Black runners banned from Estonian marathon

[ВАЛТЕР]

http://rt.com/sport/saaremaa-marathon-estonia-racism-african-runners-697/

WTF Estonia...their government destroys monuments to ww2, allows SS to parade, and now this...:confused::cursing:




Meanwhile, one of the accused organizers, Tonu Vaher, said he is shocked by the criminal case as he could never believe that banning black athletes could be labeled as racism.

[DarkPast]

http://rt.com/sport/saaremaa-marathon-estonia-racism-african-runners-697/

WTF Estonia...their government destroys monuments to ww2, allows SS to parade, and now this...:confused::cursing:

Sad, but it's not like it surprised me - the Baltic states are well-known for tolerating fascism, and even upholding some ww2 Nazis as heroes. This is a result of a) people being disillusioned with communism after the fall of the USSR (and thus seeing fascism as the solution to capitalism's problems) and b) the ruling class using anti-communism as an excuse to oppress the Russian minority.

[Aurorus Ruber]

Meanwhile, one of the accused organizers, Tonu Vaher, said he is shocked by the criminal case as he could never believe that banning black athletes could be labeled as racism.

:mad::blink: I am truly at a complete loss for words here.

[Vendetta]

Meanwhile, one of the accused organizers, Tonu Vaher, said he is shocked by the criminal case as he could never believe that banning black athletes could be labeled as racism.

That's like...the very definition of racism.

[Seth]

Sad, but it's not like it surprised me - the Baltic states are well-known for tolerating fascism, and even upholding some ww2 Nazis as heroes. This is a result of a) people being disillusioned with communism after the fall of the USSR (and thus seeing fascism as the solution to capitalism's problems) and b) the ruling class using anti-communism as an excuse to oppress the Russian minority.

Actually it's just nationalism, nationalism, and more nationalism. The reason Nazi Germany is liked is because Germany has a lot of historical ties to the Baltics and the Germans were the ones who tried to save Estonia from teh horrrible jewcommunist ruskies. Who still seek to destroy Estonia today.

[tir1944]

Estonia is closest you can get to fascism in Europe.

[ВАЛТЕР]

:mad::blink: I am truly at a complete loss for words here.

To be honest I laughed at the sheer stupidity of the statement. It wasn't a "haha racism laugh" it was a "haha what the fuck is this world coming to?" laugh

[Stork]

I knew allot of Nazis from the Baltic states and I knew about the whole SS veteran parade thing but really, such overt racism anywhere in the EU is really surprising.

[tir1944]

The EU is always ready to immediately jump on other's chauvinism but it doesn't give a single fuck about overtly racist policies against Russians(20% of the whole population in Latvia) in the Baltic.
And they talk about human rights...:rolleyes:

[Craig_J]

I don't know much about the Balkans, other than the Yugoslav wars. I knew there was a big problem in that region with "ethnic cleansing" but I thought that kind of thing was just because of Islamophobia.

I don't know much abotu Estonia and up till now I had no idea of the commendation they gave to Nazi's.

I notice people in this thead have said that "Estonia is the close to fascism" and that "Estonia has racist policies"

Could someone please kindly explain what these polices are and how Estonia is close to facism?

[Sentinel]

I don't know much about the Balkans, other than the Yugoslav wars. I knew there was a big problem in that region with "ethnic cleansing" but I thought that kind of thing was just because of Islamophobia.

I don't know much abotu Estonia and up till now I had no idea of the commendation they gave to Nazi's.


Estonia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonia) is not a Balkan but a Baltic state. I'm not very familiar with their laws and policies but Seth probably pretty much hit the nail on the head about the origins of the pro-nazi and anti-communist sentiments amongst some estonians.

It's the same story as with finnish anti-communism; USSR under Stalin annexed the Baltic states (and tried to annex Finland) as a part of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, ie in agreement with fascist Germany. But then, when Germany attacked the USSR in 1941, it allied with Finland and also used the nationalist sentiment in the Baltic states to it's advantage.

It's the legacy of these events that we are witnessing.

[dodger]

I don't know much about the Balkans, other than the Yugoslav wars. I knew there was a big problem in that region with "ethnic cleansing" but I thought that kind of thing was just because of Islamophobia.

I don't know much abotu Estonia and up till now I had no idea of the commendation they gave to Nazi's.

I notice people in this thead have said that "Estonia is the close to fascism" and that "Estonia has racist policies"

Could someone please kindly explain what these polices are and how Estonia is close to facism?

This piece by Seumas Milne...... was in the Guardian last year.

