ERR — broadcast
20260920 030000 UTC
542 transcript segments
Google Cloud Speech-to-Text API (Chirp) + Gemini 2.5 Flash Non-Thinking
Data courtesy of The GDELT Project (https://www.gdeltproject.org/), from the Internet Archive TV News Archive.
Machine transcription. Treat it as a searchable index of what was broadcast, not a verbatim quotation record.

[00:00:43] writer seems to have one
[00:00:45] goal: to make us uncomfortable.
[00:00:48] To make us want to contradict him at all costs, because
[00:00:50] Tekitada meis soovi igal juhul talle vastu vaielda, sest et
[00:00:54] he offers a different perspective on what is happening
[00:00:56] or has already happened in Estonia.
[00:01:00] He offers a perspective that has either not been discussed before
[00:01:03] for one reason or another, or that we
[00:01:14] books was published in the Estonian
[00:01:17] forces, I Thought series under the title Labyrinth in the bottom left corner. Editor Katri Liik has
[00:01:21] said about you that you are fiery,
[00:01:25] sharp, and you even invite
[00:01:28] attacks. "Is it your goal
[00:01:31] to invite attacks or
[00:01:35] why do you, as a historian, bring out such
[00:01:39] aspects from the past of Estonians that
[00:01:42] we prefer to
[00:01:43] forget? Yes,
[00:01:46] as an addition, as an addition,
[00:01:50] I would try to be grammatically correct and
[00:01:52] precise, to what was just heard,
[00:01:55] that just now in Kadriorg we had another literary
[00:01:59] event and then
[00:02:02] a quite well-known person and publisher, who was
[00:02:06] conversing with Toomas Kall and Taavid Sevijov,
[00:02:08] reacted
[00:02:11] to me, seeing me pass by, "Look, the wasp has arrived."
[00:02:14] So, in that
[00:02:17] sense, what you are saying now
[00:02:20] seems to be a broader
[00:02:24] attitude or observation about me, and it doesn't
[00:02:27] make me particularly happy, of course.
[00:02:30] When I was younger, it seemed
[00:02:34] to me that this might be my
[00:02:36] function, and at that time, I even
[00:02:40] occasionally said, very confidently,
[00:02:44] that I fulfill the role of a mirror, reflecting Estonian
[00:02:47] custom space with all its
[00:02:50] shortcomings, with all the defects
[00:02:54] that are found here. But now that I am older
[00:02:58] and calmer, I am no longer particularly happy when I am told that a wasp
[00:03:02] has arrived. But
[00:03:05] in my time, I did it. I thought that
[00:03:08] after graduating from the University of Tartu's history department, that
[00:03:11] it could be one of my functions or
[00:03:14] purposes,
[00:03:16] meanings in Estonian society. Well, but it
[00:03:20] was for a very long time,
[00:03:22] wasn't it? You did it intentionally, you had that goal,
[00:03:25] right?
[00:03:27] No, the goal was not to make anyone angry or irritated.
[00:03:31] The goal was to create a discussion.
[00:03:34] But I admit now in hindsight that it didn't particularly
[00:03:38] succeed, because you don't discuss
[00:03:41] with a wasp, you repel it, you
[00:03:45] try to swat it with a rolled-up
[00:03:48] newspaper. I must remind the listener that,
[00:03:51] first and foremost, the bloody battles of Sinimäe or the
[00:03:55] April 2007 riots, but also Andrei
[00:03:58] Fostov's further
[00:04:02] delving into Estonian history, these are still topics to which
[00:04:05] the Estonian public reacted very, very painfully.
[00:04:08] What
[00:04:11] purpose do such historical interpretations that
[00:04:15] are uncomfortable for us to read
[00:04:18] serve? Is this the purpose of being
[00:04:21] a mirror?
[00:04:24] Well, I believe and am still
[00:04:27] of the opinion that
[00:04:30] the feeling of annoying
[00:04:33] oneself, this has not only a deep philosophical meaning, but
[00:04:36] also a psychotherapeutic one,
[00:04:40] that if you learn to look
[00:04:42] at yourself as you really
[00:04:45] are and not as you would like
[00:04:49] to be, then this could have not only
[00:04:52] a healing effect, but also a progressive effect. We
[00:04:56] learn from mistakes. If we admit that something in our history
[00:05:01] went wrong and askew, instead of dismissing it or
[00:05:04] on the contrary, praising it,
[00:05:07] then there is a danger
[00:05:10] that mistakes will be repeated, that we will step on the same rake again.
