I thought I would share my little story of "online relationships". I have a profile up at a site that caters to a gay demographic, and on there I've got about like 12-13 pictures and a little blurb.
Anyway, so one day I get a message on there which read something like: "Why are you using a dead guy's pictures?". This puzzled me so I replied that in fact I'm using my own pictures. His reply to that "No, the pictures you are using are of a guy named such-and-such and he lives in [a town like 26 states over] and he recently passed away and you suck for using his pictures".
Anyway, I won't go into details here, but I offered to prove to him that I was the person in the pictures, not because I felt like any particular need to prove it, but because I felt like he needed some closure. And so we did (webcam does the trick nicely).
Anyway, then the story came out - he'd been talking to someone on craigslist of all places who posted an ad with my pictures. They got into it quite heavily (though obviously they never met), talking every day and such. Finally, when this other guy got bored of the game he invented a cyber-death and had his "sister" email the original guy to tell him that her brother is dead.
Long story short, it was interesting to examine this situation. The poor man, he seemed totally crushed. He even told me at the end that he could never really get to know me as a person, since he's tied my pictures to whatever personality the liar invented. For my part, I also felt very bad - I'd almost say guilty - even though I did nothing wrong. And I really pitied the guy - his emotions were wracked in a very real way, even though the entire thing occurred online, and even though, let's face it, he should have known better.
How about we turn down the emotional pitch and try and discuss this like adults? I'm not trying to justify anything, I'm just trying to explain it.
Perhaps it would be a useful exercise for you to try and imagine the situation from the Russian point of view. You've got a tiny nation on your border, which suddenly decides to remove a monument to your soldiers which died trying to liberate this country from the Nazis, thereby tacitly giving an endorsement to its own quisling past. What do you feel is an appropriate reaction?
The shameful thing for us is that we've turned a blind eye the rising tides of fascism in the Baltic republics because of their strategic importance. (We did not extend the same courtesy to, for instance, Croatia, but thanks to that Croatia's native fascist tendencies have been reduced. In the Baltics, we've merely stoked them).
I think your point about "zero oppression of the Russian minority" is mistaken. If I were to say, there is no oppression of the African-American minority in the States, after all there are black politicians, black business leaders, I even had a black boyfriend, or whatever, that is missing the point.
Clearly there is institutional and systemic discrimination against Russians in Estonia. Just as a for instance, not a single member of PM Ansip's cabinet is an ethnic Russian. It would be unimaginable for a Canadian cabinet to contain no French Canadians, even though they compose a smaller proportion of the Canadian population than Russians do in Estonia. In fact, it's a furthering of this uncomortable truth that Estonia's political class is composed largely of the descendants of various Nazi collaborators who were driven out by the Soviets in 1942, but who continued fostering their ideas in exile, then returned in full force once independence was achieved. Of course this last thing was not so uncommon in the entire Eastern bloc, but was more heavily scrutinised by the West in some countries (Croatia) than in others (Estonia).
Finally, let's not forget the realpolitik of this situation - Estonia cannot possibly hope to take such a historical-revisionist view of its neighbour with impunity. If some small Central American nation were to erect a monument to Castro or something, you can bet the American reaction would be swift and decisive. Russia's small neighbours , as you call them, cannot seriously expect to take overtly anti-Russian actions and then complain about the inevitable backlash.
Please don't misconstrue this as my endorsement of Russia's heavy-handed foreign policy approach. I just feel like the Estonian side has been well represented in the Western media, and Russia's not at all.
I think a lot of people here are making a lot of judgements based on a very narrow and incomplete knowledge of the problem. Why would Estonia make the decision to remove the monument to the Soviet unknown soldier? After all, the Soviet army liberated Estonia from Nazi Germany in 1942. But it's an uncomfortable truth for Estonians that they collaborated very readily with their Nazi occupiers, and contributed to the many crimes perpetrated against Jews, Russians and other Slavs, etc. So the Russian minority (a sizable minority - on the order of 1/3 of the population of Estonia is Russian), feeling already discriminated against on a linguistic basis, is additionally frustrated by the Estonian political elite's attempt to rewrite history, treating the Soviet occupation as an enslavement, and the Nazi one as something akin to a liberation.
Furthermore, there is simply no evidence that this response is orchestrated by the Russian government. In fact, they have much more effective and painful measures of retribution (such as shutting off the gas valves), which makes one wonder why they would bother with something so petty as DDoS. This is much more likely a spontaneous reaction by Russian hackers sympathising with their Estonian compatriots, but more to the point, it's an illustrative example of what kind of reactions are produced when you deny a minority the means to determine their lives through democratic processes.
A useful example in how sometimes, the little guy is not necessarily the good guy.
