Brown is never equal to Red; Brown is always worse

Two potential targets of Lithuanian prosecution.

One of my favorite movies of 2008 was Edward Zwick’s Defiance. I didn’t particularly like it because of its cinematic qualities—though the color, photography, and performances by the two leads (pictured) were excellent—but, rather, for the way it subverts in its retelling a story familiar to every child of the Lithuanian Diaspora: the fight of the Partizanai against their occupying army.

We grew up hearing about the bravery of the Partizanai, standing up against the [insert adjective here] occupation of Lithuania by the Soviet Union. They killed communist collaborators, stole from pro-communist farmers, protected crypto-nationalists. Etc. They even have a museum dedicated to them just off Gedimino Prospektas in the center of Vilnius. But instead of calling it the “Partisan Museum,” it is rather called the “Museum of Genocide Victims.”

“Oh,” the unsuspecting tourist might say to herself, “this will be similar to the new addition to the IX Fort Museum in Kaunas, which details the various forms of oppression and occupation suffered in Lithuania over the past 150 years.” Said visitor might even expect a huge exhibition on the Holocaust, seeing as the Holocaust destroyed utterly the vibrant, centuries-old Jewish community of Lithuania.

Said visitor would be in for quite a surprise. Not only is the Holocaust not mentioned in the Genocide Museum, but Jewish suffering during the war is reduced, if memory serves, to nothing more than a body count in parentheses, painted on a wall of reckoning on the way out.¹ Yes, the museum asserts, there was a genocide in Lithuania in the twentieth century, but it was a genocide against people of a certain class or a certain ideology.² And to fold these things together, the Lithuanian government even changed the definition of genocide to include, as Dovid Katz describes in today’s article for The Guardian, “wrongful deportation, imprisonment or attempts to rid society of a certain class.”

Lithuanian suffering under Soviet rule has been twisted into being called a “genocide,” and, next, the Partizanai are raised to be true heroes, giving up their lives to try to stop Soviet genocide.

Glory to the heroic partisans, destroying the fascist rearguard.

Defiance, then, spins this around. “You want to see a genocide in the forests of Lithuania?” it asks. And it delivers. We see the ghetto of Navahrudak (Naugardukas), with Jews arguing about whether to flee or not. Fleeing might mean freedom, or at least a stay of execution. But by fleeing, they condemn those who stay to death. Death here is a technology of true genocide. Following Agamben’s terminology, the Jews are stripped down to bare life, and then left to be exterminated as vermin.³

“Do you want to see what combat against actual genocide looks like?” it then asks, providing us the three Bielski brothers. Unlike the fleeing city Jews, they are not intellectuals; they are simple shtetl farmers. In other words, they come from the same stock—the valstiečiai or peasantry—that provided the Lithuanians with their nationalists a century earlier. Next, one brother, Zus, even begins to collaborate (and I choose that verb carefully) with local Soviet partisans. These partisants are Soviets risking their own lives behind enemy lines to disrupt Nazi logistical chains and hamper their abilities to engage the actual army at the front. The movie runs into some trouble with the Soviets, desperate not to come out as seeming pro-Soviet, so it stages its own performances of Soviet (and, therefore, immanent Russian) anti-Semitism, which causes Zus to return to his estranged brother and help him lead his Jewish tribe to one more day of freedom.

I’m disinclined to go into greater detail about the movie and its seeming “stick to your own kind and all will be well” moral, but it stands as an artifact of what the Lithuanian ultranationalist right would have you believe is what happened to Lithuanians at the hands of the Soviets.⁴ It fits, of course, that many of the extras were Lithuanians, and that the movie was filmed in Lithuania. It tells, the rightists might suggest, a Lithuanian story. And though there are parallels—ones I willingly drew in the capsule above—they end at a certain point. At that point, Stalin’s deportation to Siberia of the Lithuanian intellectual class and other enemies of the state reaches its limit as a horrific crime for which many thousands suffered. Yet past that terminus, the Nazi train wagons of death continue on into deep Poland, if you will permit the metaphor, passing the line of “deportation of enemies,” and moving toward “extermination of presumed subhumans.” Or, more succinctly, “genocide.”

Several times on this site I’ve returned to an old post, “The Hammer and Sickle is NOT the Swastika,” and I feel prompted by Katz’s article to return to it again. In that article, I laid out Žižek’s largely unassailable position on the matter, complete with his warning of what might happen if the two, rendered as “red” and “brown” by Katz, are considered in equivalence. But Žižek’s warning has been unheard by an increasing number of politicians in the EU, willing to go along with ultranationalist feelings in the Baltic states to insert, here and there, tiny phrases building up a precedent for equivalence.

Yes, both were horrific regimes. Yes, both committed similar crimes. But that does not lead to equivalence (any more than, pace Jonah Goldberg, Hitler’s vegetarianism means that contemporary vegetarians are crypto-fascists).

But the fight for equivalence, as Katz points out, allows the Lithuanian government to continue acting solely as victims, and not as criminals. “Wir waren nicht die Täter! Wir waren die Opfer!” they claim, sounding like a half-blind-to-history Austrian. And as long as retribution has not allowed them to finally shed their opferine capes of self-pity, they will have no interest in taking on their taterine hairshirts of responsibility.

