When will this madness end?

At first I thought it was some kind of sick joke, but the crowd that assembled outside the Lithuanian parliament building grew from a few hundred to an estimated 5000 persons, appearing to re-enact the insurrection of the US Capitol that took place this past January, replete with makeshift gallows.  There were plenty of flags, many from the former Grand Duchy, as if they were presenting themselves as "patriots." They claimed to be protesting the vaccine mandates the parliament is proposing in key sectors of society.  Some of the protesters even wore Stars of David, further aping what they had seen on television. This mock insurrection grew ever more boisterous during the course of the evening.  Riot police were called in to form a ring around the parliament building so that its members could safely be ferried out by black vans through the raucous crowd.  Local television cameras picked out at least three parliament members among the crowd, making little effort to conceal themselves.

It was all so absurd that my wife and I just gawked at first.  We could hear the noise from across the river.  We live less than a kilometer from the parliament building.  Delfi was filming the protests in real time, while other channels drifted back and forth to the unfolding event.  Police tried to calm protesters, urging them to go home as it was now well past 11 pm, but they refused to yield.  They were demanding access to the parliament despite all the PMs being safely taken home.  I had enough and went to bed.  My wife came up a short while later, but she woke with a start when she heard an explosion go off around 1:30 am.  

Someone had thrown a homemade pipe bomb at the police and pandemonium broke loose, at least that is what we gathered from Delfi news the next morning.  The police quickly took control of the chaos, arrested 26 persons as they dispersed the crowd with tear gas, water hoses and batons.  Enough was enough and the police chief was none too happy the next morning, as at least 10 officers suffered injuries, including three who had shrapnel in their legs.  

You ask what is the cost of that insurrection on January 6, 2021, well this is it.  Now, mobs are mimicking it in Eastern Europe despite their being no disputed election or any particular firebrand like Trump in this country.  People are just voicing their petty grievances, writ large on the internet.

Of course, this was all the 1/6 insurrection was about.  Trump's loyal supporters couldn't accept defeat so they tried to stop the official roll call of the electoral college in a last ditch effort to keep their beloved leader in power.  Trump gloated over the insurrection he inspired by pushing phony conspiracy theories for weeks and further firing the MAGA mob up at a rally that morning near the White House.  Democracy wasn't at stake.  Far from it.  Democracy was being carried out as it had been for more than 200 years.  Trump just couldn't accept defeat.

Here in Lithuania, opposition to the vaccines has been growing,  No one knows quite sure why, as the nation has always prided itself on its civility and good sense.  When the country demanded its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, resulting in massive demonstrations on bitter cold January evenings, it did so peacefully.  Those who died and those who were injured were because Soviet tanks rolled in to try to reclaim parliament from a Lithuanian government that had declared itself independent the year before.

There was no such civility Tuesday night.  These guys looked and acted like thugs.  Some persons feigned injuries before the police had even arrived.  Their chants made no sense, shouting "shame" at parliament members and calling them Fascists and traitors.  Yet, for several long hours the police allowed them to protest as long as they didn't cause any harm.

The question immediately became who is behind this?  The prime suspect is Russia, which has been spreading all sorts of vaccine disinformation through social media and has been actively supporting Lukashenko's efforts to flood the Lithuanian border with refugees flown in from Iraq and Greece.  Of course, Russia denies such involvement, as it always does, but the Kremlin has been actively trying to destabilize Lithuania ever since its independence was recognized by the UN in September, 1991.  

Russia tacitly supports political parties favorable to its interests.  Most recently, the Peasants and Green Party, or Valstiečiai as they like to call themselves.  It is led by an agrobusiness tycoon, who has amassed the largest percentage of landholdings in the country and used the popularity of a former police chief to take over parliament in a shocking election victory five years ago.  He promoted a kind of peasant nationalism, trying to shift the focus of government away from the urban centers and to the farm villages, which he felt were grossly neglected, but his real interests seemed to lie elsewhere.  

His party lost in the 2020 parliament election and he has been smarting ever since.  He stepped down as a MP rather than make himself subject to an all-woman government led by a coalition of three parties.  The Valstiečiai had very few prominent women in its party and none in leadership roles.  When the new woman speaker, Viktorija Čmilytė was sworn in, he scoffed at her being a chess grandmaster, claiming to be a checkers grandmaster himself.  

While the Valstiečiai had done a reasonably good job of handling the coronavirus pandemic, they have oddly been reticent of the new mandates being proposed in parliament.  This despite having imposed one of the harshest lockdowns in Europe at the height of the pandemic, with little or no financial relief to the small businesses that suffered through it.  

Like many countries, Lithuania has hit a stone wall when it comes to vaccines.  To date, roughly 45 percent of the country is fully vaccinated, but efforts to reach a minimum of 70 percent have slowed to a crawl.  This is largely due to the massive disinformation being spread through social media, much of it originating from Russian web sources.

The Valstiečiai also oppose efforts to fence the border with Belarus in an effort to stem the flow of illegal immigrants ferried to the border by Belarussian army vehicles on a nightly basis.  Detention camps have sprung up all along the border, housing these presumed refugees that come from Central Asia and North Africa via Iraq and Greece.  Belarus literally flies them into Minsk, lets them stay in comfy three and four-star hotels for a couple nights to refresh themselves, then whisks them to the border in the dead of night, where they are apprehended for the most part, as it is pretty easy to track these activities by drones.  Concurrently, there was a protest at one of these camps, seemingly designed to split the police department's attention.

I suppose it is in part the lack of acceptance of electoral defeat that drives the Valstiečiai but none of its opposition members of parliament could be seen mingling with the unruly mob.  Instead, we saw members from outlying parties and one who is in no party at all but can be found at every protest in an effort to constantly draw attention to himself.  

It seems this protest was arranged primarily to create chaos and provide images of duress to be spread across the internet the next day, saying how Fascist a country Lithuania is.  The only problem is that few international news outlets picked up the story.  I only saw a brief mention on Bloomberg, and of course Reuters.  I suppose more stories will emerge during the week as it usually takes a while for these events to spread through the media.  One person who did immediately pick up on it is Belarussian President Lukashenko, who promised more such insurrections in the weeks ahead, essentially admitting he had a hand in this.  

He's also promising World War III if Europe doesn't come to its senses and recognize him as president, instead of providing safe harbor for Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who many believe won the election, which resulted in the mass protests in the country throughout last winter and again this summer.  I suppose he wanted Lithuania to feel what it was like having its authority questioned, as Ms. Tsikhanouskaya spent much of her initial time in exile in Vilnius before becoming the darling of Europe, and even the US, with President Biden meeting with her recently in Washington.

Whatever the case, it left us with a deeply uneasy feeling.  It was bad enough when these miscreants staged a rally at Vingio Park earlier this summer, spilling over into the streets of our neighborhood in Žverynas, but now they had the audacity to besiege the parliament, a stone's throw across the Neris river.  When will this madness end?