Intro

Who is Johnny Harris? Most of you probably know, but a very short rundown: He is a popular Youtuber, praised for his editing skills, but under critique for not doing careful research. Instead, sometimes made stuff up [1] or was doing paid posts without beeing clear about it [2]. He was not only under scrutiny for his historical pieces, there are also numerous errors in his videos concerning other topics [3].

However, he improved himself! Or at least that’s what he claims. In response to PresentPasts critique, he responded: «Was a big wake up call for me […] Ill do some soul searching on how ill address this in the channel». [1] Afterwards, he started citing his sources, and presumably did more research.

In his new-ish video about Switzerland, he sadly proves that this is not the case. The video is full of errors. Nothing complicated; he gets the very basic stuff wrong. I’ll not even go into “complicated” sources to debunk him, because the HLS – the standard lexicon for Swiss history – is more than enough [4]. But the problem goes deeper. While writing this, I noticed that Johnny Harris did not only do bad research for this one video – he might not even know what research is.

Table of Contents

1. Overview: Swiss History and «Mental Defense»

2. Summary of Harris Video

3. Harris Claims

4. Harris Sources

5. Why it all matters

6. Footnotes and Literature

Overview: Swiss History and «Mental Defense»

Before we go into the video and debunk it, let me start with a very short introduction into Swiss history and why it is so complicated.

Switzerland is a rather young country, founded in 1848. However, there was a rather successful military alliance that covered about the same area as todays Switzerland – the Old Confederacy. [5] The most notable success of that military alliance was the destruction of the Burgundian Kingdom (Edit: Burgundy was a kingdom in the early middle ages, but a duchy in the late medivial period). [6]. It existed until 1798, when it was crushed by the French revolutionary armies and was reinstituted at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. [7] Internal struggles lead to a war in 1847, followed by the founding of the modern state Switzerland [8].

But the entire past of Switzerland became new meaning in the 1930s. Hitler was openly threatening to conquer German speaking areas – and that’s most of Switzerland. The Swiss government reacted with “Geistige Landesverteidigung”, a term that could be translated as “Mental Defense” (if anyone has a better translation, let me know). A series of projects was launched to stress the uniqueness of Switzerland, and to distinguish it from Germany. As a part of those projects, a number of Myths were retold and revitalzed. [9] For the most visible example, the “Hohle Gasse”, an alley that plays a role in the play “Wilhelm Tell”, was rebuilt according to the descriptions in said play. [10]

Since “Geistige Landesverteidigung” was continued well into the Cold War, Switzerland has a bit of a history problem. Many myths were propagated for decades and are sometimes still seen as truths, even when factually disproven (I am a history teacher in Switzerland. The amount of wrong stuff my students learn in primary school is horrifying).Now lets see how Johnny Harris navigates this complicated terrain.

Summary of Harris Video [11]

In his video, Harris asks why Switzerland and the US both have an abundance of guns, yet it seems to be a problem only in the US, with Switzerland having no big issues.Visiting shooting ranges and festivals, he goes to show that shooting in Switzerland is highly organized and all about precision. He then goes into Swiss history and describes how a militia was integral to their form of government from medieval times until now.In his conclusion, he says that the difference between the US and Switzerland is not in regulation and laws, but in the culture surrounding guns; the fact that having a gun is a duty in Switzerland and a right in the US.

Harris' Claims

1: The Rütlischwur

Harris claims “a group of people came together and made a promise”; he later on goes to the Rütli and calls it “The place where the founders of switzerland formed their confederacy in 1291”. [12]With those two quotes, he clearly describes the Rütlischwur: A secret oath of allegiance between Schwyz, Uri and Unterwalden in 1291, when people of the three towns came together and formed what would later become the Old Confederacy. There is only one problem: This event is entirely fictional. [13]

There isn’t much debunking to do there. Its just a fairytale, altough one that was pretty influential. It has some semblance of credibility because there is actually a document that might have been written in 1291 proving a military alliance between Schwyz and Uri and an unknown 3rd party; but this was not done in secret and obviously not on the remote Rütli, but in a town. [14]

So Harris describes a fictional event as fact. How could he make such an obvious mistake? Keep that in mind for later.

