I completely agree with you, especially regarding the “Baltics are Nazis” thing - I think it’s completely messed up. At least in Estonia, there are three very distinct kinds of people that regularly get called Nazis by foreigners (mostly by Russian media):

1. Actual Nazi sympathisers - they surely exist (as they probably do in all countries globally), but in my experience, this is an extreme fringe minority of people, because the general sentiment is that Nazis occupied and did absolutely horrible things in Estonia in WW2.
2. Conservative nationalists - a much bigger group, but still a minority, these are people who are hardcore against anything progressive, they generally even oppose the EU (often calling it a new version of the USSR, as an insult).
3. People who condemn the Soviet Union - this is the vast majority of the population.

Basically all Estonians belong to the third group (as discussed elsewhere in this thread), so it’s actually scary when Russian media lumps these people in with literal Nazi sympathisers. I don’t think Estonia can do anything to effectively combat this propaganda either - Russian media is fucking powerful.

I think in general your description of poverty rates and low wages is a perfect description of Estonia ~10 years ago, but nowadays I think it’s actually a bit different. Poverty rates have seriously decreased, wages have gone up quite quickly every year, and construction workers are making quite good money within Estonia, etc. (To be fair though, the inflation from the past year has hurt people a lot)

Are you Estonian by any chance?

I think this thread highlights the general sentiment among the Estonian population perfectly.

Yeah, good point. I’ve also heard claims that Estonia was on par with Finland in terms of GDP per capita before Soviet times, so many people blame socialism for the current weakness compared to Finland.

Lots of interesting comments here already. I am now trying to find more information from another perspective - how did the Estonian people feel about the Soviets leading up to the occupation.

During the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia, Estonia was still a part of the Russian Empire. There was also a revolutionary government in Estonia at that time, but at the same time, a democratically elected (capitalist) government emerged, resulting in a dual power situation in Estonia.

There was a war of independence during 1918-1920. In Estonian schools, it’s taught like this: on one side was the capitalist government with a mostly volunteer military (and with heavy financial and military aid from Britain and Finland) - these were the “good guys”. They were fighting the “bad guys” - Germans in the south, and Bolsheviks in the East. Bolsheviks also included the aforementioned revolutionary government, which was in fact fully comprised of ethnic Estonians, but they are mostly handwaved away as traitors to the Estonian people, and actually they are kind of treated as Russian puppets who were just executing the will of the “Soviet empire”. I remember being very confused in school when learning about these guys, I never understood how the Russians managed to convince some Estonians to betray our people, I think the common understanding most people leave school with is that they were basically just fundamentally evil people (yes, really).

Ultimately the October revolution failed in Estonia, because the capitalist government managed to somehow win against both Germans and the Red Army with a much smaller army (how this happened is actually really hard for me to understand), and so the first independent capitalist Estonia was born (which lasted until the Soviet occupation in 1939).

Based on the above, I am making some assumptions:

1. I can definitely see the war of independence creating a “Bolsheviks are the enemy” understanding in the general populace, so when the Soviets came at the start of WW2, people were already only seeing them as the enemy. I think this is the perfect environment to prevent the spread of communism as an ideology: a population who feel they’ve had their independent future stolen from them by the Soviets, their historic enemies. I can definitely see parents in such an environment priming their children to not trust Soviet teachings from a young age - I know from first hand experience that such priming was being done to children when I was very young, so this very well could be something that has been passed down through the generations from when the occupation first started.
2. Very likely the war of independence resulted in the loss of most Estonian communists, so by the time of the occupation, there were probably very few Estonian people spreading communist ideology “on the inside”.
3. This is pure speculation, but the fact that the Estonian people had effectively resisted the October revolution may have caused some built-in anger and disdain from the side of the Soviets, and this may very well explain the initial violence and frankly unjustifiable deportations of what I consider mostly innocent people.

I want to try and find some more sources about the revolutionary government and the war of independence, and how the people in Estonia felt about communism during the October revolution, but I think I will need to go to a library for this, as I am not finding much online (certainly not finding much that is unbiased).

One interesting note: the revolutionary government went into exile in Russia after the war of independence, and eventually most of them were executed during the Great Purge. I am having a hard time finding out what crimes they were accused of.

TLoU part 2

Guess I’m dead, no way I’m surviving in that world

In my experience, it’s extremely fringe and basically completely taboo to be pro-communism in Estonia. Disco Elysium is definitely a point of pride for many Estonian video game enjoyers, but even so, when discussing the authors, Estonians get super awkward about their communism. The general vibe I’ve seen is something like “ZA/UM can be forgiven for having a few screws loose, they’re artists after all” etc.

