I was looking up the name of some seemingly prolific Russophobe "analyst" named Giles Keir who writes predictable anti-Russian stuff on "Russian affairs". In the process of looking this vile creature up - I did not find anything useful or interesting and my attention span is short, I stumbled across a video collection put on a youtube by an Estonian ethno-Nazi . Like all modern Nazis he professes himself to be an anti-Communist. Not a big deal . All the Nazis of yesteryear were also anti-Communist. That's what Nazism is all about though it also like in today's Estonia and Latvia it has a strong racial twist, spiced with ideas of ethnic purity, seasoned with antisemtism and has a particular genocidal bent that other less rabid anti-Communist movements lack. The Estonian ethno-Nazi, self styled anti-Communism, put up over 85 venomously anti-Russian defamatory videos and got a large willing audience willing to watch the rot and leave repulsive comments. Apparently he is not alone, the place teems with Nazis of all colors and stripes, and the Baltic Nazi scum dominates its own corner of the hate market. Here is what I noticed - with support of Baltic Nazi backers (primarily in the USA and the UK) - there is a tendency, a movement of sorts that once put forth and now propagates an outrageous theory, which they present as truth, that Soviet and Nazi crimes were supposedly comparable or in fact the Soviets - or the Communists - were worse. That falls neatly in line with Hitler's dictum or rather propaganda technique of Große Lüge or Big Lie - that lies stick and that a monstrous, colossal lie would be believed more readily than prosaic truth. The lie is now being forcibly pushed through at all imaginable and unimaginable level and became the centerpiece of a wide array of propaganda creations. For obvious reasons the US official propaganda pushes the grotesque theory with almost religious zeal. The lie is easily disproved as it fails comparison tests. Although no Jews and almost no Russians or other subhuman Slavs survived the murderous reign of Estonian and Latvian Nazis under Hitler's protection, the extermination was complete, and Estonian and Latvian Nazis murdered perhaps as many as half a million people , civilians, and as men were drafted those civilians were mainly women, children and elderly in adjacent occupied Russian speaking territories, there is no track record of wholesale extermination of Estonians and Latvians by the Soviets on ethnic grounds. I am unaware of any single fact that hundreds of thousands of Estonians were murdered because they were Estonians. To understand the figure of how genocidal Latvian and Estonian Nazis were for comparison's sake it would suffice to say there are just over 900 000 Esths or Estonians in what is today Estonia and to accomplish the same rate of murder the Soviets, proportionately to the USSR population, should have killed at least 150 million people (150 000 000), a figure demographic data does not support. Furthermore all those Estonian and Latvian (and Lithuanian) ethno-Nazis who claim that horrors of the Soviet Union were greater than those of Nazi Germany survived the Soviet era in one piece. In fact some victims of Russian Bolshevism, like the leader of the local Estonian Neonazi party Isamaa Mart Laar or the head of the statelet's "foreign ministry" Paet managed to grow some fat in fact became obese in murderous concentration camp called Soviet Union Most estonazi youtube, online and offline propagandists got their education in the USSR. Instead of exterminating all Estonians and Latvians and destroying the land Nazi-style, Soviet Barbarians built schools, airports, port facilities, libraries, hospitals. They moved natives from squalid housing to fairly modern residential dwellings, with central heating, indoor plumbing and running water, conveniences of civilization almost no Estonian or Latvian had before Soviet slavery. I recall an episode narrated by my Estonian friend Sven, who retells a story told by his grandmother who lived under Nazi occupation and had German troops stationed in the house. Germans were polite enough though disdainful of local men. They told her that the men should put water pipe into the house so women won't have to carry water on themselves like beasts of burden. Well after Nazis left the Soviets, who were allegedly much worse, finally introduced running water, heated apartments and flush toilets to the freedom loving natives. As my friend told me - the fact known by everyone but suppressed in the Soviet Union lest ethnic solidarity would suffer, the mass murders in Estonia and Latvia and punitive extermination campaign against people of adjacent Leningrad, Pskov and Novgorod regions (all three lost practically their entire civilian population) were carried out by units of ethnic Estonian and Latvian killers. Germans were other things to do, they were busy fighting a war - says he.
Unfortunately Russian Federation, busily munching on McDonald's hamburgers and dreaming about big Germanjapanese sedans or American SUVs, preferably painted with the same color as the nation's soul, i.e. black, does nothing to contradict lest defeat the propagandist onslaught by Baltic ethno-Nazis and their sponsors, at least not in the same linguistic dimension.
As I looked at all these clips, commentaries and I am already aware of the colossal amounts of propagandist support ethno-Nazi statelets get from the US, UK and the collective EU, a following thought came up.
