use of law to revise history
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