The Blogs: The Meaning of August 26

Guilt, Shame, and Lithuania’s Moral Inversion

Lithuania found legal guilt and imposed no punishment. It found Jewish speech and built a 220-page criminal file.

On March 27, 2006, the Vilnius Regional Court found that Algimantas Mykolas Dailidė had intentionally and systematically persecuted Jewish civilians while serving in the Nazi-sponsored Lithuanian Security Police. He was prosecuted under Article 100 of the Lithuanian Criminal Code, which carried five to twenty years’ imprisonment, or life. Lithuania’s Prosecutor General’s Office requested the statutory minimum of five years. The court imposed nothing. In 2008, the Lithuanian Court of Appeal upheld both the finding and the refusal to punish him.

The United States had already stripped Dailidė of citizenship and ordered his deportation after establishing his participation in the arrest of Jews attempting to escape the Vilnius Ghetto. The Sixth Circuit found that his acts “proved him to be an inextricable link in the ultimate result—the death of innocent Jewish civilians.”

Lithuania called him no longer dangerous.

Then Lithuania found Artur Fridman.

Fridman is a Jewish citizen of Lithuania. On May 9, 2024, he visited Antakalnis Cemetery in Vilnius to honor his grandfather, Aron Fridman, a Jewish Red Army soldier who fought Nazi Germany. He posted on Facebook about the contrast between his grandfather and Lithuania’s state-honored partisan Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas.

On January 8, 2025, Lithuania imposed a written pledge restricting Fridman from leaving the country. On October 30, 2025, prosecutor Kristina Minko signed a 220-page indictment in Criminal Case No. 02-2-00512-24 under Articles 170² §1 and 313 §2 of the Lithuanian Criminal Code. Article 170² §1 permits imprisonment for up to two years. Article 313 §2 provides community service, a fine, restriction of liberty, or arrest. Under Article 49, arrest for a misdemeanor is ten to forty-five days of short-term custody in a detention facility. It is not an additional year of imprisonment, but it is custody.

His court hearing is scheduled for August 26, 2026.

Dailidė persecuted Jews. Fridman wrote words. Dailidė received no punishment. Fridman faces the machinery of criminal prosecution.

That contrast is not merely hypocrisy. It is a moral system.

Guilt Is Not Inherited

The words guilt and shame are often used interchangeably. They should not be.

Legal guilt is a finding of culpability under law. Lithuania’s courts found Dailidė’s conduct proved, yet imposed no punishment.

Personal moral guilt belongs to the person who committed the act. It is not transmitted through blood, nationality, or generations. Lithuanians living today are not personally guilty for crimes they did not commit.

Psychological guilt is different again. It is the recognition that an act was wrong: “I did something wrong.”

Shame is broader and more destabilizing. Its internal judgment is: “I am wrong; we are wrong.” The identity to which I belong has been morally damaged. June Price Tangney, Jeff Stuewig, and Debra Mashek distinguish guilt, which can encourage acknowledgment and repair, from shame, which can produce concealment, withdrawal, defensiveness, and displacement of blame.

This article does not demand inherited guilt from contemporary Lithuanians. It does not prescribe an emotion to an entire population, and it does not diagnose a nation. Its subject is the observable conduct of institutions and the moral structure created by their decisions.

That subject is present responsibility.

Today’s Lithuanian institutions are responsible for what they do with the historical record now. They choose whom to honor, which findings to suppress, which documents to reinterpret, which complaints to reject, and whose speech to prosecute.

Present responsibility requires no inherited confession. It requires truthful institutions, equal law, correction after notice, withdrawal of honors unsupported by evidence, and protection for historical speech.

No descendant inherits a perpetrator’s guilt. A state institution, however, owns its present decisions.

Lithuania’s moral inversion begins precisely there. It refuses to let past culpability produce present institutional consequences. It then transfers the discomfort created by the record onto the people who insist that the record remain visible.

A state that refuses guilt does not become innocent. It finds someone else to carry the shame.

From No Punishment to Manufactured Innocence

The Dailidė case supplies the legal measure.

The United States Department of Justice documented that Dailidė participated in the arrest of Jewish men, women, and children attempting to escape the Vilnius Ghetto. Those arrested were returned to confinement under inhuman conditions or delivered toward execution at Paneriai.

American courts revoked his citizenship and ordered his removal. Lithuania eventually prosecuted him and found that he had intentionally and systematically persecuted Jewish civilians.

Then Lithuania neutralized its own finding.

Dailidė was not acquitted. The evidence did not collapse. The court did not determine that his role had been invented. It found the conduct proved and released him from criminal responsibility because changed circumstances supposedly meant that he and his act had lost their dangerousness. The appellate court preserved that result.

Lithuania treated a man whose systematic persecution of Jews its own court had found proved as no longer dangerous enough to punish. On January 8, 2025, the same state treated a Jew’s Facebook post about his grandfather’s grave as serious enough to restrict his movement.