2: The US Constitution was inspired by Switzerland

Around the middle of the video, Harris describes the influences that shaped the US constitution. He says: “Switzerland was the model; it was the republic that had resisted tyranny”. [15] The swiss constitution is (or rather, was; we rewrote it a couple of times) indeed rather closely linked to the US constitution. There is just one small problem: It was written in 1848; or, if we count the Helvetic Republic, in 1798 (but that one was not at all similar to the US). [16] It was not the US that copied from Switzerland, but Switzerland who copied the US.

Again, there is not much to debunk here. Its just very obviously wrong, unless you claim that John Adams had a time machine in his basement and first checked out the Swiss Constitution of 1848 before writing the American one.

You could argue that certain polities within Switzerland had a constitution before the US wrote theirs, but im not gonna be that generous. Im not gonna take a wrong statment and twist it until it gets right. That would have been Harris (or his editors) job.

3: Switzerland, the Republic?

This leads us to an overall problem with Harris’ video: He sometimes calls Switzerland a confederacy, twice a republic [17], and always calls it Switzerland. But its actually a lot more complicated.

Until 1799 (or even 1848), Switzerland was not a unified state. Therefor, historians don’t call it Switzerland (although primary sources sometimes do) but talk about “The Old Confederacy” (see overview above). Since its not a country, it obviously can't be a republic; rather, it was an alliance of 13 republics. Calling the Old Confederacy “Switzerland” is an understandable simplification; but using confederacy and republic interchangeably is not. Harris never explains this difference, and he uses the terms wrong. Once more, I don’t have too much debunking to do. The facts are very straight: Switzerland is not a unified state until at least 1799.

4: Swiss neutrality

This last claim is the most complicated. In his closing statement, Harris says: “Having armed citizens […] is what kept them neutral and safe” [18]. This is at least an oversimplification. Switzerland wasn’t always safe. It was invaded several times during the Coalition Wars. [19] But even if we exclude this, attributing Swiss neutrality to just their militia is highly debatable. For the most famous example, in WW2 Swiss authorities did a lot to please Hitler and make him not invade. [20]

Swiss neutrality is a very interesting topic and there is a debate worth having how much of it was luck, how much of it was military defence, and how much was collaboration with powerful European states. A unspecific and one sided answer like the one Harris gives is not what this debate needs.

Harris uses bad sources

So there we are. That didn’t take too much time, did it? As I said in the intro, all that’s needed to debunk the video is really an entry level understanding of Swiss history, and the HLS is more than enough to fact check the simple errors he made.

Which brings up the question…how did Harris get it so wrong?

The answer is: He seems to not understand what a good source is. Thankfully, he links the sources he used for this video. [21] So let’s quickly go through them.

To retell the story of Wilhelm Tell, he uses the retelling from the official government site, swissinfo.ch. Nothing wrong with that. But for some reason, he also uses what seems to be a content mill called “Curioushistorian”. [22] Their article is very bad, does not have an author, and cites no sources. He also uses a Smithsonian article, which is full of errors although not as bad as the other one. [23] I won’t go through all of their mistakes, but just mention the most important one: Both articles question the historicity of Wilhelm Tell and imply his existence is debated. But that’s just not the case. I can’t find a single historian who thinks Wilhelm Tell was real. He obviously was not. In fact, here is right-wing extremist and historian Christoph Mörgeli discussing Wilhelm Tell – as a myth. [24]

If even nationalist extremists admit it’s a myth, why would those articles pretend there is a debate going on?

I don’t know, and I don’t care. The more important question is…why does Harris use them as sources instead of just dismissing them as really bad? And there, I can only see one possible answer: He does not know. He has no clue what he is talking about, and just uses some news article that he found on google. This might sound harsh, but I can’t see any other explanation.

Let’s continue with Harris next source. It’s a scientific paper, in fact its the only scientific article directly concerned with Swiss history he uses at all. In a video about swiss history. So it better be good. [25]

Spoiler: Its not.

Its not straight up bad. In fact, its pretty decent. Gassmanns “A Well Regulated Militia” is a 30 page overview of swiss military history full of citations and with an extensive list of literature. While I don’t know Gassmann, from his publications he seems to specialize on European medieval military history, so he certainly has some expertise.

