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*See also, Baltic neo-Nazism simmers
April 28 2007
Estonians have removed the statue called the Bronze Soldier commemorating Soviet losses fighting Hitler in World War II. Apparently 14 bodies were underneath the statue. Estonia arrested 800 people in three days and killed one Russian citizen in the fighting,(1) which Estonia knew very well would break out as soon as it touched that statue.
Estonia closed its embassy in Russia, because the situation was too tense with Russian protestors outside. Russian grocers started a boycott of Estonian goods.(2)
Estonia is a country of 1.3 million and in recent years, the Estonians with a Nazi-sympathizing past have gained dominance there.
"The image of the Estonian Nazi continues to be furthered by such acts as the country's opposition, unique in Europe, to the banning of the swastika as a political symbol, the erection in 2005 of a monument to soldiers of the Nazi SS, and a well-circulated photo of a member of the volunteer militia sporting swastika earrings on national independence day."(3)That is according to someone taking a less than admirable stance floating above the two sides.
Increasingly in the united $tates and Eastern Europe, we see a crypto-Nazi position taken. It started with propaganda that communists are the same or worse than fascists--an approach epitomized by the Black Book of Communism that for some reason people in Europe took seriously.
It is clear that a large swath of Amerikans and Eastern Europeans would not have fought Hitler had they had the chance in World War II. The crypto-Nazis do not have to come out for Hitler in the open: they just pretend that there were two equally to blame sides or that the Soviet side was worse.
MIM has no sympathy for the small nation nationalism in the geography between Russia and Germany if that nationalism led to pretending there was neutral ground in World War II or if that nationalism led to supporting Nazis. If Russian imperialists were to invade Estonia in 2007 to set the situation right, MIM could not really object. The best argument against such an invasion would be that Putin is also fascist and the bloodletting would sacrifice the blood of exploited people. It would be much better for Estonians to stop being petty-bourgeois nationalists as if there were three sides in World War II, and not two. At the same time, although there would be proletarian bloodletting, we cannot really expect the proletariat to stand around with direct moves for Nazism afoot. It would be hard to say anything would be too extreme to root out Nazism in 2007.
We fully agree with Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov and members of parliament who found the situation outrageous: "'I cannot understand it when people try to lay blame for historical events on somebody, or try to compare communism with Nazism.'"(4)
The nationalism of the exploited sometimes drags in the bourgeoisie. The president of Estonia actually tried to defuse the situation. Likewise, Putin faces trouble from his own proletariat that still remembers the huge loss of population at the hands of genocidal Nazis.
The wicked Nazi-leaning press for years painted the subject of World War II over and over again as something only the Jews cared about. Recent coverage by the Western media paints the subject as one of just the Russian ethnicity people. For example, the Boston Globe paints it as Russia "not confronting" its communist past.(5) Likewise the Albuquerque Tribune titled its article about a World War II monument as "Estonia confronts communist history." In this way, these media pander to the most backward elements of Eastern Europe, which also had many people who joined the Allied side in World War II. We hear today that just the Jews and Russians opposed Hitler, thanks to the dumb media. However, the truth is that Hitler slated non-Aryan peoples for extinction and he killed off Slavic people in general.
Germany's Merkel called Putin about the Estonia situation and the missile provocation by the united $tates in Poland and Czechoslavakia.(6)
MIM centers its work on the oppressed nations facing imperialism, but this does not mean that every political thought and action of a small or non-imperialist nation is correct. Lately, post-modernism has taken over the question to paint Estonians with Nazi-supporting ancestors as just another group of people with just another "point of view." 50,000 Soviet troops died liberating Estonia, and more than 20 million Soviet citizens overall died in the fight against Hitler. Estonia had no chance in hell of liberating itself from the Nazis alone, so any talk about a "third side" is sheer nonsense designed to cover for the Nazis.
Imperialist country people typically lack realism--intentionally or not--in understanding the extent that they exploit the labor of other people; thus they operate in denial of this fact. In this case of Estonia which is not imperialist, there was no realism to the view that there were three sides in World War II. No nation between Russia and Germany succeeded in holding out. If France could not hold out and if Poland had officers running about shooting Jews instead of Germans, it is clear that the independence claims of an Estonia are a joke, the thinnest of Nazi disguises. Nazis ended up overthrowing most of the governments of Eastern Europe from within, with the cover provided by three-sides-blather. The nationalism of the oppressed nations has reality only in alliance against imperialism. The nationalism of oppressed nations against each other has no use except to the imperialists. If someone is claiming that there are three sides, that claim has to be held up to scrutiny for reality of content. Vice President Dick Cheney is now famous for deriding "reality-based" intellectuals,(7) but even he as a leader of the most powerful country fell to the ground eventually. The greatest reality of independence of oppressed nations will occur in joint action, joint dictatorship of the proletariat of the oppressed nations over imperialism.
Notes:
1. The Washington Times is a crazy Korean cultist paper, but we
appreciate the version of a UPI story that it ran.
http://washingtontimes.com/upi/20070428-113720-4726 ;
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6599937.stm
2.
http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2007/04/28/ap3665027.html
3. Darin
Foster,
http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_view.asp?article_class
=18&no=347142&rel_no=1
4. http://english.pravda.ru/news/world/90633-1/
5. http://www.boston.com/news/world/europe/articles/2007/04/24/eastern_europe_confronts_its_communist_past/
6. http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,2461168,00.html
7. "It described a meeting in 2002 with a "senior adviser" to Bush:
"The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-
based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that
solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I
nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and
empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works
anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we
create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality --
judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new
realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort
out.'"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2006/06/19/BL2006061900578_pf.html