Soviet era memorial to those killed outside the IX Fort in Kaunas.

It is a twisted joke straight out of Russian literature that turns Yitzhak Arad, a partisan, freedom-fighter, and anti-fascist, into a potential war criminal under the eyes of the forever suffering poor little Lithuanian nation, while her own war criminals, who filled the hills outside the IX Fort in Kaunas or the woods of Paneriai with corpses, remain uncharged.

Almost, and this is with a heavy dose of trying to see the best in people, I can see a part of the Lithuanian reluctance as born out of their own reaction to having their own history treated as an exclusively fascist one. It’s notable that the main memorials to the Holocaust in Lithuania were constructed during the Soviet era.⁵ In part this underscores reluctance since then on behalf of the government to add to the total, but I can also imagine the Soviet use (or overuse) of Lithuanian complicity in the Holocaust to keep Lithuanian national pride at bay. In this reading, being pro-Jewish or pro-Holocaust-reckoning is always read as pro-Soviet.

But that doesn’t change what happened. And paranoia about the potential of pro-Soviets will continue to stunt political development in Lithuania. Bad enough that the political life there is corrupt and full of upward failure. But the spectre of the USSR limits a lot of potential social good, lest efforts toward it seem, much like in the US, “communist.”

Katz uses his space in The Guardian to try to shame the English political establishment into stopping their alliances with the likes of Vytautas Landsbergis or others who pursue (cynically or not) a red-brown equivalence. But I’ll encourage the likely readers of this site, diaspora Lithuanians, to do the same. There is a space for reckoning with the horrors of the Soviet era, but its space does not include these bizarre efforts toward equivalency which, instead, justify racism and anti-Semitism under the guise of anti-Sovietism.

Here, perhaps, Žižek’s conclusion is worth repeating:

The ‘pure’ liberal attitude towards Leftist and Rightist ‘totalitarianism’ – that they are both bad, based on the intolerance of political and other differences, the rejection of democratic and humanist values etc – is a priori false. It is necessary to take sides and proclaim Fascism fundamentally ‘worse’ than Communism. The alternative, the notion that it is even possible to compare rationally the two totalitarianisms, tends to produce the conclusion – explicit or implicit – that Fascism was the lesser evil, an understandable reaction to the Communist threat.

It is a historical fact that Nazism arrived on the scene after Communism. Even the Stalinist version of Communism predates the Reichstagsbrand. In equating brown and red, brown becomes a response, hell, almost a necessary, unavoidable response to red. From there, the mess gets more horrific. The Holocaust becomes a necessary, immanent part of the War against Communism. Is that, actually, what the likes of Landsbergis and other tools of the ultranationalist right in Lithuania wish to proclaim?

1. Darius sent me a link to  Johnathan Steele’s description of his visit: “But as I moved from room to dismal room, I had a growing sense something was missing. Vilnius was once known as the Jerusalem of the North. What about the Jews? Did their fate not merit remembrance? In a corridor I eventually found a placard with a brief, though telling, mention. It gave estimates for the victims of Lithuania’s Soviet occupation and of the Nazi one as well. The number summarily shot, or who died in prison and during deportation in the Soviet period, reached 74,500. During three years of Nazi rule from June 1941, those killed amounted to 240,000, ‘including about 200,000 Jews’.” [↩]
2. It’s not for nothing that the museum often becomes called the “KGB Museum” in English. Somehow calling this space a “Genocide Museum” sounds completely wrong. [↩]
3. Agamben, of course, in separating zoë from bios allows space for political exiles and refugees among those stripped to bare life, but it was the technology of the concentration camp, not the forced labor camp, that provided the apogee of the horror of biopolitics. [↩]
4. Defiance also has out-of-its-mind fascinating linguistic politics. The local farmers are considered Belarusian, and the main language other than English spoken in the movie is Russian. Yet when one of the farmers who hesitatingly helps the Bielskis is found out and murdered, the sign hanging from his neck, “amant żydów,” is in (bad?) Polish. None of this really fits the historical facts, either. So was everything russified for Liev Schreiber, who speaks Russian? [↩]
5. This also explains the anger over the memorial in Talinn. Russians see it as a memorial to anti-fascism. Estonians see it as a memorial to their oppression at the hands of the Soviets, who considered their partisans crypto-fascists. [↩]

Tags: Communists, Defiance, Dovid Katz, England, Holocaust, Jewish people, lands, Landsbergis, Nazis, partizanai, Slavoj Žižek, The Guardian

Other than the Lithuanian President’s decision last month not to grant citizenship to ice dancer Katherine Copely, things have been rather quiet on the citizenship front. However, this week, there is some news.

The current citizenship law in Lithuania adopted in mid-2008, which has been the basis of my popular “Guide to a Passport” series, was set to expire on the first day of 2010. On Tuesday, however, the Seimas voted to extend the deadline to 1 July, 2010. The reason given is that not enough time has elapsed since the results of the president’s council on citizenship were submitted in late October.