"Fed by the revival of the nationalist right in eastern Europe and a creeping historical revisionism that tries to equate Nazism and communism, some western historians and commentators have seized on the 70th anniversary of Hitler's invasion of Poland this month to claim the Soviet Union was equally to blame for the outbreak of war. Stalin was "Hitler's accomplice", the Economist insisted, after Russian and Polish politicians traded accusations over the events of the late 1930s.
In his introduction to this week's Guardian history of the war, the neoconservative historian Niall Ferguson declared that Stalin was "as much an aggressor as Hitler". Last month, the ostensibly more liberal Orlando Figes went further, insisting the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact was "the licence for the Holocaust".
Given that the Soviet Union played the decisive military role in Hitler's defeat at the cost of 25 million dead, it's scarcely surprising that Russians are outraged by such accusations. When the Russian president Dmitry Medvedev last week denounced attempts to draw parallels between the role of the Nazis and the Soviet Union as a "cynical lie", he wasn't just speaking for his government, but the whole country – and a good deal of the rest of the world besides.
There's no doubt that the pact of August 1939 was a shocking act of realpolitik by the state that had led the campaign against fascism since before the Spanish civil war. You can argue about how Stalin used it to buy time, his delusions about delaying the Nazi onslaught, or whether the Soviet occupation of the mainly Ukrainian and Byelorussian parts of Poland was, as Churchill maintained at the time, "necessary for the safety of Russia against the Nazi menace".
But to claim that without the pact there would have been no war is simply absurd – and, in the words of the historian Mark Mazower, "too tainted by present day political concerns to be taken seriously". Hitler had given the order to attack and occupy Poland much earlier. As fellow historian Geoff Roberts puts it, the pact was an "instrument of defence, not aggression".
That was a good deal less true of the previous year's Munich agreement, in which British and French politicians dismembered Czechoslovakia at the Nazi dictator's pleasure. The one pact that could conceivably have prevented war, a collective security alliance with the Soviet Union, was in effect blocked by the appeaser Chamberlain and an authoritarian Polish government that refused to allow Soviet troops on Polish soil.
Poland had signed its own non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany and seized Czech territory, which puts last week's description by the Polish president Lech Kaczynski of a Soviet "stab in the back" in perspective. The case against the Anglo-French appeasers and the Polish colonels' regime over the failure to prevent war is a good deal stronger than against the Soviet Union, which perhaps helps to explain the enthusiasm for the new revisionism in both parts of the continent.
But across eastern Europe, the Baltic republics and the Ukraine, the drive to rewrite history is being used to relativise Nazi crimes and rehabilitate collaborators. At the official level, it has focused on a campaign to turn August 23 – the anniversary of the non-aggression pact – into a day of commemoration for the victims of communism and Nazism.
In July that was backed by the Organisation of Security and Cooperation in Europe, following a similar vote in the European parliament and a declaration signed by Vaclav Havel and others branding "communism and Nazism as a common legacy" of Europe that should be jointly commemorated because of "substantial similarities".
That east Europeans should want to remember the deportations and killings of "class enemies" by the Soviet Union during and after the war is entirely understandable. So is their pressure on Russia to account, say, for the killing of Polish officers at Katyn – even if Soviet and Russian acknowledgment of Stalin's crimes already goes far beyond, for example, any such apologies by Britain or France for the crimes of colonialism.
But the pretence that Soviet repression reached anything like the scale or depths of Nazi savagery – or that the postwar "enslavement" of eastern Europe can be equated with wartime Nazi genocide – is a mendacity that tips towards Holocaust denial. It is certainly not a mistake that could have been made by the Auschwitz survivors liberated by the Red Army in 1945.
The real meaning of the attempt to equate Nazi genocide with Soviet repression is clearest in the Baltic republics, where collaboration with SS death squads and direct participation in the mass murder of Jews was at its most extreme, and politicians are at pains to turn perpetrators into victims. Veterans of the Latvian Legion of the Waffen-SS now parade through Riga, Vilnius's Museum of Genocide Victims barely mentions the 200,000 Lithuanian Jews murdered in the Holocaust and Estonian parliamentarians honour those who served the Third Reich as "fighters for independence".
Most repulsively of all, while rehabilitating convicted Nazi war criminals, the state prosecutor in Lithuania – a member of the EU and Nato – last year opened a war crimes investigation into four Lithuanian Jewish resistance veterans who fought with Soviet partisans: a case only abandoned for lack of evidence. As Efraim Zuroff, veteran Nazi hunter and director of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, puts it: "People need to wake up to what is going on. This attempt to create a false symmetry between communism and the Nazi genocide is aimed at covering up these countries' participation in mass murder."
As the political heirs of the Nazis' collaborators in eastern Europe gain strength on the back of growing unemployment and poverty, and anti-Semitism and racist violence against Roma grow across the region, the current indulgence of historical falsehoods about the second world war can only spread this poison."

I hope the above is of interest...........

[tachosomoza]

Keep in mind, a lot of fascists don't consider people of African descent "human", per se.

[Ocean Seal]

Estonia's the place that is constantly sabre-rattling with Russia and so on. Seriously, I begin to wonder what's wrong with these militant anti-Russian anti-communists. What strange people.

