The Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania is advertising for a new Director General. The notice demands an applicant of “impeccable reputation,” ideological alignment with the Center’s “mission and values,” and a five-year mandate to lead the institution.¹

Read plainly, the requirement is inverted.

At this institution, “impeccable reputation” does not mean fidelity to evidence, correction after notice, or professional integrity. It means ideological reliability. It means willingness to preserve predetermined outcomes by redirecting responsibility, avoiding merits review, and maintaining misleading frames after correction is possible. It means the elevation of individuals implicated in the murder of Jews into national symbols, and the construction of narratives designed to manufacture a usable, pride-preserving fiction of Lithuanian history.

In simple terms, the job is to rewrite history into fraud.

The role is not to investigate genocide. It is not to conduct research. Even the concept of “resistance” the institution claims to study is selectively constructed, expanded, contracted, and deployed as needed.

The job is to manage narrative risk.

Misinformation is incorrect information circulated without intent to deceive. Disinformation is the deliberate maintenance of a misleading frame after correction is possible. Propaganda is coordinated messaging designed to preserve outcome rather than test truth—disinformation operationalized as public narrative.

Disinformation does not require lies. It requires direction.

The position being advertised is not to discover truth, correct error, or adjudicate evidence. It is to produce disinformation and institutionalize it as state propaganda.

Actor Redirection After Notice

When confronted with signed orders, administrative authority, property seizure records, and documented causal chains linking Lithuanian officials and institutions to the destruction of Jewish communities, Lithuanian state bodies did not rebut the evidence. They redirected causation.

This is not confusion. It is design.

Responsibility is shifted upward to “Nazi occupation,” “German policy,” or unnamed external forces, while Lithuanian administration is treated as incidental or non-decisional. Crimes are acknowledged in the abstract; agency is displaced.

The Jonas Noreika case—often referenced because of its unusually clean archival record—is only one illustration of a broader institutional method. The pattern does not depend on him. It predates him, outlives him, and operates independently of any single actor.

Disinformation Is Defined by Persistence After Notice

Lithuanian institutions were placed on formal notice through documented submissions identifying administrative authority, contemporaneous records, and causation. Courts declined to adjudicate the merits by classifying institutional outputs as “informational.”⁴⁻⁵

That procedural refusal did not correct the record. It insulated it.

After notice, state and state-adjacent materials continued to frame the Holocaust as crimes “committed by Nazi Germany,” omitting Lithuanian administrative agency even where Lithuanian officials exercised direct authority.

This is not error. It is maintenance.

Fraud Recognized Beyond Lithuania

This conduct has not gone unnoticed internationally.

In the Juozas Brazaitis case, Lithuanian institutions promoted a misleading exculpatory narrative suggesting clearance by the United States. That claim was false.

The deception was sufficiently serious that members of the United States Congress formally objected, citing the misuse of US documentation and the laundering of responsibility. The issue was not historical disagreement. It was misrepresentation of the US government’s position to legitimize a domestic narrative.

When a state’s historical outputs provoke congressional intervention, the problem is not academic debate. It is institutional dishonesty.

The Record Is Documented—On Film, In Print, In Court

This pattern is extensively documented.

The documentaries J’Accuse and Baltic Truth exist because the evidentiary record exists—and because Lithuanian institutions refused to correct their outputs after notice. These films do not dispute facts. They document institutional behavior: redirection, insulation, and narrative maintenance.

The matter has also been litigated. Courts declined merits review while allowing misleading institutional narratives to persist. That refusal is itself part of the evidentiary record.

The Russian Parallel (Institutional Continuity, Not Motive)

The comparison with Russia is not rhetorical. It is structural.

The methods employed by Lithuanian state institutions—particularly the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre—are not novel. They are inherited.

During the Soviet period, historical “truth” was not falsified primarily through fabrication. It was managed through archival direction: selective release, contextual inversion, actor substitution, procedural insulation, and the conversion of documentation into instruments of exculpation rather than evidence. Archives functioned as tools of state legitimacy.

That methodology did not disappear with independence. It was repurposed.

What changed was ideology. What remained was technique.

Where Soviet authorities redirected responsibility to protect Communist legitimacy, Lithuanian institutions now redirect responsibility to protect nationalist legitimacy. The governing doctrine shifted from Marxism-Leninism to ethno-national restoration. The machinery of narrative control remained intact.

This continuity is visible in practice: classifying determinations as “informational” to avoid adjudication; fragmenting agency to dissolve responsibility; elevating occupation to nullify local authority; and selectively deploying archival material to preserve honorific outcomes. The language has been modernized. The logic has not.

Russia operates this system openly. Lithuania operates it under democratic cover.

The technique is identical. So is the outcome. Guilt is diluted through redirection, perpetrators are exculpated through abstraction, and a contaminated history is converted into something usable—then respectable—then celebratory.

In Russia, this is recognized as state disinformation deployed to disable accountability. In Lithuania, the same apparatus is presented as scholarship, commemoration, and institutional memory. The wrapper differs. The machinery does not.

In neither system is truth the objective. In both, truth is the obstacle.

That is the indictment—not that Lithuania resembles Russia in temperament or regime, but that it has retained and refined Russia’s informational weaponry to achieve the same end: absolution without reckoning.

Russia lies because it can. Lithuania lies because it must.

What the Job Posting Actually Selects For

The posting requires alignment with the Center’s “mission and values.” Those values are demonstrated by years of post-notice redirection, procedural avoidance, and narrative laundering.

An applicant with integrity would be institutionally incompatible. Integrity would require correction after notice. Integrity would require naming Lithuanian administrative agency where authority was exercised. Integrity would collapse the distinction between “informational” output and accountability.

Such a candidate would fail.

The role therefore selects for ideology. It selects for someone prepared to disinform, and issue propaganda—systematically, defensibly, and without correction.

No legitimate historian could take this job.

It is advertising for a custodian of fraud—not fraud by fabrication, but fraud by maintenance; not fraud by denial, but fraud by direction.

Democratic credentials do not sanitize information warfare. Disinformation by democracy is still disinformation.

A Manual of Deception

My forthcoming book, Recognition Without Reckoning: Sovereignty, Continuity, and the Architecture of Historical Evasion, documents in detail the fraud practiced by the Government of Lithuania across courts, ministries, and memory institutions. It traces how evidence is neutralized without being disproved, how responsibility is displaced without being denied, and how democratic form is used to launder outcomes that would be recognized as disinformation elsewhere.

It is not merely an indictment. It is a manual—showing, step by step, how a government deceives after notice, and how others replicate their model. Lithuania did not invent this machinery. It perfected it.

Truth does not require permission. It requires resistance—especially when democracies perfect the tools they learned from Moscow.

Because when democracies copy autocracies, the victims do not become less dead. They become easier to forget.

And that cannot be allowed.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)