“DOUBLE GENOCIDE”
Three major flaws mar
Mr. Cohen’s attempt

Boris Bakunas

By: Dr. Boris Vytautas Bakunas, Ph.D.

 "Mr. Cohen may appear to make a sincere effort to present a balanced view in his article; however, three major flaws mar his attempt. First, the article is based on the logical fallacy of false dichotomy, also known as the either-or fallacy. Second, the scales of balance in Mr. Cohen’s presentation waver as a result of his failure to present all the relevant facts related to the establishment of The Museum of Genocide Victims in Vilnius. Finally, Mr. Cohen obfuscates two crucial terms: Holocaust and genocide.

First, let us consider Mr. Cohen's portrayal of Post-Soviet historiography as a series of "faltering attempts to deal with a thorny question: Were Lithuanians chiefly perpetrators (of Nazi crimes against Jews) or victims (of Soviet crimes against the nation)?" By posing his question in an either-or fashion, Mr. Cohen tacitly assumes that an entire nation can be characterized as falling within the one of two mutually exclusive categories: perpetrators or victims. In point of fact, some Lithuanians collaborated with their Nazi overlords, while others rescued Jewish Lithuanians at the risk of their own lives and those of their children. Individual accounts of their heroic deeds can be found in Gilbert Martin's excellent book "The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust." Characterizing an entire group based solely on the actions of its worst or even its best representatives results in ethnic stereotyping, which clouds judgment and inflames passion.

Mr. Cohen also claims that The Museum of Genocide Victims in Vilnius “reflects a still-skewed national psyche” because it is devoted to Soviet crimes against Lithuanian partisans and not to the Jewish victims of the Nazis. Yet he fails to mention two important facts. The Vilnius Genocide Museum occupies the former KGB headquarters where Lithuanian partisans and others judged to be enemies of the Communist regime were imprisoned and tortured, while the Nazi genocide against Lithuanian Jews is memorialized in Kaunas’ 9th Fort Museum, where the Jewish people of Lithuania in the thousands were massacred. By selectively presenting only one relevant fact, Mr. Cohen slants his article towards a particular point of view.


Mr. Cohen's third error resides in confusing the terms Holocaust and genocide. The Holocaust was indeed a unique event -- in the same way that the Holodomor, the systematic famine engineered by Stalin in 1932-33 in which up to 10 million Ukrainians perished as well as the Massacre of Armenians during and right after the First World War were unique events. All instances of systematic mass murder are events unique to a particular time, place, and historical context. And all fall within the bounds of the superordinate concept of genocide.

The term "genocide" was first coined by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer of Jewish descent who lost 49 relatives during the Holocaust. After the war, Mr. Lemkin tirelessly campaigned for the establishment of international laws defining and forbidding genocide. In many of his writings and during many public appearances, Mr. Lemkin emphatically stated that genocide was a broad term that encompassed many

In his book “Axis Rule in Occupied Europe,” Mr. Lemkin wrote that "Genocide has two phases: one, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor. This imposition, in turn, may be made upon the oppressed population which is allowed to remain or upon the territory alone, after removal of the population and the colonization by the oppressor's own nationals." Clearly, the execution, torture, and mass deportations of Lithuanians by Soviet invaders fall within the scope of genocide.

Mr. Cohen’s dichotomous characterization of Lithuanians as either perpetrators or victims, his failure to present the full facts related the memorialization of genocide victims in present-day Lithuania, and his failure to understand the difference between the Holocaust and genocide gives a skewed report of independent Lithuania’s recognition of the Nazi and Soviet crimes against humanity. A little more thought and less hasty writing may have resulted in an article that enlightens rather than inflames this issue.