Slashdot Mirror
Why bother making a comment if you don't know the language? Ile sans fil = literally island without wires, ie wireless island.
I thought I would share my little story of "online relationships". I have a profile up at a site that caters to a gay demographic, and on there I've got about like 12-13 pictures and a little blurb.
Anyway, so one day I get a message on there which read something like: "Why are you using a dead guy's pictures?". This puzzled me so I replied that in fact I'm using my own pictures. His reply to that "No, the pictures you are using are of a guy named such-and-such and he lives in [a town like 26 states over] and he recently passed away and you suck for using his pictures".
Anyway, I won't go into details here, but I offered to prove to him that I was the person in the pictures, not because I felt like any particular need to prove it, but because I felt like he needed some closure. And so we did (webcam does the trick nicely).
Anyway, then the story came out - he'd been talking to someone on craigslist of all places who posted an ad with my pictures. They got into it quite heavily (though obviously they never met), talking every day and such. Finally, when this other guy got bored of the game he invented a cyber-death and had his "sister" email the original guy to tell him that her brother is dead.
Long story short, it was interesting to examine this situation. The poor man, he seemed totally crushed. He even told me at the end that he could never really get to know me as a person, since he's tied my pictures to whatever personality the liar invented. For my part, I also felt very bad - I'd almost say guilty - even though I did nothing wrong. And I really pitied the guy - his emotions were wracked in a very real way, even though the entire thing occurred online, and even though, let's face it, he should have known better.
How about we turn down the emotional pitch and try and discuss this like adults? I'm not trying to justify anything, I'm just trying to explain it.
Perhaps it would be a useful exercise for you to try and imagine the situation from the Russian point of view. You've got a tiny nation on your border, which suddenly decides to remove a monument to your soldiers which died trying to liberate this country from the Nazis, thereby tacitly giving an endorsement to its own quisling past. What do you feel is an appropriate reaction?
The shameful thing for us is that we've turned a blind eye the rising tides of fascism in the Baltic republics because of their strategic importance. (We did not extend the same courtesy to, for instance, Croatia, but thanks to that Croatia's native fascist tendencies have been reduced. In the Baltics, we've merely stoked them).
I think your point about "zero oppression of the Russian minority" is mistaken. If I were to say, there is no oppression of the African-American minority in the States, after all there are black politicians, black business leaders, I even had a black boyfriend, or whatever, that is missing the point.
Clearly there is institutional and systemic discrimination against Russians in Estonia. Just as a for instance, not a single member of PM Ansip's cabinet is an ethnic Russian. It would be unimaginable for a Canadian cabinet to contain no French Canadians, even though they compose a smaller proportion of the Canadian population than Russians do in Estonia. In fact, it's a furthering of this uncomortable truth that Estonia's political class is composed largely of the descendants of various Nazi collaborators who were driven out by the Soviets in 1942, but who continued fostering their ideas in exile, then returned in full force once independence was achieved. Of course this last thing was not so uncommon in the entire Eastern bloc, but was more heavily scrutinised by the West in some countries (Croatia) than in others (Estonia).
Finally, let's not forget the realpolitik of this situation - Estonia cannot possibly hope to take such a historical-revisionist view of its neighbour with impunity. If some small Central American nation were to erect a monument to Castro or something, you can bet the American reaction would be swift and decisive. Russia's small neighbours , as you call them, cannot seriously expect to take overtly anti-Russian actions and then complain about the inevitable backlash.
Please don't misconstrue this as my endorsement of Russia's heavy-handed foreign policy approach. I just feel like the Estonian side has been well represented in the Western media, and Russia's not at all.
I think a lot of people here are making a lot of judgements based on a very narrow and incomplete knowledge of the problem. Why would Estonia make the decision to remove the monument to the Soviet unknown soldier? After all, the Soviet army liberated Estonia from Nazi Germany in 1942. But it's an uncomfortable truth for Estonians that they collaborated very readily with their Nazi occupiers, and contributed to the many crimes perpetrated against Jews, Russians and other Slavs, etc. So the Russian minority (a sizable minority - on the order of 1/3 of the population of Estonia is Russian), feeling already discriminated against on a linguistic basis, is additionally frustrated by the Estonian political elite's attempt to rewrite history, treating the Soviet occupation as an enslavement, and the Nazi one as something akin to a liberation. Furthermore, there is simply no evidence that this response is orchestrated by the Russian government. In fact, they have much more effective and painful measures of retribution (such as shutting off the gas valves), which makes one wonder why they would bother with something so petty as DDoS. This is much more likely a spontaneous reaction by Russian hackers sympathising with their Estonian compatriots, but more to the point, it's an illustrative example of what kind of reactions are produced when you deny a minority the means to determine their lives through democratic processes. A useful example in how sometimes, the little guy is not necessarily the good guy.