Friends,
You should be aware that when you do business in Estonia or buy anything made in Estonia or visit it as tourist you support an apartheid state and fund a new generation of European Nazis. Please spend a few minutes to read through this letterto the end. Your voice, that of a free human being, is very important in preventing the new rise of ethnic fascism in Europe.
Estonia has recently joined the EU and the NATO, two supposedly democratic institutions, but it practices apartheid on the scale that would put old South Africa to shame. Estonia has disenfranchised one third of its population because of their wrong ethnicity and for years has been doing its best to rehabilitate Nazi war crimes and its perpetrators. The US and the EU and other so-called democracies prefer not to pay any attention to the mischievous antics of their naughty Baltic protégé. This demonstrative lack of concern on the part of the US and the EU does not cancel the fact that Estonia carries out an actual policy of ethnic and racial discrimination against one third of its population. Most of the victims of the apartheid policies in Estonia are Russian speakers who were born in what is now Estonia or have lived there for decades. They are denied citizenship on the ridiculous legal pretext that they are not descendants of the ethnically pure authoritarian statelet that was founded by Bolsheviks and ethnic nationalists in 1918 and came to its end through a referendum in 1940. Estonia managed to exterminate most of its ethnic minorities (though Germans as is usually the case got all the blame) even before Germans arrived on the scene, it emerged as an ethnically pure state in 1941. In practice it means that Russian speakers (not necessarily ethnic Russians but people of diverse backgrounds) are stripped of their civil rights because they were born since if their relatives stayed in or ventured into Nazi Estonia during the war years, they would had most certainly been exterminated. Those few people of wrong ethnicity who were saved from physical destruction survived only thanks to the arrival of the Soviet army. Instead of confronting its ugly past, Ethnonazi state of Estonia glorifies SS legionnaires who exterminated Russian villagers, gipsies and Jews in concentration camps, stages elaborate Nazi pageants and erects monuments to honor SS butchers. Old Nazis are now called freedom fighters and are routinely invited to official events. Estonian President shakes blood-soaked hands of old SS men and Estonian ministers call them heroes of Estonia.
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While glorifying the Nazi past the Estonian government aggressively fights against any memory of Soviet soldiers, millions of whom paid the highest price for the right of Europe, East and West, North and South, to live free of Nazi plague, free of ethnic discrimination and officialized racism, and saved millions of individuals of wrong ethnicity or inappropriate political views from physical destruction in Nazi death camps. The self-appointed guardian of democracy - the United States of America and the European Union, its tireless continental champion, continue to ignore resurgent official Nazi malfeasance in Estonia; the mischief seems to be fine as long as activities are kept anti-Russian in nature and are restricted to the confines of the rogue Baltic statelet. Recently the ethnocratic Estonian regime overstepped the last limits of decency, whatever little of it had to begin with, and possibly broke domestic and international law. On April 26, in spite of pending court hearings, numerous public petitions, appeals by veteran organizations, pleas by neighboring Russian government, motions by relatives of fallen Soviet soldiers, an effective ban by the mayor of Tallinn on any immediate excavation near or at the memorial, pledges made by Estonian prime mister, former Communist functionary and the hammer of dissidents, Andrus Ansip himself not to do anything with the monument before May 9 (10) Victory Day, absolutely illegally, central Estonian authorities came out in force: uniformed police and ministry of defense vandals desecrated the memorial and like thieves stole the monument in the middle of the night. The Estonian ministry of the defense was in charge of the grave-digging disgrace. The significance of this act was not lost on the Russian-speaking population or on people of neighboring Russia: the Estonian army itself, the direct spiritual descendant of ethnic SS formations who were bloodied and defeated by live antifascist soldiers now moved in to fight with the victors’ bones. For Russians who live in Estonia, demolition of the monument (or as the Nazis call it – removal to another location), and the manner by whom, when and how it was carried out was an insult that can hardly be forgiven or forgotten. It was also an insult to the memory of their fathers and grandfathers, and an affront to the memory of all those who died in the battle with the Nazism - from Yugoslavia to the Baltic and from France to Norway.
Despite massive official campaign of threats and intimidation, some brave young Russian speaking residents came to a peaceful demonstration to protest the desecration of the war memorial. In response Estonian authorities used special police forces and the army, the spiritual descendant of the old SS, to suppress and disperse the protesters. Without any reason or provocation uniformed Estonian Ethnonazi thugs fired rubber bullets into the crowd at point blank range, used water cannon and tear-gas, threw smoke and noise grenades, - all the goodies generously supplied to needy Estonia by its caring democratic mentors, then police moved in to club women and teenagers indiscriminately in an attack which ferocity brought back memories of Nazi savagery and of ethnic SS units the Nazis employed for their punitive expeditions against lower race civilians.
