Days after violent protests in Latvia, riots broke out in neighboring Lithuania Jan. 16, with some 7,000 gathering in the capital Vilnius to protest planned economic austerity measures. Some began throwing eggs and stones through the windows of government buildings, and police responded with tear gas and rubber bullets. (NYT, Jan. 17)
Meanwhile, Lithuanian Jewish leaders decried a graffiti attack over the weekend, in which the words “Palestine” and “Kill Jews” along with a swastika were painted on a Jewish community building in the Baltic port of Klaipeda. “How much longer will we allow provocateurs to pit the Lithuanian and Jewish people against one another?” asked Simonas Gurevicius, executive director of the Lithuanian Jewish Community. (AFP, Jan. 19)
See our last posts on the econocataclysm in the Baltics, the politics of anti-Semitism, and the Gaza backlash.
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Lithuania briefly
The rubber bullets hit few protesters’ heads. Few journalists were hurt. People say robocops aimed at peoples’ heads. Authorities boast about adequate reaction of the security forces.
Public discourse in Lithuania is a conspiracy theory so opaque that no-one is able to understand whether authorities really believe in what they’re saying. The outside forces they’re speaking about are Russia. In Lithuania it’s much harder for them to speak about this because way less people seem to believe that. ‘People’ seem to know that there’s enough mess inside the country and the ‘outside forces’ need not to intervene in order to bring discord to sovereign Lithuania. The inside forces they’re speaking about are the following three: a Russian-speaking minority of Lithuania, a populist-leftoid Che Guevara T-Shirt admiring parliamentary party ‘Frontas’ (‘Front’), a small milieu of anarchoid pissfarters (who are basically potent only in absurd theatrical ‘actions’ and endless copy-paste theorizing).
After all these are simple conspiracy theories from the authorities.
Another part of the conspiracy bag is from the leftoid front. Some say the riots were provoked by cops so that the government would be able to justify tenser repressions, higher police presence, etc. Might be. Some say that the riots started simply because one bet agency put a bet whether the riots were gonna break out. And so they did. And so someone won a whole lot of cash from this bet.
All in all I tend to think that the riots broke out simply because of the possibility of rioting after having heard about events in Latvia, Greece and other countries. Besides, the populace DOES seem to hate the government. There are many reasons for that.
Another thing is the nazi problem. Here it is a really sad fact that Lithuanian Jewish Community still believes that there are ‘provocateurs to pit the Lithuanian and Jewish people against one another’. Unfortunately anti-semitism is not a provocation, it is a present problem. The nazis in Klaipeda, despite that fact that they are a bunch of alcoholic criminals with an idiocy soaked in vodka, are backed by the population which is highly anti-semitic, which has a secret sympathy for German nazis (some of them still label them ‘liberators’ in the face of red-fascist USSR).
Watching events in Lithuania
Watching events in Lithuania and Latvia and Hungary and Bulgaria and Croatia and the Western Ukraine kind of puts the whole “red fascist” thing in perspective. Kind of amazing that the one time these monsters got knocked on their ass, when the fascists got put to bed, is supposed to prove how awful communism was.
Well, three cheers for those reds who kicked the asses of these nazi-lovers. Cry me a river about their “oppression.”
You know what’s better than protesting Nazis? Beating them.
Watching events on this blog…
…continues to be very depressing.
If Stalin hadn’t banned the Lithuanian language, the Nazis might not have found such fertile ground to exploit in the country. But I guess we’re not supposed to talk about that. (Or about the Hitler-Stalin Pact.)
banning Lithuanian language?
Having been born under Stalin in the Soviet Lithuania, having gone to the Lithuanian schools there, I wonder how did you come up with that piece of revisionist propaganda?
Lithuanian revisionism?
Did you receive instruction in the Lithuanian language? If you were born under Stalin, may I presume that you were in school during the Khrushchev era, when the policy loosened up a little—before Brezhnev cracked down again? According to my sources, under Stalin, as under Brezhnev, instruction was in Russian after the earliest grades, and the Lithuanian-language press in the Roman alphabet was suppressed. Under Stalin, some 350,000 Lithuanians were deported to labor camps in Siberia for resisting such policies (or suspicion thereof). (See Language Policy in the Soviet Union by LA Grenoble, 2003; Lithuania History page; Global Lithuanian Net; Wikipedia)
Please share your experience with us.
Another comment on Soviets in Lithuania
‘Those reds’ were an army of an imperialist state, not brave enthusiasts driven by some ethical sentiments. Besides, since you seem to know much about East Europe, resources are available to check on their thoughts on the ‘Jewish Question’.
…Yet you know what’s worse than protesting Nazis? Playing an antifa warrior in the comments section by glorifying monsters that were *ordered* to shoot them.