Will This Time Be Different?

Two days ago, Lithuania’s Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs stood in Beersheva — at Israel’s cybersecurity hub — studying how a Jewish state under siege built an innovation ecosystem. Meetings were held at the Israel National Cyber Directorate. Delegations toured laboratories. At Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, discussions focused on how research becomes commercial application and how Lithuanian students might gain experience in Israel’s advanced technology ecosystem and bring that knowledge back to Lithuania.

Lithuania seeks partnership with the Jewish state’s innovation economy.

That fact stands in full view.

It also stands in history.

There is a recurring state behavior pattern that is not about superstition or theology. It is about utility, grievance, removability, violence, transfer, stabilization, and return.

Lithuania illustrates it with clarity — across centuries, the pattern repeats.

Documented Historical Record Before Systematic Extermination

According to my records, the following expulsions, disturbances, pogroms, removals, and attacks occurred on Lithuanian territory prior to systematic extermination. These entries are extracted from my research notes. They are not exhaustive. They are sufficient to demonstrate continuity and escalation.

These are only the documented episodes of overt physical violence. This list does not reflect the full spectrum of injury inflicted through bureaucratic and governmental action — the expulsions executed by decree, the economic exclusions enforced by policy, the licensing restrictions, the professional bans, the university quotas, the confiscations, the property seizures, the administrative harassment, the forced registrations, the collective punishments, the deportations ordered under emergency powers, the denial of civil rights, the legal reclassification of Jews as removable subjects, the systematic marginalization embedded in regulation, or the institutional normalization of discrimination that preceded physical assault. The visible violence was only the surface. The administrative architecture beneath it was continuous.

As an example of some historical Administrative and Governmental Acts Affecting Jews in Lithuania, see Addendum I below for selected entries drawn from www.OAJA.org.

• Lithuania — 1323 — Jews invited to settle and build economic infrastructure.
• Vilnius — 1495 — Jews expelled.
• Vilnius — 1503 — Jews invited back.
• Lithuania — 1810 — Jews expelled.
• Lithuania — 1812 — Jews invited back.
• Lithuania — 1823 — Expulsions occurred again.
• Lithuania — February 24, 1844 — Anti-Jewish disturbances recorded in The Illustrated London News.
• Žiežmariai — 1881 — Jewish community sought protection amid fear of pogrom violence.
• Rietavas — 1881 — Jews appealed for protection due to anticipated violence.
• Balbieriškis — 1882 — Pogrom involving violence and destruction of Jewish property.
• Prienai — August 3, 1882 — Pogrom carried out against Jews including assaults and property damage.
• Dolginovo — June 12, 1886 — Pogrom at a fair involving violence against Jewish residents.
• Luokė — 1888 — Anti-Jewish unrest involving violence against Jewish residents.
• Naujamiestis — 1892 — Anti-Jewish disturbance affecting Jewish inhabitants.
• Petrašiūnai — 1893 — Anti-Jewish unrest affecting Jewish residents.
• Smorgon’ — 1894 — Anti-Jewish disturbance amid rising tensions.
• Panevėžys — Summer 1900 — Mob violence involving destruction of Jewish property.
• Šiauliai — Summer 1900 — Anti-Jewish disturbance involving crowd violence and property damage.
• Dusetos — 1905 — Pogrom involving violence against Jewish residents.
• Gargždai — December 28, 1905 — Pogrom fear and anti-Jewish mobilization.
• Novo-Vileika — 1908 — Blood-libel panic leading to mob violence and property destruction.
• Buivydžiai — March–April 1908 — Jews detained and assaulted during blood-libel unrest.
• Šalnaičiai — March–April 1908 — Mob violence including property destruction.
• Lithuanian lands — 1915 — Mass deportation and forced expulsion of Jews eastward under Russian Imperial military orders during wartime retreat.
• Vilnius region — 1919 — Violence affecting Jewish residents during territorial instability.
• Vilnius region — 1920 — Anti-Jewish incidents during shifting control.
• Marijampolė — June 1940 — Beatings of Jewish residents and destruction of Jewish homes.
• Lithuanian market towns — Summer 1940 — Refusals to trade with Jews and street assaults.
• Lithuania — 1940–Early 1941 — Public advocacy of Jewish removal from economic life by Lithuanian Activist Front publications.
• Kaunas — June 23–25, 1941 — Pogrom killings carried out by Lithuanian armed formations.
• Šiauliai — June 1941 — Pogrom violence against Jewish residents.
• Vilnius — June 1941 — Early roundups and killings prior to the structured extermination phase.

