Opinions

Lithuania and the Holocaust, a comment to the Didier Bertin article:

Lithuania cannot appease both world Jewry and far-right extremists

Olga Zabludoff

By: Olga Zabludoff
Washington, DC, USA

I commend Didier Bertin's knowledgeable and sensitive observations in his article "Lithuania and the Memory of the Holocaust." My comments here are more in the form of a PS to Mr. Bertin's words. My take-off point is his reference to the term “Double Genocide,” a government-endorsed concept that has been bandied about in Lithuanian political circles in recent times. But more about this later. Mr. Bertin borrows the term for application in a different dual context: the original genocide of the Jewish people and the current movement on the part of the Lithuanian government to neutralize if not to obliterate the remembrance of the Holocaust. 

To read more go to:
Section 5 or Section 12.

Reply to the article of Mr. Plasseraud published in VilNews in October 2011
Lithuania and the memory of the Holocaust

By Didier Bertin,
President of the Society for the Promotion of the European Human Rights Model (France) – 14 October 2011

We love Lithuania and its wonderful and precious language and fine people! The sole acute problem of Lithuania might be its government.

There is still a lot to do in this country for Human Rights Organizations like fighting Racism, antisemitism, Homophobia and promoting education and free information as the corner stone of democracy for a member-State of the European Union.

Mr. Plasseraud reminded important criticisms which could be made in Lithuania and that he does not share  despite they are true in our opinion: The obliteration of the participation of Lithuanian militias in Pogroms  and  Holocaust, the “current” authorization of Nazi Parades and the creation of a new concept which put in equivalence of the Holocaust and the suffering of people under communist dictatorship whose consequence is the arbitrary second ranking of the Holocaust. This concept is named double Genocide and made a mathematical  equality between events, which has no sense in History. In fact this concept aims to obliterate or reduce one of the two components of the equation, which is clearly the Holocaust as this can be seen in Lithuania.

As a matter of fact the Vilnius Genocide Museum displays only facts on the Soviet oppression and we were personally told by a member of the Staff that for “the Jewish things” we have to go to the green

hut named “Green House”, which is a very poor small a museum in a wooden hut and which at last refers to the Holocaust. This so called museum is as difficult to find as the Holocaust in the Lithuanian History. However and on top of these negative facts many others were forgotten were forgotten by Mr. Plasseraud.

We were also shocked by similar substantial obliterations in the museum of the 9th Fort in Kaunas. We had also the opportunity to check the content of a History school book of a 15 years old Lithuanian schoolboy and we noticed that it was far from the richness of our French school  books. The  History school  book  we  saw  was  very slim  and  presented  an  over- simplified version of events.

To read more go to Sections 5 and Section 12.

Lithuania and the memory of the Shoah (Holocaust)

May Lithuania rot in hell for a thousand years! This is what one could recently read in a Letter to VilNews’ Editor. This vindictive sentence sums up, in a nutshell, the language of a number of the current Western (including Israeli) and Russian discourses on this Baltic country. The rationale behind this demonization is what the authors of these writings consider as the radical and supposedly built-in anti-Semitism of the Lithuanians.
Yves Plassaraud, Paris – France

To read more, go to
Section 12 – LITVAK FORUM

 Ref article: https://vilnews.com/?p=10007

The border between Poland and the Lithuanian SSR was characterized by miles of high barbed wire fences, a wide no man's land with land mines, and high watchtowers at regular intervals.

Among others, shortly thereafter I witnessed Soviet bullet scars on Ridzene Hotel in Riga, Latvia, where I was staying as an economic expert of an international "blue ribbon" commission.

Once I tried to go for a weekend to Poland by bus via LT on my Canadian passport. I was warmly greeted in Lithuanian by the Sajudis Movement economic border people but stopped a couple of minutes later by the KGB who still were minding the Soviet political border even though LT declared independence back in 1990. For that reason, I was determined to use only Lithuanian or Polish to cross LT-PL border; I am fluent in Russian but I pretended that I do not understand what the KGB were saying when they saw my Canadian passport. They took away my passport and, while the busfull of people were staring at me in total silence, told the bus driver: nu i padarok ty nam privioz (what a gift you brought to us!). Well, now I am in trouble, I guessed. Later, via an LT translator, the KGB told me that this border crossing is for citizens of the USSR and the Polish People's Republic, not for Westerners. They took me off the bus, put on the ashfalt the middle of the road on a hot day under their watchful eye and I had to wait there for an evening bus going back to Vilnius; I did not reach Poland that time.

That was my last encounter with the communist security police; the first one was in Poland when I was just 15 years of age, arrested, interrogated, harassed, otherwise persecuted, etc, and expelled from high school for organizing an anticommunist self-learning group that was collecting evidence of political persecutions in the Soviet occupied LT and trying to bring the evidence to the public.

Valdas Samonis
Toronto

The Global, Economic, Financial Crisis:
We need something new.
A paradigm shift in our thinking

Dr. Ichak Adizes

A blog by Dr. Ichak Adizes

I am in Moscow. Watching the BBC. There is a live round table discussion with very prominent economists as to what to do about the global, financial, economic crisis, in the USA and in Europe. Their concerns: unemployment, declining economic growth, recession, potential for country defaults etc.

