NEVER SURRENDER: My Latest ‘Hot Type’ Column in Byline
My weekly Hot Type column in Byline Supplement features a Q&A with the former foreign affairs minister of Lithuania, Gabrielius Landsbergis, whose family has a history of fighting Russian aggression
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In today’s Hot Type column for Byline Supplement, I transcribe RadPod’s interview with Gabrielius Landsbergis, the former foreign affairs minister of Lithuania and former member of European Parliament.
His name should be familiar to members of Bette due to this report:
As I document in my Hot Type column, Landsbergis laid waste to how the West mislabels Russian warfare, which then enables democratic leaders to do nothing to combat it.
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Below is an excerpt from today’s Hot Type:
Hot Type: Never Surrender — A Q&A with Gabrielius Landsbergis
Heidi Siegmund Cuda talks to former Foreign Affairs Minister for Lithuania Gabrielius Landsbergis about the Trump Doctrine, the need for Europe not to play possum and Winston Churchill
Two weeks before the US election last year, I reported on a stunning statement by Gabrielius Landsbergis, who was then Lithuania’s Minister of Foreign Affairs. In one minute and 24 seconds at a security conference in Riga, Latvia, Landsbergis laid waste to the West’s feeble language and response to Russian aggression and hybrid warfare.
Here is his statement:
“Why do we call it hybrid? Because if you call it hybrid, then basically you don't need to do anything about it. You can just talk about it in the conference, and it solves the problem.
“If you call it terrorism, then it implies reaction — then there's actually something that needs to happen. In several countries, there have been incidents that we know have been organized, financed by Russians, in order to burn down the buildings, harm people, destroy property. So how else can you call it? And this is where the danger — the biggest danger — comes from, that if we stay in this situation long enough, that sends a very clear message to Russia that basically, they are able to do whatever they want. They can walk around, they can harm people, they can burn down buildings. And we still will be talking about ‘the hybrid’, and this is the biggest, biggest problem.
“And I usually say — I'm not afraid of Russia — I'm afraid of our fear of Russia. This is what really keeps me up at night. And if we don't find a way to stop Russians, how to send a message to them that this is a red line — you cannot cross it — they will continue.”
Continue they did, until America was fully captured.
If we had called it terrorism instead of ‘hybrid’, ‘cognitive’, or ‘information’ war, we could have used our might to thwart it. Instead, we ignored the new battlefield, we dismissed the fact our citizens were being carpet-bombed with mental poison. President Biden had four years to lead a response and opted to do nothing. The Democrats, to my sorrow, did nothing.
I spent months trying to get an interview for my podcast with Landsbergis, who proved to be a one-man wrecking ball exposing Russian aggression. This Q & A is an excerpt from that interview, lightly edited for clarity and brevity, along with his responses in a follow-up interview exclusive to Byline Supplement.
I didn’t learn until after our initial interview (from Monique Camarra) that Landsbergis inherited a legacy of standing up to Russia. His grandfather is a hero in Lithuania for his role in getting the country to leave the Soviet Union.
Vytautus Landsbergis, now aged 92, is a Lithuanian politician and like his grandson, a former member of the European Parliament. Thirty-five years ago, on March 11, 1990, he headed the Parliamentary session that declared the restoration of Lithuanian independence. Lithuania became the first Soviet Republic to do so, inspiring other Soviet-ruled countries to follow. Fifteen years later, he led the failed charge for the EU to ban communist and Nazi symbols and continues to openly fight against Russia’s influence on the Baltic states.
“My family for generations stood for Lithuania,” Gabrielius Landsbergis told Byline Supplement. “Rebuilding it, strengthening it, always fighting for the better future of our country. This is what I grew up with, and I just hope that I was capable of transferring at least a part of it to my children.”
Just hours after our interview, the SignalGate scandal erupted. I asked Landsbergis what the incident signified to Europe.
“The scandal showed to me the deep-rooted, even ideological disdain for Europe among the leaders of the US administration,” he said. “It is worrying but confirms what we have seen and heard previously. It is just one more reminder to Europe to forget any wishful thinking and continue preparing to face the outside dangers alone.”
On the same day as our podcast interview, the news broke that America’s top scholars on fascism and Eastern European history Timothy Snyder, Marci Shore, and Jason Stanley departed from the US for Canada. So it seemed fitting to begin my Q &A with Landsbergis on his ‘if we called it terrorism’ statement from Riga.
Gabrielius Landsbergis: So for us in Lithuania, what was called the hybrid warfare against against my country, against the region in Europe, probably signified one of the best examples of what has been happening since the full-scale invasion into Ukraine — that the West has chosen to be extremely careful not to overstep the red lines in our own minds.
Because if we do that, we might anger Putin… and it led to the situation where Putin was able to escalate freely in Ukraine and outside Ukraine — push those red lines further down onto us.
And unfortunately, we presented ourselves as helpless. In most of the cases, we were unable to show to Putin that we are ready to stand up, that we have means in our arsenal to push back and to inflict pain when it is needed.
A couple kilometers from my house, a shopping mall was burned down. It has been proven it was Russians, and we still don't call it anything else. I mean, it's ‘hybrid’, so their reaction to it is also ‘hybrid’.
