To Every Young Nitwit Who Thinks Communism is Cool
Claire Berlinski, Ed. ·
Jun 6, 2011 at 1:40am
This was the Estonian parliament.
You don't need to read Estonian to understand it. In fact, some of those words are not Estonian. Why did they write them in English? Because no one understands Estonian. And they want the whole world to understand what communism means.
It means this.
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Comments :
May '11
Re: To Every Young Nitwit Who Thinks Communism is Cool
I don't see English. I see Latin and what is probably Estonian.
Nov '10
Re: To Every Young Nitwit Who Thinks Communism is Cool
Hey, my dad is Estonian. He and my grandfather escaped from Estonia in 1944 in the gap between German and final Russian occupation. They have a neat story involving leaky fishing boats, denial of entry by Finland (not out of malice but fearing that the Finnish would have to turn them over to the Russians given Finland's precarious relationship with Russia at that time), displaced persons camps in Sweden and my dad eventually immigrating to Canada.
The language is related to Finnish and Hungarian. I remember my grandfather teaching me to count to ten in Estonian. When I learned, I was rewarded with the princely sum of 50 cents.
Edited on Jun 6, 2011 at 9:16amNov '10
Re: To Every Young Nitwit Who Thinks Communism is Cool
Those plaques confirm what we know about Communism: It is rule by a criminal gang that murders everyone who gets in their way.
Nov '10
Re: To Every Young Nitwit Who Thinks Communism is Cool
Suggested summer reading for every nitwit who thinks Communism is cool:
Eleni (1996) by Nicholas Gage, available in paperback or Kindle.
It’s the story of a young mother during Greece’s 1948 civil war who defied the terror of the communist insurgents to arrange for the escape of her three daughters and her son, Nicola, from certain abduction to Communist “camps” in Albania . For that act, she was imprisoned, tortured, and executed in cold blood.
Her son made it to America at the age of nine and grew up to be a successful journalist and writer. As an adult he returned to Greece to find the Communist officer who murdered his mother. He went seeking revenge and ended up finding his soul instead.
Re: To Every Young Nitwit Who Thinks Communism is Cool
"In memoriam?" Is that not English? I always thought it had passed into what we'd officially consider English. If I were somewhere where it were easy to look things up, I'd check, but since I'm not, I'll note it for future looking-up. What does OED say?
Nov '10
Re: To Every Young Nitwit Who Thinks Communism is Cool
During the first Russian occupation of Estonia, my grandfather was imprisoned for the crime of owning a farm. He was in the process of being deported to Siberia in a cattle car (Yes, the Russians had their cattle cars too) when he was able to slip away in the apparent bureaucratic confusion and hid in a hay stack for approximately 3 months sneaking out a night to find food. Fortunately or unfortunately they went from the proverbial frying pan to the fire with the German push eastward. The Germans were not all that interested in the Estonians other than subjugation. They did, however, round up all of Estonia's small but vibrate Jewish community of around 3,000. I read somewhere that approximately 10 of Estonia's prewar Jews survived the holocaust.
The "culling" of the Jews began in 1940 in the same manner as my grandfather's experience. Property owners, business and professional people, Estonians and Jews, were rounded up and shipped to Siberia in cattle cars. Some escaped as my grandfather did. At the outset of the German occupation approximately 1,000 Jews remained in Estonia and that number was reduced to 10 by war's end.
Edited on Jun 6, 2011 at 10:57amMay '11
Re: To Every Young Nitwit Who Thinks Communism is Cool
I suppose one might make some sort of argument that it has passed into English, but Latin looks the same in Estonia as it does in England.
Aug '10
Re: To Every Young Nitwit Who Thinks Communism is Cool
It's inspiring to speak to people who actually experienced Communism and fought it. I was recently in Prague talking with former Czech dissidents. One interesting tidbit: totalitarianism, a controversial term here in the States, is absolutely uncontroversial there. And the comparison--or comparability--of Nazism and Communism--is made as a matter of course without any apology or hand-wringing.