What we got in Estonia and Latvia, the situation is milder in Latvia and patently worse in Estonia, is an apartheid system that divides the societies in two halves. There is the so-called native group - the descendants of the peasants from the countryside and the Russian group (which is not necessarily ethnic Russian but is Russophone). Russians are second class citizens, in fact not citizens, disenfranchised and Russian language (though not English) is either outlawed or is subject to discrimination that is unprecedented by modern world standards. The notion that one group is superior to other (the notion is put in practice in the Baltic ethnostates) is based on the premise that it was there longer. It is the "title nationality" - a Soviet term as if there are real estate style titles issued by God's property register. There are no precedents like that in either international or commercial law. You don't necessarily have fewer rights if I bought a condo three years ago and you bought yours just a year ago. The justification for that is those people are not citizens because they did not ask Estonian or Latvian non-Soviet authorities to enter the country (never mind that all local minorities were already exterminated) - but the only Estonian and Latvian authorities at the time were Soviet, there was no occupation (grandiose efforts to promote that particularly toxic myth and a US cold war canard notwithstanding) and the people were moving within unified country which was not occupied like Belgium was by the Nazis but never existed before Bolsheviks with the territories being a part of the Russian state not for a few years, but for close to three centuries. What is most disturbing is that Russian Federation, again with its Thieving Class preoccupied with personal enrichment and consumption, does nothing to address the issue of non-occupation (or non-issue of fictional occupation) and to fight it head on.
And here comes the third thought, which is apparent to anyone who knows the situation in the Baltics well and is honest enough to speak about it.
The collective West, i.e. the semi-amorphous semi-entity led by the US as well as the new Holy Roman Empire (I won't repeat Voltaire's famous punch line) and the UK with its historic anti-Russian vendetta support Esths and Letts, Estonians and Latvians and their new fangled ethnic statelets. Support is diplomatic, propagandist and financial (three Baltic statelets are the largest per capita recipients of EU largess).
Paradoxically - and in contradiction to another myth of Putin's imperialism (grotesquely untrue though still propagated by most rabid Russophobes like Edward Lucas at the Economist), Estonian and Latvian ethnostates are supported by Moscow that channels Russia's commodity exports through their Russian- and Soviet-built ports, provides raw materials for re-export and pours money into their (mainly foreign-owned) banking system.
However no one supports the second group in those split societies - the Russians or the Russian speakers. Official Moscow may use occasionally them for domestic propaganda purposes but it would never do anything specific to alleviate their plight. As one mini oligarch (who has a summer estate in Estonia) told me in reference to the Russian junta and the Thieving class - the last thing they want is to quarrel.
In that respect the plight of Russian speakers is unprecedented, deprived of civil rights due to no fault of their own, subjected to daily harassment, linguistic and ethnic discrimination, they are totally ignored by both the West, the EU that absorbed Baltic satrapies, and the Russian Federation.
This article is full of half-truths, inaccuracies, and misunderstandings. I say this as a frequent visitor to Estonia, who has worked there, knows both Estonian and Russian, as well as members of the Estonophone and Russophone communities. I would like to debunk one claim, specifically that Russian speakers are discriminated against in Estonia to the extent of being deprived of citizenship. This is manifestly untrue.
ReplyDeleteEstonia has had a Russophone minority for centuries, this including a community of Old Believers living along the shore of Lake Peipus in the east. These people had roots in the pre-war republic and immediately became citizens upon the restoration of independence in 1991. At the same time, those residents whose presence in the countrywas solely a consequence of the Soviet demographic policies going under the cover term "strategic migration" that resulted in large numbers of Russian-speaking migrants being brought in to urban centers, found themselves with no citizenship. The Soviet Union had collapsed, and Estonia (along with Latvia) refused to grants its citizenship automatically to people who had no ties to the pre-war republic. Those with a Soviet migrant background were given the choice of applying for Estonian citizenship (a relatively simple but often resented process), applying for Russian (or other-post Soviet) citizenship and a residence permit, or effectively doing nothing and living in Estonia with no citizenship at all. A small number of people with ties to the Soviet military or security services were expelled, but each case was reviewed by the OSCE, with their decision being regarded by the Estonian authorities as final. Some people with a Soviet background opted to leave Estonia altogether, but the Estonian standard of living rose far more quickly and to a higher level than that of other post-Soviet countries, so most of them eventually decided to stay. The application for citizenship included a proof of the ability to speak and understand Estonian, something that was usually demonstrated by passing a test that, according to OSCE observers, approximately 85% of those participating passed on their first attempt. Nowadays the children of Russian-speaking families learn Estonian as part of their normal school work and no examinations are needed for them. As to citizenship, Estonia, unlike Russia, bases its citizenship on *jus sanguinis*, meaning that citizenship is handed down from parents to children rather than on the basis of having been born in the country (*jus soli*). The Estonian-born children of non-citizen parents can apply for citizenship when they reach the age of sixteen.
Gene, thank you for your comments and thank your passionate defense of Estonian Nazis and discrimination. No serious - I wrote a response to your comment but can't post it because apparently the form only accepts short comments. I have to figure out whether is it a feature, not a bug or to configure it.
ReplyDeleteFor now I'll send my comments in as a brand new post. Thanks.