Komunistinė propaganda tarp Kanados lietuvių II Pasaulinio karo metais

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to explain the circumstance in which Communist propaganda came to affect the opinions of Lithuanians in Canada during World War II. Although the vast majority of the approximately 8,000 Lithuanians living in Canada at this time centred their activities around Catholic organizations and were not Communists, many of them accepted the Communist incorporation of Lithuania into the Soviet Union and the Communist interpretation of the status of the Displaced Persons. In Canada, as in the United States, members of ethnic minorities from East Europe played a significant part in the development of both the Socialist and the Communist party. Within these parties these ethnic minorities long existed within semi-autonomous language federations and, even when these were closed down by the Communist Party in 1925, party branches still mostly formed on the basis of language and ethnic origin. In this way, Lithuanian Communists, like other ethnic minorities in the party, were able to retain their ethnic identity while taking part in the revolutionary international movement. In Canada, where Lithuanians were so few in number, this ethnic identity helped Lithuanian Communists remain close to their ideological opponents within the Lithuanian community. Lithuanian-Communists were also the only group among interwar Lithuanian Canadians to maintain a Lithuanian newspaper, founded in 1932 as Darbininkų Žodis (The Workers' Word), with the name changed in 1937 to Liaudies Balsas (The People's Voice). During the second world war, this newspaper became a major source of information for Lithuanian Canadians about events in their homeland.[...]