After mid-1941, the category changes permanently.

Approximately 96.4% of Lithuanian Jews were systematically murdered, overwhelmingly in situ, through voluntary local administrative participation and coordination.

Of the approximately 220,000 Jews living under Nazi occupation in Lithuania, roughly 212,000 were murdered — the highest annihilation percentage of any European country during the Holocaust — with most killings carried out locally by shooting and burial in mass graves rather than deportation to distant camps.

The killings were overwhelmingly carried out by shooting on Lithuanian soil.

This is not interpretation.

It is demographic record.

June 1941 – The Invasion Window and Equal Partnership

Operation Barbarossa began on June 22, 1941.

German forces entered Kaunas on June 23.
German forces entered Vilnius on June 24.

Violence began immediately.

Lithuanian armed formations identifying as “partisans” arrested, humiliated, beat, and killed Jews in the invasion window.

German command structured extermination policy.

Lithuanian forces were equal partners in the execution of the Holocaust on Lithuanian soil.

Without local administrative knowledge, local police, local registries, and local coordination, annihilation at 96.4% in situ does not occur.

This was not peripheral assistance.

It was equal partnership in genocide.

This partnership enabled the rapid, near-total execution of genocide on Lithuanian soil — transforming policy into reality through local hands.

The state does not deny the Holocaust.
It reassigns its ownership.

Genocide as Succession

Genocide is not only about hatred.
It is about gratuitous violence, theft, sociopathy, opportunism, dehumanization, and the deliberate conversion of human elimination into material gain.

It is about succession.

Murder removes the owner.
Theft confirms permanence.
Administration stabilizes transfer.

Homes vacated.
Businesses absorbed.
Positions reassigned.
Assets redistributed.

Murder creates vacancy.
Administration converts vacancy into title.

Transfer produces beneficiaries.
Beneficiaries stabilize narrative.
Narrative protects benefit.

Genocide produces an economy.

Ideology can lie.
Theft cannot.

The postwar Lithuanian state inherited a country cleansed of its Jewish population and enriched by their absence.

The material gains from this succession became embedded in postwar Lithuanian society — and in the institutions that guard them.

Institutional Conduct Dossier

The story does not end in 1941.

The following record concerns post-1990 institutional behavior.

1. Agency Established

The annihilation of Lithuanian Jewry was overwhelmingly executed through local administrative participation.

This is a demographic and administrative fact.

2. Exoneration Framing Maintained

Official state research bodies issued and maintained “completely exonerated” framings regarding implicated figures.

Those framings were formally challenged with documentary contradiction.

They were not revised.

3. Notice → Refusal → Persistence

A formal retraction demand identified a false public claim concerning judicial review and supplied corrective language.

The institutional response refused annulment.

A subsequent response reclassified the contested claim as “subjective opinion.”

The contested framing was maintained after notice.

4. Judicial Non-Adjudication

Lithuanian administrative and civil courts declined merits adjudication of challenges to institutional historical findings.

The effect was procedural closure without substantive review.

5. Narrative Stabilization

As documented:

“Postwar and post-1990 Lithuanian institutions rehabilitated perpetrators, equalized victims, denied agency, and criminalized correction… These were not failures of memory. They were acts of governance.”

Further:

“A state’s credibility rests on correction under documentary contradiction. Lithuania chose insulation over correction, procedure over truth, and narrative over responsibility.”

And:

“No contested finding central to this book has ever been revised in any form. Despite repeated notice, evidentiary submission, and institutional engagement over decades, not a single core conclusion has been corrected, narrowed, or amended.”

This record is procedural. It is not rhetorical.

The Lithuanian government has constructed and maintained a narrative architecture that externalizes agency, minimizes local participation, elevates selective heroism, dilutes administrative responsibility, and frames correction efforts as hostility.

This is fraudulent comprehensive rewriting.

It has been vigorously enforced.

This enforcement persists despite international scrutiny and repeated evidentiary challenges — yet the pattern of insulation remains unbroken.

My Book

My forthcoming book, Recognition Without Reckoning: Sovereignty, Continuity, and the Architecture of Historical Evasion, documents this pattern in full.

