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.
In fact, from day 1, in 1998, the “Red-Brown Commission” (as it was dubbed years ago by Western ambassadors), which is officially called the “International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupational Regimes in Lithuania” was bitterly opposed by Lithuanian Holocaust survivors who had the courage to speak out right to their last breaths. Defending History has assembled many of the documents in chronological order for the last decade and a half of the saga. Many of today’s unsuspecting visitors to Vilnius, and enjoyers of “Holocaust remembrance honors and banquets” are blissfully unaware of who, what, where, why.
But for icing on the cake, this week’s gushing report in Jewish News Syndicate ends with a dramatic heartfelt quote from the Commission’s executive director, Ronaldas Račinskas, who was equally proud to tell a German documentarian, on the record, on video, why it was necessary, in his view to put Fania Brantsovsky and the “others” (i.e. Rachel Margolis, Yitzhak Arad, Sara Ginaite, and more) through pre-trial investigations for “war crimes.” This is part of the chapter that the Economist back in 2008 called Blaming the Victims.
