I made Baltic Truth because I could see what Lithuania was selling the West and I knew the product did not exist. Five years later, Lithuania is still selling it. The buyers have changed. The product has not.

I grew up in the Soviet Union. Sixteen years inside the Warsaw Pact — an alliance that required its members to perform solidarity while exempting itself from every principle it claimed to uphold. I know what a failing state’s sales presentation looks like. I sat through them as a child. The rhetoric was always values, virtues, shared struggle, democratic legitimacy. The reality was always a system that could not sustain itself and depended on external credulity to continue. Lithuania is that system now. Before examining what Lithuania is selling, examine what Lithuania destroyed in order to need a sale.

What Lithuania murdered

Of all the states in which the Holocaust was carried out, Lithuania achieved the highest murder rate of its Jewish population: 96.4 percent. Rwanda’s genocide against the Tutsi produced 86 percent. Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge destroyed roughly 25 percent of its total population. No state, in any genocide, in any era, matched the proportional destruction Lithuania inflicted on its Jews.

The evidentiary foundation has been established by Grant Gochin, Silvia Foti in Storm in the Land of Rain, Michael Kretzmer, Dillon Hosier, and consolidated in the Foti Doctrine. What I am adding is what a state looks like after it murders its own future.

Between 1990 and 2023, over 1.16 million Lithuanian citizens emigrated. The country that regained independence with 3.7 million people now has approximately 2.8 million. The United Nations projects 2.28 million by 2050. The Centre for Eastern Studies documented the trajectory under a headline that requires no editorial comment: “Lithuania is losing people without a fight.” This was not emigration. This was a national referendum conducted with suitcases.

Lithuania has received over sixteen billion euros in European Union structural funds, cohesion payments, and agricultural subsidies, and contributes approximately a quarter of what it receives. The modernized hospitals, schools, and roads visible to visitors are a European gift. And the outcomes rank last in the European Union across nearly every measure of whether a state is meeting its obligations to its own citizens — lowest self-reported good health, highest suicide rate, highest cardiovascular hospitalization rate, largest income-related health gap.

EU accession was a transaction premised on shared values: rule of law, non-discrimination, honest institutional governance, historical accountability. Germany’s Vergangenheitsbewältigung was not comfortable. Poland’s confrontation with Jedwabne was not comfortable. Both states moved toward the record. Lithuania moved away. Its flagship historical institution, the Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights, dedicated no exhibition space to the Holocaust until 2011 and still honors Jonas Noreika on its exterior wall. Tablet Magazine called it “Lithuania’s Museum of Holocaust Denial.” The name fits.

The Fridman prosecution is where all of this converges. Lithuania has demonstrated prosecutorial will, procedural infrastructure, and institutional coordination sufficient to bring a case against a Jewish citizen for a Facebook post. It has not demonstrated equivalent will with respect to punishing a single Lithuanian for the murder of 220,000 Jews. The machinery exists. The will is applied in only one direction. The case is, at its foundation, a freedom-of-speech case inside a NATO and EU member state — a visitor, scholar, or Jewish tourist who posts on social media in........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)