[00:05:13] Well, this teaching word that
[00:05:17] was heard during the Singing Revolution, that one must always
[00:05:21] learn from history and
[00:05:23] history is what teaches us to be and to live, and then
[00:05:27] in contrast to that, it is said that the only thing history teaches is that history is not
[00:05:31] learned from. Now the latter seems to be true, but it's
[00:05:35] hard to accept. I would still like it to go
[00:05:38] according to that first saying, that whoever remembers the past
[00:05:42] has no future. But as a historian, a professional
[00:05:46] historian, do you believe that every new
[00:05:49] generation that grows up
[00:05:53] doesn't remember or doesn't want to remember the mistakes of the previous one, and everything
[00:05:56] repeats itself?
[00:05:59] It seems so. Well, let's say on an individual
[00:06:02] level, this is very clearly
[00:06:04] observable. When representatives of the older
[00:06:07] generation try to teach younger people or tell
[00:06:11] them not to make that mistake, it has usually never yielded
[00:06:15] results, because making mistakes, making personal mistakes,
[00:06:18] seems to be part of human rights.
[00:06:22] No young person has ever been grateful for being
[00:06:26] prevented from making mistakes. We learn
[00:06:28] from mistakes, well, and then it probably
[00:06:31] is so. But as for the perception of history,
[00:06:35] or well, that's also a well-known
[00:06:38] saying that every generation writes its own history, and
[00:06:42] it really changes with generations. The historical concepts change,
[00:06:46] and the past is re-evaluated once
[00:06:48] again. And that is, of course, an exciting process, and in my time, I
[00:06:52] also tried to participate in it. Do you
[00:06:55] mean that Estonians understand their history one-sidedly,
[00:06:58] that is, as we want to see ourselves in the mirror
[00:07:02] or as we want to remember
[00:07:04] our past? Mm, oh yes, definitely, but this is not
[00:07:08] at all unique to Estonians, all
[00:07:11] nations do it. There's a huge beautification and
[00:07:14] sugar-coating and
[00:07:16] forgetting of certain
[00:07:18] uncomfortable episodes and situations. For example, what immediately
[00:07:22] comes to mind now is that when we had the Republic of Estonia 100, well, we
[00:07:26] remember that 2018, and before that,
[00:07:30] slowly moving towards that anniversary, then the
[00:07:33] 100th anniversary of the Estonian War of Independence was also commemorated, and then, well, we even
[00:07:37] had a cool armored train traveling around Estonia, and then
[00:07:40] all those important battles and everything
[00:07:43] were remembered. Do you remember an event that was not celebrated,
[00:07:47] whose 100th anniversary passed?
[00:07:51] The Saaremaa uprising, when the men of Saaremaa refused to obey the mainlanders and
[00:07:54] go to the War of Independence. It was not mentioned at all.
[00:07:57] Well, that's just one example of how some unpleasant
[00:08:01] things that happened in the past, well, we try
[00:08:04] to forget them.
[00:08:06] And then you are the one who brings out from our history
[00:08:10] those things that we try to forget.
[00:08:12] That's what drives you as a historian.
[00:08:14] Not only as a historian, but also as
[00:08:18] a writer,
[00:08:22] because, well, let's admit that if
[00:08:25] there are taboo subjects, then poking at them is indeed interesting,
[00:08:29] intellectually interesting, because why repeat
[00:08:32] and circle around what everyone already knows and what
[00:08:36] hundreds of mouths and voices repeat? One always wants to go
[00:08:39] to a somewhat dangerous area. "Where do you
[00:08:42] find this material? How much do you visit
[00:08:45] archives? No, you don't even have to visit archives,
[00:08:49] you just have to remember your own
[00:08:52] studies at the University of Tartu and
[00:08:55] what was said, what was hinted at,
[00:08:59] what was not said at all. Of course, as a student back then, I didn't
[00:09:02] understand all of it, and I still don't understand
[00:09:05] everything. Well, in that sense, I don't master all
[00:09:08] the facts, but I
[00:09:11] did notice a few things, and that's where I started poking around. I actually started with
[00:09:15] it already in my second
[00:09:17] year, in my second-year course paper,
[00:09:20] where I wrote my
[00:09:23] essay on the theme of ancient freedom struggles.
