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Laurence Weinbaum

ByLaurence Weinbaum, Laurence Weinbaum

Analysis

Lithuania picks the wrong man to honour

The country has decided to honour a man who was implicated in the brutal murder of Jews

July 10, 2020 10:40
Paminklas_holokausto_aukoms_prie_Lietūkio_garažų
5 min read

The nineteenth-century French historian and orientalist Ernest Renan once observed that forgetfulness and historical error are crucial elements in the creation of a nation. To be sure, that observation has proven particularly relevant in the reborn nation states that emerged from the ruins of the Soviet empire.

This is especially so in the Baltics, which had enjoyed only a brief period of independence in the interwar years before their rapacious eastern neighbour gobbled them up whole. In June 1941, the equally rapacious Germans flushed the Red Army out, but by the summer of 1944, it was back.

Until the end of the 1980s when the first holes became visible in the Iron Curtain, there was little cause to believe that Moscow would ever loosen its vice-like grip on what were called in émigré circles “the captive nations.” Only a handful of octogenarian diplomats in exile continued to keep that flame of hope flickering, even as most of their compatriots at home had long since thrown in the towel and resigned themselves to life under Soviet suzerainty.

But then the unimaginable happened. The Soviet Union collapsed. Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia could finally determine their own destiny and rejoin the family of nations. Within a short time, all three firmly embedded in Nato and the European Union. Had someone forecast such a turn of events in the 1980s, he or she would have been sent for a psychiatric examination.