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.



With the recent Lithuanian elections barely out of the way, and the ruling right-wing Homeland Union Conservatives the undisputed losers, the ultranationalist right is losing no time in pressing ahead aggressively with the Double Genocide “red-equals-brown” agenda, reverting to one of the movement’s original slogans: “United Europe — United History.” For pro-tolerance and liberal forces, the profoundly undemocratic message implied is that a united Europe has to also be united (i.e. have one opinion) on questions of history, and that Double Genocide and its central document, the
Holocaust survivors from Lithuania, and their families and advocates, are reporting feelings of “shock and betrayal” at “unbelievable reports” that Yad Vashem might again be lending legitimacy to the Lithuanian government sponsored “red-brown commission.” These accounts derive from a BNS (Baltic News Service) report today that appeared in various Lithuanian media, including 