[00:09:26] My supervisor was Sulev Vahtre. I received
[00:09:29] the highest grade for it, and
[00:09:33] there I argued against the official
[00:09:37] interpretation of the ancient freedom struggle. Incidentally,
[00:09:40] later that course paper became the book "Mõtteline
[00:09:43] Eesti" (Conceptual Estonia), so this first part, which talks about
[00:09:47] those ancient times, is based on that student
[00:09:50] work from back then. And there I
[00:09:53] took, I took up a study
[00:09:57] by a German historian, Friedrich Benninghofen, on the
[00:10:00] Order of the Livonian Brothers of the Sword. As far as I know, it has not
[00:10:03] been translated into Estonian yet, and it was diametrically
[00:10:06] opposite to what I was taught
[00:10:09] in my history courses,
[00:10:13] both in primary school and later at university. Everything
[00:10:17] was completely different there, and I emphasize that Vening Hofen
[00:10:21] is not at all among the Baltic Germans, because well, Baltic
[00:10:25] Germans, Balts, could be suspected of being spiteful and
[00:10:28] against us, but Beningghof is a completely imperial German
[00:10:32] and extremely objective and impartial
[00:10:35] in my opinion, and that's where I got some of
[00:10:39] those ideas. This Beninhoffen did not justify
[00:10:42] the activities of the Teutonic Order
[00:10:44] in the Baltics.
[00:10:47] No, certainly not, but his urgent recommendation was to
[00:10:50] look at things in the context of their time,
[00:10:53] and the context of the time was such
[00:10:57] that the crusaders, when they came here, well,
[00:11:00] we remember from our past studies that we were told that
[00:11:04] they came here to plunder, to rob, to
[00:11:07] conquer lands, but in the 13th century context, they
[00:11:11] came to save us, or the people who were here, to save them. From
[00:11:14] what? From paganism,
[00:11:17] from the eastern neighbor, from pagan, no, from pagan perdition, from the fact that, well,
[00:11:21] pagans are all eventually destined for eternal torment in hell.
[00:11:25] First of all, and secondly, at that time, when I was dealing with this matter,
[00:11:29] a very modern motif emerged from it, that
[00:11:33] we all know the glorious story
[00:11:36] of the Eastern Vikings, that the people of Saaremaa and Courland, that they were once the rulers
[00:11:40] of the Baltic Sea, they even burned down Sigtuna,
[00:11:43] this is spoken of quite proudly.
[00:11:47] Also in the pre-war republic,
[00:11:51] one of the favorite motifs was the image of a Viking ship, wasn't it?
[00:11:54] On the two-crown or one-crown coin, there was Toompea somewhere and
[00:11:58] somewhere there was that Viking ship.
[00:12:01] Well, young Estonia used the Viking ship motif, well, that's something
[00:12:04] proud and powerful.
[00:12:07] If we look from the Scandinavian side, they were the victims of those attacks. That was
[00:12:11] pure piracy. That was, in modern terms,
[00:12:14] international terrorism, and it had to be dealt with in exactly the same way as
[00:12:18] the Americans, when they invaded
[00:12:21] Iraq, or how they are dealing now with the Yemeni Houthis.
[00:12:25] Or or with the Iranians,
[00:12:27] then the justification for such
[00:12:31] military intervention is the securing of trade
[00:12:34] routes, international peace, the suppression of international
[00:12:37] terrorism wherever it arises. So, at the beginning of the 13th century, when
[00:12:41] this invasion of Western Christians
[00:12:44] here began, why not look at it as one such military
[00:12:48] operation to suppress international
[00:12:50] terrorism? It may seem like a somewhat unexpected
[00:12:54] idea. "Very unexpected, but those Danish-Swedish territories that fell victim to these
[00:12:58] Eastern Viking raids, I think
[00:13:01] they saw it exactly that way and thanked
[00:13:05] the Lord in church that finally someone had started dealing
[00:13:08] with this problem. The wheel of war turned, he who
[00:13:11] was once a plunderer and terrorist, later became
[00:13:15] a victim and a slave. I
[00:13:17] now emphasize that everything I just said is
[00:13:21] very anachronistic, that the word "terrorist" certainly doesn't fit into the realities
[00:13:25] of the 13th century, but I just used
[00:13:29] that wording to give
[00:13:32] today's listener, reader,
[00:13:36] some points of reference to grasp onto.
