I am surrounded by sea of people, all marching with torches. A chant begins: Lye Tu Vah! Lye Tu Vah! Lye Tu Vah! The chant becomes a roar and then dies away. It is patriotic Lithuanians shouting out the name of their country as they march through the streets of their capital city, Vilnius. We are celebrating the 101st anniversary of the restoration of Lithuania as an independent state. I feel a great surge of emotion as I join the chanting, swept away by the love these people feel for each other and for their land.
We march to Cathedral Square, where there must be 100,000 people gathered in the cold to celebrate Independence Day with an outdoor concert of patriotic music that begins with the national anthem. All ages are here, from grandmothers to toddlers, adorable in their onesie snow-suits, waving tiny Lithuanian flags. Later I go with Lithuanian nationalists to a bar where there is mead on tap; my hosts sing patriotic songs late into the night.
This was my first torchlight parade, and my first independence-day celebration with European nationalists. It was a stirring, unforgettable occasion.
I was invited to Vilnius by a youth organization called Kryptis. On February 15, I spoke at a conference of identitarians from Poland, Germany, Ukraine, Britain, the United States, and Lithuania. It was a very successful first international conference for Kryptis, but the highlight was the march. Torchlight parades are an increasingly prominent nationalist gesture in Europe, but in some countries they are frowned on as jingoistic or even “neo-Nazi.”
This was Kryptis’ second march. Last year, the march was a wild-cat celebration with no official recognition, but it attracted about 300 people. This year, Kryptis had government permission, and the march was led by a police vehicle and a large banner that read “Lithuania is Here.” Kryptis shared sponsorship with a conservative Catholic organization, and the two groups prepared about 1,400 torches. All were taken and lit, and many people joined without torches. Kryptis was delighted with the turnout, and expects many more participants in what will become an annual tradition.
My hosts had invited foreign visitors to carry their own flags. Nationalists understand that it is not a sign of disrespect to carry the flag of Flanders or Brittany or Wales in someone else’s national parade. People who carry torches are part of a genuinely pan-European nationalism that recognizes the beauty of all European nations and regions. They share a passion for the preservation of all identities.
Of all the flags of the world, I wondered which one I could carry with real commitment. Not the one worn by the soldiers of “regime change” in Syria, Iraq. Not the one that has been irretrievably tarnished by “diversity.” I asked my hosts if they would welcome a Confederate Battle Flag. They said they, personally, would be delighted, but that the foreign media would call it a symbol of “racism.” I carried only a small Lithuanian flag, one of hundreds a pretty girl was handing out.
This was my first trip to Lithuania. Vilnius is a lovely European capital, with a historic center of cobbled streets and handsome buildings. One of the first things any American—racially conscious or not— will notice is how overwhelmingly white it is. I have been here three days and seen only one non-European: an African in my hotel.
Vilnius is famously safe at all hours of the day. Despite the masses of people in Cathedral Square, there were hardly any police. An American crowd of even one tenth the size would have had to be protected from itself with a huge armed force—and rival gang members might still blaze away at each other. In Germany or France, the streets would have to be blocked off to keep Muslims from driving trucks into the crowd.
In Vilnius, the only concern seemed to be supplying enough port-a-potties. The Lithuanian police trust their people to be orderly, polite, and considerate.
I remember 1990, when Lithuania became the first of the Soviet Republics to declare independence. I remember feeling envious—yes, envious—of Lithuanians. They were a united people in a nation reborn, with a real chance to forge a destiny. I was losing my nation; they were building theirs.
The 20th century has been a horror for Lithuania: dismemberment by Poland, invasions by Russians and Germans, and brutal Soviet occupation. But this century can be anything Lithuanians make of it.
Not all is well, of course. The economy is booming but wages are still low by European standards. Many Lithuanians are tempted by the flickering foolishness of Hollywood. Talented young people emigrate to Germany, Britain, or even Chicago. Suicide and alcoholism rates are high; birthrates are low. Lithuania is a member of the European Union, and there are bootlickers in government who think modernity means swallowing the multi-culti poisons the EU peddles to its members. Their model is Angela Merkel’s Germany, not Victor Orban’s Hungary.
Like all of Eastern Europe, Lithuania is at a crossroads: will it be seduced by the glitz of the West? Will it adopt Western degeneracy or will it remain true to its identity? Lithuania has survived centuries of partition, occupation, cultural obliteration and repression, but it could be snuffed out by just a few generations of immigration.
Like all identitarian organizations, Kryptis vividly understands what is at stake. They are “a band of brothers, native to the soil, fighting for their liberty with treasure, blood and toil.” Their struggle is our struggle.
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The painful issue of using Russian language in Latvia appears on the agenda once again. Ethnic Russians “knock at the doors” of international organisation trying to defend their rights to speak and get education in their native language. Their hope for understanding in Latvia is melting every day.
It has become known that Russian Community in Latvia sent a letter to Council of Europe about violation of human rights. The message addressed to Secretary General Thorbjorn Jagland also calls for a request from the Venice Commission to amend the two Latvian language laws which were adopted by the Saeima in spring.