The Trump Doctrine
Heidi Siegmund Cuda: I don't see how you cannot call it terrorism when there's been poisonings, defenestrations, cables cut, planes shot out of the sky. And what we see in this sort of KGB mindset is that they're very good at all these manipulations and all these tricks. But why do you think the West has been so feckless in its response? It's been devastating to those of us who understand this type of war.
GL: I've done some reading lately into what was called the Truman Doctrine, back in the time when we were able to separate the good from bad, we were able to say what's what's evil and what's not.
What was very clear is that there are free peoples around the world, and there are dictators — totalitarian dictators — and these dictators, if they're forced upon the people, they break the rules-based order of the world, and it goes against the US interests.
And that has been a doctrine for decades. And somewhere down the road, we started losing it. We were unable to really distinguish what was and what isn't in US interest in the world, and by extension, also the Western European countries.
So what we have been seeing is that freedom has lost its value… We are more keen on retaining the status quo, rather than saying, ‘Okay, we will help those who fight for freedom in their fight’. The new administration, they got rid of (the Doctrine) completely. They are not afraid to say that free people do not have a place in their mind. Actually, the free people hinder their agenda… The new doctrine, the Trump doctrine, is being implemented.
Europe Playing Dead
HSC: What is keeping Europe from acknowledging Russia is engaged in actual war… not ‘information’ or ‘hybrid’, but war?
GL: I hope that I'm not right, but what the situation currently reminds me of is that Europe is playing this animal that when attacked by an aggressor, or a bigger animal, he just plays dead in the hopes that the predator will just walk away.
So if we don't admit that we are under attack, we just lie on our backs belly up, not looking pretty, that it’s our hope that Putin just sniffs us, and decides, ‘Okay, they're not worth eating, because basically they're just dead’. And he walks the other way.
Romanian Front Line
HSC: Can you please help people understand who and what Russian political technologists are, what they do, and why we allow our freedoms to be corrupted and exploited by countries that have no freedom?
GL: First, as a person who ran a party for 10 years, I've never shied away from responsibility. I know what responsibility as a politician is. You’re there in the front, you're receiving all sorts of advice from all sorts of people, but it's up to you to make the decision…
When it comes to Brexit, for example, it is a known fact that there were quite a lot of people with their own hidden or not so hidden agendas that advised the leaders of the country to do what proved to be — and what many people believed it would be — a disastrous decision for the United Kingdom…
As for the [job of political technologists], we in Lithuania, we've faced Russia's activities for a long time. I don't think that they've ever retreated in any shape or form. We had our sort of normal years when Yeltsin was in power…
But I think what we're facing currently is a new phenomenon, and we’ve seen how it's played out in the United States, but in Europe now it's very clearly seen. For example, in Romania, where suddenly out of nowhere, a candidate appears with an extreme agenda, anti-Ukrainian, anti-European, pro-Russian.
And suddenly, he's just on TikTok, basically talking whatever comes to his mind, and he’s number one. So how do you fight? It's not a public space that we were prepared for. There's no place for arguments. There is nothing like that. And then he has millions of shares and millions of followers, and spread all over, and then you lose a battle.
So this is a very, very new phenomenon. And I'm particularly worried about the role TikTok is playing in this. And I think that we have to start building up new instruments. And maybe Romania, in some way, is actually paving the way. They're being very hard line about fighting this, but from where I stand, they're doing everything that they can to defend their country.
Georgia Losing Its Freedom
HSC: Do people in Europe acknowledge that Russian money and rich businessmen are attempting to overthrow governments?
GL: We're still in denial. Clearly, this is still the denial phase of the reality. I've just come back from Georgia, and I met the opposition there, the non-governmental organizations, parents of the people who are political prisoners being held in prisons right now. I mean, it's just so obvious that we are losing the country. The people themselves there are losing their country to Russia, without tanks, just via, as you said, with the political technology, and then capturing the state, capturing the institutions, changing the laws so that they make the country unrecognizable.
Then one day, you wake up in the morning and you understand that it's no longer the country that you've been born into, or that you remember, throughout your life, because it barely resembles a democratic country.
You know, you have political prisoners all over the place, and it resembles Belarus rather than a democratic country. So it's truly horrible, and to think that they're left alone. All the people I met, whoever I talked to, all of them had one request: ‘Can you get Europe's attention? Because nobody's here. We're literally fighting this alone…’
Never Surrender
HSC: My last question for you really goes back to the work that you are doing to push the EU to actually deal with Russia and not play possum. I've been reading Vaslav Havel's book — the dissident essays — The Power of the Powerless — and learning so many things about the importance of people who live within truth and do not accept the lies and do you have anything that you use as a mantra — a beautiful sentiment that people can grab onto like a life raft in this time?
GL: I do but it's kind of banal so I do not normally share it. But it helps me. It’s actually the thing that you would repeat to yourself. So it's a kind of Churchill quip, ‘never surrender’.
To support the work of Gabrielius Landsbergis, go to: landsbergis.com
The above is an excerpt from my Hot Type column. As always, I ask those who can afford to support a small global team of investigative reporters to please take out a subscription to Byline Supplement.
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And I welcome everyone to watch the original RadPod interview with Landsbergis.
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