During indiscriminate onslaught, first ethnic Russian was killed and dozens were maimed. In the ensuing flight from the scene some looting indeed occurred provoked by police provocateurs. Ethnonazi forces later moved in with arrests. Almost a thousand people were detained, most were arrested only because of their Russian ethnicity or wrong looks. Those confirmed Russian were transported to a harbor warehouse as if they were livestock where police proceeded to beat them, some were beaten almost to death, kept in unsanitary conditions, chained or bound together without access to water or toilets. Antifascist activists were subjected to torture (physical and chemical: the new generation of Estonian torturers has the benefit of receiving instruction from more democratic instructors). Later on, the local human rights supervisory agency represented by an ethnic Estonian loyal to the current ethnocratic regime and infamous for his wild Russophobe outbursts, inspected the blood stained improvised detention facility and declared that everything was normal.
Is it normal? You decide. In Europe there is a statelet which the EU declares is certifiably democratic. Under watchful protection of NATO this rabid regime of ethnic apartheid denies one third of its population most elementary rights – including the most basic and essential right of speaking and writing publicly in their own language, disenfranchises one third of its population on a most laughable legal technicality, and in a posture of racial superiority, sure of itself, insolent, giving the appearance of total impunity, commits crimes on a daily basis – from grave desecration to warrantless arrests and property searches. It murders, maims, beats up, arrests, tortures its people because of their wrong ethnicity. Brussels and Washington look the other way. Corrupt corporate media reports falsehoods and spreads disinformation about marauding vandals.
This is disgrace. The shame is not only on the US and EU governments which abetted, sponsored and nourished Ethnonazi statelet as a strategic asset and supposedly an irritant to Russia. The shame is on every European and American who keeps silent today for whatever reason he or she may have. Keeping silent, because perhaps he or she thinks Estonia is small and can act as naughtily as it wishes or that somehow Estonian authorities have a special right to discriminate against "dirty Russian" or may be you hold a belief Russian women and teenagers should be taught a lesson with rubber bullets and police batons for some historic event. Or you think that this is not your business as Estonia is far away and you have no connection with anyone who is Russian or Jewish or lives in the Baltics.
There is a poem about Nazism by the German priest Martin Niemoeller, the most known version of which reads in English translation :
They came first for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me,
and by that time no one was left to speak up.
Today, new European Nazis, the Ethnonazis, with blessing and encouragement of their benefactors in Brussels and Washington, came for Russians or, as the case is, just for Russian speakers. Other Europeans keep silent or perhaps even silently approve of the dirty deed. 1000 people were thrown into a detention camp because of their ethnicity. So what? Is it a small camp? On the scale of today’s Italy Estonian crime would mean construction of an improvised concentration camp with 50 000 inmates. Translated into the proportions of the United States the same concentration camp would have 200 000 detainees plus the appropriate number of guards and torturers. As the fight against civil rights shifts into high gear not just in the Baltics but even across the Atlantic, you cannot remain absolutely sure about the future, perhaps one day your owb home-grown Nazis, no matter how they would call themselves, inspired by your silence about the crimes of modern Estonian ethnic fascism, crimes committed in the name of ethnic justice or some chimera like promoting patriotism or exporting abstract freedom, will come for you. And then there will be no one to speak up. Because Russians, who once rescued Europe from the spiritual predecessors of today’s Estonian state, will never pay again the same price for the lives of those who are silent today.
What can you do? Not much but probably enough to stop the Nazis. Don’t buy anything in Estonia. Don't do any kind of business with Estonian companies and organizations. Don't invest in Estonian stocks. Don't travel to Estonia as a tourist. If you are American, write to your representative in the House of Representatives and ask why is the government wasting your tax dollars on support of Estonian Nazis? Demand that Estonia is kicked out of NATO before it becomes a liability to America and the rest of the world.
If you are an EU national, contact your parliamentary representative. Write to the foreign ministry and ask what is going on – how come Estonia is in the European Union? Is it some kind of mistake or a practical joke? There should be no place for ethnocracies in the family of civilized nations lest in the EU. Stop vast amounts of EU aid coming to the coffers of the Ethnonazi regime. Forward this letter to your local newspaper with a follow up note: why do they never report about apartheid, linguistic and ethnic discrimination in Estonia?
And at the very least please forward this letter to your friends and colleagues.
Thank you.
International Committee for the Baltic States without Nazism
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