internationale situation - Litauen

03. Mai 2012

Lithuanian neo-Nazi youth group has been adopted onto a council which receives European Union funding. The Union of Lithuanian Nationalist Youth (ULNY) was unanimously elected to the Lithuanian Council of Youth Organisations at a national conference last weekend. ULNY is one of the leading organisers of Vilnius’s annual Independence Day neo-Nazi march. International petitions were launched calling for this year’s event, which took place on March 11, to be cancelled. The LCYO umbrella group is the largest non-governmental youth organisation in Lithuania and is financially backed by both the government and the EU. It is made up of 64 groups and has a membership of more than 200,000 people.

via thejc: Neo-Nazi youth group on EU funded council

internationale situation - Litauen

15. März 2012

Nazis are marching through Europe again. Real Nazis. Old ones, young ones, brazenly sporting the infamous uniforms and flags of a growing and genuinely dangerous movement. To American ears, this has the sound of hysteria and impossibility. Nazism was defeated and repudiated, it is the unforgivable insult not just because it’s so extreme but because it’s incredible. The American post-war experience of Nazis ranged from the nuttiness of the American Nazi Party and its crazed head, George Lincoln Rockwell, to some of the militia groups, skinheads, Holocaust deniers and Aryan Nation types that pop up occasionally. They’re annoying and angering, but they’re clearly on the fringes of American society, a cost of our commitment to free expression. That is not the case in many Eastern European nations. Numerous political parties and social movements have sprung up that support former and current Nazis and Nazi causes. This March 16 will see the emergence of the worst of this onto the world stage. Since the mid-’90s, in Latvia, there have been organized and growing demonstrations celebrating the Latvians who served in German Waffen-SS legions. Their activities included opposing the advancing Red Army, last-ditch fighting in Berlin, and for some of them liquidating ghettos and murdering Jews across Eastern Europe. For about a decade a variety of Latvian right-wing parties have been seeking to provide government pensions to the Latvians who served Hitler. The explanations range from the apologist to revisionist to ideological. The central thesis is that most of the Waffen-SS soldiers were drafted, not volunteers and that they were fighting against Russian invaders, “Freedom Fighters” as a proposed Parliamentary resolution calls them. On March 16, In Riga, there will be another set of demonstrations and marches by SS veterans, with supporters from Sweden, Estonia, Lithuania and elsewhere.

via huffingtonpost: The Nazi Resurgence in Europe: The Waffen-SS Marches Again

internationale situation - Litauen

13. März 2012

The recent nationalist march in Vilnius, held under the slogan “Lithuania for Lithuanians” did not get nearly as much attention in the US media as similar nationalist marches in Moscow. The mainstream American media somehow omits several unpleasant facts about those marches, which do not fit its worldview. Here are these facts. First, the last “Russia for the Russians” march in Moscow in November 2011 was attended by several opposition leaders lionized by the American media – Alexey Navalny and Vladimir Milov, among others. Second, some European countries can no longer acquiesce to the policy of “closed eyes” which the US and the EU have been conducting towards petty Baltic nationalisms and the local state-sponsored glorification of the Baltic battalions at Adolph Hitler’s service in 1941-1945. For example, Poland is more and more often undertaking official protests against the mishandling of the Polish minority in Lithuania. Israel has long voiced concern about the rehabilitation of Nazi criminals in all three Baltic countries – Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. In this context, it gets more and more embarrassing for the US and the EU to ignore the persecution of the Russian minority in Latvia and Estonia, which is much worse than the attitude of the Lithuanian authorities to the local Poles. The neo-Nazi slogans, chanted and carried on banners at the Vilnius march (“Lithuania for Lithuanians,” “Skinheads for Lithuania, Race and Nation”) looked and sounded especially embarrassing in the Lithuanian capital, a home to about 220,000 Jews before the World War II. Vilnius (or Wilno, in Polish) used to be called “the Jerusalem of the North.” The city had been “an ethnic fruit cake” of four large communities until 1939 – namely, Poles, Jews, Lithuanians and Russians. In 1939, as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and the subsequent occupation of Poland, Vilnius ceased to be a Polish territory and became a capital of Lithuania. Purged of its Jewish population by German Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators in 1941-1944, the city is now witnessing some tensions between its Polish and Lithuanian communities. According to the Polish Gazeta Wyborcza, these tensions were provoked by the ethnocentric policy of the government of the newly independent Lithuania.

via ruvr.ru: East European nationalism: condemned in Russia, forgiven in the Baltics?

internationale situation - Litauen

06. Mai 2011

Noch vor nicht allzu langer Zeit, vor zwei Jahren marschierten sie auf der Hauptstrasse der litauischen Hauptstadt, trugen Transparente mit Nazi-Attributen und die Farben der Landesflagge gemischt mit Flaggen mit Swastika, Schädeln, anderer Nazi-Symbolik, schrieen alle 3-4 Minuten "Juden raus", "Lietuva -lietuviams" (Litauen den Litauern), "Vienas, du, trys su puse –grazi Lietuva be rusu" (Eins, Zwei, Drei ein Halb - schön ist Litauen ohne die Russen!). Und ein lustiges Abzählreim, der mit einem wunderbaren Wunsch endet: "Imkit, broliai, pagaliuka, ir uzmuskit ta zyduka" (Nehmt Brüder ein Stöckchen und tötet diesen Juden). In der Geschichte, an die sich die alten Leute noch erinnern, nahmen sie es wörtlich. Kein Stöckchen, aber ein echtes Gewehr, Maschinengewehr, Klingen, Schaufeln, Eisenstöcke, alles was unter die Hand kam und töteten. Keinen virtuellen Juden aus dem "lustigen" Liedchen, sondern real-existierende 220 tausend litauische Juden von den 240 tausend der vor dem Krieg hier lebenden jüdischen Bevölkerung.

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