Eastern Europe’s Compassion Deficit

[LiberalEsto]

2. As a person of Eastern European descent, I feel it's unfair to brand EE as uniformly intolerant

There are xenophobes and racists everywhere in the world, not just in Eastern Europe. Look at the U.S., where people of African-American descent are shot and killed by police or incarcerated in hugely disproportionate numbers, sometimes for no reason other than for being black.

Of course the fact that this sickness exists here does not excuse intolerance elsewhere. There are good people in the U.S. fighting racism, just as there are good people in Eastern Europe who oppose the violence and hatred stirred up by rightwing politicians and the jerks who need someone else to bully in order to feel better about their own pathetic selves.

However, let me remind us that the people of Eastern Europe have only emerged in the past 20-odd years from decades of Soviet oppression and isolation from other parts of the world. During the Soviet era major efforts were made to suppress ethnic and cultural identities, languages and history in the occupied states. I can personally speak to the experience of Estonians because of what my cousins and aunt there told me when I visited them in recent years. Estonians struggled hard to secretly preserve their native language and traditions at a time when their children were forced to attend Russian-only schools and forbidden to speak Estonian.

People in Europe have very legitimate concerns about being overwhelmed by the huge number of refugees, the costs of housing and feeding them, and the issues over how to integrate them into communities. Estonia is a country with about 1.3 million people, and about 300,000 of them are Russians shipped in by the Soviet Union decades ago in its campaign to "Russify" Estonia (destroy its national identity). Many tens of thousands of Estonians were deported to labor camps in Siberia at the same time. Similar things happened in Latvia and Lithuania; however I can't speak for other Eastern European nations. These imported Russians refused to learn the local languages despite some of them having lived in the Baltic countries for 50-plus years, and they bitched like mad when the Baltic nations regained their freedom and asked the unwanted Russian population to master a little basic Estonian, Latvian or Lithuanian. In other words, it's okay for Russians to force other peoples to speak ONLY Russian, but it's not okay for other people to ask that Russians learn a small amount of the language of the countries they live in.

As to today's refugees from the Middle East, Estonia, despite having an already very large immigrant population of Russians, is offering resettled Syrian refugees from the Middle East the equivalent of $28,000 a year per family to live on.
http://sputniknews.com/europe/20151008/1028229944/migrants-estonia-eu-money.html

To put this in perspective, Estonians' 2012 gross average income in 2012 U.S. dollars was $18,371, the lowest in Europe, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. This is before national taxes of nearly 33 per cent. So $28,000 is an extremely generous amount for the refugees,or at least it seems so to me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_wage


I also wonder whether some Eastern Europeans' reactions are affected by their previous occupation by the Ottoman Empire, but I don't know enough about this to voice an opinion.