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Įrašė Moacir P. de Sá Pereira
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2008.07.11 12.34 |
 Well, it’s a good thing I decided to wait until after Šokių šventė to weigh in on the Seimas’s passing a nearly certainly unconstitutional dual citizenship law, since President Valdas Adamkus just vetoed it. About the veto I do not have much to say, since the article I read is only filled with Regina Narušienės over the top histrionics and descent into self-parody. Having her complain about people who are beholden to a “pasenusis mentalitetas” absolutely made my day.
But still, some value exists in looking at what the new law proposed. It basically took to heart the Constitutional Court’s rulings about the unconstitutionality of citizenship based on ethnic criteria by not granting dual citizenship to “ethnic” Lithuanians (who may still be eligible to get Lithuanian citizenship after forfeiting their other citizenship). And that was a good step. The quicker the precedent forms that divorces the ethnic nation from the republican state, the better.
But the new law had a sort of twist that has a very good justification with a nefarious politics behind it. The first time I heard about the Constitutional Court’s decision about stopping dual citizenship, someone suggested to me that it was somehow based on the fact that Lithuanians were panicked about the “lines around the block in NYC” of people petitioning for Lithuanian passports. In other words, they feared a massive return of an exiled Jewish community to the Lithuanian public (and political) sphere.
So whether or not it is true that there exists a paranoia about a Jewish population with political power, the new law limited dual citizenship only to people (and their descendants) who could prove that they fled Lithuania after the Soviets invaded in 1940, as opposed to earlier, when, of course, masses of Jews and others were fleeing Central Europe as Hitler’s influence grew larger in nations like Lithuania (for more, read Eidintas).
On the one hand, it makes sense to give dual citizenship to those who fled their nation and had their citizenship stripped by a USSR that claimed that their nation no longer existed (and, thus, that the automatic USSR citizenship all Lithuanian citizens received was invalid). I may not have existed had my grandparents not fled, but certainly my mother would have reproduced, and those children would have been Lithuanian citizens, had it not been for WWII.
On the other hand, the Soviet invasion begs to be understood in historical context, which this post-1940 distinction completely ignores. Contexts like how Lithuania colluded with the USSR to ensure its autonomy against Poland. Contexts like how Vilnius’s being the capital of Lithuania is in large part the result of the secret protocols in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Contexts like these demonstrate that WWII did not begin (in Lithuania) with the marching of the Soviets in 1940, but, rather, began far earlier, with a political climate that threatened the continued autonomy of the Lithuanian Republic as it felt pressure from two different spheres of influence (German and Soviet). Can you really blame a Jewish family in Kaunas for wanting to get the hell out of the increasingly noxious environment in 1938? Yet that family would have been ineligible for dual citizenship.
So by drawing the political line over dual citizenship, the Seimas still managed to underhandedly effect an ethnic agenda. As a result, I am glad to see that Adamkus chose to veto the law. Plus, it keeps the conflict within the realm of the legislative for a while longer. The more finesse this gets at the legislative, the better, since it will hopefully only grow in constitutionality (though I doubt it). |
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Įrašė Moacir P. de Sá Pereira
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2008.06.29 21.54 |
Well, who but a Nazi would deny that Karl Marx was a German because he was a Jew?—Mr. Wilson, The Stranger
.jpg "Image") I leave for Šokių šventė on Wednesday, making this post the likely last peep from me before then. I start with a quote from the interesting but not spectacular Nazi hunter movie, The Stranger, a 1946 production starring both Orson Welles and Edward G. Robinson. Robinson plays Wilson, a G-Man who is tasked with finding the whereabouts of Franz Kindler, the mastermind behind the Final Solution, who disappeared without any trace of his identity (other than knowledge of what his all-consuming hobby was and that one other Nazi knew who he was, his underling).
Welles plays Kindler, who has refashioned himself as a history teacher at a private school in Connecticut. Charles Rankin he's now called, and he marries at the start of the movie a daughter of a Supreme Court justice. Wilson gets in with the family, and then he gets invited to a dinner with them all.
Here Rankin explains that democracy is not in the German blood. Lines like “All men are created equal” and “liberté, égalité, fraternité” have no German counterpart. Rankin’s young brother in law then offers Marx as a counterexample. Rankin immediately retorts that Marx was no German; he was a Jew. This quick retort is the only thing that keeps Wilson on Rankin’s tail as a potential Kindler.
And I think the line is a good lead into this pre-Šokių šventė post. It was not even half a year ago that Darius Udrys turned JAVLB upside down by suggesting that a Litvak dance group perform a Litvak dance at šventė. Litvaks, of course, have been vital contributors to Lithuanian culture for over 500 years, yet for the organizers of šventė, including them would have threatened the “Lithuanianness” of the event.
The complainers built up shields against claims of anti-Semitism by offering the farcical argument that allowing Litvak dances would then mean that they should allow dances from remote cultures such as those on Zanzibar. In other words, the Litvak is so wholly Other to the Lithuanian, that her cultural contribution is equivalent to that of an African villager a half a world away.
The Litvak, by being a Jew, has no right to a claim on Lithuanian culture (though, of course, Catholics, Lutherans, atheists, etc., do, right?). The Litvak is not Lithuanian, the thinking goes. She is a Litvak, and that is it. Closed are the doors to Šokių šventė to these anomalies. They are not Lithuanians, so they should not have opportunities to perform their cultural dances in our cultural fair. Let them learn our dances and dance them, if they like. But their culture is out of bounds.
And, well, now we know how Ashkenazi Emanuel Goldenberg reacts to that: Only a Nazi would deny that a Litvak is a Lithuanian because she is a Jew. |
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Paskutinį kartą atnaujinta ( 2008.06.30 10.50 )
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Įrašė Moacir P. de Sá Pereira
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2008.06.18 14.31 |
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The beforementioned response from PLB to the question of citizenship remains a complete mystery to me. I eagerly want to play a game of “find the subtext” in pulling apart the various moves in Narušienė’s statement, but the subtext that emerges is so grotesque and offensive, that I do it only hoping, sincerely, that I am missing something. Before addressing her statement, I reread the LRKT decision regarding the unconstitutionality of the law on citizenship. It is a brilliant document with an approach to the constitutional term “tauta” that is, well, devastating to the racist rhetoric mobilized by the ardent nationalist diaspora community. There exists also an oddly framed English translation of the decision, but in some places it is absolutely wrong (“nepertraukiamas” does not mean “discontinued”; it sort of means the opposite), and it often feels like weird English. Nevertheless, language knowledge is no excuse to avoid reading the decision.
In any case, Narušienė’s statement ends with five bullet points, which I will take up below. |
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Paskutinį kartą atnaujinta ( 2008.06.18 14.44 )
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Skaityti toliau...
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Įrašė Moacir P. de Sá Pereira
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2008.06.18 09.43 |
 As I mentioned in the last post, a more detailed interview with me (and a neat photo!) appeared in lietuviams.com on Monday. It was since picked up by delfi and alfa, and my comment about envisioning Vilnius as a Disney World Fantasyland even ended up being the “dienos citata” at delfi. So that’s that.
So now I'm on the record in the Lithuanian media twice as saying that I think it’s foolish for PLB and the Seimas to play games with trying to pass (probably unconstitutional) resolutions regarding dual citizenship instead of saving all their political capital for an actual amendment to the constitution. Both interviews were done before I'd seen the PLB response to the Socialliberalų petition to amend the constitution, so my silence is one of simply timing. I haven’t looked over the response in enough detail to put together a response, but that has largely been since my first, quick response resulted in great pain as my jaw somehow hit the floor. |
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