The Fridman prosecution is not law. It is state mythology enforced by criminal statute.

Lithuania does not merely remember the Forest Brothers. It mandates selective and creative fictional memory. It elevates the anti-Soviet chapter, negates the Holocaust chapter, and now prosecutes a Jew for refusing to recite the state’s mandated version.

That is what the Artur Fridman case means.

Fridman criticized the Forest Brothers and the Lithuanian heroic mythology built around them. Lithuania answered with two criminal statutes: Article 170² §1, the statute protecting Lithuania’s official anti-Soviet memory, and Article 313 §2, the statute concerning desecration of the memory of the deceased. The state’s theory is obscene in its simplicity: Lithuanian patriotic memory may be protected by criminal law, while Jewish memory of Lithuanian crimes may be treated as criminal speech.

That is not democracy. That is Soviet method with Lithuanian vocabulary.

The Soviet system did not merely lie. It organized permissible memory. It decided which victims counted, which crimes could be named, which heroes could be questioned, and which historical truths were punishable because they threatened state legitimacy. Lithuania now performs the same operation in reverse. The Soviet hero has been replaced by the Forest Brother. The censored memory has changed. The method has not.

Lithuania does not ask the public to remember the Forest Brother as a freedom fighter only. It mandates that memory. It takes the anti-Soviet chapter, consecrates it, funds it, teaches it, decorates it, prosecutes around it, and then treats the Jewish chapter as defamation.

We remember the ghettos. We remember the pits. We remember Lithuanian auxiliary police. We remember white armbanders. We remember Jewish property seized before and after murder. We remember women beaten, raped, and marched to forests. We remember children murdered. We remember Lithuanian men who passed through the machinery of Jewish destruction and were later absorbed into Lithuania’s national-resistance pantheon.

Lithuania may choose to forget that record. It may not prosecute Jews for remembering it.

Juozas Krikštaponis, also rendered as Juozas Krištaponis, shows the fraud. Lithuania commemorated the partisan commander. Jewish memory records the murder trail before the forest.

Mindaugas Pocius’s 2022 article in Genocidas ir rezistencija states that the 2nd Auxiliary Police Service Battalion murdered more than 15,000 Jews in more than fifteen locations in Belarus between October and December 1941. All three companies took part in the massacre. The battalion also murdered at least 2,360 prisoners of Stalag No. 352 in Minsk. Pocius concludes that Krikštaponis commanded the battalion’s 2nd Company on October 10, 1941, when prisoners of the Rudzensk Jewish ghetto were killed, and on October 15–16, 1941, when prisoners........

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