Neo-Nazi Marchers on Lithuania’s Cherished March 11th Independence Day (Vilnius 2018)
For the 11th year running, the center of Lithuania’s beautiful capital, Vilnius, was gifted in the high afternoon hours this past Sunday, Match 11th, to far-righters and neo-Nazis on the annual holiday cherished by the free world for its historic importance, in 1990, in the series of events that toppled the Soviet Union’s hated misrule [...]
For the 11th year running, the center of Lithuania’s beautiful capital, Vilnius, was gifted in the high afternoon hours this past Sunday, March 11th, to far-righters and neo-Nazis on the annual holiday cherished by the free world for its historic importance, in 1990, in the series of events that toppled the Soviet Union’s hated misrule. The Defending History community, all resolute admirers of Lithuania who celebrate its success, has monitored this event annually. The international outcry after the 2008 event, which featured “Juden raus” and a throng of swastikas had led to curious “compromises” each year between organizers and the municipality on what will and will not be done. But no sign yet of the mayor’s office, municipality or government finding the moral backbone to just say, “No, not in the center of our capital on our independence day.”
But first, the general opinion of the Defending History community. We believe in free speech, even for the most despicable speech. But there is a time and place for everything. By starting, for the first time in 2008, four years after accession to the European Union and NATO, to gift the neo-Nazis the center of the capital, on independence day, a statement was being made that for many constituted de facto legitimization of the view that Hitler and the Holocaust are to be celebrated in the interests of ethnic purity and hatred of the nation’s minorities. This, in a country where over 95% of the Jewish population were murdered via massive local voluntary collaboration in the killing process by “patriotic nationalist forces.” We have consistently, in the spirit of Yiddish lore, invoked the old Litvak Yiddish saying about something that is fit for Balbírishok (today’s Balbieriškis), a shtetl far away, but not for the central prospect of the capital (no disrespect to the fine people of Balbírishok, to cite a point that came up some years ago).
For some Holocaust survivors and their families the most painful part of these marches has been the flaunting of swastikas and other fascist symbols. Some years white armbands were the theme, invoking the 1941 killers of the Lithuanian Activist Front who began to slaughter their Jewish neighbors before the Nazi army even arrived. But the overriding source of pain has been the carrying of banners glorifying actual Lithuanian Holocaust collaborators, and this in a country with so many true heroes, heroes that can be cherished by all humanity, over a period of close to a thousand proud years of Lithuanian history in the European arena.
Sunday’s small Defending History monitoring team was made up of Leonas Kaplanas, Dovid Katz, Nicolas LaFay, Julius Norwilla (team coordinator), Ruta Ostrovskaja, and Grytė Ruzgė. DH published a public invitation for folks to consider joining around a week before the event. Two stalwarts of many years’ DH monitoring, Evaldas Balčiūnas and Milan Chersonski, were unable to attend this year because of health reasons. The only other evident, separate and uniquely individual monitoring/protesting presence was the well-known, flamboyant and controversial Vilnius Jewish personality, Daniel Lupshitz, an assistant to the mayor of Vilnius, who came once again wrapped in an Israeli-style Jewish prayer shawl or táles (tallit).
So how did this past Sunday stack up against previous marches, including this year for the first time, a February 16th Vilnius march that was moved from its usual Kaunas venue, where the DH team has likewise been monitoring the event for years? What was the result this time around of the neos’ negotiations with the municipality and mayor’s office that simply lacked the moral courage to Just Say No? The good news was that there were no banners of the Holocaust collaborators, but unlike February 16th, “Lietuva Lietuviams” — the clarion racist chants of “Lithuania for Lithuanians” — barred last month, were reintroduced both in the shouted chants for hours to the point of severe monotony, and on a huge banner out front, and smaller individual signs. Curiously, Lithuania is the most “ethnically pure” of the Baltic states, and one has to wonder about the deeper historic and racial-cleansing ethos of the marchers. Also, the march ended at Lukiškės Square, and did not reach Parliament, as in previous years. “Well done, city negotiators”. . . As ever, not a sign of the well-endowed “human rights monitoring NGOs” who enjoy lavish funding for lovely websites, conferences, reports and travels. But at one point, Leonas Kaplanas, part of the monitoring team, did shout back, when the “Lietuva Lietuviams” chants were reaching a hysterical crescendo, with a single, elegant cry-out of: “Lietuva visiems” — Lithuania for Everybody!