The message was unmistakable: even when Lithuania formally recognized persecution of Jews, recognition would not be permitted to mature into punishment.

Impunity, however, was only the first stage. Lithuania did not stop at declining consequences. Its state memory institutions moved from non-punishment toward rehabilitation, exoneration, heroization, and even rescue.

The contradiction is not an inference drawn from generalized national rhetoric. It appears inside a single state document.

In a report dated December 17, 2019, and published the following day, the Lithuanian Genocide and Resistance Research Centre concluded that Jonas Noreika had actively contributed to rescuing the Jews of Šiauliai and should be regarded as a participant in anti-Nazi resistance from the beginning of his service as Šiauliai County governor. The same instrument concluded that, until the liquidation of the Žagarė Ghetto, Noreika did not understand that ghettos were one stage of the Holocaust.

The man who supposedly did not understand what a ghetto was for is the same man the state credited with helping to rescue Jews from it.

The report was compiled by Dalius Egidijus Stancikas, a geologist by training, identified by LRT as a member of the Centre’s secretariat and its data protection officer. Its central evidentiary basis was testimony given by Father Jonas Borevičius in 1986 to a federal court in Chicago, in United States v. Antanas Virkutis. That proceeding concerned another man, and it took place more than forty years after the events in Šiauliai.

The Centre defended him. Director Teresė Birutė Burauskaitė pointed to his decades of work in the KGB archives and to his part in publishing document collections. Then she stated the Centre’s actual standard: she is not a historian herself, and what she requires of the Centre’s specialists is that they “believe in the results of their research.”

Lithuanian historians themselves dismantled the report. Vilnius University professor Nerijus Šepetys said a history student would receive a poor grade for comparable work. Alvydas Nikžentaitis, director of Lithuania’s state-funded Institute of History, said the Centre had converted an assumption into fact and built its conclusion on a single retrospective source. Vilnius University professor Jurgita Verbickienė identified the larger method: instead of establishing what happened, Lithuania was searching for justifications.

The Centre had already been warned. On April 11, 2019, eight months before the rescue report, the Holocaust Sub-commission of Lithuania’s own International Commission described the Centre’s attempts to surround Noreika with exculpatory arguments as “utterly unacceptable” and, in some cases, “offensive to the memory of the victims.” The Centre did not correct course. It escalated from exculpation to rescue.

Their criticism matters because the target here is not Lithuanians as a people. It is a state institution producing moral absolution in the language of historical research.

The Rescuer Nation

The Noreika document contains the national-memory mechanism in miniature.

Ignorance removes responsibility. Rescue supplies virtue. Combined, the two claims create a nation that supposedly knew too little to answer for what happened but enough to deserve gratitude for resisting it.

That construction does more than omit guilt. It converts potential shame into pride. An implicated administrator becomes a rescuer. A record that should require investigation and institutional humility becomes evidence of national courage.

Once that conversion has been made, Jewish memory becomes a threat. A Jew who names perpetrators, administrative orders, ghettos, confiscation, or local participation is no longer merely presenting evidence. He is refusing the national gift. He is declining the identity offered to him: survivor or descendant rescued by a fundamentally decent nation.

The expected Jewish response is gratitude.

The Jew who refuses gratitude becomes the problem.

Artur Fridman and the Assigned Role

I am not Artur Fridman’s lawyer, and I do not speak for him. I rely on the indictment in my possession, the criminal statutes, government correspondence, published judicial and institutional records, and the surrounding documentary record.

Fridman is innocent. The prosecution bears the burden. Criminal Case No. 02-2-00512-24 is illegitimate.

The phrase “ungrateful Jew” is not presented here as an official Lithuanian quotation. It describes the moral role produced by the state’s narrative and its decision to prosecute him.

Fridman honored his Jewish grandfather, who fought Nazi Germany. He did so on May 9, a date Lithuania associates with Soviet occupation and many Jews associate with the military defeat of the regime that organized their annihilation. Ramanauskas-Vanagas is buried in the same cemetery, in the pantheon of state leaders. The two dead men lie on the same ground. Fridman was prosecuted for what he wrote about one while standing at the grave of the other.

He questioned the state’s heroization of Ramanauskas-Vanagas. Lithuania responded not with historical debate, archival disclosure, or a civil correction. It responded first with a restriction on his movement and later with two criminal counts and 220 pages of accusation. Punishment began before trial.

Article 170² §1 criminalizes specified forms of public approval, denial, or gross trivialization of international crimes and crimes committed by the USSR or Nazi Germany. Its penalties include imprisonment for up to two years. Article 313 §2 criminalizes public false statements about the dead that could arouse contempt or undermine respect for their memory. It is a misdemeanor, but it permits a custodial arrest.

