O P I N I O N
FACEBOOK DISCUSSION AS ON 12 MAY 2011:
Opinion
8-12 May 2011 Facebook Debate
Posted in Double Games, Opinion
Tagged Efraim Zuroff, Prague Declaration, Ronaldas Racinskas, Saulius Suziedelis, Steven Spielberg, Timothy Snyder
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Milan Chersonski on the ‘March of the Living’ at Ponar
O P I N I O N
by Milan Chersonski
МАРШ ЖИВЫХ. ВПЕЧАТЛЕНИЯ И РАЗМЫШЛЕНИЯ
В календаре памятных дат Государства Израиль есть День памяти Жертв нацизма и Героев сопротивления – Йом а-Шоа вэ а-Гвура. По европейскому календарю он приходится на 19 апреля – день начала восстания в Варшавском гетто в 1943г.. Почти месяц – дольше, чем польская армия, защищавшая страну от нацистов в 1939г., – истощенные голодом и болезнями, плохо вооруженные узники сражались против специально обученных нацистских формирований и их местных нацистских пособников.
Posted in In Russian, Milan Chersonski (1937-2021), News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, Ponár (Ponary, Paneriai)
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Eyewitness Report: ‘March of the Living’ at Ponar Killing Site near the Lithuanian Capital
E Y E W I T N E S S R E P O R T / O P I N I O N
by Geoff Vasil
I attended the March of the Living today at Ponár (Polish Ponary, Lithuanian Paneriai), the mass killing site outside Vilnius, Lithuania. It is Yom Hashoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day. I had been to Ponár only once before, because a friend of mine was afraid she would get lost taking the city buses there and back.
Posted in Defense of Old Jewish Cemeteries and Mass Grave Sites, Double Games, Geoff Vasil, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, Ponár (Ponary, Paneriai)
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Why Does the State Commemorate Murderers?
O P I N I O N
by Evaldas Balčiūnas
Probably every mature person living in Lithuania has heard about the mass murder of people at the beginning of World War II. During the first months of the war ― in a period of less than half a year ― more than 100,000 people were murdered, most of them Jews.
“Evil deeds uncondemned often end up idolized.”
It is sad, but there are more than enough facts corroborating that Lithuanians — regular officers of the Lithuanian military — took part in the mass murders of civilians, women and children.
Posted in Bold Citizens Speak Out, Collaborators Glorified, Debates on the Postwar "Forest Brothers", Evaldas Balčiūnas, Human Rights, Lithuania, Opinion, Politics of Memory, Vilnius's Genocide Center and the Genocide Museum it Manages
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Freedom of Speech is not ‘Pick and Choose’: On the Paleckis Trial in Vilnius
O P I N I O N
by Dovid Katz
DefendingHistory.com disagrees with each and every word that Lithuanian politician Algirdas Paleckis has uttered about the events in Vilnius, Lithuania, of January 13th 1991 when courageous unarmed protesters for freedom and independence were mercilessly murdered by armed Soviet forces.
As students of Voltaire (though the famous quote is by his biographer Evelyn Beatrice Hall), we disapprove of all that Paleckis has said about January 1991 (and consider it to be sheer nonsense), but we will join the fight to the finish for his right to say it and not be subject to trial in a member-state of the European Union and NATO.
Posted in Free Speech & Democracy, Human Rights, Media Watch, Opinion, US State Dept Manipulated?
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Has the Forward Association abandoned Elementary Ethics?
O P I N I O N
by Dovid Katz
On February 25th, the Yiddish Forverts in New York published a defamatory ad-hominem attack on this journal’s editor.
The article was signed by ‘Jacob London (Oxford)’, the pseudonym of Sovetish Heymland veteran Gennady Estraikh who was secretary to the Soviet magazine’s editor Aaron Vergelis for many years. Now, a resident of New York, he is listed as the paper’s editor for its ‘European Bureau’. It is quite shocking for many readers that the paper’s editor-in-chief, Boris Sandler, himself a Sovetish Heymland veteran, allows for the paper’s abuse for fake-name, fake-place vicious attack on colleagues in the field of Yiddish Studies.