Incorporating appeals to the Constitutional Court (Konstitucinis Teismas), the new project would try to develop a plan regarding dual citizenship that avoids a legal limbo while waiting for it to be declared unconstitutional. The main hangup of the current project is in part 7.5 of the proposed law on citizenship, which declares that a Lithuanian citizen can maintain her citizenship if she

yra lietuvių kilmės asmuo, išvykęs iš Lietuvos po 1990 m. kovo 11 d. ir įgijęs Europos Sąjungos ar Šiaurės Atlanto Sutarties Organizacijos valstybės narės pilietybę.

is a person of Lithuanian descent who left Lithuania after 11 March 1990 and acquired citizenship of a nation that is a member either of the European Union or NATO.

This clause, in my opinion, is in violation of the 29th clause of the Lithuanian Constitution, that is, their version of the ERA:

Žmogaus teisių negalima varžyti ir teikti jam privilegijų dėl jo lyties, rasės, tautybės, kalbos, kilmės, socialinės padėties, tikėjimo, įsitikinimų ar pažiūrų pagrindu.

A person’s rights cannot be infringed upon, nor can a person be granted privileges based on his or her sex, race, ethnicity, language, descent, social standing, religion, creed, or beliefs.

Considering that the Court already struck down similar language when dual citizenship became an issue in the first place, I’m not sure why they would change their minds this time. At that time, they decided that the “tauta” to whom belongs the “suvernitetas,” as prescribed in the opening articles of the Lithuanian Constitution, is backformed from the population of citizens, making a tautology between citizenship and “tautybė.” It seems to me that following this logic, the article in the proposed law above could be kept, but it would mean “a Lithuanian citizen who left Lithuania…” In that case, it fails the rareness test for dual citizenship as prescribed in the Constitution. Getting rid of it, however, would also erase the crypto-racist effect that diaspora communities are seeking: dual citizenship only for ethnic Lithuanians, not for Russians, Jews, Poles, etc.

Furthermore, the proposed law could go against the Treaty of Lisbon, which is now three days into being in effect. The Treaty incorporates the text of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, which includes, in Article 21:

1. Any discrimination based on any ground such as sex, race, colour, ethnic or social origin, genetic features, language, religion or belief, political or any other opinion, membership of a national minority, property, birth, disability, age or sexual orientation shall be prohibited.

Of course, Lithuania’s already flaunting non-compliance with this article in their legalizing discrimination against homosexuals.

But we’ll see what happens.

Tags: Constitution, Copely, ethnicity, European Union, Guide to a Passport, Konstitucinis teismas, NATO, Seimas, sovereignty

That was easy.

I am responding to no questions on this topic if I consider them already answered below. See Update 2 for the rationale.

Update 1 (21.8.2009) on notarized copies, etc.

Update 2 (2.2.2010) on grandpa’s original birth certificate or passport and answering questions in general.

This morning, I rode my bicycle to the Consulate General of the Republic of Lithuania in Chicago and picked up my Lithuanian passport. I used my driver’s license as ID, which means I now have both a Lithuanian passport and a US passport. I am now a dual citizen.

My “Guide to a Passport” series was written as a diary, so it lacked the summarizing benefit of writing about the whole affair with hindsight. So I’ve decided to collapse all of the information from the series into one concise post–this one!–which will serve as the one-stop shop anyone in the world (I’m generalizing this for not just US citizens) can use in pursuing dual citizenship with Lithuania. Throughout, I’ll also include links to posts that include the specifics of the various things I had to do.

The requirement for dual citizenship is a simple one:

One must be a “Citizen 0” or the direct descendant (child, grandchild) of a “Citizen 0.”

Proving this is, of course, the hard part. So first, an outline:

• Citizen 0
• Gathering evidence
  • An important note before gathering
  • Things one must prove
  • From Lithuania
  • From DP camps
• Preparing evidence
  • Authentication
  • Apostille
  • Translation
• Submitting evidence

Citizen 0

“Citizen 0″ is a term I made up to describe the source individual of a person’s claim to Lithuanian citizenship. Who is eligible to be Citizen 0 widens if dual citizenship is no longer necessary, but since this post is about dual citizenship, I’ll provide the most narrow definition:

Citizen 0 is a person who was a citizen of the Republic of Lithuania before 14 June 1940 and left Lithuania between 15 June 1940 and 11 March 1990.

Any project of acquiring dual citizenship has to begin with determining who should be the applicant’s Citizen 0. Ideally, it would be the person herself, but that’s not likely to be the case, so throughout I’ll assume it’s a parent or grandparent. It is probably useful (because last names don’t change) to trace a genealogical chain through male ancestors. I suspect also, because of the patriarchy, that in the gathering stage it is easier to find evidence about fathers or grandfathers.

Picking a single Citizen 0 is helpful since it focuses the approach. If an applicant has many ancestors who could be Citizen 0s, she should choose the ancestor who is most likely to have the largest governmental paper trail: served in the army, owned land, completed advanced education, etc.

Gathering evidence

Once an applicant has determined a Citizen 0, the next step is to start gathering evidence.

But first, an important note! Of the materials submitted in a citizenship application, the only documents the applicant should expect back are her current passport and driver’s license (both are photocopied at the consulate). So if one is considering using an heirloom like grandpa’s 75 year-old passport to prove that he qualifies as a Citizen 0, one shouldn’t expect it back. One should, in light of the quick turnaround, always consider utilizing the services of the Lithuanian Archives, who provide authenticated copies of documents they have on file. These photocopies have no sentimental value, after all.