The ...
In Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (Metropolitan Books. New York. 2013), Turse writes that the US military’s official position, and the popular understanding in the US, is that leadership “has never condoned wanton killing or disregard for human life.” (2) On the rare occasions when atrocities are brought to light, they are blamed on low-level individuals and are said to be aberrations having nothing to do with official policy. The My Lai massacre, for example, was blamed on Lieutenant William Calley, who is said to have gone “crazy” (4,5) – although he and his unit ...
It is worth noting that 6 out of these 7 countries (with the exception of Lebanon) identified by General Wesley Clark “to be taken out” are now the object of President Trump’s ban on Muslims’ entry to the US: Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Libya, Sudan, Iran and Yemen.
All of these countries are on the Pentagon’s drawing board. These countries have been directly or indirectly been the object of US aggression (Global Research Editor).
General Wesley Clark. Retired 4-star U.S. Army general, Supreme Allied Commander of NATO during the 1999 War on Yugoslavia.
Complete Transcript of Program, Democracy Now.
Today we spend the hour with General ...
Obama has announced new sanctions on Russia based on unsubstantiated charges by the CIA that the Russian government influenced the outcome of the US presidential election with “malicious cyber-enabled activities.”
The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has issued a report “related to the declaration of 35 Russian officials persona non grata for malicious cyber activity and harassment.”
The report is a description of “tools and infrastructure used by Russian intelligence services to compromise and exploit networks and infrastructure associated with the recent U.S. election, as well as a range of U.S. government, political and private sector entities.”
The report does not provide ...
Will the election of Republican George W. Bush as President usher in changes in foreign policy with regard to Serbia, Yugoslavia, and the Balkans? Will there be a continuation of „humanitarian interventionism“, „military humanism“, „economic globalism“ and „globalization“?
The Bush Administration foreign policy team has rejected the selective humanitarian interventionism of the Bill Clinton/Al Gore Administration, as espoused by Madeleine Albright and James Rubin. John Hulsman, Balkans adviser to Bush, announced that Bush was concerned about „imperial overstretch“ and has rejected a foreign policy that uses the US military in „nation building“. Hulsman has announced a „philosophical sea change“ in Balkans ...
It is as if the Gambino and Genovese crime families were arguing their turf disputes in the courts and the news media. The Democrats are screaming bloody murder over President Trump’s firing of FBI director James Comey, whom Hillary Clinton still blames for her defeat at the polls and whom the bipartisan War Party has never forgiven for Comey’s earlier hesitancy to blame the Russians for the same offense.
Now that Trump has cut Comey loose — ostensibly for his handling of the Clinton emails scandal, according to three letters sent by Trump and his two top Justice Department officials ...
One of the consequences of the geopolitical changes that has come to characterize modern civil society has been the surge in popularity of paramilitary units across Europe. This phenomenon is particularly observable in the Baltic States. The Lithuanian Riflemen’ Union is a telling example. Established in 1919, the Union has become very popular in the past few years; its number has grown significantly. Now it has around 8,000 members up from 6,000 two years ago.Trained by military personnel and falling under the responsibility of the defence ministry, the Union serves the clear purpose of supporting the regular army’s capabilities and ...
(JTA) — A Lithuanian judge postponed a precedent-setting trial in which a U.S. citizen is demanding that a state museum end its glorification of a deceased Nazi collaborator.Jonas Noreika - "General Storm"The case is thought to be the first in which civil servants intend to publicly defend in court the actions and good name of an alleged collaborator. Lawyers representing the museum said they needed more time to review materials relevant to the case, which involves the late Jonas Noreika. The postponement was announced Tuesday in Vilnius.The state-funded museum, known as the Center for the Study of the Genocide and Resistance of the ...
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists published a study, on 1 March 2017, which opened as follows:
“The US nuclear forces modernization program has been portrayed to the public as an effort to ensure the reliability and safety of warheads in the US nuclear arsenal, rather than to enhance their military capabilities. In reality, however, that program has implemented revolutionary new technologies that will vastly increase the targeting capability of the US ballistic missile arsenal. This increase in capability is astonishing — boosting the overall killing power of existing US ballistic missile forces by a factor of roughly three — and ...
When an intelligence agency arranges to disseminated fake news it is called “disinformation” and it is a subset of what is referred to as covert action, basically secret operations run in a foreign country to influence opinion or to disrupt the functioning of a government or group that is considered to be hostile.During the Cold War, disinformation operations were run by many of the leading players in both the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and in the opposition Warsaw Pact. Sometimes the activity and the sponsorship were clearly visible, as when Radio Free Europe and Radio Moscow would exchange barbs about ...
A Father of NationUkraine is an East European territory which was originally forming a western part of the Russian Empire from the mid-17th century. That is a present-day independent state and separate ethnolinguistic nation as a typical example of Benedict Anderson’s theory-model of the “imagined community” – a self-constructed idea of the artificial ethnic and linguistic-cultural identity. According to Anderson, the nation is abstract and firstly subjective social construction that defy simple, objective definition yet have been for the last two centuries the crucial basis of conflict in world politics and international relations, through assertion of their expressed nationalism.[i] However, ...
