The Denial that is Part of Holocaust Obfuscation: Second Day of the Lithuanian Parliament’s Conference



by Dovid Katz

The Lithuanian Holocaust broke out in the week of 22 June 1941, when the Nazis attacked the Soviet Union; it is the week when, in many locations, so-called ‘patriots’ and ‘rebels’ in large numbers began to humiliate, plunder, injure and slaughter Jewish neighbors before the first Germans ever arrived. At the conference held yesterday and today in the country’s parliament, this was the Elephant in the Room that reared its head now and again, no matter how hard the political and academic planners worked to ensure that it would disappear in a program dedicated to virtually every other conceivable aspect (translation of original program here; final printed English version of the program here).

SEE ALSO:

Report on the first day of the conference.

Full translation of Mr. Racinskas’s speech.

The plot thickens. These are the very ‘patriots’ and ‘rebels’ who are being honored this week by major state institutions, and to no small degree, at this very conference. As if their launch of the Holocaust, which went on under German rule, and with their continued massive voluntary participation, is either some kind of uncorroborated slander, or, as if this is some very tiny detail in an otherwise glorious campaign of rebellion against Soviet forces (with no mention that the USSR’s troops were actually fleeing the German invasion, not their ‘rebellion’).

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Posted in "Red-Brown Commission", Collaborators Glorified, Double Games, Dovid Katz, Events, Foreign Ministries: Holocaust Politics Abuse?, Holocaust Policies of Mr. Ronaldas Račinskas and the State-Sponsored "International Commission" (ICECNSORL), Legacy of 23 June 1941, Lithuania, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, Vilnius's Genocide Center and the Genocide Museum it Manages | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Denial that is Part of Holocaust Obfuscation: Second Day of the Lithuanian Parliament’s Conference

In Delirium of Obfuscation: First Day of the Lithuanian Parliament’s Conference on the 70th Anniversary of Hitler’s Attack on the USSR



by Dovid Katz

Today was Day 1 of the Lithuanian parliament’s two-day ‘International Conference: The Beginning of the Soviet-German War in the Baltic States in 1941 — 29-30 June 2011, Vilnius’.  It is being held as part of a series of events to mark the seventieth anniversary of the Nazi War against the Soviet Union, unleashed on 22 June 1941.

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Where does Yad Vashem stand on East European Double-Game Double-Genocide Holocaust Politics?


DefendingHistory.com reported June 7th on Yad Vashem’s announced participation in the Lithuanian parliament’s 29-30 ‘International Conference: The Beginning of the Soviet-German War in the Baltic States in 1941’.

We commented on the pain caused to Lithuanian Holocaust survivors and their families by a decision to confer legitimacy, via the sterling name of Yad Vashem — the world’s premier Holocaust museum and research institution — on a conference held on the seventieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Lithuanian Holocaust. The agenda of the Lithuanian-government sponsored event has appeared to be yet another cover for the massive local violence that unleashed the Holocaust here, and to attempt yet again to recast the Lithuanian Activist Front (LAF), the Provisional Government (PG) and other fascist bodies as supposedly heroic freedom fighters.

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Cartoon of The Jew and The Gay Holding Up (Controlling) the World is Back in Town


The infamous cartoon of The Jew and The Gay holding up the world was featured in Respublika and other mass circulation newspapers in Lithuania in 2004, and again from 2009. See our reports here, here and here. It came back to the newspaper today.

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Gert Weisskirchen: On Blackwashing History


 


O P I N I O N

by Gert Weisskirchen

In several places in Europe, particularly in the new-accession states, there are discernible efforts to ‘blackwash’ history.

Far-right forces are hard at work to obfuscate the Holocaust, in part by defaming the victims and in part by glorifying the local perpetrators and collaborators.

