May 3, 2007
Stories from Occupation
Do. Not. Miss. the four part essay on Estonian Independence on Kojinshugi. I started reading Sam on his Unigolyn blog when he was in Estonia. He moved to British Columbia and I have kept up with his less political kojinshugi.
He recently returned to Estonia and has posted four parts of an essay on the nation's history, annotated with stories his relatives and memories from childhood. This, from the second part, caught my eye:
I remember signatures being collected in schools for the language law. I don’t know what the signatures were for, or why they were asking nine-year olds to do it. But I remember signing it and I remember feeling joy doing it. We were told we didn’t have to wear our Octobrist pins anymore. That day I went home and asked my mom for a hammer. I sat on the front steps of my house and I beat that grotesque pentagram and Lenin’s bald head into a flat piece of metal. I now wish I’d kept it, but back then I just wanted to be rid of it.They gave us new schoolbooks. The old ones all started with a four-page adulation of Lenin, the Lover of Children and Our Great Father. They said we could throw the old ones away. My school was only about 50 meters away from the Bronze Soldier and the Eternal Flame, a recessed gas fire, was still burning there. Me and some of my friends didn’t feel like dumping the books in a trash can. After school, we went to the Flame and we ripped those books to shreds and burned them. Keep in mind we were nine year-olds. No one told us to burn those books. We weren’t politically savvy. But we knew almost viscerally that this shit they had been forcing on us was pure, unadulterated evil.
My mother in law had the same feeling at a similar age, The occupying Japanese forces came to school on the first day and supervised the kids' cutting every reference to the United States, a Dollar Sign, or the American flag out of their schoolbooks. Mom knew, too, that that was wrong though she did not know how wrong or why.
You'll not find either Sam or my Mother in law at a peace rally holding up a "War Is Not The Answer" banner (well, Sam might be infiltrating the assembly for a podcast or something...)
I'm only half through. I will bug you again when I have finished it, but this is incredible stuff: the real prized jewels in the blogosphere,