Who will Secure Lithuania?

The term “security” is a very multifaceted one. But today’s geopolitical situation forces us to think about its military aspect above all.

Our attention is completely absorbed by news about wars, conflicts, military exercises and increasing defence capabilities. An average European reader has no chances to skip this kind of news while looking through news feeds of popular media.

Even planned further militarization of the European region and Russia pose the real threat today. A whole generation of European children is growing in the firm belief that the war is approaching. We destroy ourselves by our fears. We notice everything concerning military issues and neglect economic and social sides of our life. We live in a changed world and we are to blame for it.

Let’s take Lithuania as an example. This small country with reach history and with immensely kind and open people last few weeks falls into the center of world attention mainly in connection with military affairs: rotational U.S. Army troops arrival, participating in NATO drills, United States F-22 Raptor stealth aircraft’s landing in Lithuania at Šiauliai Airbase and so on and so forth.

One can conclude that the only serious problem of Lithuania’ s security is its weak national defence capabilities. This opinion is purposely formed by national media and by international journalists. The more so, the government actively supports shaping such public views by giving interview and showing off near military vehicles, aircraft and equipment (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayHW-Q8dcNw).

Few people think about the purposes of such PR campaign. This one-sided approach to the security of the state raises questions. Attracting attention to the military aspect of security will not help the authorities to secure the country. Hungry and angry people may become a force that can turn everything upside down. There are a lot of problems concerning Lithuania’s security in energy, economic and demographic spheres today that are not the priorities for the government. Unfortunately, during the pre-election period the authorities do their best to divert the attention of people from social problems to more “global” ones. They successfully exploit the Motherland’s defenders image instead of reporting on the domestic policy where they did not succeed.

The failures in domestic policy are more than obvious. According to the statistics, Lithuania today is one of the poorest nations in the EU. Catastrophic situation is in the field of education. Low Lithuanian teachers’ salaries even make them to strike. The situation in Lithuanian retail centers where a liter of milk costs less than a liter of water is absolutely absurd! The minimum wage in Lithuania is only 350 per month. That is the lowest level among the Baltic States. Lithuanian trade unions stage protest actions to demand better working conditions.

The more so, according to statistics, youth unemployment rate in Lithuania in March was 14.10 percent. Young people continue to leave Lithuania in search of a better life.

At the same time the government is ready to welcome about 1000 NATO troops. On one hand there is nothing bad in additional military aid. On the other – the country doesn’t have spare money for accommodating foreign soldiers. Such steps pose a serious financial burden on a host nation. Do citizens really can afford maintaining the foreign army under shortfalls of means to cover their own living expenses?

Deterioration of living conditions particularly evident among ordinary citizens. Public revolt against food price increase in Lithuania of the last few days is an indicator of growing dissatisfaction with the domestic policy of the Lithuanian authorities who as if nothing has happened try not to notice social “thunderstorm” approaching. It may happen so that “social explosion” will occur earlier than expecting Russia’s attack. Lithuanians need not only a feeling of military security, but confidence in the future, food and demographic security. They should trust government and be sure that the authorities think about them. Only in this case Lithuanians will be active during election campaigns, respect their parliament and leaders. Unclear, who will secure Lithuania, but obviously not those people who are obliged to do it.

Originally written in May 2016

Author: Adomas Abromaitis

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.

[wpedon id=”4696″ align=”left”]

READ MORE!

The Ultimate War Crime: America’s “Global War on Terrorism”

The Islamic State is not only protected by the US and its allies, it is trained and financed by US-NATO, with the support of Israel and Washington’s Persian Gulf allies.Al Qaeda Affiliated Entities are “Intelligence Assets. Instruments of US Intelligence. The Global War on Terrorism is a fabrication used to justify a war of conquest. The Jihadist terrorists are “Made in America”. They are instruments of US intelligence, yet they are presented to public opinion as “enemies of America”.IntroductionThe Obama administration has embarked upon the ultimate war crime, a Worldwide military adventure, “a long war”, which threatens the future of humanity.The Pentagon’s global military design is one ...

Why the Latest Claims Against Assad are a Pack of Lies

With a critical public increasingly turning to social media to scrutinize the claims of the mainstream as well as the credibility of the assertions made by the various NGOs and government-funded human rights organisations, it’s arguably becoming more difficult for the corporate press to pass their propaganda off as legitimate news. This is particularly the case during periods when the establishment pushes for military conflicts. One salutary lesson from the Iraq debacle, is that the public appear not to be so readily fooled. Or are they? It’s a measure of the extent to which the mass media barely stray from their paymasters ...