But the problem is…he does not really say what Harris wants him to say. Harris probably found his article because of the “well regulated militia” in the title. But Gassmann never uses this term, apart from the title. It gets worse when we look at what parts of the article Harris uses.

In his source document, Harris has two direct quotes from Gassmann: “In the period, the Swiss Confederacy was the only major polity that was not monarchical, but republican, and at the same time eschewed a standing army in favour of continued reliance on militia throughout.” [21]

And: “Even to contemporary writers, it was remarkable that within a sea of princely states which disarmed their own populace and instead paid standing armies, Switzerland was not only a republic, but also relied exclusively on locally-raised militia.“ [21]

He simplifies this in the video to: “[Switzerland] miraculously showed that you can have a republic, even in Europe, a sea of monarchies and kings.” [26] This is…quite a stretch. There were lots of republics in Europe, the most well known probably Venice. Gassmann does not claim Switzerland was the only republic, if you read his quote carefully; it’s the only republic that relied on a militia. But it gets worse.

Lets look at where in Gassmanns article those quotes are from: Both are from the very first page. The introduction. If you know research papers, the first pages are usually only a short overview, with the real meat coming later on. But it gets worse still: The first quote is from the abstract and therefor does not have any references. The second quote does have a reference, which leads to the “History of the Canton of Zurich”. This is a bit odd, isn’t it? Why would the source for a very broad statement about Europe point to a book about a small part of the Old Confederacy? Well, because the original quote never mentions Switzerland. Here it is: “To writers of the 17th century, the militia system of Zurichs troops and their privately owned arms was remarkable.” [27]

This gets very liberally interpreted by Gassmann as “[…] It was remarkable that within a sea of princely states […], Switzerland was not only a republic, but also relied exclusively on locally-raised militia.“ [28] which then get “rephrased” by Harris as “[Switzerland] miraculously showed that you can have a republic, even in Europe, a sea of monarchies and kings.” [26]

At this point, I need to honestly ask: Why even show your sources, if you are going to pick the part of them that is inaccurate and then even rephrase this part to the point of it no longer being correct?

But his treatment of Gassmanns text gets worse still. See, as I said before, Gassmanns text isn’t bad. I would not call it groundbreaking research, and as I have just shown, he isn’t really that accurate in his first pages, but he actually has some things to say and generally shows knowledge of Swiss history. Just as Harris, Gassmann discusses the influence of Swiss conditions on the 13 Colonies during the time the American constitution was written. He writes:

“Antifederalists argued […] there was no need for a federal constitution, drawing on sometimes heavily romanticised descriptions of Swiss conditions. For the federalists, the reality of the swiss Confederation showed up the inadequacies of a confederacy*”.* [29]

This is interesting because not only does it show that what Americans thought of the Old Confederacy and historical reality differed substantially, it also correctly distinguishes between a confederacy and a federal state. Again, this is not a text I brought up or even knew of. This is Harris Source; it gives an indirect warning on how to read 17th/18th century descriptions of the Old Confederacy (as romanticised instead of factual) and reminds us that the Swiss were not in a unified state, but in a lose confederacy. And yet this two things were fully ignored making the video. I don’t know why, but given that Harris only cited from the very first page and ignored relevant passages later on…I have to assume that he just never actually read his own source.

Why it all matters

Looking into this, I wanted to talk just about Swiss history. But the problem at hand isn’t really about Swiss history specifically. Its about research.In the video, Harris claims that he really did a deep dive there. [30] He did go “deeper than I usually do”. But…what did he actually do? He read a bunch of newspaper articles of various quality, found an article by a military historian which we have to assume he did not read, found another article that is concerned not with swiss history but with the reception of swiss history (which I didn’t go into)…and then told his story.

The sad thing is: I actually think Harris has a point. There are huge differences in gun culture between Switzerland and the US, and those are worth exploring. But going through his sources, it strikes me that he never read anything on Swiss history. He never bothered to get an overview of Swiss history before making a video on it (actually, he has even made videos on Swiss history before [31]). This goes to the point where he can’t even distinguish myth from reality in obvious cases (e.g. Rütlischwur, see above).

