MANAGER
Little Lithuania is the country that dares where others are silent, and stands up to aggressive China.
LIGHTS PEACE OVER A VULNERABLE COUNTRY: Archbishop Gintaras Grusas from the Christmas service in the cathedral in Vilnius. Photo: AP / NTB
view more
–
Manager: This is an editorial from Dagbladet, and expresses the newspaper’s views. Dagbladet’s political editor is responsible for the editorial.
Published
last updated
–
–
Our small, semi-Nordic, neighboring Lithuania, is worth a tribute in the year 2021 ebbs out. While Norway’s relations with China were in the “freezer” for eight years, because the Nobel Committee awarded the Peace Prize to the Chinese regime critic Liu Xiaobo in 2010, little Lithuania has had the Antarctic cold thrown at it because it has allowed itself to open a representative office for Taiwan in Lithuania. the capital Vilnius. And while Norway did knee-to-knee, including the “Norwegian” diplomatic exercise human rights, to get out of the diplomatic freezer, Lithuania has stood firm in the Chinese Antarctic storm. Lithuania stood upright and defended democratic values, in stark contrast to Norway.
view more
–
In mid-December all the Lithuanian diplomats were expelled from Beijing, in a way that was created to be humiliating. The very influential propaganda newspaper Global Times compared Lithuania with its 2.8 million inhabitants with “a mouse, even a fly” that could easily be killed. But that it was hardly worth killing the fly because of all the filth it would create. Nevertheless, Lithuania continued to urge its citizens to throw away, among other things, Chinese smartphones after it became clear that they had built-in software that could be activated without warning.
China has responded with all goods from the EU that contain Lithuanian elements not entering China. This means that a number of containers that are already on their way will probably be rejected when they arrive. China is fighting by all means against what they perceive as the slightest insult. All in the spirit of President Xi Jinping’s increasingly nationalist and dictatorial spirit.
But Lithuania is historic well vaccinated against being overthrown by dictatorial powers, after being overthrown by Stalin, saw Hitler, and then Stalin once more, during World War II. Lithuania was also the country that took the lead when the Soviet Union disintegrated 30 years ago these days.
The mask falls to the ground
To stand up for Democratic values were also at stake when neighboring Belarus exploded in demonstrations after President Alexander Lukashenko’s election fraud in August 2020. The alleged winner of the election, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, fled to Lithuania, while her husband was recently sentenced to 15 years in prison. Lukashenko also responded to Lithuania with holy dictatorial anger, sending refugees from the Middle East to the border. There they were stopped, as they would be at all of the EU’s external borders. Despite this, Lithuania was a country to emulate in 2021.
–