US Human Rights Violations: Geneva Centre for Justice

Universal Periodic Review reveals longstanding unwillingness to fully commit to obligations of pertinent human rights treaties.On 11 May 2015, the United States of America participated in its second Universal Periodic Review (UPR). The Universal Periodic Review is meant to be a mechanism by which all UN Member States are periodically assessed on their human rights record. The process allows countries to present a report of their efforts to promote and improve human rights within their country. It also affords the Working Group of the UPR, comprised of member countries of the Human Rights Council, the opportunity to assess the human ...

Noel Malcolm: “Kosovo – A Short History”, 1999. A History Written With an Attempt to Support Albanian Territorial Claims in the Balkans (Second Part)

Noel Malcolm – Kosovo – A Short History A history written with an attempt to support Albanian territorial claims in the Balkans Historical Institute of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Art Belgrade, 2000 Response to the Book of Noel Malcolm Kosovo – A Short History Milorad Ekmecic, Academician Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts Belgrade Historiography By the Garb Only Reading, from necessity, the books by some Western, particularly American scholars, dealing with the past of the Serbs and the Balkans, I recall the impressions that are in my memory, for some reason, related to the socially committed painter Georg Grosz. Today the flashes of those recollections of my college ...

America’s Recent Achievements in the Middle East

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, ...

Native American Genocide

The term Genocide derives from the Latin (genos=race, tribe; cide=killing) and means literally the killing or murder of an entire tribe or people. The Oxford English Dictionary defines genocide as “the deliberate and systematic extermination of an ethnic or national group” and cites the first usage of the term as R. Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, (1944) p.79. “By ‘genocide’ we mean the destruction of a nation or an ethnic group.” The U.N. General Assembly adopted this term and defended it in 1946 as “….a denial of the right of existence of entire human groups.” Most people tend to associate ...

Finland’s Nazi Past and the SS Martti Ahtisaari

At the time of the illegal NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 when Martti Ahtisaari was the President of Finland, his government sought to commemorate and to honor Finland’s Nazi SS volunteers from the Holocaust. This offers irrefutable evidence of Ahtisaari’s direct links for support of Nazism and Nazi revisionism. If Ahtisaari had bothered to check the decisions of the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunals, he would have found that that court held that all Waffen SS troops were war criminals guilty of war crimes and guilty of committing crimes against humanity, namely the mass murder of Jews. Ahtisaari lacks even ...

U.S. Korea Policy

“If you have nukes, never give them up–If you don’t have them, get them”Dan Coats, Director of National IntelligenceThose were the words of President Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, about the lessons taught from the U.S. destruction of Libya and the assassination of Muammar Gaddafi.That is why North Korea is a nuclear power. That is the reality and eventually the U.S. will have to accept “Mutually Assured Madness“. The U.S. has nobody to blame for its self-inflected wounds. It is called Blowback.The propaganda mill and the mainstream media greatly exaggerate the US national security risk to the American people, and ...

Why London Presented Hitler with Vienna and Prague?

State frontiers are established by human beingsand may be changed by human beings.Adolf Hitler. Mein KampfDiplomacy, with all the conventions of its forms,recognizes only real facts.Charles de GaullePart OneAll of Adolf Hitler’s actions, from the time he rose to power in 1933 until 1939, could be described as one triumph after another. He met each challenge he faced: he took over as head of the country, returned Germany’s lost territories without a struggle, and was given permission from England and France to rearm. But one further task lay before him, and failure now would make his previous achievements almost pointless. ...

The UN Convention on War Crimes should be Applied to the United States

Despite the measures taken by the international community to reinforce global security and protect civilians from the relentless increase in the number of armed conflicts, unjustified civilian casualties are not decreasing, and not only in the tinder box that is the Middle East, but also in Asia, Latin America, Africa, and even in Europe.The rules aimed at protecting the victims of armed conflict, and placing restrictions on the methods and means of warfare, are spelled out in detail in international humanitarian law, which also defines the mechanisms for ensuring compliance with these rules. A significant portion of those that concern ...

Another Dangerous Rush to Judgment in Syria

Exclusive: The U.S. government and the mainstream media rushed to judgment again, blaming the Syrian government for a new poison-gas attack and ignoring other possibilities, reports Robert Parry. With the latest hasty judgment about Tuesday’s poison-gas deaths in a rebel-held area of northern Syria, the mainstream U.S. news media once more reveals itself to be a threat to responsible journalism and to the future of humanity. Again, we see the troubling pattern of verdict first, investigation later, even when that behavior can lead to a dangerous war escalation and many more deaths. Before a careful evaluation of the evidence about Tuesday’s tragedy ...

The Lie of the 21st Century: How Mainstream Media “Fake News” Led to the U.S. Invasion of Iraq

The mainstream media (MSM) has declared war on alternative media websites labeling them “Fake News” ever since Hillary Clinton lost the election to Donald Trump. The New York Times editorial board expressed their frustration in an article calling for the censorship of alternative and social media Facebook and the Digital Virus Called Fake News’ which claimed both social media platforms (Facebook and Google) has not been aggressive enough in blocking fake news sites:Most of the fake news stories are produced by scammers looking to make a quick buck. The vast majority of them take far-right positions. But a big part ...

