Lithuania

One of Britain’s most important and impactful cultural workers breathed his last breath on 7 December 2023, having been diagnosed with a brain tumour eight weeks previously. Benjamin Zephaniah was widely known as a poet, author and actor, but also as a tireless and courageous campaigner for justice. He never hesitated to speak his mind; he never put his career before his principles. He was unique in his ability to cut through ruling class cultural hegemony – a function of his prodigious talent and his strong roots in the British working class, in particular among oppressed communities. As a black man from a working class Jamaican background, Zephaniah faced racism all his life, and anti-racism was one of his main areas of focus as an activist. For decades, he stood shoulder ...

in this long read, ian parker visited the Baltic state and describes what he saw and heard and read there. 01 Sep 2023 Lithuania bears the scars of a dramatic fall from regional power over the past centuries – in the fourteenth century the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was the largest country in Europe – suffering dismemberment, occupation by Russia and Germany and three separate unhappy periods as the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic – in 1918 to 1919, 1940 to 1941 and 1944 to 1990. Independence in 1990 was followed by membership of NATO and the European Union in 2004. These times are written on the body of the state and the people, now just under 3 million, in memories of exile, either to Nazi concentration camps (the fate of Jews who were not murdered during that occ...

Posted by: Sammi Ibrahem,Sr Local Jews say Lithuania’s State-run body tasked with memorializing Holocaust is attempting to absolve Lithuanians of ‘substantial complicity’ with the occupying Nazis in the mass murder of Jews during WWII: Lithuania’s state body for preserving the memory of the Holocaust broke the country’s laws against denying that genocide, local Jews said.The controversy surrounding the Center for the Study of the Genocide and Resistance of Residents of Lithuania is the latest in a series of actions that the country’s critics say is a government-sponsored campaign to exculpate its people from its substantial complicity in the murder of 85 percent of the country’s 170,000 Jews.The Center published last month a text claiming that “the Lithuanians operated against the ...