Good, As For a Lithuanian

Germán Hernández Amores, Medea, with her dead children, flees Corinth in a chariot drawn by dragons, 1887, Museo del Prado

Heroes never have blood on their hands, or rather, we have decided they shouldn't. Only in the last century the concept of the innocent hero was constructed and put into practice. The complicated figures that mythology gave us were replaced or reinvented, made cleaner and more comfortable: heroes who are purely good, whose causes are purely just, whose hands, whatever they do, remain unstained. One of the great contributors to this belief today are Disney movies, the concept was not invented by them, it was perfected. The idea behind Disney is that their characters should be examples of goodness for people. This concept of the hero being purely good can be traced back to Christianity and the Gospels, where all the good deeds of Christ are written, and in some Disney movie cases the Gospels are even quoted directly by movie characters. And now, having grown up with this concept at the back of our minds, this template is carried everywhere, into history, into memory, into the quiet judgments that are made about whether other people or their work deserves to be called good.

In Ancient Greece, goodness was not considered a value. What was valued at that time was the ability to read a situation, to act with full force, to be excellent at what one was, whatever that happened to be. The term expressing this concept was arete, which can be translated as excellence, the fullest realisation of one's potential. Today this concept is most closely represented by the word virtue, but the meaning was not carried forward intact. Over centuries, as Christian moral thinking became the dominant framework in Europe, virtue was gradually moralised, it came to mean goodness, decency, moral correctness. The most cunning mind for ancient Greeks, became the most humble heart for Christians; same as the sharpest edge of a sword became a charitable deed, and so on. The concept survived but its meaning was quietly reconstructed, and with it, the ancient understanding that excellence and morality were never the same thing. For ancient Greeks whether that potential was used for noble or terrible ends was not the point; the point was that it was used fully.

This is why Greek thinking and its mythology was never meant to be comfortable. The stories were not moral fables with lessons at the end, as they are seen today. They were investigations, into what humans are capable of, into the contradictions that drive great people toward great destruction, into the unbearable tension between love and violence, or loyalty and betrayal, or heroism and atrocity. Moral and social values were consistently encoded in myths, particularly around hubris — the dangerous overreach of human ambition beyond its proper limits, justice, and human limits more broadly, functioning as cultural teachings, even if their moral lessons were sometimes complex or ambiguous rather than straightforward. They were played and discussed across generations by the ancient Greeks. The myth itself did not contain a single answer, it was a question that refused to close, and to which you can always return and reflect again.

When thinking about the ancient hero Medea, this is where modern and ancient thinking meet in contradiction. Today we need to know immediately, is she a hero or a villain? The category must be assigned before the story can even be told. This is the modern reflex, the need for verdict before understanding, but the ancient point of view did not work this way, it did not focus on a character's morality as a fixed quality, but followed one action after another, letting the story unfold without verdict, which is precisely what allows us to see the complexity of a hero, and of human nature itself, at the same time noting that the greatness and destruction often sharing the same root.

Medea was a sorceress and a princess of Colchis, a woman of exceptional intelligence and knowledge of plants and their properties. When another Greek hero, Jason, arrived seeking the Golden Fleece, an object of mythical power that held the key to his rightful claim to the throne, it was Medea who made his success possible. She betrayed her father by helping Jason steal the Golden Fleece from him, who was sworn to protect it, her knowledge and gifts were used entirely in Jason's service, she fled her homeland, she left everything she had known behind. For years she lived as his wife in exile, bearing their children, bound to a man and a life far from her own people and land. When at a certain point Jason made a decision to abandon Medea for a more politically advantageous marriage, she was left with nothing: no homeland to return to, no protection, no standing in society. She chose to kill the woman Jason intended to marry, and then her own children, taking from him everything he had left her behind for. Her escape from Corinth was painted by the Spanish painter Germán Hernández Amores in 1887. In the painting, her face is caught in the first moment of realising what she has done, and the pain is slowly coming in.