Global Security, the United Nations Organization and the Role of the Security Council

Historical backgroundAfter the failure of the interwar League of Nations to prevent international crises and military conflicts of the 1930s which finally culminated in the next global war, the major Allied states (the USA, the USA, the UK, and China) agreed in Moscow in October 1943 to create a new, more functional, and improved international peace-keeping organization after the war under a new name of the United Nations Organization (the UNO). In other words, the UNO has evolved from a wining coalition of countries fighting against European Nazism and fascism in WWII. Following further negotiations at Dumbarton Oaks and Yalta, ...

The Surreal World: Macedonia

Claiming that Macedonians voluntarily chose to rename our country into “North Macedonia” and ethnicity into “North Macedonians” is like saying that Indigenous groups choose to be called “Redskins”. And when Western media attack Macedonians for denouncing the forced name change, it would be akin to them attacking Indigenous groups for denouncing anti-Indigenous terms.Welcome to The Surreal World: Macedonia.Yes, Macedonians get attacked for denouncing the derogatory terms used against us. Why? Because the United States says so. And they fund media and so-called “think tanks” to do the same. These same groups accuse Macedonians of the exact tactics that are being ...

Five Myths about American Indians

Thanksgiving recalls for many people a meal between European colonists and indigenous Americans that we have invested with all the symbolism we can muster. But the new arrivals who sat down to share venison with some of America’s original inhabitants relied on a raft of misconceptions that began as early as the 1500s, when Europeans produced fanciful depictions of the “New World.” In the centuries that followed, captivity narratives, novels, short stories, textbooks, newspapers, art, photography, movies and television perpetuated old stereotypes or created new ones — particularly ones that cast indigenous peoples as obstacles to, rather than actors in, ...

Zbigniew Brzezinski: U.S. Imperialism, Capitalism and Fascism

If you want to know the untold history of the U.S.A., then a good place to start is with the history of US imperialism in Asia from the mid-19th century until today. Not only will that reveal the history of the criminality of US foreign policy, but it will also reveal the true nature of U.S. capitalism, imperialism, fascism and U.S. wars of aggression: past, present and future. For centuries the U.S. has preached that it believes in democracy, freedom and self-determination, but its actions towards other countries speak louder than words. Internationally the U.S. is a predator and a bully. ...

The Six Day War – Myth and Reality

The Six Day War of June 1967, a series of battles fought by the armed forces of the state of Israel against a combination of Arab armies, is one of manifold significance. From a military standpoint, it presented a model strategy of how to prosecute and win a war waged on several fronts.The stunning victory also created a sense of euphoria among communities in the Jewish Diaspora: Among American Jews, a segment of Jewry David Ben Gurion viewed with disdain because of their failure to migrate en masse to Israel, a new sense of commitment in both emotional and financial ...

Ukraine Provocation in the Black Sea is Directed Against Russia

Ukraine is a virtual US colony – the way it’s been since the Obama regime’s February 2014 coup, replacing democratic governance with fascist tyranny in Europe’s heartland.Ukraine shares a near-1,500 mile land and sea border with the Russian Federation, the longest Western frontier with the country.The regime running things is a hotbed of militarized extremism, waging war on its own people, committing appalling human rights abuses – with full support and encouragement from Washington and key NATO countries.Stop NATO’s Rick Rozoff earlier explained that Ukraine is “the decisive linchpin in plans by the US and its NATO allies to effect ...

Al Qaeda: The Data Base

Shortly before his untimely death, former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told the House of Commons that “Al Qaeda” is not really a terrorist group but a database of international mujaheddin and arms smugglers used by the CIA and Saudis to funnel guerrillas, arms, and money into Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. Courtesy of World Affairs, a journal based in New Delhi, WMR can bring you an important excerpt from an Apr.-Jun. 2004 article by Pierre-Henry Bunel, a former agent for French military intelligence. “I first heard about Al-Qaida while I was attending the Command and Staff course in Jordan. I was a French ...

Albanian Ethnogenesis and Kosovo-Metochia

The topic to be addressed in this text is the basic misconception on the question of the Balkan Albanian ethnogenesis and national identity that was framed by extremely geo-politically coloured German-based “Illyrian” theory of the Albanian ethnic and cultural origin. This (quasi)theory, unfortunately, has very deep and negative regional political-security consequences. The implementation of the “Illyrian” theory of the Albanian ethnogenesis was accepted firstly by the Rilindja, (the Renaissance) – the Albanian nationalistic and chauvinistic political movement in 1878–1913 for the sake to create the ethnically pure Greater Albania as a national state of all Balkan Albanians composed by self-interpreted ...