[CCIP]

What's with the Germans? I love the Germans. I'm not going to go up to a random German and make them apologize for World War II. Nor will any sane Russian. I'm 1/4 German myself.

Russians are not the winners. They got equally badly treated under Stalin, just like everyone else - it wasn't based on nationality, unlike Hitler. How do I get it through to you that the Soviet system is NOT a Russian empire, it's an empire of the Bolschevik party, an organization which from the beginning was composed of a large variety of people of many nationalities. Oppression was based on dissent from it, and not simply on the fact that someone was Estonian, Russian or whatever. Quite reversely from the system the SS was part of, no?

Of course it's part of the "tragedy of small nations" - that's why it's a tragedy. That automatically implies that they were more or less inescapably screwed from the beginning. It doesn't mean I agree they can be run over. That's not meant to undermine their suffering, which I AGAIN - for at least the 3rd time in this thread - acknowledge and sympathise with.

Of course you don't "honor" the bad history - you don't put monuments glorifying it and put flowers on them - you make conclusions from it.

I understand why the Balts joined the Germans in 1941. And you should understand why any Russian doesn't like that. Because there were very distinct plans for the "Slavic Untermensch". The Soviets, by contrast, only wanted an "Estonian/Latvian/Lithuanian SSR".

Anyway, I don't understand why we're fighting here. It's not like I'm saying "Estonians = bad", or that Estonians must absolutely forget the Waffen SS - hell no! But the Germans have their own way of honoring Waffen SS - by having museums and monuments to the Holocaust. Why the Estonians don't follow suit, along with putting up monuments commemorating Soviet atrocities, is beyond me.