He links sources, but does not seem to read them. He links sources, but some of them are just very low quality. He links sources, but they don’t really say what he says they say. This might be a very harsh conclusion, but it really seems that he first decided what story to tell and only after the fact looked for sources that go into the general direction of the argument he had already made.

The lesson here is…just because you cite sources does not mean you did actual research.

Footnotes and Literature

[1] . See top comment for Harris reaction.

[2]

[3]

[4] The HLS is available in German, French and Italian, but saddly not in English.

[5] Würgler, Andreas: Konsolidierung und Erweiterung (1353-1515), in: Eidgenossenschaft, in: HLS.

[6] Sieber Lehmann, Claudius: Burgunderkriege, in: HLS.

[7] Frankhauser, Andreas: Helvetische Republik, in: HLS

[8] Kley, Andreas: Die Gründung des Bundesstaates, in: Bundesstaat, in: HLS.

[9] Jorio, Marco: Geistige Landesverteidigung, in: HLS

[10] Messmer, Kurt: Küssnacht, Hohle Gasse. Blogpost for the National Museum of Switzerland,

[11] Johnny Harris: Why the Swiss Love Their Guns (more than Americans)

[12] Minute 10 and Minute 23.50 of the video.

[13] Stadler, Hans: Rütli, in: HLS

[14] The date 1291 can be found on the document, but given the widespread practice of dating back documents to make them more credible its impossible to say for sure when it was actually written; The third town is names as "the people from the lower valley", and its unclear which town this would be. See Sabolnier, Roger: Gründungszeit ohne Eidgenossen. Baden 2008.

[15] Minute 16.18 of the video.

[16] Frankhauser, Andreas: Verfassung, in: Helvetische Republik, in: HLS

[17] Minute 13.50 and 16.18 of the video

[18] Minute 35.50 of the video

[19] Illi, Martin: Franzoseneinfall, in: HLS

[20] Schwab, Andreas: Die Schweiz im Visier - die Diskussion seit1995, in: Zweiter Weltkrieg, in: HLS

[21]

[22]

[23]

[24]

[25] Gassmann, Jürg: A well regulated militia. Political and Military Organisation in Pre-Napoleonic Switzerland (1550-1799), in: Acta Periodica Duellatorum, 4(1), P. 23–52.

[26] Minute 13.50 of the video

[27] Sigg, Otto: Das 17. Jahrhundert’, in: Geschichte des Kantons Zürich, Band II: Frühe Neuzeit / 16. bis 18. Jahrhundert, various editors, (Zürich: Werd, 1996), 282-363 (here p. 350); Translation by me, original in German.

[28] Gassmann, Jürg: A well regulated militia. Political and Military Organisation in Pre-Napoleonic Switzerland (1550-1799), in: Acta Periodica Duellatorum, 4(1), P. 23

[29] see above, p. 43; emphasis by me.

[30] Minute 2.00 of the video.

[31] and

Literature:

Kreis, Georg [editor]: Geschichte der Schweiz. Basel 2014.

Maissen, Thomas: Geschichte der Schweiz. Baden 2010.

Sablonier, Roger: Gründungszeit ohne Eidgenossen. Baden 2008.

Context

"Double genocide theory" states that Eastern Europe had two equal and opposite genocides in the 1930s and 1940s: the Holocaust on the one hand, and Soviet repression on the other hand. This theory has become a bitterly divisive topic in much of Eastern Europe.

Before I go any further: Soviet crimes did happen. The Soviet invasion of the Baltic states was illegal and unprovoked, and the Soviets' rule of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia was brutal. All of these things are true, horrible, and should be commemorated.

But "Double Genocide" goes beyond historical facts, by equating Stalin's misrule injustice and cruelty with Hitler's genocide. In function, it's a way for countries with histories of Holocaust collaboration to deflect guilt. Lithuania-based scholar Dovid Katz describes "double genocide" :

a tool of discourse, sophistry, casuistry, to talk the Holocaust out of history without denying a single death.

One of the consequences of this theory is that it helps states rebrand local Holocaust perpetrators as "freedom fighters."