[00:13:40] Valdur Mikita has described that
[00:13:43] the ecosystem at the border of field and forest
[00:13:47] is the most species-rich. Species from the forest,
[00:13:51] plant and animal species,
[00:13:54] mix there, and vice versa. It is also claimed that
[00:13:58] for example, when the DNA of people mixes with traces
[00:14:01] of many nationalities, then it is a person who is
[00:14:05] intellectually capable and talented in many
[00:14:08] fields. You are also on the border. How
[00:14:11] do you currently feel
[00:14:13] about being on the border?
[00:14:15] Mm
[00:14:18] Well, first of all, I know that
[00:14:21] the border areas between the forest and the open land are the most biodiverse, and
[00:14:25] I know that even without Valdur Mikita, because when I was studying
[00:14:29] beekeeping at the time, those areas
[00:14:32] are indeed the most magnificent, the most
[00:14:35] suitable for bees.
[00:14:37] Talking like this now, I took a moment to think.
[00:14:41] Yes, I'm on the edge, even just by the fact that I come from Ida-Virumaa, which is such
[00:14:45] a border area. I'm from a mixed
[00:14:48] family, and here we are dealing with,
[00:14:52] I emphasize, such a family
[00:14:55] composition that is very
[00:14:58] contrasting.
[00:15:00] If one of my parents were Estonian, the other Latvian, one
[00:15:04] parent Estonian, the other Finnish, then it wouldn't create such
[00:15:07] a big contrast as having one parent Estonian,
[00:15:10] the other Russian. I even once
[00:15:13] made a table of the contradictions
[00:15:16] this creates. There were six
[00:15:20] levels where there is a diametrical contradiction.
[00:15:23] I don't know, we probably don't need to list them now, but
[00:15:27] a few examples could be interesting. Well, let's start with
[00:15:30] the fact that one is a small nation, under
[00:15:34] a million, which is why we have,
[00:15:38] for at least a century, at least a century,
[00:15:42] had this existential fear that at least Estonian intellectual
[00:15:45] demographers express, that, well, we are in danger
[00:15:48] of extinction. And Russians, let's say,
[00:15:51] are 150 million, and although the demographic situation there is also very
[00:15:54] bad, but as a large nation, they have never
[00:15:57] felt that existential fear of
[00:16:01] extinction, so it is not a topic
[00:16:05] for them at all. Estonia is a small
[00:16:08] nation-state with a mentality derived from that, and
[00:16:11] Russia is a large empire, with a mentality
[00:16:13] derived from that.
[00:16:16] Estonia has been part of the West for actually
[00:16:20] all these seven or eight centuries, that is the
[00:16:23] legacy of the crusaders, they integrated us into the West
[00:16:27] with very painful methods, and 50 years of Soviet
[00:16:30] occupation did not change that situation. Incidentally, this is the main
[00:16:34] motif of "Conceptual Estonia," my first book.
[00:16:38] And Russia is an Eastern,
[00:16:41] I don't know, Mongolian-Tatar Eastern type. There are
[00:16:44] many such contradictions and diametrical contradictions, and
[00:16:48] in my own family, in everyday life, these
[00:16:51] manifested, so that while I was between these two
[00:16:55] drew from one side and drew from the other
[00:16:58] side, and I kept thinking and thinking and thinking, what is all
[00:17:02] this that is happening around me? Such a borderline state
[00:17:06] undoubtedly gives broader
[00:17:09] opportunities to perceive the world, and on the other hand, perhaps this
[00:17:12] borderline state also sets its own limits on how
[00:17:16] to perceive the world. What thoughts does this statement
[00:17:20] evoke in you?
[00:17:25] This is such a broad topic,
[00:17:27] philosophical.
