Lithuania’s free-speech performance collapses when Facebook posts and YouTube videos become state files.

Lithuania left the Soviet Union in 1990. Its courts and regulators still behave, in the cases that matter to the state, as though the verdict arrives first and the reasoning is written afterward.

That is a claim about public documents, official decisions, state rhetoric, regulatory actions, and prosecutions Lithuania itself has placed on the record. The full architecture is laid out in my Substack article, Verdict First, Reasoning Later. This is the shorter point: Lithuania’s claim to free speech and independent courts has become a diplomatic performance. The domestic record shows something older, uglier, and more familiar.

Two current cases expose the farce.

Stanislovas Tomas, who is not Jewish, was fined €2,500 by the Lithuanian Radio and Television Commission over a YouTube comparison. Artur Fridman, a Jewish citizen of Lithuania, was charged under Article 170² §1 and Article 313 §2 of the Lithuanian Criminal Code over a Facebook post honoring his grandfather, Aron Fridman, a Jewish soldier who fought Nazi Germany in the Red Army. Different speakers. Different procedures. Different statutes. The same institutional reflex.

The state dislikes the speech. The state finds the instrument. The file is constructed to deliver the result.

This is not adult rule of law. It is a child’s imitation of legality. A mature state answers evidence. Lithuania labels the person who brought it. A mature court tests competing claims. Lithuania produces conclusions that make protected national memory safe. A mature regulator applies rules symmetrically. Lithuania applies them directionally.

The verdict comes first. The reasoning comes later.

Soviet legal culture had a name for the mechanism: telephone law. The phrase describes a system in which political expectation precedes legal reasoning. The judge or official does not need a written order. The desired outcome is understood. The file is then dressed in procedure.

Lithuania will object that it has independent courts, European Union membership, NATO membership, legal codes, prosecutors, regulators, and appeal rights. The Soviet Union had codes too. It had courts. It had procedures. The question is not whether institutions exist. The question is how they behave when state memory is at stake.

Eugene J. Levin’s Lithuania Confessed from the Floor of Parliament matters because it identifies the language of instruction. On April 1, 2021, MP Mindaugas Puidokas described me on the parliamentary record as the etatinis Lietuvos juodintojas, the salaried or professional blackener of Lithuania. That was not a legal argument. It was a role assignment. Once the state labels a Holocaust-memory complainant as a permanent enemy of Lithuania, its institutions know how to read the file.

They read it exactly that way.

In 2022, Lithuania’s Journalist Ethics Inspector issued Decision S-424 against me. I had complained that the state Genocide and Resistance Research Centre, the LGGRTC, publicly named me and asserted that my submissions had “possibly violated” Lithuania’s Constitution and Criminal Code. The Inspector rejected my complaint. The theory was that I had become a “public person” because of my book, my Times of Israel authorship, my website, my public Holocaust-accountability work, and my Honorary Consul status.

In other words, the more publicly a Litvak descendant challenged Lithuanian Holocaust distortion, the less protection Lithuania said he deserved.

Applied symmetrically, the same logic would have made the LGGRTC director, a highly visible state........

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