Furthermore, this warning extends to the applicant’s own birth certificate. If there is a sentimental attachment to the “original” birth certificate, the applicant should find out how to get a new official certificate made. It will cost money and take time, but it is possible. I walked into a currency exchange and bought two at once, for example. Please see Update 1 for more information on birth certificates and notarization.

What must one prove? There are four different things an applicant must prove:

1. That the applicant’s ancestor is a valid Citizen 0. Proving pre-war citizenship can be done most easily (and emotionally cheaply) by contacting the Lithuanian Archives. Similarly, there was a nationwide census in 1942 that the Archives have recorded, which can help prove that Citizen 0 did not leave before 1940. Proving flight between 1940 and 1990 can be done either via hunting down documents from DP camps or via naturalization documents and the like from the country where Citizen 0 ended up.
2. That the Citizen 0 is, in fact, the applicant’s ancestor. This can be done via a chain of birth certificates–that of the applicant and the applicant’s parent who is the descendant of Citizen 0, etc. If names don’t match on the certificates (usually because of marriage), then supplementary evidence of name changes will be necessary. An applicant should see how she can acquire new birth certificates, as the rules change from state to state and country to country.
3. That the applicant is who she says she is. Easy enough. A current, valid passport proves this. If the applicant’s name is different than that on the birth certificate, then, obviously, supplemental evidence of legal name changes is needed.
4. That the applicant is eligible to be served by the specific consulate in question. Also easy, and done with a current, valid state ID like a driver’s license. This is important just so that the consulate knows that it’s the proper consulate for the job. I have to prove that I live in a state served by the Consulate General in Illinois, say, in order to expect their services.

Getting evidence from Lithuania. I wrote already about my experiences with the Lithuanian Archives, but I can provide a synopsis here. I found that I had to make two queries: one that provided evidence that my Citizen 0 was a citizen before 1940 and one that provided evidence that my Citizen 0 was still in Lithuania in 1942. This involves making two separate requests of the Lietuvos centrinės valstybės archyvas, and the forms for both are available on this list of forms. The forms are available as .docs or .pdfs. Notable is that there is a possible third request, for proof of being shipped off to Germany. I don’t know if that is helpful or not, but I managed without it. One should also note that the Archive does not have records of births or marriages. That evidence is provided by Lietuvos valstybės istorijos archyvas, which has its own forms, etc. On the other hand, there is probably not much need for gathering vital statistic evidence about Citizen 0.

The Archive is cheap and fast. A five-day turnaround citizenship request costs 20 Lt, which is under $10. Getting the money to them, however, is a bit tricky, and the prices start to rise if you can’t draw on a Lithuanian bank. The five-day turnaround costs 7 Eur, and they add an 8 Eur fee to cover the bank’s fees if you send a check in lieu of making a wire transfer. Add in about two weeks for the mailed response, and the whole process still takes a less than a month, which is pretty shiny, considering.

The price and speed of using the Archive to find evidence of pre-1940 citizenship and of post-1940 residency make it my recommendation. One shouldn’t risk sentimental trouble with heirlooms. Rely on stamped photocopies from the Archive.

A final note about usage: the Lithuanian Archive presents “evidence,” not “proof.” They make no claims about whether whatever they find proves citizenship, etc. That is up to the Migration Department to decide. They just help make your case for you.

Getting evidence from DP camps. It is very likely that any Citizen 0 left Lithuania via Germany. If that is the case, then proving that Citizen 0 was in a DP camp is a good way of proving that Citizen 0 left Lithuania between 1940 and 1990. Depending on the applicant’s situation, it may be useful to use other evidence that’s a bit more solid, like naturalization documents or visas or something like that. I did not have those documents, and filing requests with US Immigration for new certificates took too long.

Instead, I followed a tip given by a professor and contacted the International Tracing Service. They have a form online for finding information about people in the camps, and it’s free. It takes some time (I think my search took about two months), but I received in the mail a stack of photocopies of trip manifests that showed my grandparents’ trip from Germany to Canada.

In the letter from the Lithuanian government that spells out their reasoning regarding my case for citizenship, they referred specifically to these documents. So considering the price, it is certainly a worthwhile venture.

Preparing evidence

Once all the evidence and materials are collected, they must be prepared for submission. Every document submitted in the request must be authenticated (perhaps via apostille) and translated into Lithuanian. The exceptions are, of course, documents provided by the Lithuanian government, which include any evidence sent by the Archive.

Authentication. Authentication is just proving that a foreign document is valid. For the Lithuanian government to accept a Canadian document as valid, for example, the document–a birth certificate, say–must be sent to Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada, which provides some guidelines for authentication. Once the document is returned, with a new set of stamps that prove that it has been authenticated, the Lithuanian government will reauthenticate it, which carries a fee ($14). Authentication is a bit of a pain, since it’s quite a bottleneck of doing the same thing over and over. Luckily, some countries, like the US and Lithuania, accept apostilles from each other.