[00:17:29] When I once
[00:17:33] corrected, let's put
[00:17:35] it this way, the "Estonian custom space"
[00:17:38] invented by President Kersti Kaljulaid, do you remember
[00:17:41] when it was first mentioned? It was
[00:17:44] when there was the great migration crisis in Europe
[00:17:48] and understandably, the Estonian president then expressed
[00:17:52] an idea or brought up a certain prerequisite,
[00:17:55] on the basis of which we could then receive
[00:17:58] at that time, there was talk of alleged or soon-to-be-arriving
[00:18:02] masses of refugees from somewhere in the Middle East, that we can only accept
[00:18:06] those people who somehow conform to the Estonian
[00:18:09] custom space, and she used, in my opinion,
[00:18:12] in four of her important speeches, I
[00:18:16] think over two years, this concept
[00:18:19] of "custom space," never specifying what
[00:18:22] it is. And then my correction was that, yes,
[00:18:26] very nice, but please now bring out the
[00:18:28] criteria that a person must meet in order
[00:18:32] to fit into the Estonian custom space. Please define
[00:18:35] this custom space. At that time, I also had
[00:18:39] some accounts on social media, I had several thousand followers on Facebook, or
[00:18:42] no, they were called friends on Facebook. Then
[00:18:46] I received a lot of criticism from there, that
[00:18:49] a true Estonian doesn't need a definition, a true Estonian already knows what
[00:18:53] custom space is. But here are some, I don't know, some
[00:18:56] not quite true Estonians, but those who are
[00:19:00] foreigners like Fostof, well, they must be
[00:19:03] explained. So
[00:19:07] the main content
[00:19:09] of my
[00:19:12] argument is that, let's leave aside those refugees from the Middle East or North Africa,
[00:19:15] someone from America comes to Estonia and says, "Very
[00:19:19] good, I want to be Estonian, I want to fit into this
[00:19:23] cultural space." But now tell me, what should
[00:19:26] I do with my mentality, what criteria should
[00:19:30] I meet? And what will we then
[00:19:32] tell him? That, you know, it's
[00:19:35] undefinable, it's a sort of internal
[00:19:38] feeling, you just suck it in with your mother's
[00:19:41] milk and you know, we can't explain it to you,
[00:19:45] it's so unexplainable.
[00:19:48] Such an explanation doesn't satisfy me. And
[00:19:51] this fuss around the custom space really lasted quite a long time, I remember
[00:19:54] it took two years before a relevant article appeared
[00:19:58] in the Estonian Wikipedia, the content of which doesn't really
[00:20:02] satisfy me.
[00:20:05] But well, let's talk about literature, since
[00:20:08] I am a literary person, no one would deny that "Truth and Justice" is a very
[00:20:12] important text for understanding
[00:20:16] the Estonian mindset.
[00:20:18] Let's take "Truth and Justice", the first part, and let's take violence
[00:20:22] against women, it's a very painful topic.
[00:20:25] Years ago there was a terrible incident when a refugee from Syria, I think a man,
[00:20:29] poured gasoline over his wife, set
[00:20:33] her on fire, because in his opinion the woman had behaved incorrectly,
[00:20:37] violating ancient rules and laws, exactly this
[00:20:41] woman. But, well, this act is clearly not compatible with the Estonian
[00:20:44] custom space, it's completely at odds with it. But now
[00:20:48] let's take "Truth and Justice". Let's take violence
[00:20:51] against women. Farmer Andres Andres
[00:20:53] Paas, he generally doesn't beat his wives, well, it's true,
[00:20:57] he works Krõõt to death, but he beats Mari once, when
[00:21:00] Mari can't get over Juss's suicide, when Juss starts
[00:21:04] haunting her, then Andres beats
[00:21:07] her and also cuts down the tree on which Juss
[00:21:11] hanged himself. Sauna Madis doesn't
[00:21:13] beat his sauna aunt, but he threatens her very seriously once when
[00:21:17] the sauna aunt spreads rumors in the village and talks
[00:21:21] all sorts of ugly things about the master Andres and his wife.
[00:21:25] Madis threatens to beat her so much that she is beaten. And then there is
[00:21:29] Oru Pearu, who constantly beats his wife, who unfortunately
[00:21:32] remains anonymous, she is consistently called a "sheep whore".
[00:21:35] She constantly gets beaten. Now the big question is, which
[00:21:39] of these three men represents the Estonian
[00:21:41] custom space?