We know this face not only from myth, it has been seen in history, and in politics, and in the quiet aftermath of decisions that could not be taken back. It has been produced by history in the faces of those who acted, who crossed a line that could not be uncrossed, and then had to live inside that fact. The difficulty is not in finding such faces, the actual difficulty is in a society's willingness to look at them, to sit with the complexity rather than reach immediately for the simpler story, the one where the hero was purely good, the cause entirely just, and whatever was along the way was someone else's fault. What follows is one such history, and one such looking away, and it belongs to Lithuania.

Before speaking about what happened in the summer of 1941 in Lithuania, it is worth pausing on what it means for those who carry this history personally. For those whose grandfather was a partisan hero, and also possibly a perpetrator, that is not an abstract historical problem, that is something that lives in families, in silences, in things never said at the dinner table. It is a wound that has no clean edges. The modern template does not have a category for a person who was both hero and perpetrator, both brave and capable of atrocity. To accept both truths simultaneously would mean dismantling the way we have been taught to think about goodness itself. And so what is chosen instead is silence, is a taboo that is easier to inherit than to confront. And what follows here is not an accusation but an attempt to understand why looking away is so deeply human, and why, in Lithuania, it has become so specifically necessary.

The summer of 1941 is the hardest chapter in Lithuanian history, and as a consequence the least talked about. Lithuanian paramilitary units participated in the killing of Jews, in some cases independently, before German forces had fully established control, in others alongside them. They executed their neighbours, people who they in many cases knew personally, people who had lived there for generations. This is internationally documented fact, it is not russian propaganda, however convenient for them this accusation has become especially now. Some of those involved in the 1941 killings later became figures in the anti-Soviet resistance, the same resistance that has since been celebrated by independent Lithuania with monuments and national honours. To acknowledge this is not to doubt the suffering Lithuania endured under Soviet occupation, it is to question the image of Lithuania as a purely innocent victim, a nation that only ever suffered and never caused suffering. Because this is the current story the monuments tell and it is the story Lithuanians want to believe in. And it is precisely this historical fact of 1941 that challenges it.

But there is something else at stake beyond historical accuracy. A society that cannot look at its own past honestly becomes vulnerable, exposed at its weakest point to anyone willing to exploit that silence. And silence has a cost that is more personal than political. Many Lithuanians grow up without knowing their own ancestors, their culture, the identity that was passed down for generations. What remains today is a reconstruction, and even that is uncertain. The stories of their relatives are hidden, half-told or never told at all. It is possible to grow up knowing something happened but not what, inheriting the silence along with everything else, and that silence is part of the imposter feeling, the sense of not fully knowing who you are or where you came from, that the ground beneath your identity is not entirely solid. Acknowledging what happened, as painful and uncomfortable as it is, would not weaken Lithuania, it would be the first step toward a more honest and more stable sense of self of its citizens.

In 2016 a book called Mūsiškiai, in Lithuanian, Our People, in English, was written by Rūta Vanagaitė, a Lithuanian writer and now a controversial figure in Lithuania. In her book the writer raised questions about Lithuanian participation in the Holocaust and wrote her journey into discovering it. The fact that she openly questioned and disagreed with the official truth about the Holocaust as it is presented inside the country made her a target, soon after she was accused of being a russian agent. In other words, it was a way for society to avoid engaging with the uncomfortable historical facts she raised, and instead attack her motives.

Yet in 2017 Vanagaitė did make a serious mistake, she misread some historical facts and expressed them publicly as statements, which gave her critics legitimate ammunition. What followed went far beyond a factual correction. Her publisher took out all five of her books from circulation, which was more than 27,000 copies, and ordered them to be pulped. On international media it was publicly described as an act of censorship. But this punishment was not a response to a factual error, she had been a target the moment the question about Lithuanian participation in the Holocaust was first raised with her book.