Posted in Dovid Katz, Human Rights, News & Views, Opinion, Yiddish Affairs
Tagged Boris Sandler, CCNY Professor Jack Jacobs, Elliot PAlevsky, Evan Zimroth, Forverts asotsiatsye, Grammar of the Yiddish Language, Intensive Yiddish, Jack Jacobs Jewish Labor Bund, Jack Jacobs Lithuania, Jack Jacobs Vilnius, Jacob London, Jewish Daily Forward; Forverts; Gennady Estraikh; Boris Sandler; Jack Jacobs; Elliott Palevsky; Sovetish Heymland; Sovetish Heimland, Jewish Labor Bund, Lithuanian Consulate New York, Professor Jack Jacobs, Sam Norich, Samuel Norich, Yankl Jacobs
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Lithuanian Fascists Checking Lists of Citizens who Oppose Fascism
O P I N I O N
by Geoff Vasil
Ričardas Čekutis, an organizer of the March 11th 2011 neo-Nazi march through central Vilnius and the head of public relations at Lithuania’s Genocide Research Center, an institution nominally tasked with (and paid for by the taxpayers) to promote genocide research and education, recently answered some criticism of himself and his ideas, a neo-fascist political party and neo-Nazi marches, questions that were posed by Darius Kuolys.
Posted in Free Speech & Democracy, Geoff Vasil, Human Rights, Opinion
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Foreign Ministry cooking another one-sided ‘open forum’, this time in — Kaunas
O P I N I O N
by Dovid Katz
Yet again, Lithuania’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs is misinvesting assets in cooking up one-sided events that are designed to pose as open and honest forums for a variety of opinions, treating audiences as if they were idiots who will not notice something is amiss.
Posted in "Jewish" Events as Cover?, Double Games, Foreign Ministries: Holocaust Politics Abuse?, Israel, News & Views, Opinion
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How to hold an academic conference in a Soviet (and occasionally, in a post-Soviet) milieu
O P I N I O N
by Geoff Vasil
1. Line up the names of people who agree with you and are ideologically reliable or beholden to you for their ticket there and back. Best to use locals as far as possible with a big-wheel foreign invitee or two, provided they’re safe.
2. Do some stuff, make a program, maybe provide a tour to foreign academics, get them sauced. The program of events can be created on the fly, tailored to meet the needs of attracting the right set of people, using up funds allocated, etc. Be creative.
Posted in "Jewish" Events as Cover?, Geoff Vasil, Human Rights, Humor (Of Sorts), Opinion
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Didier Bertin replies
O P I N I O N
by Didier Bertin
Reply to the letter of 14 March 2011 from the Chief of Staff of Viviane Reding by Didier Bertin (Society for the Promotion of the European Human Rights Model)
ENGLISH VERSION
PREFACE: We have started to exchange letters with Viviane Reding, Vice President of the European Commission and her Chief of Staff Martin Selmayr regarding our opposition in the name of European Values to the dangerous tendency to consider that the former Communist regimes committed crimes equivalent to those of Nazism and thus undermining the uniqueness of the Holocaust.
We have noted in your last letter that European Union has allocated resources to finance programs safeguarding the memory of the crimes committed by totalitarian regimes including Nazism. We thus understand that Nazism is now considered as a totalitarian regime among others and has lost its usual specificity of symbol of the highest degree of horror reached in our civilized word.
Posted in Didier Bertin, Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, Opinion
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Baltic Media: Covering the Fascist Marches, or Covering Them Up?
O P I N I O N
by Geoff Vasil
This year Lithuanian neo-Nazis organized by Marius Kundrotas, Ričardas Čekutis and Julijus Panka with Lithuanian MP Kazimieras Uoka as their mascot marched in Kaunas on February 16 and through central Vilnius on March 11. February 16 is the old, pre-World War II national day of independence while March 11 is the date in 1990 when the Lithuanian Supreme Soviet voted to restore national independence and exit the Soviet Union.
