DISINFO: Hitler's Nazi officials are not less Belarusian heroes than Kalinowski
SUMMARY
Some people name Kalinowski a Belarusian national hero. Recently Belarusian foreign minister Uladzimir Makei said that Kalinowski belongs to Belarusian history and that he is a figure in Lithuanian and Polish history as well. This is an awful logic. It implies that fascist collaborators are Belarusian heroes too, just as Wilhelm Kube [Nazi senior official in the occupying government of the Soviet Union with the rank of Generalkommissar for Weissruthenien], a Hitler’s executioner of the Belarusian people in the WWII. A sacramental question to the foreign minister is the following: Won’t the participation of Belarusian delegation in the reburial ceremony of Kalinowski remnants be a justification of Polish gentry activities to turn Belarusian lands into the eastern part of Poland?
RESPONSE
This publication puts forward an absurd parallel between Belarusian, Lithuanian and Polish national hero Kalinowski and Wilhelm Kube, the head of the Nazi occupational body in Belarus during the WWII, aimed to discredit Belarusian history. It is consistent with the recurring pro-Kremlin narrative about Western aggressive activities towards Belarus and its history. Wincenty Konstanty Kalinowski, also known as Kastuś Kalinoŭski was a 19th-century writer, lawyer and revolutionary. As one of the leaders of the Belarusian, Lithuanian and Polish national revival and the leader of the 1863-1864 uprising (also known as January uprising) against Imperial Russia, Kalinowski is considered a national hero in Belarus, Lithuania and Poland. The monument to Kalinowski in the Belarusian town of Svislach where Kalinowski graduated from a local school was established in 1958. In 2017-18 Lithuanian archaeologists found the remains of Kalinowski and other leaders of the uprising in the centre of Vilnius. The Lithuanian authorities plan to organize a reburial ceremony at the end of November 2019 and to open a monument to the January uprising. In response to an appeal by Belarusian public figures to the Lithuanian state, the Lithuanian government stated it plans that the inscriptions on the monument will be in Belarusian, Lithuanian and Polish. See earlier disinformation cases claiming that the West and Russophobia advocates selected the little-known terrorist Kalinowski as a Belarusian national hero, to promote terrorism and that Lithuania does not want to take Kalinowski’s DNA test to avoid a blunder as it can turn out that the remains belong to a different person.