In 2020, Lithuania did something extraordinary.
It declared historical truth a national security risk.

That is not rhetoric. It is doctrine.

Lithuania’s National Threat Assessment 2020, issued jointly by its intelligence and military security services, formally placed challenges to the state’s historical narrative—particularly those affecting courts, institutions, and national reputation—inside the threat domain. Not espionage. Not terrorism. Not invasion. Verification.

The test was simple: does the truth destabilize the nation?
If yes, it was treated as a threat.

By the time that assessment was issued, my work was already the central source of that destabilization. It consisted of sustained litigation in Lithuanian courts; publication of primary documents drawn from Lithuania’s own archives; formal correspondence with ministries, prosecutors, courts, and state-funded memory institutions; and international exposure of the distance between Lithuania’s official narrative and the documentary record. I identified perpetrators, traced administrative chains, documented property theft, and demonstrated how post-Soviet institutions preserved falsehood through procedure rather than rebuttal.

The report does not name me. It does not need to. The activities it defines as hostile—archival disclosure, legal challenge, and reputational impact on state institutions—describe my work precisely, and no other comparable body of activity existed at the time. This doctrine was not anticipatory. It was reactive.

That is not conjecture. It is chronology.

Truth as the Enemy

In democratic systems, archives, courts, and scholarship stabilize legitimacy by correcting falsehood. Lithuania reversed that logic. Truth was no longer stabilizing; it was destabilizing. Verification became suspect not because it was wrong, but because it worked.

This was not accidental. It was deliberate.

Across the Lithuanian state, institutions aligned.

The presidency curated commemoration and controlled visibility. When I—a Lithuanian citizen engaged in lawful historical inquiry—challenged the record publicly, the President blocked me from his Facebook page. The act was petty in form but revealing in substance. Narrative control extended even to personal visibility. Engagement was replaced with exclusion.

Successive governments maintained the same posture. No administration corrected course. Continuity establishes intent.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs managed the external story. Abroad, Lithuania presented itself as a victim state and moral peer. Holocaust acknowledgment was abstracted and depersonalized, while Lithuanian agency was erased. Crucially, the state has already declared that future commemoration will center on Lithuania as a “rescuer nation.” This is not interpretive drift; it is announced policy. A rescue rate of approximately 0.04%—a statistical outlier—has been elevated into the dominant moral narrative and promoted as the centerpiece of remembrance going forward. That 0.04% is framed as representative, while the remaining 99.96% of the historical record—mass participation, administrative execution, and near-total annihilation—is neutralized, relativized, or pushed aside. A marginal exception has been institutionalized as the story, while the overwhelming reality is pushed to the margins. This is not balance. It is inversion by design.

State-funded memory institutions standardized language, diffused responsibility, and reframed exposure as destabilization.

At the same time that Lithuania securitized historical truth, it advanced an antisemitism resolution that, on its face, appears committed to combating prejudice yet functions, in practice, as a vehicle for opportunistic Holocaust revisionism. The state’s own planning documents and public statements explicitly elevate the narrative of rescuers—a tiny fraction of the historical record—into the centerpiece of commemoration, while displacing the overwhelming reality of Lithuanian complicity and participation. This orchestrated elevation of exceptional cases into the dominant public story has been candidly critiqued as an Orwellian fraud: the elision of massive historical violence under the guise of moral affirmation. The public should be alerted that these events, resolutions, and commemorative spectacles are intended not to educate, but to deceive.

The courts provided insulation. My cases were not rejected on the merits; they were deflected on standing, jurisdiction, and technical grounds. Procedure replaced judgment. Review disappeared without denial.

The security establishment completed the structure by securitizing history itself. Archives became vulnerabilities. Litigation became hostile activity. Truth became an attack surface.

Each institution played its role. None contradicted the system.

That is not drift. That is statecraft.

Criminalization Without Law

The intimidation was explicit.

Lithuanian government websites publicly warned me of criminal and constitutional charges for historical inquiry and litigation. No statute was cited. No offense was named. No proceedings were initiated—because none were possible.

There is no Lithuanian law criminalizing archival publication, court filings, or challenges to state honors. There is no constitutional provision under which historical verification constitutes a crime.

The threats were therefore not law enforcement. They were intimidation.

They were never withdrawn. No apology was issued. The pages remain public. Their purpose is obvious: to warn others that telling the truth carries personal risk even when no charge can ever be brought.

This is what happens when a state declares truth a security threat. Enforcement follows.

The campaign escalated further when the then defense minister publicly labeled me an enemy of the state. That is not the language of historical disagreement. It is the language of internal enemies—language familiar from totalitarian systems, not from democratic societies where citizens seeking truth are protected, not branded.

Until that moment, I had never considered myself a threat to anyone. I was looking for the truth about my own family. That label changed my understanding—not of myself, but of the state. By calling me an enemy of the state, the defense minister revealed my significance to Lithuania in a way I had not previously recognized. States do not reserve that phrase for inconsequential people. They use it when someone has reached the nerve center of legitimacy itself.

