Why I petitioned IHRA to review Lithuania’s membership

Orwell gave his invented tyranny a Ministry of Truth, and gave the Ministry a single task: keep the record obedient to the state. Facts that embarrassed power were dropped into what he called the memory hole and were gone. The warning in Nineteen Eighty-Four was never only about lying about the present. It was about who decides what happened. A government that can fix what is remembered can fix, downstream, what a citizen is still permitted to say is true.

In Holocaust memory, Lithuania has built something close to that. Not a single ministry. A working system, and its first instrument is vocabulary.

In “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell showed how soft words are made to carry hard crimes, how language defends the indefensible by quietly removing the actor from the act. Lithuania’s murdered Jews did not “vanish.” They did not “perish.” They were not “lost.” Those are the words Lithuanian official memory reaches for, and not one of them contains a killer. The people behind those verbs were hunted, registered, robbed, marched, and shot, in large part by Lithuanian men who knew the victims’ names, their streets, and the faces of their children. When the state does name the local killers at all, it calls them “collaborators,” a word that hands the initiative back to Germany and demotes the men who organized the murder to someone else’s helpers.

The arithmetic is not in dispute. Of roughly 220,000 Jews in Lithuania in June 1941, about 212,000 were murdered, the most complete destructions of any Jewish community in occupied Europe. Around two thousand four hundred remain today. The Lithuanian state has not punished any Lithuanian for those murders. None of that is hidden by “vanished.” Only the hand on the rifle is.

A single rephrased verb is the smallest unit of the apparatus I am calling the Ministry of Memory. The larger machine is assembled from state-funded research bodies, prosecutors, diplomats, commemorative offices, public-relations formulas, and select Jewish institutional encounters and diplomatic partners willing to accept engagement without answers. Its product is........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)