There were “only a few swastikas” worn by marchers adept at hiding in the middle of crowds. But no “classic swastikas” were observed, just the “Lithuanian swastika” with the added lines (meant to invoke a medieval symbol) and the “curved swastika”. In fact swastikas were made legal in the country in a 2010 court ruling, but the international outcry has led the government to try hard to persuade the neo-Nazis to avoid its use. The DH team managed to document a number of instances including these two (photo right).
Most of this year’s crowd were middle aged to older, without many of the regulars who, we were told, were encouraged to lead events elsewhere. For much of the time, the crowd was smaller than in previous years, numbering a few hundred, but it swelled to around one thousand at max, on the march up Gedimino Boulevard. One personality “of many years’ standing” was the former top official of the state-sponsored Genocide Research Center, Ričardas Čekutis, wearing his trademark White Power scarf.
The Pepe the Frog meme, imported from the United States, where it has been appropriated by the alt-right, was back in town too.
There were various and sundry far-right and fascist symbols.
As usual, it was both sad and surreal to see the neo-Nazi marches throng pass the sign marking the Vilnius Jewish Public Library, and, this year, the newly added sign for the World Jewish Congress International Yiddish Center. By contrast, it was more “natural” for them to be passing the memorial stone honoring the notorious Holocaust collaborator Jonas Noreika (alias “Generolas Vetra”) on the Genocide Museum wall. Mr. Noreika would have been well pleased with such honors in store in 2018.
Indeed, failure to appreciate the genocide that was the Holocaust, and to honor as heroes local collaborators and perpetrators, continues to lead to misappropriation of the word “genocide” for a variety of perceived wrongs. As ever, there was a banner about that too, claiming that the Lithuanian people were being subjected to genocide.
The far right Ukrainian presence was the only military-garbed unit with the day’s event, and the militia in town for the parade attracted considerable adoration.
The event concluded with speeches by far-right personalities at Lukiškės Square. In addition to Sakalas Gorodeckis, chairman of the fascistic Nationalist Union , who last year used Independence Day to launch a public attack against Lithuania’s oldest Holocaust survivor, there were representatives of neo-Nazi and far right parties from Germany (the Young Nationalists), and three groups from Ukraine, the Right Sector, Swaboda, and a group of military-clad members of the so-called National Corpus militia.
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.
Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!
Donate to Support Us
We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics, and international relations.
The U.N. Organization was established in 1945 for the very security reason – to preserve the peace in the world. We believe that the governmental bodies and administrative structures of the U.N. have to be composed by the proved democratically oriented politicians and magistrates but above all this requirement has to be applied to the post and function of the U.N. Secretary-General. Nevertheless, in the history of the U.N. there is at least one (extremely) problematic appointment to the post of the U.N. Secretary-General: Kurt Waldheim from Austria.On the official website of the U.N. about its fourth Secretary-General one can ...
Only a few recent Holocaust movies have provoked so many vituperative reviews or elicited so many strong opinions for reasons almost entirely divorced from the film itself.Even before Predrag Antonijevic’s new film ‘Dara of Jasenovac’, about the Ustasa-run World War II concentration camp complex at Jasenovac in Croatia has been released in its native country – Serbia – it found itself at the centre of a welter of criticism, accused of a laundry list of transgressions by American and British film critics.In August 1941, the Croatian WWII fascist Ustasa movement established the Jasenovac camp system, where over 83,000 Serbs, Roma, ...
The Independent State of Croatia (NDH) was a World War II puppet state of Germany and Italy, which was established in parts of Axis-occupied Yugoslavia. The NDH was founded on 10 April 1941, after the invasion of Yugoslavia by the Axis powers.A poster from the WWII Nazi Ustashi Independent State of Croatia with the state flag (Source: Instagram)The NDH consisted of modern-day Croatia and most of Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as some parts of modern-day Serbia and Slovenia. The regime targeted Serbs, Jews, Roma people and anti-fascist or dissident Croatians and Muslims, as part of a large-scale genocide campaign ...