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

I knew allot of Nazis from the Baltic states and I knew about the whole SS veteran parade thing but really, such overt racism anywhere in the EU is really surprising.

Yeah, because racism is only for rednecks in the U.S. right?

Europe is rife with racism, prejudice and national chauvinism -- not the least among leftists who look down on their nose at workers over here and say "at least we're not as bad as America."

[Zostrianos]

Actually it's just nationalism, nationalism, and more nationalism. The reason Nazi Germany is liked is because Germany has a lot of historical ties to the Baltics and the Germans were the ones who tried to save Estonia from teh horrrible jewcommunist ruskies. Who still seek to destroy Estonia today.

I still can't get my head around how Neonazism is becoming so widespread in eastern Europe and Russia, considering what the Nazis did to most of those countries they occupied. And even the few countries that they didn't oppress (like Estonia) would have suffered the same fate as the others. The Nazis took advantage of anti-Soviet sentiment to facilitate their occupations, but as soon as they were settled, the people learned the hard way that their "liberators" were even more brutal than the Soviets. Nazi terror was far more brutal than that inflicted by Stalin; when you look at the historical accounts, the Soviets usually preferred to do their dirty work away from the public eye, arresting people and deporting them somewhere or killing them in the woods. The Nazis on the other hand, took pleasure in showing their terror in public, carrying out mass executions in town squares, and wiping out entire towns and villages as a response to any dissent or anti-Nazi rebellion.

[Veovis]

Keep in mind, a lot of fascists don't consider people of African descent "human", per se.

Then fascists should keep in mind that if you go back far enough, everyone is of African descent.

[Smyg]

Plus, sub-saharan Africans are far more racially pure than anyone else, lacking neanderthal heritage and all.

[mykittyhasaboner]

Yeah, because racism is only for rednecks in the U.S. right?

Europe is rife with racism, prejudice and national chauvinism -- not the least among leftists who look down on their nose at workers over here and say "at least we're not as bad as America."

In some cases, it can be a lot worse in Europe. One only needs to look at what it's like for Turkish, North African, Arabic immigrants or the Roma people to see how racist people in Europe can be.

This instance of banning black runners or assholes throwing bananas at black footballers is even more telling.

[tachosomoza]

Then fascists should keep in mind that if you go back far enough, everyone is of African descent.

Fascists aren't known for learning from history or being necessarily intelligent, are they?

[Stork]

Yeah, because racism is only for rednecks in the U.S. right?

Europe is rife with racism, prejudice and national chauvinism -- not the least among leftists who look down on their nose at workers over here and say "at least we're not as bad as America."
That's not what I was implying at all. What I meant was that institutional racism this overt is not common in the western world.

[Seth]

I still can't get my head around how Neonazism is becoming so widespread in eastern Europe and Russia, considering what the Nazis did to most of those countries they occupied. And even the few countries that they didn't oppress (like Estonia) would have suffered the same fate as the others. The Nazis took advantage of anti-Soviet sentiment to facilitate their occupations, but as soon as they were settled, the people learned the hard way that their "liberators" were even more brutal than the Soviets. Nazi terror was far more brutal than that inflicted by Stalin; when you look at the historical accounts, the Soviets usually preferred to do their dirty work away from the public eye, arresting people and deporting them somewhere or killing them in the woods. The Nazis on the other hand, took pleasure in showing their terror in public, carrying out mass executions in town squares, and wiping out entire towns and villages as a response to any dissent or anti-Nazi rebellion.

For countries like Ukraine, the nazis were something their grandparents suffered from. The Soviets are a more recent memory, and they view socialism as something that destroyed their national dignity or whatever. Post-Soviet capitalism was an unmitigated disaster for the vast majority of the people, and of course there is no shortage of other crises that happen under capitalism, so naturally someone has to be blamed for this mess. In true nationalist fashion, no one looks at their own honest, patriotic, hard working, caring bourgeoisie, immigrants and minorities get the lion's share of blame. Nazism or an ignorant version thereof is a convenient channel for this blame. No one bothers to research the real nazis, so you get weird things like Slavic nazis even though the nazis had genocidal plans for nearly everything east of the Urals. On the other hand in Russia, you have right wing nationalists that worship the USSR as the peak of Russian might or whatever and want to roll everything back to 1991. Then you have the Zyuganovites who are basically a mix between a pensioner's movement, confused nationalists, and Brezhnevites.

The nazis inflicted so much more suffering than anything anyone else did, but the Third Reich was so long ago and nationalism is so dominant that nazism has found a niche to take root in.

[El Louton]

1936 Olympics anyone?

[Craig_J]

I hope the above is of interest...........

Indeed it was. :D I found the article very interesting to read and it's educated me a bit more so thank you for your help Comrade!