I grew up under Communism. That is not a complaint. It is a qualification. I watched a government edit reality in front of people who could see the contradiction with their own eyes, and I watched most of them learn not to say so. The state rarely lied about whether a thing had happened. It arranged which part of the thing you were allowed to look at. The arrangement was the message. By the time I left Soviet-occupied Communist Latvia, I could read the propaganda arrangement the way a chef reads a recipe.

I work in media. Framing is not a figure of speech in my trade. It is the work. A frame decides what enters the picture and what is cut away, and the cut is rarely innocent. I wrote about one such cut in Delfi Chose the Kippah, where a major Lithuanian news portal placed a non-Jewish critic of the state inside a borrowed Jewish frame, telling the reader how to see him before he reached a single word. Grant Gochin documented the verbal version in What Lithuania Means When It Says “Vanished,” “Lost,” or “Perished”: vocabulary that acknowledges absence while deleting the people and institutions that caused it. The calendar performs the same operation in time. You can crop a photograph in space. You can crop a history in time. The second cut is harder to notice because the missing piece is not beyond the edge of an image. It sits on a calendar, on a day the reader has been steered past.

Lithuania uses three clocks. One begins on June 24, 1941, at Gargždai, with a German squad firing. One freezes on June 23, at a declaration of restored statehood. One stops on July 12, twenty days before Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis signed anti-Jewish regulations. The clocks answer different questions. Lithuanian propaganda moves between them as though they described the same historical unit. The movement is the deception.

Start with the first clock. In a 2021 LRT account, Arūnas Bubnys, then director of Lithuania’s state genocide research center, identified the June 24 killing at Gargždai as the first massacre of the Holocaust in Lithuania and emphasized that Lithuanians did not participate in that first shooting. The date is real. Its placement does national work. It puts a German finger on the trigger on page one and pushes the surrounding Lithuanian participation, and the Lithuanian violence that followed, toward the edge of the frame.

In Kaunas on June 25 through 27, local Lithuanian perpetrators carried out much of the........

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