Posted in Celebrations of Fascism, Estonia, Geoff Vasil, Human Rights, Kaunas, Latvia, Neo-Nazi & Fascist Marches, News & Views, Opinion, Riga's Waffen SS Marches, Vilnius
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Reply to Rokas Grajauskas: 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).
[UPDATE of 1 March 2013]: The journal refused to publish a reply, but after an intervention from Prof. MEP Leonidas Donskis it was uploaded on the journal’s website for a time, and then removed.]
◊
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. The web journal I edit, 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.
Posted in Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, Dovid Katz, EU, Free Speech & Democracy, Human Rights, Hungary, Lithuania, Opinion, Politics of Memory, US State Dept Manipulated?
Tagged Double Genocide, Double Genocide + Communism, Dovid Katz Lithuanian Foreign Policy Review, Holocaust Obfuscation, Leonidas Donskis, Lithuanian Foreign Policy Review, origin of the term Holocaust Obfuscation, Prague Declaration, Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism, Prague Process, Rokas Grajauskas, Rokas Grajauskas + Jewish issues
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Fascism in National Cellophane
O P I N I O N
by Nida Vasiliauskaitė
There is a view that pro-fascist tendencies in Lithuania are nothing more than a bubble blown by the New Left, an informal intellectual and political movement (not a party), that it is a case of “Communist slander” aimed at peaceful and likeable patriots: those who simply love their Homeland, are proud of it and who—unlike the angry folks from the New Left who are “attacking” good people for no reason at all—do not seek enemies (and do not find them), degrade nobody and are a threat to nobody.
No, for them everyone is a friend. (How different they are from, for example, Nida Vasiliauskaitė, who, as they will tell you, “hates everyone” simply and purely at her own whim and out of bad will, or because she has been “paid” by all the comrades of “Brussels” and “Moscow” banded together. They emphasize that which unites, not that which divides…)
Posted in Bold Citizens Speak Out, Celebrations of Fascism, Human Rights, Nida Vasiliauskaitė, Opinion, Racism
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Text of the Letter Delivered to the Lithuanian Ambassador in London on 7 February 2011
Text of the letter delivered to the Lithuanian ambassador in London Monday morning 7 February 2011 by the Right Honourable Denis MacShane MP. The letter was drafted by Danny Ben-Moshe and evolved with input from the other signatories. Signatories include Lord Janner of Braunstone, Rabbi Barry Marcus of Central Synagogue, and Professor Ada Rapoport-Albert, head of the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at University College London which hosted the main conference. PDF here. Background and further links to press coverage here.
H.E. Dr Oskaras Jusys
Ambassador
Embassy of the Republic of Lithuania
84 Gloucester Place
London W1U 6AU
7 February 2011
Dear Ambassador
Posted in A 21st Century Campaign Against Lithuanian Holocaust Survivors?, Antisemitism & Bias, Documents, Dov Levin (1925 - 2016), Efraim Zuroff, EU, Events, Foreign Ministries: Holocaust Politics Abuse?, Identity Theft of Litvak Heritage, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, UCL Manipulated?, United Kingdom
Tagged Ada Rapoport-Albert, Clemens Heni, Danny Ben-Moshe, Danny Stone, Dov Levin, Dovid Katz, Efraim Zuroff, Harry Shukman, Lord Janner of Braunstone, Michael Freedland, Mikail Iossel, Saul Issroff, Uri Chanoch
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Who Got Stupid, the European Parliament or Us?
O P I N I O N
by Leonidas Donskis
The European Parliament recently reacted by way of a resolution to a piece of draft legislation by a member of the parliament of the Republic of Lithuania, Petras Gražulis. If enacted, his legislation would have de jure expelled from public life homosexual citizens in the country. Since then, several comments have already rung out in our public space in Lithuania, whose essence, despite differences in levels of nuance, is similar: that the European Parliament is allegedly interfering too minutely and grandly in the affairs of the Republic of Lithuania; that it is allegedly violating the principle of subsidiarity; that it is applying double standards because it was so careful in commenting upon the sins of France in the sphere of human rights but ruthlessly attacks the new member states, first and foremost Lithuania.