Here are before-and-after pictures, at https://twitter.com/MAL0mt/status/701077438525263873/photo/1, of what the U.S. government has achieved, in the Middle East:What’s especially interesting there, is that in all of these missions, except for Iraq, the U.S. was doing it with the key participation of the Saud family, the royals who own Saudi Arabia, and who are the world’s largest buyers of American weaponry. Since Barack Obama came into the White House, the operations — Libya, Yemen, and Syria — have been, to a large extent, joint operations with the Sauds. ‘We’ are now working more closely with ‘our’ ‘friends’, even than ‘we’ were under George W. Bush.As President Obama instructed his military, ...
While much is said in some American media outlets about “fake news” in the US, the smallness of the matters being discussed might come into focus when compared with Ukraine, which is of late producing rather much fake news about the Holocaust and elementary points in World War II history.As we reported back in October, Ukrainian media outlet Radio Svoboda — the Ukrainian arm of the US Government-funded arm of RFERL — posted a picture from the US Holocaust Museum. It is an image of Polish Jews being deported to a death camp. There was just one problem. Radio Svoboda claimed the picture ...
The national scandal unleashed by the Lithuanian Rūta Vanagaitė and the Jewish Efraim Zuroff via their statements about Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas, is gradually losing momentum. The Seimas (parliament) went right ahead and declared the incoming year, 2018, to be The Year of Ramanauskas-Vanagas. That is sad. Three years ago, I wrote about this person’s activities in Druskininkai in 1941. Society back then was silent about it. It was only the desire of some politicians to glorify this personage that led to the aforementioned Lithuanian and Jewish commentators to talk about him. They spoke loudly and an antisemitic bubble burst. Vanagaitė’s statement had some ...
Unless We Learn Our History, We’re Doomed to Repeat ItPreface: I am a patriotic American who loves my country. I was born here, and lived here my entire life.So why do I frequently point out America’s warts? Because – as the Founding Fathers and Supreme Court judges have explained – we can only make America better if we honestly examine her shortcomings. After all:“Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.”Only when Americans can honestly look at our weaknesses can we become stronger. If we fail to do so, history will repeat …While Americans rightly condemn the Nazis as monstrous people, ...
The Kaunas Garage Massacre of the Jews in June 1941It was with great interest that I read the op-ed jointly penned by Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi and his Lithuanian counterpart, Gabrielius Landsbergis, in last Friday’s Jerusalem Post. As could be expected, such initiatives are usually written to offer a rosy picture of the wonderful relations between two countries and the bright prospects for future cooperation. As a descendant of Lithuanian Jews, a frequent visitor to Lithuania ever since independence, and the co-author of a recent book on the rampant Holocaust distortion orchestrated by successive Lithuanian governments, I didn’t know whether to ...
Washington: Cardinal George Pell, who is Vatican Prefect of the Secretariat for the Economy, told The Tablet, a Catholic newspaper on June 17, 2016, that:“The Vatican is committed to transparency, international cooperation, and the use of contemporary international standards in financial reporting.”Cardinal Pell further praised Jean Baptiste de Franssu, the director of the Vatican Bank as one who had done “an excellent clean out job.”Pell further stated: “Pope Francis continues to insist that the financial reforms must continue.”Nowhere in Pell’s message was there any mention of the Nazi linked Ustasha Treasury first identified by the US State department in 1998 ...
The US President Donald Trump is no doubt a successful businessman who rules his country as if it is a huge enterprise. And this kind of management, to his mind, should lead to success. And very often it really works. As a wise leader he uses different tools to reach his goals. Thus, the most cunning one, which the US exploits in Europe – is indirect influence on the EU countries to gain the desired aim. The EU just becomes a tool in “capable hands” of the US.Let us give the simple example. Last week the Ministry of National Defence ...
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, ...
A report on August 15th from Russian Television alleged that the Ukrainian government that the U.S. installed in February of this year was resorting to internationally banned white phosphorous firebombs in order to help destroy the million people who lived in the now Ukrainian separatist capital of Donetsk. It lands super-hot and starts fires and burns to death almost anyone it touches.The Ukrainian separatists are the residents in Ukraine’s southeast, where Viktor Yanukovych, the Ukrainian President, was elected overwhelmingly by the votes of the people in this region in 2010. They reject the government that Obama installed, and are therefore seeking independence from it. ...