Around the table are the managing director of the IMF, the CEO of Pimco, a distinguished professor of economics from Chicago and another person with a heavy Italian accent whose name I failed to record.

To summarize what they are saying: there is a crisis of unemployment, the financial markets are sick and there is declining economic growth. Result: a serious crisis of a potential for a double dip recession and potential for a default by some countries.

They recommend different solutions how to solve the financial crisis, how to improve the rate of employment etc.

The common denominator to their solutions is that they are trying to get back to what we HAD before, which is full employment, healthy financial markets and economic growth.

It will not work.

If we succeed to go BACK, it will be only a temporary solution and the crisis will come back as a tsunami, much bigger, later on.

Why?

Let us analyze the problem.

Read more...

Dominican Father David O’Rourke, one of the two priest producers of “Red Terror on the Amber Coast.” Father O’Rourke is director of The Tatra Project (www.tatraproject.org), which provides educational resources and media on life under the former Soviet Union.

I lived and worked on and off in Vilnius, from 2000 until about 2009.  Part of my work involved research in the film and photo archives that led to the documentary film, Red Terror on the Amber Coast.  I was the writer and producer.  I have only one point I want to make here, but I think it is important. 

From the  time that the Soviets first occupied the Baltics after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact until the fall of the Soviet system, essentially all the information about life in the Baltic Republics came from the occupying governments – Soviet and Nazi.  Occupiers have their own agenda.   Telling the truth about what they were doing in the countries they occupied was not one of them.   To the contrary, both the Soviets and the Nazis were expert in producing self-promoting propaganda.  So I believe it is both naïve and foolish to look to news and information reports produced by either of these regimes about the occupation years  as though they were reliable.  My own view is that relatively little concerning life during these years is known today outside these countries and their several diasporas.  And very little is known because historians in the West don’t think that  the Baltics and their people are important enough to their own studies to worry about.   

David O'Rourke
California, USA.

Tokeh Beach in Sierra Leone.

Greetings to our VilNews readers in:

• Togo
• Belize
• Hawaii
• Mauritius
• Polynesia
• Guatemala
• Sierra Leone
• Cote d'Ivoire
• Burkina Faso
• Dominican Republic
• Saint Vincent & Grenadines

Our VilNews e-magazine has now readers in no less than 114 countries!

The above 11 locations are probably representing our most exotic readerships.

It would be interesting to hear from you who are reading VilNews under the sun, so why not send us an email with some information about yourself, your connections to Lithuania etc – from your deckchair in the cooling shade under the palm tree?

We somehow like this that Lithuania attracts interest from suntanned readers so far away from the motherland...

Thanks for caring so much about Lithuania! I think one of Lithuania's challenges is lack of name recognition. I have been in Washington, DC for about two weeks and I try to mention Lithuania with every new contact I make. Also, Lithuanians (at least here in the States) need to do a better job of reaching out to NON-ethnic Lithuanians to share their culture, language, and people. Best,
Jennifer Lambert, Washington, DC USA

Dr. Adizes insights:
What is wrong with “occupy Wall Street and elsewhere” demonstrations?

Dr. Isaac Adezis.

Let me start with the ‘bottom line’, with my conclusion: they are demonstrating in the wrong place against the wrong people.
Now, let me explain.
Most of the demonstrations have placards about greed, about how Wall Street companies and executives earn obscene sums of money while the country is truly suffering. American companies are awash in record profits while unemployment is at record highs. Something is genuinely not right… Right?
Yes, right, but what they are demonstrating against are the manifestations to the problem not the cause of the problem.
What is the cause?
The profit motive. That is where the problem is.
Imagine what would happen if medical doctors turn profit oriented and measure their success by profits. And medical schools taught them that profit should be their goal by which they should measure their success.
Many of us will die from unnecessary surgeries, go bankrupt from non ending medical bills or insurance premiums, and productivity of labor will go way, way down because we will be hospitalized to no end.
What does medical training say?
“Do no harm!!”
“The patient is first!”

Read more...

 
Val Samonis.

There never seems to be any serious attempt at reform in the EU; just plans to talk about later plans, und so weiter und so weiter!

The end result?

Europe will split into North (neuro) and South (seuro) monetary zones and their satellite economies. Further disintegration and conflict within and between those two zones will deepen as Europe reverts to its old notorious historical habits; coupled with the spreading Middle East War, all bets are off: riots, ethnic & religious strife, energy and food prices skyrocketing, to name a few. European demography and therefore economy is getting catastrophic (dependency ratios increasing rapidly) as young people are already abandoning Europe (like a Titanic), esp. Greece, Poland, etc, heading for the New World (esp. Canada, US, Brazil, Australia).

Greetings from Toronto,

Val Samonis, PhD, CPC
The Web Professor of Global Management(SM)

 
Ref. https://vilnews.com/?p=9374

We have received the following comment to our article about the new nuclear situation in and around Lithuania:

In 1971 I lived thru the trauma of the near melt-down of the nuclear power plant at Three Mile Island in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, USA. Don't live there anymore, but there are too many nuclear plants in the USA, it's hard to find a town that's far enough away from one. And no one wants the barrels of waste buried near their neighborhood, and do we really know where it is being stored and buried? Most people don't! It's time we make use of solar and wind energy, it's clean, it's green. Our grandchildren will thank us.

Paulette Rynkiewicz Wise, USA