Big Trouble in the Little Baltic:
How Capital Wrecks Nations
Veiko Hessler
As the world continues to convulse in economic and military strife, the tiny Baltic nation of Estonia is unlikely to be topping the thoughts of policy makers or the global public. Yet, sometimes by looking at the small details of world politics we can gain huge insights into the coming macro trends. By nature, commentators on the dissident Right tend to think in sweeping concepts such as imperial glory and the battle for global hegemony. But there is another quiet form of nationalism: The simple will of small nations that wish to be left alone to pursue their own destiny, without revanchist ambitions or jingoistic pomp. While great powers struggle for domination, the minor nations of the world seek only to survive in a hostile and ever-shifting political landscape. They have looked on in horror as Russia attempts to redraw the borders of Ukraine by military might, acutely aware that they could be next.
It is thus perhaps unsurprising that Estonia has been one of the most ardent supporters of the Ukrainian cause, donating well over 300 million euros to it, nearing 1% of its total Gross Domestic Product, while also incurring an inflation rate of 21%, in part by refusing to accept Russian oil and gas. At first glance, the reasons for pursuing this policy of solidarity seem altruistic and self-sacrificial: One small nation supporting the independence of another second-tier power, viewing it as a joint struggle against the forces of Russian neo-imperialism. Indeed, prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the “Narva scenario” whereby Russia would weaponize the population of the Estonian city of Narva, which is 90% ethnic Russian, as a pretext to dismember the Estonian state was often discussed as Russia’s logical next step in its expansionist program. It is a common belief that only the shield of European Union and NATO membership has saved Baltic independence — and even this is tenuous protection.
Before the outbreak of current hostilities, RAND Corporation wargaming exercises posited that a Russian invasion of Estonia would be limited only by logistical concerns, with the Estonian capital of Tallinn estimated to be under threat a mere 60 hours after a hypothetical invasion began. With this existential threat in mind, it seems unsurprising that Estonia has been one of the most Europhilic and slavish adopters of the liberal order, with the current Prime Minister Kaja Kallas being a former EU Commissioner, a total embodiment of prim and proper adherence to global norms. At the same time, Estonia now has its first billionaire, as the country markets itself as a glittering tech and banking hub, with a new business district dominating central Tallinn’s skyline. E-Estonia, as the government touts it, is thus a model citizen of the new world order and has become so in part because it believes its survival depends on being such.
Yet, this raises troubling questions about the nature of sovereignty and survival. Both the dissident Right and liberal policymakers view the most pressing threats to survival as external. For the Rightist, it is immigration that destroys nations; it seems irrefutable that changing a nation’s population will irrevocably change its character. And for the liberal, if a nation falls under the dominion of a supposed rogue state like Russia, for all practical purposes it ceases to exist. But I wish to make the case that nations are not destroyed from without, but instead are in fact first destroyed from within.
Estonia is a nation with a history of millennia of invasions and occupations, from Teutonic crusades to Swedish imperial domination, as well as centuries of Russian and Soviet rule which killed in excess of 30% of the country’s entire population, scattering a huge diaspora to the four corners of the Earth. And yet Estonia is still here, free and independent. The bill of nationhood has been paid in blood, whether in the doomed peasant uprising against Teutonic rule on St. George’s Night in 1343, or the equally catastrophic total mobilization of the Estonian population to repel the Soviet onslaught in 1944. To be Estonian is to be imbued with a pathological and irrepressible will to be free, a kamikaze tribe who has again and again thrown itself into battle against totally unwinnable odds, and remarkably endured despite unspeakable hardships. Invasion, then, seems an unlikely final end for the Estonian people, who have demonstrated time and time again an unshakable determination not to be remade, by empires or by ideologies. Amid the vast expanse of birch trees and bogs, a quiet and seemingly unimportant people simply wishes to be left to its insular introspection.