This leads us to today's story: Lithuania's Jonas Noreika, aka Generolas Vėtra – "General Storm".

The Story of Jonas Noreika

was an anti-Soviet militant from the Lithuanian Activist Front (LAF). He posthumously holds the Cross of Vytis, First Degree, Lithuania's highest civil decoration. He was briefly imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp in 1943. When World War II ended and Lithuania was reannexed by the USSR, Noreika became involved in the anti-Soviet resistance movement. The Soviets captured him and executed him for treason in 1947.

Today, he's honored chiefly for his resistance against the Soviets, but it's also claimed that he resisted the Nazis. There are streets and a high school bearing his name. There was, until recently, a plaque commemorating him in downtown Vilnius. The state-funded Genocide and Resistance Research Center of Lithuania (LGGRTC) that, besides fighting the Soviets, Noreika also "actively contributed to the rescue of Šiauliai Jews." (Šiauliai County was the district that the Nazis made Noreika governor of).

This is a lie. Noreika was an outspoken anti-Semite before the war, and an active and enthusiastic participant in the Holocaust. He forced Jews into ghettos, stole their property, subjected them to torture, slavery and starvation, and finally had them shot by the thousands. The is Noreika's most infamous crime, but not his only one.

There were many people like Noreika in Lithuania (and all of Eastern Europe) during WWII. The highest estimate of direct Holocaust participants in Lithuania is .

But what makes Noreika's story notable is that his own granddaughter, investigative journalist (née Silvia Kučėnaitė), is leading a campaign to expose her grandfather's crimes. She has collected , that connect him to the murder of Lithuanian Jews.

Why Defend Noreika?

So, why would anyone defend Noreika, a documented Holocaust perpetrator? This is rooted the Baltic states' resentment over their colonization by the Soviets, and the importance of the post-WWII insurgency, which was waged until 1956, in the Lithuanian, Latvian, and Estonian national identities.

One of the Soviet Union's main charges against the Baltic guerillas--also called --was that they were entirely a Nazi remnant. Given the scale and extent of Baltic collaboration with Nazi Germany, this charge is serious, and there was certainly an overlap between former collaborators and the Forest Brothers.

Reality, of course, is a bit more complicated. The ugly truth is that many of the postwar independence activists undoubtedly participated in the Holocaust: this includes Noreika, , and . This fact taints the movement's legacy.

But other pro-independence activists, like Domas Jasaitis and his wife Sofija Lukauskaitė are recognized by reputable organizations . And given the sheer size of the anti-Soviet movement, and the fact that many guerillas of the early 50s were children in 1941, it's false to say that independence movement was a wholesale rebranding of former Nazis.

Unfortunately though, the Baltic states have responded to Soviet charges with a gross and dishonest over-correction: the Lithuanian government has whitewashed the entire movement, and categorically denies that any of its prominent leaders participated in the Holocaust. Hence the glorification of Noreika.

What Noreika's Defenders Say

There are a few recurrent red herrings that Noreika's apologists use.

I'll start with the worst alibi: the LGGRTC admitted that Noreika established Jewish ghettos, but claimed that he put Jews in ghettos for their own protection. . They say this on page 3 of the report. I dunno if it's even worth rebutting that, but ... their "evidence" that the ghettos were Noreika's way of protecting Jews is this:

• That ghettos in Lithuania had Jewish "councils" (so did the ghettos in Poland)

• That a senior SS officer told the Jews that the only way he could protect them from pogroms was if they moved into ghettos (pogroms committed by whom? And we're trusting an SS officer?)

• That Lithuanian Jews complied with orders to move into ghettos (as if they had a choice).

A less outrageous strategy is to split hairs over what Noreika's exact position in the occupation government was. For example, the LGGRTC (page 4), where Plungė is located. But whether Noreika had official authority in Telšiai doesn't disprove anything. Lithuania is a small country. People can travel.

Another strategy is to quibble over dates. For example: the Plungė massacre took place July 13-15, 1941. Noreika, the LGGRTC (page 4), wasn't appointed governor of Šiauliai until early August. The implication is that Noreika couldn't have orchestrated the massacre because he lacked nominal authority. This too is ridiculous. Militias like the one that Noreika led could, and did, participate in the Holocaust without the Nazis' permission.

