sketches and observations made in and of an ethnocracy

A few days ago I landed in the airport of Reval, now called Tallin (ethno-Nazis get all worked up when Russians spell Tallin properly, with a single "n" that is, albeit the correct name of the city should be Reval or Revel, in Russian at least; Ethno-Nazis would probably get a collective heart attack when they find out that their friends Czechs - who did an outstanding job on Estonian SS scum in the last weeks of the WWII - often spell Tallinn with a single "l" - like Talin). Czechs either abhor double consonants or have no use for them.  Most of them don't know anything about Estonians' existence (lucky people) hence I don't believe they omit the "n" on purpose.

We had a pleasurable flight from Pressburg / Bratislava's homey airport (for which I hold special affection)  by a small French-built ATR-42 turboprop (an exquisite machine) first to Prague and then on an another CSA flight operated by a Airbus A-319 to  the ethno-Nazi cesspool known as Tallin or  Tallinn (in ethno-Nazi parlance).

CSA - once Czechoslovak Airlines now just Czech Airlines (the Slovak carriers Air Slovakia and SkyEurope went bankrupt last year) - is excellent. They flirted with low cost nonsense like charging passengers for sandwiches and drinks a few years back but then reverted to being a normal airline. Which is somewhat extraordinary turnaround on its own.  No amount of praise is enough for the CSA because they are so usually good.

Tallin or Tallinn airport was designed by a Russian, a Muscovite architect and built with Soviet Union (Russian) money in the late 80s. You won't find that sort of information or in fact any reference to the origins of the airport's building or to its architectural authorship, not in Estonia, not on the pages of the English language (CIA and ethno-Nazi controlled) Wikipedia. All history before 1918 is filtered out. In fact it looks like the history began in the year of 1918. History of the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic is more or less erased as well. Those buildings are just there. It is a go-between collective amnesia that affects about half of the city's population (Estonian speakers, recent peasants who became urbanized during Soviet era), the other half are Russian speakers are they are deprived of all civil rights and are not allowed to have a memory on their own, and of a historic censorship carried out on an unprecedented scale. It is like the Estonian SSR did not exist. Of course it did as the entire city including airport were built under the Soviet Union but nobody is supposed to talk about things that are inconvenient (from the Estonian ethno-Nazi standpoint) . By the way the Soviet airport is now called Lennart Meri Tallin International Airport. Lennart Meri was a notorious Russophobe and a Nazi. Russians built the airport. Now it is named after a rabid ethnic nationalist.  The world where everything is upside down, victims became villains, and villains like the Nazis are now heroes.


There is a humble musical genre known as announcement chime.  It is the chime or combination of sounds that precedes or follows an announcement in an airport or a train station.

Announcement chimes are standard all over through the are a few exceptions. The announcement chime at the Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris is special. Something like an UFO sound from a 1960s sci-fi movie. Now I can't think of nothing more neutral that an announcement chime from a political or ideological standpoint, but wait right here, this is no usual place. 


As I walked toward the luggage carousel, some announcement came through the intercom. Preceded by a chime.  There is a proverb about the devil being in the details (though in the original by Flaubert it must have been the God: le bon Dieu est dans le détail) but as this was Estonia the deity that hid in the details was positively diabolic. Estonian ethno-Nazis are great masters of little official nasties:  bites, spits, stings, hints, insinuations, most anti-Russian though most Russians are oblivious to what is going on for reason of being naturally obtuse or, alternatively, because ethno-Nazi performances escape them as they directed at a different, a foreign audience.  This thing was pretty innocent though quite telling. As the chime sounded before announcement (they said that a toilet was closed or they called for a passenger to go to the gate as the wretched creature was delaying some flight)... I paused.
It was not an ordinary airport announcement chime.
Bon Dieu
This was the first accord of the ethno-Nazi anthem.
At least I got a chuckle out of it.