Lithuanian speech laws can claim first scalp

[I expanded and updated this on 21 December 2011, to organize the argument better and provide more background.]

News has broken over the past week about the uncertain fate of Algirdas Paleckis, the head of the Socialist People’s Front, a party in Lithuania. Speaking on the radio in November of last year, he talked about what are known as the “January Events,” which include the shooting of protestors by the TV Tower in Vilnius. Paleckis asked about who was actually at the tower and then said, “saviškiai šaudė į savus”—“our own were shooting at our own” or “like was shooting at like.”

For this comment, he has been charged under 170-2 of the Lithuanian Penal Code—a clause enacted in 2010 which makes it a crime to “publicly endorse,” “deny,” or “coarsely belittle” both Soviet and Nazi German crimes as well as the the aggressions of 1990–1991.

Last week, however, the government put off their decision on the matter, allegedly because of documents that were not translated from Russian in time. These documents, pertaining to the January Events, may vindicate what Paleckis said. His party, however, suggests that the government is eager to bury their decision—due 30 December—under news regarding the holidays, especially now that it has gotten a bit of international play.

Even if you use the same words to describe Paleckis as you did his grandfather—”Moscow’s ass-licker,” Russian agent, buffoon whose vanity is flattered by the KGB to provoke the Lithuanian state—his fate is a troubling one for three reasons.

1. The law sucks

I’m still enough into the Enlightenment to be in favor of free speech laws, but even past that, the law Paleckis is accused of breaking is a complete disaster of jurisprudence. First, it codifies explicitly the legal equivalence of Soviet and Nazi German crimes. I’ve written enough about that in the past. Second, the language describing the events of 1990–1991 is completely mealymouthed. I’m scared to even attempt a translation.

Finally, this fancy law obfuscates the existence of the Holocaust. It only alludes to it first as a “genocide” that has been recognized as such by the EU and then again as a “genocide” against “inhabitants of the Lithuanian Republic.” This isn’t euphemism; this is an offensive game of playing equivalences, the far right fantasy of “Dual Genocide”: the Holocaust, the argument is read by me, doesn’t need to be mentioned since it wasn’t the only genocide in Lithuania. The Lithuanians also suffered!

If you aren’t convinced by my arguments, Dovid Katz makes a more liberal (even invoking Voltaire) case for defending Paleckis’s right to free speech, regardless of its contents. Katz also links to Leonidas Donskis, who writes about “concept inflation” in terms of “genocide” and Lithuania’s eagerness to “criminalise discussion,” which is wholly anti-democratic. Donskis even calls out Western European  democracies who have similar speech laws regarding denying the Holocaust, so this isn’t a case of simply piling on poor, little Lithuania.

Simply put, if you believe in free speech, you believe that Paleckis should have his charges dropped—not potentially spend a year in prison (after having his sentence suspended for two years, effectively silencing him).

2. Paleckis did not “deny” the shootings

This is more of a delicate matter, and for it, I rely on the phrase that has rung out and is repeated in the press: “like was shooting at like.”¹ This statement is empirically correct even if we accept the official version of the events. For example, the case could be made that everyone present was still a Soviet citizen—this is surely the position Moscow took, in warning Lithuanians of the “bourgeois dictatorship” that would follow independence.² Soviet citizens (soldiers of the Red Army / KGB forces) fired upon Soviet citizens of the Lithuanian SSR.

Even more foolishly: human beings shot at human beings.

This isn’t lawerly slipperiness. This is a point about ontology. The only way “like was shooting at like” can be considered a “denial” is if we consider that the difference between the shooters and the victims is so stark that they are different ontological entities, sharing nearly no commonality between them. Opfer vs. Täter, in the most childish manichean game of cops and robbers (or partisans and communists, as we used to play as kids) imaginable.

Paleckis had language specialists come in to prove that he was merely expressing his opinion, and not denying anything. In my opinion, it does not even come down to that. The parts quoted in the press are philosophically not a denial, and it would require the mentality of a playground bully to see it otherwise.³

3. Can there be a non-nationalist history of Lithuania?

What Paleckis is after, per his provocation, is a reckoning and inquiry into the January Events. It is absolutely the case that at the time, Moscow denied opening fire on the protestors. It is also absolutely the case that eyewitness reports and testimony gathered at the time—which is, I imagine, what these documents requiring translation are—conflict with the state’s version of events. As Balsas printed, in discussing the Paleckis case, some Sąjūdis members felt that bloodshed was needed to unify the movement. Others present at the tower or watching from nearby testified at having seen gun flashes from rooftops, where there were no Soviet soldiers. And apparently the ballistics findings of the bodies suggest that it was not (entirely) Soviets shooting, as they include weapons from the start of the 20th Century.

So it’s unclear. Even as the 20th anniversary of the events creeps up, the state has shown a lack of interest in pursuing these uncertainties. Paleckis’s father, an MEP, in scolding his son for saying what he did, says that discussion of the events should be left to witnesses to discuss “openly, in detail, and objectively, and not the new generation, supported by the tales of others.” That’s exactly the kind of discussion that the current law has made impossible. Who will stand up and say “I saw Lithuanians open fire,” if they know they could be hauled off to jail just for saying it? Paleckis’s brother, a journalist, brags about his own closeness to the action, as he was “already working as a journalist.” The “insanities” Paleckis is repeating, he continues, already bubbled up during the bloody night itself, told by “overthrowers” like Soviet soldiers. In other words, even by his own admission, the events on the ground were immediately uncertain, but, in his opinion, no inquiry is required because those providing uncertainty are, conveniently, all unreliable.

And this is the problem here. Revising the state history requires taking seriously people the state has already deemed unfit to bear witness, holders of unreliable testimony. The fact that the state (and especially the long shadow of Sąjūdis which is cast over the entire political apparatus) benefits from the state’s version of events is never—and now can never—be questioned.

I have no idea what happened that night 20 years ago. I was at home, probably doing homework or whatever it is that studious freshmen in high school do on Saturday evenings. Shortly after the events—maybe even the next day—I recall participating in a protest, probably at the USSR consulate in New York City, where each of the 14 people who was killed that night was memorialized. The sign youthful, nationalist me carried, ironically, read “Литовская Свиня,” as a sort of resistance and recuperation of the belittling of Lithuanians at the hands of the Soviet state.

And yet now, the Lithuanian government is acting like the swine from the sign I carried, greedily gobbling up all claims on historical legitimacy and silencing dissent.

Lithuania is afraid of looking back at its history. That’s shameful, but expected. No state likes to roll out its darkest moments and parade them about. But Lithuania does a state like the US one better; it criminalizes the efforts of others to see what hides in those darkest moments.

1. Though the law does not cover simply denials, in the media he is accused of “denial,” so I’ll focus on that. [↩]
2. Moscow’s prescience is for a different post. [↩]
3. It may, of course, be the case that he said more on the radio, and I’ll get to that, but so perhaps newspapers were disinclined to reprint it, fearing their own scalps. See how stupid this is? [↩]

Tags: Algirdas Paleckis, Balsas, Communists, Dovid Katz, Holocaust, January Events, Leonidas Donskis, nationalism, Nazis, Sausio įvykiai, Socialistinis liaudies frontas