It was, unexpectedly, the proudest moment of my life.

My Answer to the “Russian Agent” Smear

At that point, the accusation becomes almost comical.

I do not work with Russia. I do not speak for Russia. I do not advance Russian interests. I do not think I even know a single Russian. I live in Los Angeles, a city with hundreds of thousands of Russian and Soviet immigrants, and I do not know one of them. My work is conducted openly, under my own name, through Western courts, Western archives, and Western publications.

The documents I publish are Lithuanian documents. The archives are Lithuanian archives. The litigation is Lithuanian litigation. The conclusions arise from the Lithuanian record itself.

Calling me a Russian agent is not an argument. It is an admission that the state has nothing left but slander.

Truth Versus Tanks

Putin has shown the world what real security threats look like: tanks, missiles, invasion, mass murder. Ukraine is the proof.

Yet Lithuania’s doctrine reveals something astonishing: it fears documentation more than armor.

Truth cannot invade territory. It cannot fire artillery. Its power lies elsewhere—in its ability to invalidate legitimacy. By publicly declaring historical exposure a vulnerability, Lithuania did not protect itself. It advertised where pressure works.

When I began this work, I did not understand that. I was not trying to destabilize a state. I was trying to learn the truth about my own family. It was Lithuania’s hyperbolic reaction—the intimidation, the fraud, the securitization of archives—that taught me something deeper: the truth terrified them far more than I ever realized.

A Strategic Gift to Moscow

Lithuania’s conduct plays directly into the hands of Russian disinformation strategy—not because Russia needs to fabricate anything, but because Lithuania supplies the contradiction for free.

Modern propaganda, misinformation, and disinformation thrive on exposing hypocrisy, double standards, and selective morality inside Western alliances. When a NATO and EU member state classifies archival truth as a security threat, weaponizes intimidation against a Jewish researcher, and defends historical falsehood as policy, it weakens the West’s ability to credibly distinguish truth from propaganda.

This is why Lithuania has been described—by Western analysts—as a strategic liability to the West. It corrodes U.S. and NATO credibility at precisely the point where moral authority matters most. NATO exists to deter invasion, not to subsidize narrative protection. The United States cannot credibly condemn disinformation abroad while underwriting institutional misinformation at home.

Lithuania did not have this weapon forced upon it.
It forged it itself—and handed it over.

How Fear Backfires

If the Lithuanian state decided I was dangerous enough to brand an enemy of the state, to threaten me with criminal and constitutional charges without law, and to fold my work into a national-security assessment—before my book existed—that tells you everything you need to know about the power of evidence.

I am one Jewish researcher, living in Los Angeles, working with documents from Lithuania’s own archives. Against me stood a NATO and EU member state: its ministers, its courts, its security doctrine, and its intimidation apparatus.

They feared me more than Putin.

That inversion is not a statement about my power. It is a confession about the power of truth.

What Comes Next — and the Streisand Effect

My book, Recognition Without Reckoning, assembles this record and will be published and released into the public domain: the crimes, the beneficiaries, the institutional laundering, the procedural insulation, and the moment when Lithuania crossed the line and declared truth itself the enemy.

By attempting to suppress the truth—by intimidating me, smearing me, and securitizing history—the Lithuanian state has ensured the opposite of what it intended. It has guaranteed visibility. It has guaranteed scrutiny. It has triggered the Streisand Effect. Suppression has magnified the record. Intimidation has amplified it. Their panic has become the marketing.

For that, I thank them.

If I was treated this way before the record was complete, how exactly does the Lithuanian state intend to respond once it is complete, published, and irreversible? If it has already threatened me at the state level without law, do I now need to fear for my personal safety?

Or will Lithuania finally confront the reality its own actions have already confirmed: that suppressing the truth only multiplies it, and that fear is the clearest measure of how powerful that truth has become.

They destroyed my family once.
They will not destroy the record.

And if their fear is the metric, then the record has already done its work.

Footnotes

State Security Department of the Republic of Lithuania & Second Department of Operational Services, National Threat Assessment 2020 (archived PDF):
https://static-cdn.toi-media.com/blogs/uploads/2026/02/2020-Gresmes-LT-National-Threat-Assessment.pdf
“The Guardian of the Erased,” Times of Israel Blogs — documentation of unretracted threats and intimidation:
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/the-guardian-of-the-erased/
“Criminal Trash and Enemy of the State,” Times of Israel Blogs — public vilification as enforcement:
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/criminal-trash-and-enemy-of-the-state/
“Lithuania: A Strategic Liability to the West,” Times of Israel Blogs:
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/lithuania-a-strategic-liability-to-the-west/
“Lithuania’s antisemitism resolution is Orwellian fraud,” Times of Israel Blogs:
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/lithuanias-antisemitism-resolution-is-orwellian-fraud/