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:

  1. The Estonian population expanded rapidly during the industrial revolution right up to the 1910s.

  2. World War 1 and the Great Depression manage to suppress population growth for the next decade.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. 20000 people were deported to Russia very early in the existence of the SSR

  6. 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.

  7. 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.

    • 420blazeit69 [he/him]
      ·
      1 year ago

      What do you call someone who believes people who lie to them all the time? I'd call them naive, gullible, uncurious, or maybe willfully ignorant.

      • Mainstream published estimates (PDF link) of the total numbers of "victims of repression" in the 1930s have ranged from [3.5 million to 20 million]. The bases for these assessments are unclear in most cases and seem to have come from guesses, rumors, or extrapolation from isolated local observations... [From research into Soviet archives,] the documentable numbers of victims are much smaller.
      • The Chinese government estimates more than 300 fatalities [in the aftermath of the Tiananmen demonstrations]... Student leader Wu’er Kaixi said he had seen 200 students cut down by gunfire, but it was later proven that he left the square several hours before the events he described allegedly occurred... A BBC reporter watching from a high floor of the Beijing Hotel said he saw soldiers shooting at students at the monument in the center of the square. But as the many journalists who tried to watch the action from that relatively safe vantage point can attest, the middle of the square is not visible from the hotel... When a journalist as careful and well-informed as Tim Russert, NBC’s Washington bureau chief, can fall prey to the most feverish versions of the fable, the sad consequences of reportorial laziness become clear. On May 31 on Meet the Press, Russert referred to “tens of thousands” of deaths in Tiananmen Square.
      • Moreover, three of [The Black Book of Communism's] main contributors (Karel Bartosek, Jean-Louis Margolin, and Nicolas Werth) publicly disassociated themselves from Stéphane Courtois' statements in the introduction and criticized his editorial conduct. Margolin and Werth felt that Courtois was "obsessed" with arriving at a total of 100 million killed which resulted in "sloppy and biased scholarship", faulted him for exaggerating death tolls in specific countries, and rejected the comparison between Communism and Nazism.

      Anti-communist propaganda is full of mistakes, guesses, rumors, and outright lies. This is a fact even harsh critics of communist governments readily admit. You can't take any of this junk at face value, even if there are grains of truth.

      You also have to place the bad things communist countries have done in context. Say someone is arrested for working with a foreign government to overthrow the existing government -- nearly every country on the planet arrests people for that, but it's supposed to be some damning indictment when a communist country does it? Or compare FDR rounding up Japanese Americans (with little-to-no evidence of sabatoge) and putting them in concentration camps to Stalin deporting "unreliable" groups (some of whom actually were violently opposed to the USSR) to Siberia from the Eastern Front. Why is FDR portrayed as a great man, and his concentration camps are simply a tragic blemish, but Stalin is portrayed as a genocidal maniac, where the vast good he did (no individual was more responsible for defeating fascism) is irrelevant compared to his wrongs?

      • FluffyPotato@lemm.ee
        ·
        1 year ago

        Yea, yea, I have seen the talking points before. I'm sure you just have plenty of legitimate questions about how many were killed and since the historic records arent very complete it can't be that many, right. And even if they were killed then it was justified. I have gone through this song and dance before and it's the same tune every time and it's not interesting anymore.