There's also the matter of Noreika's imprisonment by the Nazis, one of his defenders' go-to "proofs" of his innocence. It's true that (page 4). But he wasn't imprisoned for helping Jews. He was imprisoned for resisting German attempts to organize Lithuanian militiamen into a formal SS legion. This was a power struggle between himself and the Germans. There's no evidence of any principled opposition to Nazism, other than not wanting to be directly subordinate to Germany.

Then there's the "innocence by association" argument. For example, in 1943, when Noreika had turned against the Germans, he seems to have interacted with some Lithuanian anti-Nazi activists who did save Jews, like . Jasaitis is quoted speaking favorably of his work with Noreika, and saying that they worked well together. But when Noreika worked with Jasaitis, it wasn't to protect Jews. It was to prevent the Germans from mobilizing Lithuanian conscripts. Even if Noreika knew about Jasaitis's actions to protect Jews, there's no evidence that Noreika was involved in it, approved of it, or would've tolerated it if he'd discovered it in 1941.

Another ploy is to discredit the evidence against Noreika by pointing out that much of it came from KGB archives. (in Lithuanian). The forgery argument has been used by the Lithuanian right many times to dismiss evidence that Lithuanian nationalists participated in the massacres of 1941 as Soviet lies. But if the KGB had wanted to slander Noreika as a mass murderer, they wouldn't have used internal documents to do it. These were classified records, not propaganda leaflets.

And every inconsistency in the KGB's archives can be explained by bad bookkeeping, conflicting reports, typos, and unintentional misunderstandings. Every government archive has these problems. As historian Saulius Sužiedėlis about the primary documents on the Holocaust in Lithuania:

Indeed, there are inconsistencies and gaps in the historical record. Perhaps, some of these are intentional since the Soviet authorities were keenly interested in discrediting "bourgeois nationalism" and engaged in considerable disinformation, especially during the 1970s and eighties. But there is no evidence that any of the significant documents on which recent studies are based have in any way been altered or forged.

And we don't have to rely on KGB archives to know what kind of man Noreika was. We have his own writings.

The Evidence against Noreika

I mentioned Noreika's granddaughter, Silvia Foti, earlier. Foti has extensively researched her grandfather's life using primary sources, including sources that her own mother had copies of. These include two books that he wrote in the 1930s:

• (1933) - Noreika calls on Lithuanians to boycott all Jewish-owned businesses.

• (1939) - Noreika praises the leadership of Hitler and Mussolini, and advocates for Lithuania to follow a similar path.

These don't prove on their own that Noreika participated in the Holocaust, but they tell you where his sympathies lay. And they can't have been Soviet forgeries. Foti's mother owned original copies; Foti's grandmother, Noreika's wife, brought them with her when she fled to Chicago.

But the most damning evidence that Foti has is while serving as governor of Šiauliai. These orders include:

• Forcing Jews into the Šiauliai ghetto (only a tiny handful, out of more than 2,000, survived).

• Ordering all Jewish property to be confiscated.

• Ordering Jews to be put to work as slaves, 4eg chopping firewood.

Foti also has found a memo that was sent to Noreika from one of his subordinates, which . This is arguably her strongest piece of evidence, because it is a pre-Soviet document that directly connects Noreika to the Holocaust.

So, to sum it up: we have a man who was an avowed anti-Semite and fascist before World War II. He was given authority when the Nazis occupied Lithuania. He enforced the Nazis' orders against the Jews. He established a ghetto whose inhabitants were almost totally exterminated. He was a thief and a slave-driver. He did this in a country where 95% of its prewar Jewish population was murdered, the highest rate in Europe. This isn't the story of a secret Holocaust rescuer; it's the story of a mass murderer.

Conclusion

The story of Noreika is a reminder that people want national heroes, they want those heroes to be spotless, and sometimes they'll ignore all facts to get it this way. This is true everywhere: Latin America with Bolivar, Turkey with Ataturk, the USA with the Founding Fathers. But history is messy, and it's possible for someone to serve both a good cause (fighting the illegal occupation of your country) and a despicable one (the Holocaust).

