Lithuania calls itself a free-speech democracy. Its Holocaust-memory law runs in one direction only.
Lithuania did not begin by prosecuting Artur Fridman. It began by warning me.
On July 18, 2018, the Lithuanian Genocide and Resistance Research Centre answered my submission about Jonas Noreika with a document that read less like history than a caution. The Centre refused to change its conclusion that Noreika bore no responsibility for crimes against Jews. Then it wrote that the conclusions I demanded “possibly violate” the Constitution of the Republic of Lithuania and other legal acts. In the same response it placed the historians Andrius Kulikauskas and Evaldas Balčiūnas in quotation marks, questioned their standing, and suggested their public views produced a preconceived lack of objectivity.
It did not stay private. The Centre published a page on its own website describing the exchange. There it told the public that I was attempting to prove the Holocaust was begun “not by the Nazis, but by Lithuanians,” and that, without solid evidence and “possibly violating” the Constitution and the Criminal Code, I had accused named Lithuanian figures. A state memory institution had told a citizen, in writing and then in public, that his historical conclusions might be a crime.
Hold that sentence next to what Lithuania did six years later.
On October 30, 2025, Lithuanian authorities assembled a 220-page pre-trial file against Artur Fridman, Criminal Case No. 02-2-00512-24, under Article 170² §1 and Article 313 §2 of the Criminal Code. Fridman is presumed innocent, and the prosecution against him is illegitimate. He wrote about his grandfather’s wartime memory and became a defendant. The article numbers charged against him are not identical to the ones the Centre waved at me in 2018. The mechanism is.
Lithuania presents itself abroad as a free-speech democracy: a member of the European Union and NATO, a member of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, with a free press and independent courts. Inside the field of Holocaust memory that guarantee is a fraud. The state’s speech law does not protect speech. It protects one version of history and punishes the other. It shields the distortion the state itself produces and treats correction by the descendants of the murdered as prosecutable.
The warning was the doctrine
The 2018 message was not “your evidence is wrong.” It was “your conclusions may be unlawful.” That is a state warning dressed as historical comment. The Centre objected to the claims that Lithuanians bore responsibility for crimes against humanity, that Lithuanians murdered Jews, that Noreika was an enemy of humanity, that Brazaitis and the Provisional Government required accountability. It recast contested historical conclusions as constitutional and criminal exposure, invoking the presumption of innocence, defamation, and limits on expression to do it. Strip the vocabulary and the instruction was plain: name Lithuanian responsibility for Holocaust crimes and you become the legal problem.
The Centre knew the true record well enough to quote it. In the same response it cited the state-commissioned Dieckmann–Sužiedėlis findings that Lithuanian organizations and institutions took part in identifying Jews, seizing their property, concentrating them, and ultimately annihilating them. It conceded the apparatus in the abstract, then refused to apply it to Noreika in the concrete. That is the method: admit categories, erase names; acknowledge the structures, protect the administrator who signed the local orders. The surrounding apparatus — the witness the state had to discredit, and the office Noreika accepted after Ignas Urbaitis left it — is set out in How Lithuania Discredited Its Witness and The Man Noreika Replaced, and is not the subject here. The point here is narrower. The state knew, and it pointed the criminal law at the correction rather than the error.
The same machinery, one direction
The proof that this is speech suppression and not a defense of historical truth is the direction of enforcement. Run the same statute both ways and watch only one side fire.
On International Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2021, Valdas Rakutis, a member of the Seimas, published a text that assigned a share of Holocaust responsibility to Jews. The article drew a formal protest from a United States commissioner, Paul Packer, who wrote to Rakutis directly. Rakutis was not punished. No 220-page file followed. The statute that exists to punish Holocaust distortion did not move against the sitting legislator who performed it on the calendar’s most conspicuous day.
Fridman wrote about his grandfather and drew an indictment. The state did not lack a statute. It lacked a target it wanted to prosecute.
That is not a single coincidence. When the distortion belonged to the state, the machinery stopped. Three times the Vilnius prosecutor declined to investigate the Genocide Centre for Holocaust distortion under Article 170² §1: on August 17, 2018 (Investigation Material No. M-2-02-00825-18), again on November 12, 2018, and a third time in November 2019. The same office that could find no basis to examine a state institution found 220 pages when the speaker was a private Jewish citizen. A neutral statute does not produce one-directional outcomes for a decade. The full enforcement pattern is set out in The Selective Enforcement Index.
The defenses are the misconduct
Lithuania will answer with institutions: courts, prosecutors, IHRA membership, academic freedom. Each answer is part of the misconduct.