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Eyewitness Account of the Screening of ‘Uprising of the Enslaved’



by [NAME WITHHELD ON REQUEST]

The premiere of the Lithuanian-language film Pavergtųjų sukilimas, or Uprising of the Enslaved, was held in Vilnius in the early evening of 22 June 2011, timed to coincide with the anniversary of what is commonly called the “June Uprising”.

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The Act of 30 June 1941, and its 2011 Commemoration in Ukraine



O P I N I O N

by Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe (Berlin)

On 8 June 2011, the internet journal Maidan announced that “on 30 July [2011] at 11 AM exactly a flash mob will read the Act of Renewal of the Ukrainian State simultaneously in seven places in Kiev”.  The “flash mob” in Kiev will be commemorating the 70th anniversary of the proclamation of the Ukrainian state by the leading OUN-B politician Iaroslav Stets’ko, who in the evening of 30 June 1941 read out the “Act of Proclamation of a Ukrainian State” during a meeting in the hall of the Prosvita Society in the market place in L’viv, the center of western Ukraine.

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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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Yad Vashem, Causing Pain to Survivors with Participation in Lith. Parliament Conference Lauding Collaborators, Withdraws at Last Moment (after Defending History’s Plea)


UPDATE 1: On 27 June 2011 at 3:31 PM (Vilnius time), the Israeli Embassy in Riga (responsible for Lithuania as well as Latvia) emailed DefendingHistory.com to say that Yad Vashem’s participation in the event has been cancelled. This was confirmed in a further email from Yad Vashem at 3:56 PM. In Vilnius, however, the name of Yad Vashem and its designated representative continue to appear on programs and brochures, giving the impression that the event enjoys the formal participation of Yad Vashem. See our public query to Yad Vashem.

UPDATE 2: See Defending History’s eyewitness reports of Day 1 and Day 2 of the conference.

According to a conference program posted on the website of the Lithuanian Parliament, Yad Vashem is the only Jewish institution sending a representative to the latest conference mounted by the Lithuanian government in its campaign to downgrade the Holocaust and whitewash the Lithuanian Holocaust’s first murderers (the L.A.F. and other fascist groups), often by glorifying them as ‘freedom fighters’. The printed brochure for the conference, to be held on 29 and 30 June 2011, announces the event as a joint project of the Lithuanian Parliament (Seimas) and the deeply antisemitic Genocide Research Center. One of the Center’s top ‘specialists’ participated in the recent neo-Nazi parade and went on to launch a public antisemitic campaign. He was neither removed from his post nor publicly reprimanded, as the season’s conferences plow ahead full steam.

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Posted in A 21st Century Campaign Against Lithuanian Holocaust Survivors?, Collaborators Glorified, Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, Events, Foreign Ministries: Holocaust Politics Abuse?, Israel, It Pays to Defend History: Success Over the Years..., Legacy of 23 June 1941, Lithuania, Museums, News & Views, Yad Vashem and Lithuania | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Yad Vashem, Causing Pain to Survivors with Participation in Lith. Parliament Conference Lauding Collaborators, Withdraws at Last Moment (after Defending History’s Plea)

Monash University’s ‘Aftermath’ Conference concluded in Melbourne


The international conference Aftermath: The Politics of Memory concluded this evening with a final keynote speech by Shoah Foundation director and Beth Shalom founder Dr. Stephen Smith who made repeated reference to the growing problem of Holocaust Obfuscation. His central point was the need for the history of the Holocaust to sensitize humanity, and indeed, western governments, to the need to care in real time about any subsequent genocide.

One of the conference’s dramatic moments came when Professor Konrad Kwiet (Macquarie University, Sydney and resident historian at the Sydney Jewish Museum) asked to come to the podium to announce his public resignation from the Lithuanian government sponsored International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithaunia.