May 19, 1919 has different and even opposing meanings in Turkey and Greece, just as May 15, 1948, marks both the establishment of Israel and, for Palestinians, the start of the Nakba (“catastrophe”).In Turkey, this date marks the first step that led to the establishment of the Turkish Republic, while for descendants of Ottoman Greeks and Greece it marks the end of the centuries-long Pontic Greek presence on the shores of the Black Sea. Whereas Turks celebrate May 19, Greeks mourn it. Researcher Tamer Çilingir summarised the issue in a 2016 interview with the Turkish-Armenian daily Agos:“The Pontic Genocide is the ...
Introduction
Some have tried to debunk the view that the West implicitly or explicitly promised Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not expand east after German reunification and dissolution of the Warsaw Pact). These claims are misleading and obfuscate the historical record of at least a clear understanding, if not promise that there should be no NATO expansion eastward in any way, shape or form. At the very least the West made a implied commitment not to expand NATO east. It is more precise to say, however, that the West gave an explicit verbal, that is, unwritten guarantee not to ...
It’s all over but the postmortems. Trump and Clinton are their parties’ presumptive nominees. Choice for voters in November amounts to death by hanging or firing squad.
Democracy is pure fantasy. None whatever exists. Trump was the last GOP aspirant left standing after all others dropped out, an unlikely choice, a surprise winner, prevailing despite party bosses opposing him.
Democrat power brokers chose Clinton before primary/caucus season began. The race was over before it started.
Voters in November get to choose between a dirty business as usual billionaire racist, demagogue and a recklessly dangerous neocon racketeer, war criminal, Wall Street tool she ...
Barack Obama’s speech on the Ukrainian crisis seems to have left the public confused as he claimed that Kosovo broke away from Serbia “after a referendum”. But attentive listeners quickly pointed Obama’s gaps in history – there was no referendum in Kosovo. Video here.President Obama was speaking Wednesday at The Center for Fine Arts in the heart of Brussels, Belgium, and was telling the youth crowd mostly about Russian-Ukrainian conflict over the strategic Crimean Peninsula.He lashed out at Russia for “violation of international law, its assault on Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.”Obama recalled the conflict around Kosovo and NATO’s involvement, ...
In recent years, both the Western as well as the liberal Russian press have had a lot to say about Russian “barbarianism,” as if to contrast it with European “civilization.” But a closer inspection – through the prism of the heroic pages of Russian history – of the two groups’ moral ideals and actual lives presents us with quite a different picture.
For example, in pagan times, ancient Russians never worshipped a god of war, although their contemporaries in Europe were transfixed by their own martial deity, constructing an entire epic narrative around the concepts of war and conquest.
After defeating the ...
There was an interesting announcement recently that went almost entirely unnoticed in the Canadian media.
On June 17, Peter Szijjarto, foreign minister of Hungary’s centre-right government, made the startling declaration that his national security forces will erect a four-metre wall along the entire 175 kilometres of shared border with Serbia.
Szijjarto’s rationale for resorting to such a drastic measure results from a months-long flood of asylum seekers pouring into southern Hungary. While tens of thousands of these desperate illegal immigrants have been caught, detained and returned into Serbia, the vast majority have used the processing time for their asylum applications to simply ...
During the recent years of the confrontation between Russia and Ukraine, there has been one issue where the Western mainstream press simply cannot fully ignore or reject the Russian arguments. This issue concerns the life and actions of Stepan Bandera (1909-1959) and his followers from what is known as the “Banderite” faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN, a far-right organization that took terrorist actions against Polish and Soviet officials from the 1920s to the 1950s and which is now legally protected from any criticism in Ukraine).THE “WRONG” AND “RIGHT” VICTIMSBecause Bandera was born on January 1, 1909, celebrations ...
War with Russia appears increasingly likely as the US and its NATO satraps continue their military provocations of Moscow.
As dangers mount, our foolish politicians should all be forced to read, and then re-read, Prof. Christopher Clark’s magisterial book, ‘The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914.’ What is past increasingly appears prologue.
Prof. Clark carefully details how small cabals of anti-German senior officials in France, Britain and Russia engineered World War I, a dire conflict that was unnecessary, idiotic, and illogical. Germany and Austria-Hungary of course share some the blame, but to a much lesser degree than the bellicose French, ...
The Chinese have a genius for pithy expressions and few are more packed with meaning, while immediately understandable, than "paper tiger". NATO is one, but paper tigers that overestimate their powers can be dangerous.Some Russians are concerned that there are today more hostile troops at the Russian border than at any time since 1941. While this is true, it is not, at the moment, very significant. The Germans invaded the USSR with nearly 150 divisions in 1941. Which, as it turned out, were not enough.Today NATO has – or claims to have – a battle group in each of the three ...
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