German president in Estonia: Historical revisionism to justify militarism
By
Peter Schwarz
25 August 2017
In a speech in Estonia on the 78th anniversary of the Hitler-Stalin pact, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier (Social Democratic Party, SPD) sought to whip up nationalist resentments against Russia.
The German president is currently paying an official visit to the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. His first stop was the Estonian capital, Tallinn, where he gave a presentation on August 23 titled “Germany and Estonia—a changing history, a common future” at the Academy of Sciences. On that day in 1939, the German and Soviet foreign ministers, Ribbentrop and Molotov, signed the German-Soviet non-aggression pact. The pact gave Nazi Germany a green light for its invasion of Poland and led to the eventual incorporation of the Baltic States into the Soviet Union.
Steinmeier used the anniversary to threaten Russia and boost Estonian nationalism, which draws directly from the traditions of the Nazis.
Addressing Moscow, he warned that Berlin would never “recognise the illegal annexation of the Crimea” nor “accept covert interference through hybrid means or deliberate disinformation,” as has supposedly taken place in Estonia. Steinmeier accused the Russian leadership of “deliberately defining their country’s image as different from, or even in hostility to us in the West.”
He then falsely presented Estonia and the other Baltic states as havens of freedom and justice. “The very first message echoing here in Tallinn is the power of freedom—a force which no inhuman ideology or totalitarian rule can restrain in the long term,” he gushed.
Steinmeier knows very well this is not true. As is the case across Eastern Europe, where…