On March 11, 2026, a banner reading “Lietuva-Lietuviams” — “Lithuania for Lithuanians” — was hung from an overpass in Vilnius on Lithuania’s Independence Day. Konstantinas Andrijauskas, an associate professor at Vilnius University, tore it down. LRT reported that police opened a pre-trial investigation into him for disturbing public order after the banner’s owner complained. The banner went up. The state’s immediate coercive response fell on the professor who removed it.
That sequence is not new in Lithuania. It is the pattern. It has been the pattern since the 1930s. The slogan has outlived the Jews it helped to murder.
In 1989, I met Vytautas Čekanauskas, Lithuania’s Honorary Consul in Los Angeles, who had already served in that role for twelve years. I told him I wanted to learn more about my Lithuanian heritage. He told me emphatically: “A Jew cannot be a Lithuanian, and a Lithuanian cannot be a Jew.” I reported this in Malice, Murder and Manipulation. I did not fully understand what he meant then. I do now.
What the slogan meant
“Lietuva-Lietuviams” was never a neutral expression of patriotism. It was a formula of ethnic ownership. Lithuania belongs to ethnic Lithuanians. Everyone else is conditional: a guest at best. But certainly a Jew could not be a Lithuanian. Not then, not now.
The Lithuanian Jewish Community has traced the slogan to the interwar weekly Verslas, where anti-Jewish exclusion and boycott politics helped prepare the ground for 1941. That matters because it shows the phrase was already functioning before the war as a public formula of ethnic and economic cleansing.
Jonas Noreika, whom Lithuania honors as a national hero, published his antisemitic pamphlet Pakelk galvą, lietuvi! — “Hold Your Head High, Lithuanian!” — in 1933, demanding the exclusion of Jews from Lithuanian economic and public life. The pamphlet was “Lietuva-Lietuviams” in written doctrine. Noreika put that doctrine into practice during the Holocaust as head of Šiauliai district, where he administered the murder of approximately 14,500 Jews. His granddaughter, Silvia Foti, exposed his record in Storm in the Land of Rain. Lithuania has not revoked his national honors. The murder of 14,500 Jewish Lithuanian citizens is not considered disqualifying — because Lithuania never regarded its Jews as Lithuanian. They held citizenship. They were never granted belonging.
The diary of Dr. Aharon Pick, the Šiauliai ghetto physician, shows what that exclusion looked like in lived form. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum notes that Pick recorded how Jewish doctors were dismissed from their posts and subjected to public humiliation. A slogan like “Lietuva-Lietuviams” does not begin with pits. It begins by teaching who belongs, who does not, and whose removal can be called national repair.
The straight line
The chain is sequential, documented, and direct. Once Jews are defined as outside the nation, they can be pushed out of schools, professions, commerce, and public life. Once exclusion is normalized, Jews can be reclassified from citizens to obstacles. Once Jews are obstacles, their removal can be presented as restoration. Once removal is restoration, murder can be sold as patriotism.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum states plainly that Lithuanians carried out violent riots against Jews both shortly before and immediately after the arrival of German forces, and that German Einsatzgruppen together with Lithuanian auxiliaries began murdering Lithuania’s Jews in June and July 1941. The photographic record of the Lietūkis garage massacre shows celebratory Lithuanian nationalists murdering more than fifty Jewish men in Kaunas on June 27, 1941, before a crowd.
The Jäger Report recorded 137,346 people murdered by December 1, 1941, overwhelmingly Jews, and declared that the “Jewish problem” in Lithuania had been solved except for those temporarily kept alive for labor. The speed of the destruction matters because it exposes the lie of historical inevitability.
Lithuania’s favorite alibi is compulsion: occupation, fear, German control. Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men destroys that excuse. Even inside a killing unit, not everyone killed in the same way. Some refused. Some evaded participation. Some continued enthusiastically. That is the point. The men who murdered Jews in Lithuania were not dragged by history. They acted voluntarily and enthusiastically. They were implementing the Lithuanian nationalist agenda of “Lietuva-Lietuviams”.
And they did not stop when the Germans were expelled. Lithuanian nationalists — not German Nazis, but Lithuanian ones — continued to murder Jews who survived the war and attempted to return home. The program was “Lietuva-Lietuviams”, and surviving Jews were evidence of its incompletion. As Eugene Levin documented, Jews came home, only to be murdered — by Lithuanians, without German orders, without German supervision, because the doctrine “Lietuva-Lietuviams” demanded total elimination and every returning Jew was an affront to its fulfillment. The cessation of those murders was May 9, 1945. A date to be celebrated by those who oppose the genocide of Jews, or mourned, by those who regret the incompletion of “Lietuva-Lietuviams”, and for other reasons.
The slogan never died
In March 2026, LRT described “Lietuva-Lietuviams” as a slogan typically used by the far right. President Gitanas Nausėda said it carried associations with the ideologies of 1930s Germany. Legal scholar Skirmantas Bikelis argued that the deeper problem lies in demonizing ideas still present in society and even in state institutions — citing a 2019 case in which attackers shouting “Lithuania for Lithuanians” physically assaulted a man in the street. Anthropologist Gražina Bielousova defended disruptive civic resistance as democracy’s heart, not its breakdown. A few days later, another banner appeared on the same overpass: Vilnius visiems — Vilnius for everyone.