If I can editorialize: what Noreika is accused of is so grotesque, and the evidence against him is so strong, that rehabilitating him is impossible. There's no excuse for his crimes.

And the Lithuania that Noreika and his allies wanted to build wouldn't have been free. We have Noreika's own words as proof. His ideal Lithuania would've been a totalitarian state with minorities exterminated and dissent illegal. It would've been a Nazi client state at best, or outright annexed at worst. It would've been nothing like the democratic Lithuania that exists today. It's tragic that Lithuania had to wait 45 years for its freedom, but it's fortunate that Noreika's Lithuania never came into existence.

And I'll give credit where credit is due: Lithuania is gradually coming to terms with its painful past. The process is slow, and there have been setbacks, but progress is being made:

• The Lithuanian government itself is divided over the adulation of Noreika and his ilk; a state-appointed commission .

• The plaque honoring Noreika is the subject of a bitter fight; it was , illegally restored by local right-wing activists, and ; we'll see what happens in the coming months. But the fact that this fight is happening at all is proof that a lot of Lithuanians want their government to do the right thing.

• The Lithuanian Parliament Professor Jakubauskas from the LGGRTC in 2021 over his defense of Noreika (Jakubauskas claimed that he was the victim of a conspiracy led by the Israeli ambassador ... as I said, there's still progress to be made).

• Diplomatic pressure is making it harder for the Lithuanian government to evade this issue. . With Lithuania seeking closer ties with the US and NATO, this issue won't go away.

What's sad is that Lithuania has plenty of national heroes who deserve praise. According to Yad Vashem, Lithuania has the of any country in Europe. There were people like Domas Jasaitis who truly resisted the Holocaust while also supporting an independent Lithuania. And, of course, there were countless ordinary people who nonviolently rose up against Soviet rule in the late 80s and early 90s.

An important fact about history is that it's possible for two things to be bad. The Soviets were wrong for invading Lithuania in 1940, wrong for arbitrarily imprisoning, deporting, and executing Lithuanian citizens, and wrong for denying it its independence after World War II. But the redirection of public fury against Lithuanian Jews--a well-documented historical fact--was shameful. As a democracy, Lithuania is responsible for confronting its past, instead of using Soviet oppression as an excuse to pretend that men like Noreika were heroes.

EDIT: Fixed links to the LGGRTC's publications.

Hello! I'm a history enthusiast who's always wanted to undertake the daunting task of researching and understanding Chinese history.

In terms of wider history, I'm most familiar with the Greco Roman world of antiquity and in particular the Roman state from 753 BC to 1453 AD. I've often seen and heard China be discussed as something of an East Asian mirror to Rome in terms of longevity and influence in its respective geographic region.

However, I think there's also interesting cultural similarities to Iran/Persia in terms of the Chinese state being able to incorporate nomadic groups (e.g. Mongols and Manchu's) into their society and bureaucracy via Sinicization.

Best I properly know of Chinese history is the more modern stuff from Sun Yat Sen to the victory of Mao Zedong in the civil war, as well as the social reforms of Deng Xiaoping. Oh, and the decline of the Qing through various 'issues' in the 1800's (cough cough the Taiping Rebellion)

So what I'm wondering is: is there a specific, popular period of Chinese history you would recommend jumping into to get really interested/invested?

Like, the Late Roman Republic with Caesar is a great, dramatic and intriguing point to get into with Roman history. And the Komnenoi era does the same for Byzantine history. So what would you recommend for Chinese history pre-1900?

Edit: Thank you so much for the wonderful responses! I have decided to start with the Tang (from the succession of Raising) and work my way backwards and forwards from there. This is a beginning of a really exciting rabbit hole of history for me, and I'm sure I shall return to this subreddit with more questions the deeper I delve! Once again, my sincerest thanks!

(PLEASE NOTE: This post is not a statement on current elections, in the US or the rest of the world. Just a rant about the superficial way people on Twitter talk about this specific event.)

