Attack on Estonia's Defense Ministry.

[Bright]

http://rt.com/news/estonia-defense-ministry-shooting/

In short, an Armenian-Estonian lawyer in financial straits, Karen Drambjan, armed himself with firearms and small explosives, started shooting at the Ministry building and was shot dead with no harm to his two hostages.

The guy made no demands and didn't put forward a manifesto, so his motives remain a mystery. I have no doubt he was a lone nut, but I do find the political background of the incident interesting. Drambjan had made failed political bids for two leftist parties, the United Left Party and its predecessor the Constitution Party, which had actually been marked as a tool for political manipulation on part of Russia by Estonia's Security Police.

He also had very extremist and nonsensical views of Estonia's relationship with its minority groups (calling the government "fascist," etc.) but I suppose this does once again demonstrate how strained the ethnic landscape is over here.

It would be rather odd if he was inspired by the Norway shootings, since he and Breivik seem to be just about complete opposites...

[Sidewinder]

The same page has links to articles describing Estonians as supposedly "proud" of Nazi collaborators, and Russia complaining about this. I imagine Stas Bush has something to say about the former Soviet Socialist Republics' attitudes towards their Union- or at least, to Russia.

[K. A. Pital]

To make things clear - Estonia behaves with Russians like Zimbabwe behaves with white settlers - they're colonizers. And thus a reverse-apartheid by the colonized against the colonizers is justified - at least for Estonians and their government. Nationalism and neo-Nazism is on the rise in Estonia, but I wouldn't say they're much more fascist than Russia. They're all cryptofascist oligarchic fuckholes. Plague on both of their houses.

I must say that SS marches inside a EU member nation make me cringe and laugh about Europe's collective pretense at civilization and culture.

[CJvR]

The same page has links to articles describing Estonians as supposedly "proud" of Nazi collaborators, and Russia complaining about this.

Well Estonia, and the Baltics in general, don't have the same obvious relation with Nazi aggression as most of the rest of Europe. In Estonia the Nazis were liberators from the Soviet occupation and given how the 3rd Reich was organized most Estonians willing to fight to keep their country free from the Soviets would have been sucked into the Waffen SS which served as a kind of Nazi Foreign Legion (check out it's OoB). Unfortunately for Estonia both the Commies and the Nazis couldn't loose WWII so it was back to Soviet occupation for two more generations.

[K. A. Pital]

People forget to mention how Estonian, Latvian, Ukrainian, Russian nationalists mass-murdered Jews as part of "liberation from the USSR" thing.

The French Foreign Legion was hideous enough an institution; the Nazi version of such a structure was even more horrifying.

[Big Orange]

Here's an interesting blog article, Myth, Violence, Genocide, by historian Christopher Hale who has published a book on the topic of E. Europeans being deeply involved in Nazi atrocities inflicted on minority/political targets called Hitler's Foreign Executioners: Europe's Dirty Secret.