That response existed only because some Lithuanians understand exactly what the first banner meant. Lithuania’s own president, its own public broadcaster, its own legal scholars, and its own intellectuals recognized the slogan as exclusionary and murderous. The question is not whether Lithuania knows. The question is what Lithuania does with what it knows.
The slogan enforced by law
What Lithuania does is investigate the professor and prosecute the Jew.
“Lietuva-Lietuviams” — eliminationist language with a documented trail from boycott to ghetto to killing pit — is treated as protected expression under Lithuanian free speech law. A Jewish citizen’s Facebook post about the history that language produced is not. The banner stays up. The Jew is indicted. Democracy and Western values, indeed!
The culture that produced those crowds had already taught Lithuanian children what to do when a Jew falls. A Lithuanian nursery rhyme — “A Jew was climbing a ladder and accidentally fell off. Take a stick, children, and kill that Jew” — is classified as a well-known Lithuanian folk song. Lithuania’s folk songs are protected national heritage. An antisemitic rhyme instructing children to murder Jews is preserved as Lithuanian culture. Hate speech against Jews is, in Lithuania, protected speech.
In 2023, Lithuanian parliamentarian Remigijus Žemaitaitis quoted the rhyme on Facebook, deliberately directed it at Jews, argued that Jewish conduct caused antisemitism, called Jews a “sub-species,” accused them of committing a greater Holocaust against Lithuanians than Lithuanians committed against Jews, and demanded Jews apologize for their “nasty little actions.” Lithuania initially treated his Facebook posts as protected expression. Prosecutors sought a €51,250 fine. The court imposed €5,000 — a 90% discount. Žemaitaitis refused to apologize. He was re-elected. His party entered the ruling coalition. He remains in power. The conviction changed nothing.
Now consider Artur Fridman. On May 9, 2024, Fridman — a private Jewish citizen — posted on Facebook honoring the memory of his murdered grandfather. Lithuania assembled a 220-page criminal indictment, imposed a travel restriction, and activated the full machinery of criminal prosecution.
Žemaitaitis deliberately targeted living Jews with a rhyme about murdering them. Fridman honored his dead grandfather, murdered by Lithuanians. Žemaitaitis sits in government. Fridman sits in a criminal dock.
In Lithuania, a parliamentarian who directs a call to murder Jews at Jews receives a €5,000 fine and a seat in the ruling coalition. A Jewish citizen who mourns his grandfather’s murder receives a criminal case number. The state protects the speech that calls for Jewish murder. The state prosecutes the speech that remembers Jewish murder.
The Fridman prosecution is not identical to that banner. It is worse. It is the same exclusionary logic translated into legal process. As set out in The indictment that put Lithuania on trial, Lithuania filed Case No. 02-2-00512-24 against Artur Fridman — the same Jewish citizen, the same Facebook post, the same grandfather’s memory. The message is the same as the banner’s message: Jewish history is tolerated only while it remains silent.
Foreign critics can be ignored. Foreign authors can be denounced. American litigants can be stonewalled. The reachable target is the Jewish Lithuanian citizen still inside Lithuania, subject to police, prosecutors, and courts. That is who Lithuania chose. These are the “values” Lithuanian diplomats invoke when they address Western audiences.
In my own litigation, Lithuanian courts repeatedly classified state historical conclusions as informational acts not subject to substantive judicial review. The merits were blocked. But for Fridman’s Facebook post, Lithuania assembled a 220 page criminal indictment, deployed experts, and activated the machinery of criminal law. Thirty actions challenging Holocaust fraud can be procedurally smothered. One Jewish citizen’s speech can trigger full prosecutorial mobilization. The disproportion is the policy.
The unbroken line
The line from the 1930s to the present is not a metaphor. It is continuity of language, exclusion, selective enforcement, and national self-protection.
“Lietuva-Lietuviams” in the 1930s meant Jews must be eliminated from economic and public life. In 1941 it meant Jews must leave Lithuania through the killing pits and concentration camp chimneys. In 2026 it means Jews must not speak about what happened in those pits, the ghettos, and the concentration camps — and must never refer to Lithuanians as culprits. All culpability must be assigned to Nazis, Soviets, and “collaborators” — as I decoded in The Doctrine Lithuania Never Revoked.
The slogan did not pull triggers. But it taught who counted and who did not. It taught who belonged and who was to be eliminated. Kazys Škirpa, Lithuania’s national hero, translated that teaching into doctrine — demanding the elimination of all Jews from Lithuania. Lithuania’s Genocide and Resistance Research Centre reduced his eliminationist program to “manifestations of antisemitism.” The slogan taught that Jewish Lithuanian citizens who had built Lithuania and fought for Lithuanian independence were not neighbors with equal rights but intruders in someone else’s house to be “eliminated.” When murderous elimination came, that teaching mattered. When the courts came for Artur Fridman, the same teaching is still operative.
Čekanauskas told me in 1989 that a Jew cannot be a Lithuanian. Before the war, roughly 250,000 Jews lived in Lithuania (including Vilnius). Today about 2,400 remain — a reduction of more than 99%. “Lietuva-Lietuviams” was nearly achieved through murder, before, during, and after the Lithuanian Holocaust. The Fridman prosecution suggests Lithuania intends to complete it now, through law.
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