So I was reading through @sunaurus@lemm.ee 's comment about Estonian demographic history and felt intrigued by some of the claims, so I did a teeny tiny bit of digging to see what I could find. So here goes:
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The Estonian population expanded rapidly during the industrial revolution right up to the 1910s.
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World War 1 and the Great Depression manage to suppress population growth for the next decade.
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Nazi occupation of Estonia (marked RKO) coincides with WW2. The vast majority of ethnic Jews flee to the USSR, and those whl stayed behind were exterminated. The nazis and their Estonian collaborators built concentration camps. This coincides with a dip in the graph.
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After WW2, Estonia is back under the USSR. The first Estonian SSR was established in 1940-1941 when nazi occupation started. After some lag, the population begins climbing on the same curve it did before. The population of the country peaks in 1989.
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20000 people were deported to Russia very early in the existence of the SSR
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The nazis aimed to remove 50% of the population on paper but only had 4yrs to do so. This means using concentration camps on ethnic Estonians for germans to take their homes/land as in palestine today.
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20k is not the same as sunaurus’s 20% claim, not even close. 20% does however match the proportion of modern estonians who are russian. The obvious conclusion one can gather from this comparison is that this is not dissimilar to Great Replacement propaganda. The assumption here is that ethnic Russians are taking up Estonian space, because the evidence points to massive population growth under the ussr rather than a contraction like the one that occurred with German occupation.
Immigration was highest during that huge growth period, so I’m curious where all those excess deaths and gulags occurred to have not slowed or stopped said growth. It sounds to me like this person is just intimidated by people they consider foreign.
Another important facet of this: Communism doesn’t have any malthusian elements in its ideology. There is no marxist theory which purports states are more efficient when they commit genocide.
Naziism very boldly and forwardly posits ethnic cleansing as one of its aims. Genocide is attractive to fascists because it frees up resources and capital for those considered deserving of them. In fascism, death balances the budget and every prominent fascist writer was not shy about saying so.
Capitalism is not addressing the tragedy of the commons, fascism is addressing it by stealing the resources from others, communism is a transgender polycule having an orgy behind the dumpster at dennys after a 3am rave party.
There is no tragedy of the commons. The coiner of the phrase as well as the concept of “lifeboat ethics”, Garrett Hardin, was a fascist and white supremacist who used environmentalism as a tool to smuggle and propagate anti-immigrant and eugenicist ideologies.
Much like barter, the Tragedy of the Commons is an extrapolation based on modern economic orthodoxy, yet either did not exist or was solved out of existence from the dawn of human society.
Comrade that 3rd article is unironically supportive of trophy hunting. Also ecofascists don’t own the concept of “tragedy of the commons”. We don’t disagree with malthusians that resources are limited, we disagree on how to allocate resources.
I heard 40 billion was the theoretical carrying capacity for earth, if human consumption was minimized. As communists we don’t really want to stop technological or population growth, we want people to stop eating meat and driving cars and living in single family houses and yes we want people to choose to have less kids but we generally don’t agree with forced population control measures. We believe that we can allocate the finite resources of earth in a manner conductive towards human existence.
Malthusians and ecofascists want to stop technological and:or population growth so that western levels of consumption can be maintained. A malthusian would rather have a world with half a billion people not asking how it gets down that low, meanwhile a communist wants more people, they want humanity to flourish and grow, maybe not exponentially, maybe they want humanity to reach an equilibrium where births and deaths are equal.
What I’m saying is, resources are limited and there’s a regressive and progressive approach to the issue, and the malthusian approach is the regressive one. And communism is naturally the antithesis to malthusian. And off in the corner wearing a dunce cap drooling is capitalism which does not believe we will run out of fossil fuels.
What does any of this mean, idk fuck Ted Kaczynski.
So does liberal capitalism. Literally read anything by Peter Singer and he will wax on for pages and pages about how we should be donating to famine relief before at the very end (and it is in every single one of his works and literally on his website) saying that actually population control will have a higher marginal utility than famine relief so really we should be making sure the poors don’t breed. Just disgusting stuff.
Malthus’s argument as an analytical hypothesis has applied in many instances in history (in China, for instance).
However, Malthus also saw a normative and political dimension to in in that he believed it was right and good, inescapable, and the only way of restoring the ‘natural order’. He was not able to foresee different economic conditions, technological innovations or different social systems which would obviate the problem.
Communism is also premised on a rejection of not only the Malthusian political idea which Fascism embraces as an active participant, but emphasizes that the predicament is not necessary and that it can be overcome.
Communism is the only ideology genuinely hopeful, and the only hope, for the future.
Taking any advice or insight on accuracy. I typed this up really fast so it’s a bit of a mess. Any supporting evidence helps.
I don’t have anything to add but the Baltikkks are notorious around here for just making up bizarre pseudo-history to justify their obsessive hatred of the USSR. I think they’re mostly mad because the local equivalent of Naziism had near universal support and they weren’t allowed to do Nazi shit for forty years, but that is admittedly very much prejudice.
Every single baltic person I have met without fail will say something along the lines of “i lived under communism” and they’re like 30. Like they were only just born when the USSR collapsed they lived under none communism. Yet they’ll use this to justify the most reactionary thinking…
I’ve seen that from a bunch of eastern europeans and it’s just like… you are not 60, whatever communism you lived under was a handful of years where you weren’t a child at the very end of the eastern bloc at the height of cold war stupidity. I really seems like most of them think the horrors of the shock doctrine were “communism”.
A friend of mine works with a lithuanian lady who is either doing a phd or already completed it (I’m bringing this up because I want to show that her brainworms go extremely deep and also that formal education on europe is dogshit), and she keeps complaining about seeing young people being “into” communism and making the nazi equivalence. I told said friend that anyone who talks about how nice the Germans were and how mean the soviets were, probably should be questioned about what exactly their family did that made the Germans so amendable.
Fuck Timothy Snyder. Fuck Anne Applebaum. Those two Nazi apologists need to be transported back in time to Eastern Europe in 1941 and live their fucking hot takes out.
Really good post. Cuts through the bullshit and presents it as it is.
Honestly if Sun shows up here and recognises how wrong they are I’ll be surprised, but I do hope it happens. They genuinely have the ability to learn, the question is whether they’ll close themselves off due to cognitive dissonance or not. I don’t even want them to like the soviet union just realise that they’ve filled their brain with trash about it and maybe taking a more solidly open-minded stance is a good idea.
I denounce Randy Orton for his heinous crimes against the Estonian people!
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