It applies continuity doctrine, successor liability, and customary international law to Lithuania’s postwar consolidation and post-1990 memory governance.

It demonstrates:

• How extermination and expropriation produced demographic homogeneity.
  • How sovereignty is claimed through continuity.
  • How continuity carries obligations.
  • How institutional insulation shields historical exposure.
  • How refusal persists after notice.
  • How correction is avoided procedurally.

The book assembles records of crimes, beneficiaries, institutional laundering, procedural insulation, and instances where historical truth has been framed as a national security risk.

It stands as a comprehensive procedural and evidentiary record of evasion — assembled after decades of research, litigation, and unheeded notices.

Business, Clearly and Explicitly

I support Jews and Lithuanians doing business together.

I support trade.
I support academic exchange.
I support cybersecurity cooperation.

Economic engagement is not betrayal.

The descendants of Vilna’s annihilated Jews now teach Lithuania how to build what Lithuania once destroyed.

Jews have survived by navigating power structures pragmatically, not by isolating themselves.

But engagement without clarity is exposure.

Optimism without evidence is negligence.

Clarity means:

Clarity about agency.
Clarity about administrative participation.
Clarity about theft embedded in extermination.
Clarity about institutional rewriting of history.

True partnership requires this foundation of acknowledged history — otherwise, the old sequence risks repeating under new guises.

Across empire, occupation, independence, and restored sovereignty, the sequence appears repeatedly:

Utility.
Resentment.
Removal.
Transfer.
Stabilization.
Return.

Today’s cybersecurity dialogues and innovation partnerships represent utility once more.

The question is whether resentment, removal, transfer, and stabilization follow — or whether acknowledgment finally interrupts the cycle.

If Lithuania’s present conduct breaks this sequence — demonstrably, procedurally, permanently — it will mark the first rupture in centuries.

That rupture would be welcome.

It would also be unprecedented.

Will this time be different?

Addendum I

Selected Administrative and Governmental Acts Affecting Jews in Lithuania (OAJA Extract)

Jul. 7, 1656 — “Expulsion of Jews Across the Borders” issued by Duke Frederick William of Prussia — Present-day Lithuania / East Prussia — orders Jews out of Prussian domain “to Somogitia.”

Oct. 10, 1721 — “Ejusdem Amendment Mandate” issued by Frederick Augustus III of Poland (titled Grand-Duke of Lithuania) — Kingdom of Bohemia — orders that Jews arriving from specified French areas be turned away at border crossings, with exceptions for specified “capitalist/exchange Jews” but not “beggar Jews.”

Nov. 29, 1722 — “Ordinance” (Pomeranian War & Domain-Chamber) — Europe (multi-countries) — regulates Jewish hide purchases; OAJA editor geography note includes Lithuania/Poland.

Feb. 15, 1723 — “Ordinance” (special order) — Europe (multi-countries) — prohibits Jews from purchasing cattle/horse hides; OAJA editor geography note includes Lithuania/Poland.

Aug. 30, 1723 — “Edict” (special order) — Europe (multi-countries) — prohibits Jews from acquiring ox/cattle/cow/horse hides; OAJA editor geography note includes Lithuania/Poland.

Nov. 18, 1724 — “Ordinance regarding taxes for the Jewish-hostel/house in Riga” — Governorate of Livonia; Russian Empire — regulates arriving Jews and explicitly treats “arriving foreigners from Lithuania” as a controlled category for brandy inventory/tax handling at the assigned house.

Aug. 5, 1747 — “Order” issued by Frederick Augustus (titled Duke of Lithuania) — Europe (multi-countries) — orders city excise administrators to enforce capitation/head-tax collection from Jews staying in cities and restrict passage without proof of payment.

Jul. 20, 1750 — “Order” issued by Frederick Augustus (titled Duke of Lithuania) — Europe (multi-countries) — directs route/road compliance and levy submission (body-tax and other levies) for Jews frequenting Leipzig fairs.

Aug. 21, 1752 — “General-Order” issued by Frederick Augustus (titled Duke of Lithuania) — Europe (multi-countries) — prohibits Jews from lending/handing permits to other Jews; imposes fines; restricts issuance of further permits.

Apr. 7, 1759 — “General [Order]” issued by Frederick Augustus (titled Duke of Lithuania) — Europe (multi-countries) — orders close surveillance of transient Jews and restricts illegal peddling and illegal money-exchange.