[00:21:45] Very difficult to answer, isn't it? I have never
[00:21:48] asked myself this question. Well, a person on the borderline does ask such
[00:21:51] questions, and if we now become
[00:21:55] very, I don't know, disgusting and cynical, I am now being very
[00:21:58] ironic, then probably to that Syrian who will
[00:22:02] one day come to Estonia seeking asylum, if he asks how he should
[00:22:06] behave, then we will say, based
[00:22:09] on an incident in Rakvere, where a
[00:22:12] person whom Ekre once wanted to get as a
[00:22:15] minister, came under great suspicion
[00:22:19] because his wife had injuries, the mechanism of which
[00:22:22] or the mechanism of their formation
[00:22:25] was unclear, so the Estonian custom space is such that you beat women,
[00:22:29] you beat them quietly, and if asked, do you beat them? You deny it. Is that
[00:22:32] the Estonian
[00:22:34] custom space? Practice shows that it probably
[00:22:37] is. It happens regrettably often,
[00:22:41] yes, and if I say that now, well, thank God, Facebook is
[00:22:44] long gone, but I can imagine the hail of abuse
[00:22:48] I would receive right now. That no, it's not
[00:22:51] like that.
[00:22:54] It still infuriates me sometimes, this sugar-coating
[00:22:57] of reality or this Estonianness, that we are something different from what we actually
[00:23:01] are.
[00:23:04] We may yet talk about some articles that have caused
[00:23:08] very strong and lasting
[00:23:12] objections in society, to which you have been able to respond in turn, but
[00:23:16] I am currently stuck on your article that appeared in July.
[00:23:20] It was titled, "What is punishment literature?"
[00:23:24] So my question related to the previous one is, when you
[00:23:28] show Estonians in the mirror
[00:23:31] their uncomfortable moments of customs,
[00:23:35] character, or history, is this
[00:23:37] punishment literature?
[00:23:42] Is it something with which you not only
[00:23:45] express your personal opinion,
[00:23:48] but also that we, who
[00:23:51] read, should feel
[00:23:54] punished? I am now in a situation where
[00:23:57] we are sitting in the studio right now. Actually, I
[00:24:01] should be lying on a couch and a psychologist should be
[00:24:03] talking to me. Now I should start
[00:24:07] digging deeply into myself.
[00:24:11] Because from this question, it is clear that is it like this, that I, as this
[00:24:14] borderline person, who has heard one thing, another, and
[00:24:18] a third, perhaps I now somehow want to take revenge on the Estonian
[00:24:21] people or on this custom space
[00:24:24] where I live? Your answer
[00:24:26] interests me.
[00:24:35] Still no.
[00:24:37] No,
[00:24:42] I still come back to the thought that if we talk about unpleasant
[00:24:45] things, then
[00:24:49] there is hope that we will learn
[00:24:52] from something, starting to be ashamed of it or, if not
[00:24:56] ashamed, then thinking that this is not rational behavior, let's rather not.
[00:25:00] do it in such a way that right now, to extricate ourselves from this difficult situation, this difficult
[00:25:03] question, I recall what is happening
[00:25:07] in the Middle East, since I mainly write in Eesti Ekspress
[00:25:10] about foreign policy events,
[00:25:14] then ee in this Arab-Israeli
[00:25:17] conflict, I have
[00:25:20] registered over the years, and experts have also said,
[00:25:23] that what distinguishes Israelis, or
[00:25:26] Jews, from Arabs is that Israelis learn from their
[00:25:30] mistakes. If they have suffered a defeat in some military
[00:25:33] campaign, like during the war in
[00:25:36] 1973, then they learn from these
[00:25:39] mistakes. Arabs, who always instill in themselves
[00:25:42] some kind of ee
[00:25:45] victory, the same Yom Kippur War, for example, that
[00:25:49] it surprised me that in Egypt, the anniversary
[00:25:52] is always celebrated as a great Egyptian victory, although they did not
[00:25:55] win, they were defeated in that war in the end. So
[00:25:59] Arabs, who are not able to admit their mistakes at all... to say that
[00:26:02] they have been defeated somewhere, then they also don't learn from it. And we see this every
[00:26:06] single time when another conflict flares up there, that
[00:26:10] Arabs do not learn from their mistakes because the
[00:26:13] mirror they hold up shows some kind of
[00:26:17] well, a very wise, very heroic,
[00:26:20] very, very close to God person
[00:26:23] apparently, who is then flawless,
[00:26:25] infallible. If we don't learn from our mistakes, then it
[00:26:29] can have very disastrous consequences." If you
[00:26:33] write in Eesti Ekspress about the
[00:26:36] clashes between Jews and Palestinians,
[00:26:39] what kind of feedback do you
[00:26:41] get?
