[This is a hastily assembled translation of the article, “Tolerantiški lietuviai — grėsmė senajai išeivijai” by Mykolas Gudelis, published in Vakarai. I’m providing the translation here for those (both who consider themselves Lithuanian and not) who care about these sorts of issues. The translation is reprinted here with permission from Vakarai.

Personally, anyone who read my letter in Lietuvos rytas (English) about this issue can see that I have much in common with Gudelis’s viewpoint—a less charitable soul would even whine that he seems not to have read my piece. He loses the plot a bit with his invocation of a slippery slope, which furthermore risks an equivalence of anti-Semitism with other forms of intolerance. It is definitely not as simple as he makes it seem. Furthermore, he runs into his own set of dichotomies between old and new, which reek of their own prejudice.

Still, it is important that this issue of intolerance writ large remain in the public forefront when it comes to affairs of the Lithuanian diaspora. 

I may change the translation around in parts as corrections are given to me. Some tricky or key words I've reproduced with their Lithuanian (original) counterparts in brackets.

--m] 

In the seventeen years of Lithuanian independence, more than half a million Lithuanians have left their homeland. As such, an existential question arises both among Lithuanians in Lithuania and Lithuanians abroad: is the Lithuanian nation [tauta] vanishing? Clearly, there’s no single answer to this question, and, upon further investigation, it seems to me that there is nothing to worry about: Lithuanians are surely not becoming and will not become extinct.

The Lithuanian nation has a unique property, which protects it from globalization, cosmopolitanism, internationalism, the migrant workforce, and so on. It’s tricky to name this defense mechanism. I wouldn’t want to call it “hatred” [neapykanta], but perhaps “dislike” [nemėgimas] works better. This word, “dislike,” is based on the Lithuanian verb “to like.” It’s simply the negative form. We often say, “well, it’s not that I can’t stand it. I just don’t like it.” But what is the difference between hating and disliking? Where do we draw the line, past which disliking becomes hating? Surely disliking and hating are two different things, but how do the two concepts really differ? Leaving aside the subtleties of the Lithuanian language as well as the ontological explorations, I think that everyone has a different answer to these questions.

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