It's election year in the United States and as usual the debates about "voting for the lesser evil" start flaring up again. And, of course, what best way to argue your point about a contemporary event than by decontextualizing an apparently similar historical event? I am, of course, talking about the 1932 presidential election in Germany, which saw among its candidates:

• Paul von Hindeburg (around 53% of the votes)

• Adolf Hitler (around 37%)

• Ernst Thalmann, of the KPD (around 10%)

This during the second, and decisive, round of votes. The first round also included Theodor Duesterberg, one of the leaders of the veterans' association Der Stalhelm, who received 6,8% of the votes and decided to retire; the Stalhelm decided to support Hitler in the second round, who gained around 2 million votes, while Hindenburg gained around 700.000. Hindenburg was still able to come on top of the second round, in part also thanks to the support of the center-left SPD, the German socialdemocratic party.

Now if you frequent that hellsite commonly know as Twitter, you'll also know that discourse about this election is relatively frequent. Here's for example , from a user arguing that if it comes to Hindenburg vs Hitler, you definitely should vote Hindenburg. As you can imagine, many people disagreed with the sentiment (see for example ) arguing that, well, it was Hindenburg who nominated Hitler chancellor, so why would you vote for him if you're anti-Hitler.

This second group of people more often than not comes from an anti-liberal (in the US political sense) position, and want to argue that what the SPD did - choosing to vote for the lesser evil - was a mistake. But here's the thing: these people are speaking from hindsight. They already know that Hindenburg would, a few months later, nominate Hitler as chancellor. However, in early 1932, it was actually not that crazy to assume that Hindenburg was the safest bet to block that from happening. And not because he was a progressive man, far from it: he was a staunch conservative and an anti-democratic, actively seeking to restore monarchy. So, if you're a socialist in 1932, he's certainly not one of your idols. But he also despised Hitler. He did not want to make him the chancellor. Yes, of course I know he did later, but when Bruning's time as chancellor was over, in May 1932, he nominated von Papen (from the Zentrum party), and in November 1932, despite Hitler being open to negotiations with other parties as long as he was chancellor, Hindenburg persisted in his denial and nominated von Schleicher instead.

But why, instead of voting for the guy who - even before making Hitler the chancellor - wasn't exactly an herald of left-wing values, didn't the SPD push to vote for Thalmann? Surely if he became president it would have been better right? Well, here's the thing: this was one of the most doomed elections in the history of voting. None of the candidates were big fans of democracy; this also includes Thalmann, who was a stalinist and really believed in the whole dictatorship of the proletariat thing. Not only that, but at the time communists all over Europe, and especially in Germany, considered socialist / socialdemocratic parties basically the same as the Nazis. So, you can see why the SPD and its base wasn't exactly the biggest fan of Thalmann, and sure you might argue that the German communists were justified in their belief, given how the SPD-led government approved the brutal repression of the spartacist uprising, in 1919, which famously led to the deaths of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.

But. Even if the SPD in 1932 accepted to fully support Thalmann in his presidential bid, their voter base was around 20% of the electorate. So even if we assume that historically no SPD voters went for Thalmann anyway, and assume that in this made up scenario they all vote for Thalmann, that only makes around 30% of the votes. Hitler got 37%, and at the second round of voting in the presidential election, whoever gets the relative majority of the votes wins.

But let's go even deeper in our assumption and imagine that somehow Thalmann magically manages to drum up enought support to be able to get enough votes to beat both Hitler and Hindenburg and become the new president of Germany. We're in the realm of speculation rather than history here, but: while the SPD and the KPD combined still had decent popular support, the conservative elites in Germany at the time were very strong, especially in the army. It's very difficult to believe that his rise to the seat of president would have been smooth, or even that it would have happened at all even if he won the vote (remember that in late-Weimar years, democracy wasn't particularly popular).

So was there nothing that could be done to stop Hitler? Well, no. Plenty of things could have gone differently in the 14 years before this election. But this specific moment in history? Absolutely no good endings to be found here unless you willingly ignore most of the context around it.

tl; dr: stop studying history on Twitter and go read some of the millions of pages that have been written about Hitler's rise to power by reputable historians.

Sources: Ian Kershaw, To Hell and Back

Gustavo Corni, Weimar. La Germania dal 1918 al 1933 (no English translation, but Corni is an Italian historian who specializes in the history of contemporary Germany and has written plenty of books about it)