Apostille. An apostille (wikipedia), simply put, is a document added to an original document that swears to the validity of the original document. This is a short cut to authentication, since when the Lithuanian government sees an Illinois birth certificate with an apostille attached to it, it trusts the apostille and doesn’t need to reauthenticate the document. Depending on the applicant’s situation, an apostille can be a nightmare to get, especially if the applicant lives in a different state from whichever state issued the birth certificate that she is trying to authenticate via apostille. For me, it was a quick trip downtown before work one morning.

Again, because every foreign government document must be authenticated, that means that naturalization documents must also be authenticated. In the US, getting an apostille for a federal document is a bit of a pain, since it requires mailing the documents to DC.

Translation. Every document submitted in the citizenship application must be translated in full into Lithuanian. The only exceptions are apostilles (just the certifications) and, of course, documents already in Lithuanian. Documents don’t need official translation–one can translate them herself–but those documents require an signed attestation that the applicant speaks both English and Lithuanian fluently and has translated the documents to the best of her ability (see example under “Pastabos”). I don’t know how much official translations cost, as I translated everything myself (with a native speaker friend who looked over what I did), but I suspect that, given the paucity of exposure to Lithuanian legalese that we get, in most cases it’s worth paying for the translation.

Submitting evidence

This is the easy part. The local consulate’s webpage should have links to forms to download and fill out for the application. The two required forms are linked to from this page on the Chicago General Consulate’s site. Add a few passport-sized photos, and it’s off to the Consulate to submit the application! I wrote about my experiences here, and I will add that the government has up to a year to decide on an application. That said, my decision came in just over two months, and I received my passport just over three months after submitting my paperwork. Super!

Update 1

The most common question I’ve gotten about this post involves notarization and copies of documents like birth certificates. I suppose I didn’t make it clear above, but:

One cannot submit notarized photocopies of US documents. They must be official documents with translations and apostilles.

It is possible to have more than one birth certificate. The applicant must follow the laws for her state to figure out how to get a new birth certificate to submit to the Lithuanian government. In my case, I walked into a currency exchange, paid a fee, and picked up two certificates for myself a week later (or so). It is important to lose the magical, hyperliteral connection to some kind of “original” certificate that is the only “official” one. This view, brought to its extreme by certain Americans dissatisfied with the current President, is simply, legally, wrong. A birth certificate issued for me today is as official as the one issued the day I was born. In fact, even that old one isn’t the “original”–the original is kept by the state. And the state can certify to a birth over and over and over.

Perhaps it’s easier to think, then, that a birth certificate is more like a college transcript than like a passport. No one freaks about having to order 5 transcripts at once, though they are all official attestations of a certain academic record.

Update 2

The previous update was about notarized documents (short version: Notarize nothing). This update is about another frequent question I get and on answering questions in general. To begin, I’ll reiterate what I already called an “important note” above:

DO NOT use “original” documents from Lithuania in your application.

Maybe your Citizen 0 kept meticulous records, saved everything, and can prove that she meets the criteria to be a Citizen 0. Congratulations, you have heirlooms. But that does not matter, since it is very likely that in making your citizenship request, the government will keep all those documents your Citizen 0 worked so hard to save.

So don’t do it.

Contact the Lithuanian Archives. They are cheap and fast, and they give you documents that are as valid as the documents your grandmother kept from 70 years ago. Having those old documents does not make the petition any easier in any real sense, and it only causes potential for heartbreak when the government keeps them.

Documents pertaining to leaving Lithuania are a bit trickier, but I’ve already indicated above how I managed to get around all that for free.

Recall that both of my potential Citizen 0s are long dead and that they left nearly no pre-war documentation behind. So I started with, basically, a blank slate. The only “old” documents I provided were my passport and driver’s license, which were photocopied at the consulate. Everything else I ordered from the various governmental agencies in the US, Canada, and Lithuania, as well as with ITS. I encourage everyone to follow that lead.

Now, the amount of bold text and italics in the previous few paragraphs indicate that I’m frustrated enough with questions I’ve gotten on this site pertaining to citizenship to declare, in general, that I am no longer responding to inquiries that I consider to be answered already in this document. I tried very hard to track every step and then generalize them for a wide, international audience. Answers to nearly every question that I could answer (remember, I’m not a lawyer, etc.) are already in the text above.

There are some things I have overlooked, such as an example of the attestation of competence in English and Lithuanian that one can write when translating English documents on one’s own. When asked about something like that, I’ll continue updating this page. But if a question is something like “can I use a notarized copy of my birth certificate?”, I won’t answer. I’m sorry to be a jerk about this, but I don’t consider it non-jerky to ask a question that has been already answered, too.

Tags: dual citizenship, Guide to a Passport

Over on Twitter, Jurate has been doing yeoman’s work in trying to put the recent “Section-28-style” law that was passed in Lithuania yesterday into context. Pink news describes the law in this way:

The law, titled ‘Law on the Protection of Minors against the Detrimental Effect of Public Information’, includes “the propaganda of homosexuality [or] bisexuality” as a detrimental factor on young people.

It has been compared to Section 28, the law which prohibited discussion of homsexuality in UK schools.

And it has caused a shitstorm on Twitter. But is Pink News’s characterisation of the law fair? Nothing in the quoted section above is false, but does it lack context? The law, after all, has a much broader title than just something like “Law to ban public discussion of homosexuality.” The law is, like the YouTube clip above, designed to protect children, not ban discussion of homosexuality. And parenting, Jurate writes in a tweet that includes a link to the actual law, “is a huge issue worldwide.”