Article 313 does not activate itself. Paragraph 3 permits liability only after a qualifying complaint, a legal representative’s statement, or a prosecutor’s demand. The indictment records that Algirdas Ramanauskas, Ramanauskas-Vanagas’s relative, filed the complaint. A private citizen used the mechanism the law provides to protect a deceased person’s reputation.

That explains only the Article 313 count. Article 170² §1 is not complaint-dependent. No private complaint was required for it. The prosecution added the only count carrying a prison sentence and converted a private grievance over a dead man’s reputation into a public memory-crime case about the official meaning of Soviet history.

The state therefore placed its criminal authority behind two protected objects: the reputation of a deceased national figure, activated by a relative’s complaint, and the official moral meaning of Soviet history, enforced through a public-prosecution count that required no family complaint.

Where is the equivalent urgency for Jewish victims?

On July 18, 2018, the Lithuanian Genocide Centre answered my historical evidence not by correcting its record but by warning that the conclusions I sought might violate Lithuania’s Constitution or criminal law. Seven years before Fridman’s indictment, I then filed a criminal complaint under Article 170² §1 against the Centre and its director over state Holocaust distortion. Lithuania refused to investigate.

My legal challenges to the Centre’s treatment of Jonas Noreika were prevented from reaching a merits examination. The Centre’s historical outputs were treated as informational acts beyond ordinary judicial correction.

Burauskaitė later told the national broadcaster that an administrative court had examined a Centre report on Noreika and ruled that its conclusions were reached by scientific methodology. The ruling said no such thing. The Supreme Administrative Court dismissed the case because the Centre’s historical conclusions did not fall within the realm of public administration. The Centre converted procedural non-review into scientific endorsement.

Yet when a Jewish citizen challenged the state’s national-memory hierarchy, the same legal system discovered jurisdiction, urgency, experts, prosecutors, and paper.

This is directional enforcement. The law does not operate as a neutral protection of historical truth. It protects the state’s approved distribution of dignity.

Dailidė’s victims received a finding without punishment. Noreika received a rescue narrative. A private complaint protected Ramanauskas-Vanagas’s reputation; prosecutors added a public memory-crime count. State historical claims received procedural protection. Fridman received an indictment.

The state has assigned him the guilt produced by his refusal to participate in its innocence.

Orwell’s Language, Kafka’s Procedure

Orwell helps explain the language. Kafka helps explain the machinery.

In the official vocabulary, administrative persecution becomes anti-Nazi complexity. An implicated official becomes a rescuer. An institutional refusal becomes exoneration. Evidence becomes defamation. Criminal prosecution becomes the defense of historical dignity.

The words retain their ordinary appearance while their moral content is reversed.

Kafka enters when the citizen tries to challenge the system. The state historical institution publishes an account. Courts refuse to test it on the merits. Prosecutors decline to apply memory law against the state institution. The institution’s authority survives every rejected challenge.

Then the same state apparatus uses protected historical claims to support criminal proceedings against a citizen.

The foundational narrative cannot be tried.

The Jew always can.

Lithuania did not merely fail to resolve the contradiction. It made the contradiction enforceable.

The Shame Lies in the Present

No Lithuanian child is born guilty of the Holocaust. No modern Lithuanian should be assigned personal culpability for a crime committed before that person was born.

That principle is morally essential.

It is also why Lithuania’s present conduct is so damning.

The wrongdoing examined here is not inherited. It is contemporary. Lithuania’s institutions chose whom to honor, whom to exculpate, whose evidence to refuse, and whose words to prosecute. They converted an unpunished perpetrator into a problem of reputation and converted the Jewish critic into a criminal problem of speech.

Artur Fridman does not carry Lithuania’s historical guilt.

Lithuania has chosen to place its disowned shame on him.

On August 26, 2026, Fridman is scheduled to enter a Lithuanian courtroom as a criminal defendant. The state will present itself as the protector of truth, dignity, and the memory of the dead.

But the two files remain side by side.

One file concerns a man found to have intentionally and systematically persecuted Jews. Lithuania imposed no punishment.

The other concerns a Jew who remembered his grandfather and challenged a national hero. Lithuania produced a travel restriction, 220 pages, and the threat of imprisonment.

Lithuania can call that law. It can call it historical protection. It can call it national dignity.

The moral record calls it inversion.

The shame lies not only in what Lithuania failed to punish after the Holocaust. It lies in the present decision to make a Jew answer for remembering what the state requires him to forget.

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Prior Articles Referencing Artur Fridman

The following prior published articles by Grant Arthur Gochin directly discuss or materially reference Artur Fridman. Cross-published versions are listed separately where they provide distinct publication links.

Times of Israel Blogs

JNS

The Indictment That Put Lithuania on Trial

Substack

Lithuanian Jewish Community

The Impossibility of Ignorance