Don’t get me wrong, I get it now, I’m just saying that when I first came to Hexbear, I was confused

I think oppressed and exploited people have no need to be civil, but on the other hand, I don’t think it’s right to say that people who are alienated by “uncivil” posts on Lemmy were never really friends (I am extending your “dems” to include Lemmy users here, I hope I’m not misrepresenting your point) - I think a lot of them have good intentions and would probably support socialism if they understood it. Maybe I’m naive, but I’ve noticed several times seemingly decent people on Lemmy having negative opinions about Hexbear. Just recently, I saw one person calling Hexbear “tankies”, and then in another thread the same person was calling for the elimination of millionaires. They’re just a few steps away from being a “tankie” themselves, and they just don’t realise it because they are missing some key information.

I was saying in another thread before, I think having a friendly “intro to Hexbear” type page or post would be awesome, because it could be shown to confused Lemmy users who don’t understand Hexbear yet.

I really think it’s an honest misunderstanding, fueled by wrong first impressions.

Even for myself, the first time I opened hexbear.net a few months ago, I immediately saw some post about Trump on the front page, and a bunch of posts and comments criticising liberals. I completely misunderstood what was going on here, I also thought that it’s some kind of right wing circlejerk. This misunderstanding was later reinforced by reading comments elsewhere on Lemmy calling Hexbear a Putin supporter instance, troll instance, etc.

I only started questioning my understanding when I started noticing some sincere comments by Hexbear users, and eventually I realised that you guys have pretty much the same worldview as I do (in terms of the rich only being rich because they exploit the poor etc).

It can really take some effort on the part of external users to figure out what’s going on in here, and from my own experience, I think it’s extremely easy to get the wrong idea.

Is there any generic “intro to Hexbear” post somewhere that I can point other people to when explaining what Hexbear is?

I think there are a lot of people on Lemmy who would fundamentally agree with most of the values held by Hexbear users, but they never give it a chance because of some bad first impression (either they are told by others that Hexbear users are all just trolls, or maybe they even get called a fascist or something like that by somebody with @hexbear in their name).

Would be great if there was some better intro. Does such a thing exist already? I tried searching but did not find anything.

Heck yeah! I lived in a city with a bunch of architecture like that, always hear people saying how ugly it is, but I love it so much. Nice to meet another fan.

So many tech YouTubers are overrated, but one who really stands out to me is JayzTwoCents. Somehow I have several memories of clicking on one of his videos and being shocked at him being confidently incorrect about something. I no longer click on his videos at all.

Behold, the result of 4 hours of careful ship design: https://imgur.com/a/ZbfD8tN

Unfortunately, they’re also fedded with exploding heads, but I’ve never actually seen a post from there.

Exploding heads has been shut down, because nobody on Lemmy wanted to accept their bullshit (they made a long post about it before they finally closed), so actually nobody is federated with them anymore

I like reading most hexbear content, I have learned a lot here. I hope you guys do not defederate lemm.ee. By the way, the lemm.ee mods are very strict when it comes to enforcing the instance-wide no bigotry rule.

I find it absolutely awesome, the game has the same “just one more quick adventure… oops 5 hours have passed” effect as TES games, but in space. I think I’ve also spent 3-4h in the ship editor at this point.

I’m probably a very boring person

If you search for Russia on hexbear, you find comments like this quite quickly, like:

https://hexbear.net/comment/3738463

Peace looks like guaranteeing Ukrainian neutrality by taking NATO membership off the table and likely ceding the DPR and LPR to the Russian federation at this point.

https://hexbear.net/comment/3765816

We also get a lot of shock at the fact that some of us think, in that situation, Ukraine would have to give independence and security guarantees to the Donbas & Crimea. Many of us think that given the realities of the civil war there over the last 8 years or so, plus this conflict, it’s probably the only way to prevent retributory ethnic cleansing in the region. It has nothing to do with ideas of fairness or sovereignty or any other nebulous concept; it’s about what’s least worst for the working class there.

I’ve seen many other such comments in the past week lurking here, so it definitely comes up every now and then. I can also see the logic behind these comments, even if I don’t agree with the logic myself.

I am personally against American invasions and am not trying to say the USA is somehow good or benevolent, I was just pointing out why outsiders may perceive some hexbear users as pro-Putin

I’ve seen several comments on hexbear (I can find links if you haven’t seen them) along the lines of “I’m not pro-Putin… BUT we should give him what he wants in order to end the war quicker”, and as an outsider, I think for sure these comments are actually seen as totally pro-Putin by non-hexbear users, due to how trying to appease dictators has ended for Europe in the past.