So let’s hop to Section 4 of the law, which I’ll reproduce in its entirety in Lithuanian here:

Neigiamą poveikį nepilnamečių psichikos sveikatai, fiziniam, protiniam ar doroviniam vystymuisi darančia laikoma viešoji informacija:

1. susijusi su psichinio (psichologinio, emocinio) ar fizinio smurto vaizdavimu: kai detaliai rodomas žmonių ir (ar) gyvūnų žalojimas, kankinimas ar žudymas;
2. kai rodomas sąmoningas turto gadinimas ar naikinimas;
3. kai rodomas mirusio, mirštančio arba žiauriai sužaloto žmogaus kūnas, išskyrus atvejus, kai toks rodymas reikalingas asmens tapatybei nustatyti;
4. erotinio pobūdžio: kai skatinamas lytinis geismas, siūloma lytiškai santykiauti, rodomas lytinis aktas, jo imitacija ar kitoks seksualinis pasitenkinimas, lytiniai organai, seksualiniai reikmenys;
5. sukelianti baimę ar siaubą;
6. skatinanti lošti, raginanti, siūlanti dalyvauti azartiniuose lošimuose, loterijose ir kituose žaidimuose, kuriuose sudaromas lengvo laimėjimo įspūdis;
7. kuria palankiai vertinamas priklausomumas nuo narkotinių, toksinių, psichotropinių medžiagų, tabako ar alkoholio, taip pat kitų medžiagų, kurios vartojamos arba gali būti vartojamos svaiginimosi tikslais, skatinamas jų vartojimas, gamyba, platinimas ar įsigijimas;
8. skatinanti savęs žalojimą ar savižudybę, detalizuojanti savižudybės priemones ir aplinkybes;
9. kuria teigiamai vertinama nusikalstama veika ar idealizuojami nusikaltėliai;
10. susijusi su nusikalstamos veikos modeliavimu;
11. kuria tyčiojamasi iš žmogaus;
12. kuria tyčiojamasi ar niekinama dėl tautybės, rasės, lyties, kilmės, neįgalumo, seksualinės orientacijos, socialinės padėties, kalbos, tikėjimo, įsitikinimų ar pažiūrų;
13. kai demonstruojami paranormalūs reiškiniai, sudarant šių reiškinių tikrumo įspūdį;
14. kuria propaguojami homoseksualūs, biseksualūs ar poligaminiai santykiai;
15. kuria iškreipiami šeimos santykiai, paniekinamos jos vertybės;
16. kai vartojami nešvankūs posakiai, žodžiai ar gestai;
17. kai patariama, kaip pasigaminti, įsigyti ar naudoti sprogmenis, narkotines ar psichotropines medžiagas, taip pat kitus gyvybei ar sveikatai pavojingus dalykus;
18. kuria skatinami blogi mitybos, higienos ir fizinio pasyvumo įpročiai;
19. kai rodomas žmogaus hipnozės seansas;
20. kuri apibrėžta šio įstatymo 6 straipsnyje.

Skleisti informaciją, atitinkančią bent vieną iš šio straipsnio 1 dalies punktų, draudžiama arba ribojama šio įstatymo nustatyta tvarka.

Draudžiama skleisti ir kituose įstatymuose uždraustą viešąją informaciją, kuri gali pakenkti nepilnamečių psichikos sveikatai, fiziniam, protiniam ar doroviniam vystymuisi, ypač pornografinio turinio informaciją ir (ar) savitikslį smurtą pateikiančią informaciją.

4.2 explains that distributing information that matches anything in 4.1 is forbidden or regulated by this law. And 4.3 explains that it’s forbidden to distribute information that can harm a minor’s psychological or physical health as well as his or her intellectual or moral maturation. Singled out are pornographic and violent materials.

But 4.1 is fascinating in its own way, since it provides the roadmap. It provides the cheatsheet in which we see what kinds of information the Lithuanian government feels are inappropriate to expose to minors. Here’s a quick translation I’ve done of what’s not allowed:

1. Anything pertaining to psychological or physical violence, torture, injury, or killing of people or animals;
2. Anything showing intentional destruction of property;
3. Anything depicting corpses or mutilated bodies save in situations of identification;
4. Anything of an erotic nature, including sexual yearning, invitations to bump, depictions of the sexual act, its simulation or any kind of sexual satisfaction, sex organs, sexual accoutrements;
5. Anything causing fear or horror;
6. Anything encouraging gambling, cames of chance, or the fantasy of easy winning;
7. Anything encouraging the use of drugs, tobacco or alcohol, including their manufacture or commerce;
8. Anything encouraging self-mutilation or suicide;
9. Anything that promotes a positive image of criminals or crime;
10. Anything that models criminal behavior;
11. Anything that mocks someone;
12. Anything that mocks or denigrates someone based on nation, race, gender, family, disability, sexual orientation, social standing, language, religion, beliefs or views;
13. Anything interpreting the paranormal;
14. Anything that advocates homosexual, bisexual, or polygamous relationships;
15. Anything that encourages the denigration of familial relationships and demeans the importance of family;
16. Anything using dirty language or gestures;
17. Anything that explains how to manufacture, acquire, or use explosives, drugs, or anything else that can harm life or health;
18. Anything that encourages malnourishment or hygienic and physical passivity;
19. Anything that shows hypnosis or a séance;
20. Anything outlined in section 6.