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 ...
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.[wpedon id="4696" align="left"]SaveSaveSave
Berlin Olympic Stadium (14-05- 1938). England's national team is in white kitsIt’s that time of year again – when Britain’s “poppy fascism” dominates public life. Television presenters are perhaps the most conspicuous exponents, whereby the paper facsimile of the little red flower must be donned on all lapels.Now weeks ahead of the official commemoration day, more and more Britons, including TV personalties, are pinning the poppy in public.It may seem innocuous, but there is a disturbing authoritarianism to the increasing custom. Those who don’t wear the symbol commemorating Britain’s war dead are liable to be castigated and abused for being ...
When great powers fade, as they inevitably must, it’s normally for one of two reasons. Some powers exhaust themselves through overreach abroad, underinvestment at home, or a mixture of the two. This was the case for the Soviet Union. Other powers lose their privileged position with the emergence of new, stronger powers. This describes what happened with France and Great Britain in the case of Germany’s emergence after World War I and, more benignly, with the European powers and the rise of the United States during and after World War II.To some extent America is facing a version of this—amid ...
In early 1944, Mirjana Babunovic-Dimitrijevic, a 22-year-old middle-class woman living in Sarajevo, was arrested by the Ustasa police. After she was arrested along with her mother and aunt, they were all deported to the Jasenovac concentration camp, for refusing to convert to Catholicism. All three women died there in late 1944.These women were among more than 80,000 victims who perished at Jasenovac between 1941 and 1945. While we don’t know precisely how they died nor what happened during their short lives in the camp, two things are certain.First, their deaths were the direct result of deliberate political decisions. Second, they ...
General Adolf Heusinger (August 4, 1897 – November 30, 1982) was a German general officer who briefly served as Adolf Hitler’s Chief of the General Staff of the Army during World War II and served as the first Inspector General of the Bundeswehr, the West German armed forces, from 1957 to 1961. Heusinger served as Chairman of the NATO Military Committee from 1961 to 1964.Heusinger was born in Holzminden, in the Duchy of Brunswick, German Empire. He entered the Imperial German Army on June 17, 1915, and was assigned to 7. Thüringisches Infanterie-Regiment Nr. 96, an infantry regiment raised in ...
The historical Western policy of „Russophobia Vulgaris“, which is currently promulgated by the British Cabinet of Theresa May, is nothing new. It was originally started by the British Empire in the XIX century, followed up by the US after the WWII and now, as Russia it getting notably reinforced, is escalated in the form of the “New Cold War”. The Russian exodus from the West (diplomatic only yet), presented as a punishment for Russia’s alleged nerve gas poisoning of a former Russian/MI6 double-agent reminds us of the baiting of Jews in the Middle Age for alleged ‘poisoning of wells‘.We have ...
The title page of Rūta Vanagaitė’s best-known book contains two pictures of young men. “This one is a Jew,” she said, pointing at the picture on the left. “He was a bicycle-racing champion. Good enough to represent Lithuania in international competitions, but not good enough to live.” He was executed during the Holocaust. The man in the picture on the right was a Lithuanian executioner. “They are both us,” Vanagaitė explained. “But Lithuanians don’t like to think of them as ‘us,’ because one is a Jew and the other is a killer.” Her book is called “Us.” (The title has ...
But first, the general opinion of the Defending History community. We believe in free speech, even for the most despicable speech. But there is a time and place for everything. By starting, for the first time in 2008, four years after accession to the European Union and NATO, to gift the neo-Nazis the center of the capital, on independence day, a statement was being made that for many constituted de facto legitimization of the view that Hitler and the Holocaust are to be celebrated in the interests of ethnic purity and hatred of the nation’s minorities. This, in a country where over 95% of the Jewish population were murdered via massive local voluntary collaboration in the killing process by “patriotic nationalist forces.” We have consistently, in the spirit of Yiddish lore, invoked the old Litvak Yiddish saying about something that is fit for Balbírishok (today’s Balbieriškis), a shtetl far away, but not for the central prospect of the capital (no disrespect to the fine people of Balbírishok, to cite a point that came up some years ago).