May '10
Re: To Every Young Nitwit Who Thinks Communism is Cool
Robert Promm: During the first Russian occupation of Estonia, my grandfather was imprisoned for the crime of owning a farm. He was in the process of being deported to Siberia in a cattle car (Yes, the Russians had their cattle cars too) when he was able to slip away in the apparent bureaucratic confusion and hid in a hay stack for approximately 3 months sneaking out a night to find food. Fortunately or unfortunately they went from the proverbial frying pan to the fire with the German push eastward. The Germans were not all that interested in the Estonians other than subjugation. They did, however, round up all of Estonia's small but vibrate Jewish community of around 3,000. I read somewhere that approximately 10 of Estonia's prewar Jews survived the holocaust.
Edited on Jun 06 at 10:57 am
Thanks for sharing some of your families' history, Robert. It's important to know what happened at that time in that part of the world.
Apr '11
Re: To Every Young Nitwit Who Thinks Communism is Cool
Claire Berlinski, Ed.
"In memoriam?" Is that not English? I always thought it had passed into what we'd officially consider English. If I were somewhere where it were easy to look things up, I'd check, but since I'm not, I'll note it for future looking-up. What does OED say? · Jun 6 at 10:21am
Thus saith the OED:
in, prep.2
I. The Latin preposition in, (with the ablative case) ‘in’, (with accusative) ‘into’, enters into a number of phrases, chiefly of legal, logical, philosophical, or ecclesiastical origin, now or formerly current in English, of which the chief are given below.In early use, the in seems occasionally to have been taken as the English preposition, and is thus found printed in roman type, while the rest of the phrase is in italics.
[...]
15. in memoriam, to to the memory of, in memory of. Common as the commencement of an epitaph or commemorative inscription. Hence, after the title of Tennyson's poem, used as n. = A memorial poem or writing.
[cont'd below]
Apr '11
Re: To Every Young Nitwit Who Thinks Communism is Cool
[cont'd from above: for anyone unfamiliar with the OED it contains quotations of its usage, the earliest being the first known date of its use in English in a retrievable source.]
1850; Tennyson (title); In Memoriam A.H.H. Obiit mdcccxxxiii.
1895; Daily News 19 Oct. 6/1; The in memoriam of a bereavement, a breviary of a sorrowing parent's love.
Edited on Jun 6, 2011 at 12:42pm*******
Now for my own tuppence ha'penny worth:
One can certainly make the argument that "in memoriam" has entered the English language. So in a sense we can of course say that (in addition to being Latin) it is English. But it does not follow therefrom that it is only English. "In memoriam" is also used in languages besides English (eg French). So I would be very slow to draw the conclusion that the use of a Latin phrase on a plaque in a non-English speaking country was inspired by the phrase's currency in the English language. We would really need to ask some Estonians (1) whether this Latin phrase is commonly used in Estonia and (2) how common it is in general to use Latin terms and phrases in Estonia.
Nov '10
Re: To Every Young Nitwit Who Thinks Communism is Cool
Estonian uses the Latin script. Cyrillic Russian script is nowhere to be seen except by the Russian minority who represent about 1/3rd of the population and declining as the Russians move back home or emigrate elsewhere.
There are a lot of German words in Estonian and the Estonian alphabet is closest to the German with umlauts, etc.
My surname is German of Bavarian origin. It is thought that the feudal estate on which my ancestors were surfs might have belonged to a German baron named Promm. It was not until the late 17th century that Estonians took surnames and when they did, many took the name of the estate on which they worked.
Latin is used in jurisprudence and in medicine just like in most of the western world.
Estonian independence is a novel thing. Back in the middle ages they were ruled by the Teutonic Knights (German), followed by Sweden followed by imperial Russia, followed by a brief independence between the great wars, followed by Soviet Russia, followed by Nazi Germany, followed by Soviet Russia until 1991 when independence was finally achieved.