Quite a list! But, yes. The advocation of homosexuality is akin to showing a séance, depicting corpses, or encouraging self-mutilation and suicide. (I’ll let that last point, and the implicit irony between forbidding both behaviors sit mostly without comment.) So on the one hand, yes, it’s important to see how the law is about so much more than just banning homosexual discussion from the public sphere. On the other hand, it shows—despite 4.1.12!—the homophobia buried into the foundation of Lithuanian society. But by couching the ban in terms of THINK OF THE CHILDREN, it also shows itself as not particularly different from similar efforts in our very own United States to pursue a covert agenda of hate.

So I’m troubled a bit by the fact that this law, which, with all of its problems, is not that different from what passes for the norm in much of the US, is generating so much heat, considering the fact that there are far worse aspects of public homophobia in Lithuania that require addressing; my “homofobija” tag on delicious has 24 bookmarks, not all of which involve this law. Pink News has piles of articles about the various catastrophes Lithuania has created for itself when it comes to its shocking desire to, over and over, pull out the homophobic bop gun and shoot itself. From the mayoral to the national level, the Lithuanian public sphere simply can’t handle homosexuality.

Given the track record, then (“Lietuva yra itin homofobiška” / “Lithuania is very homophobic” one headline reads, quoting a minister), pretending that this law is not shameful, that it’s merely part of a larger concern regarding parenting, is disingenous in the extreme. But by choosing this moment to have Twitter explode in outrage provides the homophobes a certain level of cover. Where was the outrage when pride parades are persistently being banned?

Tags: homophobia, intolerance, Seimas

The road is over. I wrote my first “Guide to a Passport” post just under six months ago, and in that time I’ve been in contact with governmental agencies of three nations at varying levels. I’ve read laws, I’ve made ill-prepared phone calls, I’ve scanned in documents. It was a process. But it paid off, since this morning I received the electronic version of the decision made on 22 June 2009 (short of five months to the day of the start of the process) by the Department of Migration of the Ministry of the Interior of the Republic of Lithuania. It reads, at the end:

n u s p r e n d ž i u, kad:

1. Moacir Pranas De Sa Pereira … įgyja Lietuvos Respublikos pilietybę, įgyvendinus jo teisę į Lietuvos Respublikos pilietybę kaip asmens, turėjusio Lietuvos pilietybę iki 1940 m. birželio 15 d. ir išvykusio į kitas valstybes 1940 m. birželio 15 d.–1990 m. kovo 11 d. okupacijų metu, vaikaičio.

Note the 1940–1990 date range given there. It turns out that it was important, after all, to demonstrate that my grandparents did not leave Lithuania until after 1940. In fact, the announcement very conveniently describes precisely which pieces of information were used in rendering the decision:

• My mother’s birth certificate, which I explained here.
• The 1942 census record demonstrating that my grandparents were living in Alytus, explained here.
• The proof of my grandfather’s serving in the Lithuanian Army and finishing Utenos “Saulės” high school, which I explained here.
• The 1948 list of Displaced Persons traveling from Bremen to Canada via England, which I explained here.

In other words, the messing around with the Michigan death certificate and attempts to get information from Canada and/or the USA regarding landing papers was not necessary. The documents provided by the various Lithuanian Archives and by the International Tracing Service in Germany were sufficient, when added to my own and my mother’s birth certificates.

The Chicago Consulate has written me that I should expect my passport in two – four weeks. That will make the ultimate post of this guide.

Tags: dual citizenship, Guide to a Passport

Ages ago, Deimantė sent me this famous video:

It’s a kind of a sketchy video for a number of reasons (its own existence being kind of the big one), but, no matter what, that woman wants to party. And she’s adamant and repetitive about it. What else is adamant and repetitive? Why, a ringtone!

So I’ve decided that in honor of my impending travel to Lithuania (and in honor of today’s being Joninės), I would celebrate the celebration by turning her broken record antics into a 21-second ringtone, available in .m4r format for iPhones and .mp3 format for other contemporary phones.

As I wrote in a post on a different site when I uploaded some Obama ringtones, to install on the iPhone:

1. Download the above .m4r, usually by right-clicking or control-clicking and choosing “Save Link As…” or whatever.
2. Open up iTunes and drop the .m4r into the library. It should immediately get copied into the ringtones Library.
3. Sync. Party.

For non-iPhones, follow whatever technique you normally use for installing ringtones.

Tags: ringtones, tūsas, VEKS

There’s a writeup (by me) of the exciting documentary The Linguists over on Donkey Hottie. The movie closes with a bunch of ostensibly Chulym children illustrating a (Chulym) story for a children’s book to be published in Chulym, a language that, however, the children do not speak.

The linguists celebrate this “reconnection” with one’s “history” via this “community project,” but I’m not so sure. I think the value of language is being overstated. So the Lithchatty question becomes:

If I don’t speak a word of Lithuanian, but illustrate a version of (say) “Eglė žalčių karalienė” told to me in English, am I creating Lithuanian cultural output? Can I be a Lithuanian cultural producer without speaking Lithuanian?