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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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Myth, Violence, Genocide



O P I N I O N

by Christopher Hale

There are a number of books about the ‘foreign divisions of the Third Reich’. Most seem to be written for military history buffs and those fascinated by uniforms and arcane details of military insignia. Some are downright sinister. The series of books written by Richard Landwehr, an American ‘historian’ associated with the far right, are overtly favourable and have titles like ‘Lions of Flanders’, ‘Steadfast Hussars’ and ‘Nordic Warriors’.  His Wiki entry includes the following rationale:

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On Snyder’s Conceptualization of the Final Solution ‘in the Bloodlands’


 


O P I N I O N

by Rachel Croucher

I have read and re-read the chapter entitled “Final Solution” in Timothy Snyder’s major new book, Bloodlands (Basic Books 2010), in an attempt to garner further insight into events surrounding the genocide of the Jews in Eastern Europe for a dissertation on contemporary Holocaust remembrance precisely in the countries of these so-called Bloodlands, and with emphasis upon Lithuania. I had hoped that the chapter would expand my knowledge on the specifics of and motivations for the disturbingly high levels of local participation in the actual mass-murdering (far beyond just collaboration) in these countries.

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Can Timothy Snyder’s ‘Bloodlands’ be Appropriated by East European Nationalists?



O P I N I O N

by Per Rudling

The great strength of Professor Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands (Basic Books, 2010) is that it contextualizes the violent 1930s and 1940s in Eastern Europe.

FOR MORE SEE DEFENDING HISTORY’S PAGE ON RESPONSES TO TIMOTHY SNYDER

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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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List of Lithuanian Government’s ‘Fake Litvaks’ is Leaked to the Media


This journal reported on 6 September 2010 on an elaborate plot by the Lithuanian government’s ‘Jewish manipulation department’, as the informal grouping is known in Vilnius diplomatic circles, to usurp (some would say ‘hijack’) the ethnonym Litvak and abuse it to cover for — and facilitate — the state’s policies on Double Genocide and antisemitism with ‘Jewish’ projects.

Did any of the ‘Fake Litvaks’ actually sign the 2011 public letter protesting the capital’s neo-Nazi march?

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Canada Chronicle



Apologies! This page has moved here (https://defendinghistory.com/canada)

See also:

Canada section


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Kepiro Trial Continues in Budapest


The new Budapest trial of the twice-convicted Hungarian Nazi war criminal Sandor Kepiro continued in Budapest today, when the court determined that the 97 year old was perectly competent mentally to continue. To avoid unduly taxing the defendant’s energy, authorities decided for sessions of forty-minutes each rather than the customary three consecutive hours.

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1000 Neo-Nazi Marchers Fill Central Vilnius on Lithuania’s Independence Day; They are Addressed by Two Members of Parliament


Marcher sports a designer swastika on her handbag at the March 11th 2012 neo-Nazi march on Gedimino Prospect in the heart of Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital.

———

EYEWITNESS REPORT & IMAGES

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Courageous Achievements


Brussels — Valiant members of parliament and the European Parliament from Latvia, Lithuania and other East European Countries sign the Seventy Years Declaration

Kaunas — Daiva Čepauskaitė’s new play: ‘Day and Night’

Šiauliai — Evaldas Balčiūnas is translating the memoir of a Jewish woman partisan of the Vilna Ghetto

Vilnius — Social Democratic MP Vytenis Povilas Andriukaitis boldly responds to the latest Holocaust-related article by the foreign minister of Lithuania

Vilnius — In the face of untoward pressure over many years, Rachel Kostanian has maintained steadfast historical accuracy in the Green House Holocaust department of the State Jewish Museum; Esther Goldberg’s reports I & II

Vilnius — Books and a documentary of lasting value produced by the House of Memory, led by Linas Vildžiūnas, Vaidotas Reivytis and others; projects curtailed by the government’s ‘red-brown establishment’ monopolizing resources

Vilnius — Saulius Beržinis’s Kopa Studios producing series of uniquely spin-free documentaries on the Holocaust

Riga — Rabbi Menachem Barkahan’s New Holocaust Museum

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