Posted in EU, Free Speech & Democracy, Human Rights, Leonidas Donskis, LGBTQ Equal Rights, News & Views, Opinion
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“This Campaign Makes Me Really Angry”
O P I N I O N
by Shimon Alperovich
The following is Rachel Croucher’s authorized translation of the interview with Lithuanian Jewish Community chairperson Dr. Shimon Alperovich published in German by Frank Brendle in Taz.de.
YEAR OF REMEMBRANCE: In the Lithuanian year of remembrance the Holocaust is under threat of being forgotten while surviving Jewish partisans have been the subject of a campaign for some years. Conversation with Simonas Alperavičius, President of the Jewish Community of Lithuania. INTERVIEW BY FRANK BRENDLE, 04.02.2011
Mr Alperavičius, the 70th anniversary of the Nazi occupation of Lithuania falls this year, as well as twenty years of independence from the Soviet Union. What will take priority?
Posted in "Red-Brown Commission", A 21st Century Campaign Against Lithuanian Holocaust Survivors?, Collaborators Glorified, Double Games, Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Opinion, Politics of Memory, Rachel Croucher, Shimon Alperovich (1928 – 2014)
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Lithuanian Jews, Holocaust Survivors, Specialists who Disagree with the Lithuanian Government — Shut Out of London Conference
O P I N I O N
by Dovid Katz
The Holocaust Survivor community is responding with a mixture of sadness and defiance to news that the Lithuanian Foreign Ministry, which actively coordinated the recent attempt (December 2010) to underpin ‘Double Genocide’ and downgrade the Holocaust in European Union law (see top story on home page), is now financing, in partnership with (naive?) parties in London, a starkly one-sided colloquium on ‘Jewish-Lithuanian Relations Between Coexistence and Violence’ on 6-7 Feb 2011 in London.
London Fog: Will the Conference be a ‘Graywash’?
Posted in "Jewish" Events as Cover?, Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, Events, Foreign Ministries: Holocaust Politics Abuse?, News & Views, Opinion, Rothschild Foundation Europe (Hanadiv): Lithuanian Issues, UCL Manipulated?, United Kingdom
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A rather simple story: Lithuania, the Jews, and the Shoah
O P I N I O N
by Clemens Heni
An Open Letter to the Scholars Reading Papers at the 6-7 February UCL-Warburg Symposium in London
On February 6 and 7 of 2011, there will be a conference held in London, entitled “No simple stories: Jewish-Lithuanian relations between coexistence and violence”. Taking into account that some 95% of Lithuanian Jews were killed during the Holocaust — the highest percentage in all of Europe — this is quite a heartbreaking title, isn’t it?
“No simple stories” — really? For those Lithuanians involved, killing Jews was quite simple, even before the Germans arrived.
“No simple stories.”
Really?
Posted in "Jewish" Events as Cover?, Clemens Heni, Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, History, Lithuania, Opinion, Politics of Memory, UCL Manipulated?, United Kingdom, Yitzhak Arad
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Polish Ambassador to Lithuania HE Janusz Skolimowski Speaks Out Boldly on Latest Holocaust Denial
VILNIUS—The following is the text of HE Polish ambassador Janusz Skolimowski’s 26 November letter in Veidas, which the ambassador copied to Lithuania’s Minister of the Interior. This authorized English translation was kindly provided to Defending History by the Embassy of Poland here. The letter followed one by seven other ambassadors regarding the same events in Lithuania.
From: Ambassador of the Republic of Poland in Vilnius
To: Editor-in-Chief of the weekly magazine “Veidas”
For the attention of: Mr. Raimundas Palaitis, Minister of the Interior of the Republic of Lithuania
Concerns: Article of Petras Stankeras dated November 14th, 2010:
“The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg — the biggest legal farce in history”
Dear Mr. Editor-in-Chief,
Posted in Antisemitism & Bias, Documents, Human Rights, Lithuania, Media Watch, News & Views, Opinion, Poland, Politics of Memory
Tagged Holocaust in Lithuania, Janusz Skolimowski, Nuremberg Trials, Petras Stankeras, Polish Embassy in Vilnius, Raimundas Palaitis, Veidas
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