[00:26:44] Well, I would even phrase it this way, that
[00:26:46] many younger generation intellectuals, who were once
[00:26:50] on friendly terms with me, are no longer so, because
[00:26:54] there is still a predominantly pro-Palestinian
[00:26:56] stance. I would even say that
[00:27:00] there's a small parallel now with the Ukrainian war, which
[00:27:02] notoriously, when it started in 2022,
[00:27:06] then in Russian society, well,
[00:27:10] they got very, very much at odds with each other.
[00:27:13] There were typical cases where in one family the children
[00:27:17] had one opinion and the parents had a completely different opinion, and it could even
[00:27:21] end with them ceasing to communicate with each other. The Ukrainian
[00:27:25] war made Russians fall out with each other. I
[00:27:28] say that what happened with Gaza, made the Estonian
[00:27:31] intellectual community fall out with each other. I wouldn't say that the entire Estonian nation is
[00:27:35] now divided, but the Estonian intellectual community certainly is, and I perceive that
[00:27:38] very clearly. So, the fact that I started
[00:27:42] writing about this and took a very firm stance, I simply created
[00:27:45] more adversaries
[00:27:49] for myself, maybe even enemies. But I
[00:27:52] say that this is not the first time, I have had many such
[00:27:56] moments in life, starting from the conceptual Estonia, after its
[00:27:59] publication, the national wing,
[00:28:02] the conservative wing suddenly discovered that maybe I am a Moscow
[00:28:06] henchman, maybe I am this or that, because I want to rob the Estonian
[00:28:09] people of their Estonian history and show everything
[00:28:13] somehow in a light favorable to the Russian Empire,
[00:28:17] well, roughly such
[00:28:20] suspicions existed. And now, with the
[00:28:24] aftershocks of the Gaza conflict, mentally, now
[00:28:27] it suddenly turns out, how should I
[00:28:30] say this? Well, in this left-wing modern
[00:28:34] discourse, the prevailing definition, I
[00:28:37] am a white, half-dead man, who
[00:28:40] patronizes and does something else like that, in short, I unexpectedly found myself
[00:28:44] in the same company where once in the early 90s I
[00:28:47] thought those were
[00:28:50] the conservative nationalists who despised my view
[00:28:53] of history. I thought I was completely different from them, but now a
[00:28:57] new generation came and today it's completely different, I'm exactly in the same
[00:29:00] company. Mm
[00:29:02] paradox, your most
[00:29:06] recognized work, Sillamäe Passion, has
[00:29:10] received the Cultural Endowment of Estonia annual prize, the Virumaa prize, many other
[00:29:13] prizes, it has also been translated into Russian.
[00:29:16] Yes, and one of my university classmates,
[00:29:20] who is now quite a well-known ethnologist, Aimar
[00:29:23] Ventsel, he did an experiment. He would occasionally
[00:29:27] give the Russian-language version in Ida-Virumaa to Russian-speaking
[00:29:30] people to read. And he confirmed, well,
[00:29:34] let's say, through such an experiment, he confirmed what I already
[00:29:38] knew, that our Russians hate this book,
[00:29:41] for the reason, but for the same reason why Estonians hate
[00:29:45] my text, I write some things there that
[00:29:48] Russians don't like, which
[00:29:51] undermines their self-image, puts it in doubt.
[00:29:55] You are a stranger to
[00:29:58] strangers and a stranger to your
[00:30:01] own, right? "I don't even know to whom I really
[00:30:04] belong, to my closest ones, to my
[00:30:07] closest, to my family, to them I am probably
[00:30:10] my own. Let's move in time to April
[00:30:14] 2013, when your article "My
[00:30:17] Life with Leena" was published. It was a frank
[00:30:21] article about your home beauty, focused on your
[00:30:25] wife's bedridden mother, who needed
[00:30:27] round-the-clock care, a place in a nursing home was not
[00:30:31] possible.
[00:30:33] This article received a lot of feedback,
[00:30:37] a lot of thoughtful consideration, a lot of
[00:30:39] condemnation. It was again such an
[00:30:42] inflammatory abscess that you
[00:30:45] pressed. How do you look at all of that, which was 3 years
[00:30:49] ago, how do you look at it
[00:30:52] today?
[00:30:56] It was a deep trauma that we had..."