When I asked the courts to review the Centre’s findings, the state argued that courts do not adjudicate history; the procedural architecture is set out in Verdict First, Reasoning Later. Judicial independence became the means of placing state distortion beyond review while Fridman’s speech stayed fully reachable. The prosecutor’s independence performed the same function: the office could find no basis to examine the state institution, yet produced a full file against the citizen. Discretion that runs in only one direction is not a rebuttal to the charge. It is the charge.
The IHRA credential collapses the same way. The alliance Lithuania cites as proof of good standing saw its expert chairs issue a statement of grave concern over the Centre’s justification of Noreika’s wartime conduct toward Jews, and Lithuania’s own Presidential Commission refuted the Centre’s Noreika statement. Membership is the image; the record it conceals is the evidence. Academic freedom fares no better, because the Centre claimed it for itself while denying it to others, placing “historians” in quotation marks around Andrius Kulikauskas and Evaldas Balčiūnas and impugning their objectivity. Academic freedom invoked by the state to protect its own narrative, and withheld from the scholars who dissent, is its inversion.
There is, finally, no forum. The prosecutor refuses, the court says it does not judge history, and Parliament directs the citizen back to the courts; the closed loop is described in The Soviet Court That Never Left. The state’s own distortion has no venue in which it can be tested. The citizen’s speech always has one.
Lithuania will reach for Article 313 §2 and call Fridman’s case a defense of the honor of the dead rather than the suppression of speech. The choice is the suppression. A state that routes a dispute over Holocaust history into criminal defamation, while no Lithuanian has been punished for dishonoring the memory of the murdered Jews, has not protected anyone’s honor. It has selected whose memory the criminal law will defend.
If that institution is offered against Fridman as source or authority, its conduct is part of the case, not its background. A state body that told a Jewish descendant his Holocaust-accountability conclusions might be criminal cannot be treated as a disinterested expert when a second Jewish defendant is prosecuted for historical speech; the wider problem of the state relying on its own false witness is documented in The State’s Witness Is the State’s Lie. The court should require the Centre to produce what it reviewed, what it discarded, who approved the language, and how a submission on Holocaust accountability became, in its hands, a possible constitutional and criminal offense.
The doctrine, written down
First the state warned me. Then it built a file on Fridman. These are two stages of one system. The Genocide Centre published its account of history, received notice that the account was false, refused to correct it, and reached instead for the language of crime against the people who corrected it. The statute that never punished a legislator’s distortion now sits at the head of a 220-page case against a private Jew.
That is not a free country protecting truth. It is a memory regime protecting itself. Lithuania wrote the doctrine down in 2018, published it under its own name, and has asked a criminal court to enforce it. A state that prosecutes the corrected and shields the distorter does not have free speech in this field. It has a permit system, and the permit is denied to the descendants of the murdered.
Grant Arthur Gochin is a diplomat, journalist, and wealth advisor focused on historical accountability, Jewish continuity, and recognition doctrine. He serves as Honorary Consul for the Republic of Togo and is the Emeritus Special Envoy for Diaspora Affairs of the African Union, representing all fifty-five AU member states. He is also Emeritus Dean of the Los Angeles Consular Corps.
Gochin is Advisor on Recognition Doctrine and Sovereignty to the Mthwakazi Republic Party, Office of the President, providing advisory guidance on international recognition, sovereignty theory, and comparative precedent relating to remedial self-determination.
His philanthropic work in Togo led to his investiture as Chief of the Village of Babade. Over several decades, Gochin has documented and restored Jewish heritage in Lithuania, including leading the Maceva Project, which mapped and preserved dozens of abandoned and desecrated Jewish cemeteries. His work exposed state-sponsored Holocaust revisionism and contributed to international recognition of systematic manipulation of historical memory.
Gochin is the author of *Malice, Murder and Manipulation* (2013), which traces the destruction of his family in Lithuania and examines postwar historical distortion. A consistent advocate against antisemitism, antizionism, and other forms of bigotry, he writes and speaks internationally on the political uses of history and the necessity of historical integrity for Jewish survival. His journalism confronts governmental misinformation and disinformation campaigns and maintains a firm position on Israel’s legitimacy and security grounded in historical evidence and collective survival.
Professionally, Gochin is a Certified Financial Planner™ and wealth advisor based in California. He holds an MBA earned with academic distinction and leads Grant Arthur & Associates Wealth Services. He lives in Los Angeles with his husband, son, and dog, Kelev.
https://www.grantgochin.com