Anyway, The Linguists is available to watch online for the time being on babelgum.com, so hurry to watch it if you can.

Tags: identity, language

No, this isn’t going to become a smut page, at least, I don’t think so. But if I’m to judge by search results bringing people to this site, my snippet of Lithuanian erotica from earlier in the month was kind of a (secret) hit.

So for today, I offer this photo that was making the rounds of twitter. I have no idea about its provenance. All I did to it was enhance the colors so that it popped a bit more (as it were).

As you can see, it’s a wonderful testament (as it were) to the long and hard (as it were) work of growing rye and making bread. It’s an ode to the agrarian culture of Lithuania, as well as their love of buns from the oven (as it were).

Sometimes, even, the grain can be a bit testy (as it were) and complain and threaten to grow no more.

But, really, here, it’s all about the last verse, as should be obvious from the oval (as it were) around it, which I did not add.

I guess I’m setting a precedent for any future seemingly historical and dirty things to come my way (as it were). So be it.

Tags: karolis, music, rankdarbiai, twitter

Consulate General of the Republic of Lithuania in Chicago

The “Guide to a Passport” series is coming to a close, I hope. Despite still not receiving (though they say they mailed it out three weeks ago) my grandfather’s death certificate from the State of Michigan, the upcoming travel season means I need to submit my imperfect application for citizenship in the Republic of Lithuania as soon as possible. So I did that today.

But first, I filled out the two separate .doc forms (išsaugojimas just to guarantee the right to citizenship and įgyvendimas to actually pursue the citizenship without renouncing US citizenship), translated the various certificates and stuff I acquired (with a touch of help from a friend), and put together a pile of pages. I also included three passport photos, since I figured I’d fill out the passport request form while I was at the consulate.

And today I took the whole morning off work, even though I ended up only spending about a half hour in the office. Everything was way more casual than I expected (I even got a little dressed up!). I expected sitting down with a vice-consul or something and discussing all the forms in some opulent office with Adamkus beaming down on me. Instead, I was in a rather perfunctory room with two glassed-off workers and a bunch of tiny cubicles for filling out forms. Entre nous, the Brazilian consulate’s digs are nicer, but whatever.

The byla.

The worker, who was also the fellow I corresponded with over email a few months ago, repeatedly said how “šaunu” my application was, which I took immense pride in. He also pronounced my name completely correctly, save considering the “c” in my first name to be an affricate consonant, not a fricative. In so doing, of course, he simply followed Lithuanian rules of orthography, which generally do a decent job with my name, which only adds to my confusion over how many Lithuanians I know completely foul the name up.

My mother’s Canadian birth certificate, which I had sent off to Ottawa for legalization, will have to be relegalized by the Lithuanians for $14. It’s good that I did send it out, actually, since the notarized copy I had made would have gotten me nowhere. The fact that all of the birth certificates I provided give maiden names was also intensely useful; I got to avoid having to provide marriage certificates (which I do not have). They kept everything I gave them except for my passport and driver’s license, which they photocopied.

Importantly, the office was wholy uninterested in my proving flight from Lithuania after 1940. They were far more interested in proof that flight had happened before 1990. I hope that my mom’s birth certificate and the copies of files I got from the International Tracing Service will sufficiently demonstrate that. This lack of interest in post-1940 flight is crucially valuable information for people pursuing dual citizenship in the future!

Finally, I was charged $28 for the passport application also. The friendly Third Secretary, Vytautas, then told me the documents would all be shipped to Lithuania on Monday, where the Migracijos departamentas will take up to a year to decide my case. Vytautas suspected that I should know in about six months. Considering I’ll have to apply for a student visa for France in June, I would like to know before even then, but whatever.

As a postscript, I left the field for “tautybė” blank. I asked Vytautas if this would be a problem. Since I was making my petition based on familial descent, not ethnic ties, he explained, it was ok for me to leave it unanswered. I did a little dance and thanked him.

I worry that the request may be denied for insufficient information, but then that’ll give me more to write about. Now to the numbers:

Costs this post:

• $14 (legalization of Canadian birth certificate)
• $28 (passport fee)
• $20 (approximate lost wages in going downtown to consulate)

Cost to-date of dual citizenship:$166.26

Tags: dual citizenship, Guide to a Passport

Robin Scherbatsky enjoys a Švyturys.

This website, I hope, won’t devolve into a Lithuania-in-the-news spotter, but an amusing little thing happened during last night’s episode of How I Met Your Mother, called “Murtaugh.”

Ted has come up with a “Murtaugh List” of things he think he is too old (at 30) to do any longer. Barney decides to run through everything on the list in 24 hours. After coming home from a rave with a sore back from sleeping on a futon, he has one thing left on the list, drinking a beer bong. Ted reaches into a cardboard box to pull out three “weird, Russian beers” he found in the basement. Robin says she’ll take a “brewski” and then then giggle at the joke of saying “brewski.” At this moment, the camera zooms in on her, and we see the beer she is holding: a Švyturys Ekstra Draught.

Švyturys, of course, is not Russian, but, rather, Lithuanian.

And, yes, this whole post is just an excuse to talk about Cobie Smulders.

Tags: beer, švyturys