The response to Vanagaitė's book tells more about Lithuania than the book itself does. A society that is secure in its identity can afford to be questioned; a society that cannot afford to be questioned is telling how fragile that identity actually is. The accusations, the public humiliation, none of this was about historical accuracy, it was about protection. Protection of a narrative that has become so central to Lithuanian self-understanding that any crack in it feels like a threat to the whole structure. And this is where the imposter feeling becomes something more serious, not a private anxiety but a collective one. When a nation cannot ask honest questions about its own past, it does not protect itself, it hollows itself out. What remains is not identity but the performance of one, and a nation that performs its identity rather than lives it is already in an identity crisis, whether it admits it or not.

And this identity crisis is not only visible in monuments and political accusations. It lives in much smaller moments, in the way Lithuanians talk about Lithuanian things and in the way Lithuanian things are presented to the world.

For example it can sound like this: it is a good book, for a Lithuanian book; it is good work, as done by a Lithuanian. The qualification arrives before the judgment, lowering the standard in advance, creating a separate category where Lithuanian things are measured only against other Lithuanian things and never against the world. On the surface this looks like modesty, but it is not modesty, it is a verdict delivered before the trial. The work is declared lesser before it has been tested, before it has been translated, before any reader outside Lithuania has had the chance to encounter it. And because the verdict comes first, the test never happens. The limitation is not imposed from outside, it is chosen from inside.

The mechanism works like this: by saying it first, it cannot hurt later. If the standard is announced as lower before anyone else can notice, the comparison is controlled. It cannot be wrong because the standard by which wrong could be measured has been removed. It is a preemptive strike against disappointment — a way of managing the wound before it arrives. And it works. In the short term it always works. The pain is smaller because the expectation was already lowered. The fall is shorter because the starting point was already closer to the ground.

But the same crisis expresses itself in the opposite direction too. When Lithuanian culture is presented internationally, what is chosen is not what is most original, most genuinely Lithuanian, what is chosen is something that looks as serious culture is supposed to look: conceptual, artistic, maybe deliberately important, but not uniquely Lithuanian. The work that is distinctly its own is considered not serious enough to represent the country abroad, so it goes nowhere. And what does go abroad is a performance of cultural seriousness rather than an expression of something unique.

Internally the bar is lowered before the comparison is made, externally the most curated and imitative version is sent out. In neither direction does Lithuania simply present itself as it is. And a culture that cannot present itself honestly, either to itself or to the world, is not suffering from modesty, it is suffering from not knowing who it is.

And this is not only about culture, the same two modes run through how Lithuania presents itself in the world entirely: either it is a small nation that cannot be held to international standards, or it is the most heroic victim, the most loyal ally, the most European of its neighbours. There is no middle ground where Lithuania can simply exist on equal terms with others, neither diminished nor exceptional, just present. But both positions come from the same wound, both are the same anxiety in different clothing, and both prevent Lithuanians from seeing themselves as they actually are.

From the silence about 1941 to the lowered bar placed before every Lithuanian work, all of this is a pattern driven by a single need: to avoid an honest look at itself. And there is a cost to that: a nation that is not honest with itself cannot be fully honest with others, and others sense it, even without being able to name it. What presents itself as strength, others feel as performance, what claims to be identity, others feel as a shell. And a shell, however well constructed, is trusted by no one, because it can be sensed that something is missing from the inside.

A nation that knows who it is, does not need to perform itself, nor does it need to lower the bar before the comparison is made, or silence the parts of its history that do not fit the story it wants to tell. Lithuania has all the material for a more honest self-knowledge: it has rich history and culture, and wounds, and the strength that survived them. What is missing is the willingness to hold all of it simultaneously: the heroism and the atrocity, the suffering and the causing of suffering, the pride and the doubt. The Ancient Greeks understood this very well, Medea is more human than any purely good hero precisely because she cannot be reduced to a single verdict. And Lithuania is more real than its monuments suggest, but reaching that reality requires something the monuments were specifically designed to prevent: the will to look at the full picture and find there not shame, but the beginning of knowing who you actually are.

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