But in every nation, there exists a segment of the population who survive not by resistance, but by collaboration. In each branch of our European family, there are rotten apples, driven by avarice, who view survival not in collectivist, but individual terms. When the invaders come, they accommodate and embrace them, whether those invaders are foreign powers or economic migrants. Estonia may now be free, but sometimes the greatest disaster in life is to be granted what we most desperately desire. Those on the dissident Right often view demographic integrity as the benchmark of a nation’s well-being, assessing changes in the percentages of native and foreign populations as relative indicators of health and sickness. This is a flawed metric, however. Mass migration is the late stage of a disease that has metastasized. It is the outward expression of a culture and people in decay, but the rot sets in long before the first immigrant has ever set foot inside a nation’s border.
It is common to explain away the willingness of some segments of our people to sell out their nations by stating that foreign and malevolent actors control their minds — that the machinations of evil cabals poison the hearts of the weak-willed. This is, sadly, a naïve interpretation of the world. It is true that we have many enemies constantly working to subvert and destroy our people, but they can only be successful because greedy and misguided individuals from within our ranks open the gates for them. And once the gates are opened, it is rarely ever closed again. The resulting change occurs within the relative blink of an eye, catching the patriots off guard and unprepared.

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If one were simply to take demographics and national homogeneity as the gold standard of a nation’s health, Estonia could be said to be, by contemporary Western standards, a relatively well nation. Despite its large Russian population, mass emigration, and anemic birthrates, the core population remains Estonian. Mass public displays of nationalism are encouraged, whether at the hugely popular Song Festival held every five years or at the flag-waving celebrations on Independence Day. Those living in Western countries, where such mass displays of ethnic solidary are at best suspect and at worst de facto banned, may be envious. But make no mistake: Estonia has changed.
In 2002, Estonia unveiled a monument to Estonian members of the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS who had fought against Soviet occupation, sparking international outrage. In 2011 a criminal case was launched against the organizers of a marathon on the island of Saaremaa that wished to ban black runners, while a year later in 2012, the Deputy Editor of the Estonian paper Eesti Ekspress had to apologize after running a mock ad for weight loss pills featuring images of concentration camp inmates. These disparate incidents are not expressions of hate and supremacy, but rather indicate that Estonians took the notions of free speech and sovereignty in a spirit of almost childlike naïveté, safe in the belief that it was their country and that they could do and say what they wanted. They were time capsules: a nation with no prior experience of liberal thought and speech policing, one which had thrown off Soviet totalitarianism and was joyfully reveling in an atmosphere of unbridled freedom. But no nation is an island.
In 2017 a Wikileaks document revealed that the US embassy there was promoting diversity in Estonia. But this foreign intervention pales in comparison to the de facto coup that was organized in 2020. Martin Helme, then-Finance Minister and leader of the Estonian Conservative People’s Party (EKRE), cast doubt on the integrity of the US elections, leading then-Prime Minister Jüri Ratas to resign on unrelated corruption charges, collapsing the government coalition and thus thwarting Helme’s plans to hold a national referendum on defining marriage as being exclusively between a man and woman, which would have headed off the potential legalization of same-sex marriage in Estonia. In the West we are of course no strangers to deep-state chicanery by now, but for Estonia this represented the crossing of the Rubicon — the conclusive and definitive end to that brief hope that in a free and largely homogeneous country, a people can pursue their own self-determination.
This coup cannot be blamed entirely on the intervention of Western powers, however. To examine what has changed in the Estonian psyche, it is necessary to look at another scandal that was not political, but artistic. In 2019 the video game Disco Elysium was released, proving to be an unexpected critical and commercial success. It was designed by an Estonian, Robert Kurvitz, with the backing of the Estonian ZA/UM cultural collective. Unlike most recent video games, it was a triumph of narrative, originality, introspection, and humor — a piece of art totally Estonian in nature that was a meditation on the human condition, shot through with a deeply Baltic sense of place. While the team that created it are believed to harbor Leftist sympathies, its artistic merits transcend any such reductionist evaluation. Like all great works of art, it is open to interpretation.
In 2022 it was revealed that Kurvitz and his team had been fired from the studio they founded, and there is now an acrimonious and ongoing legal battle between him and the financial hyenas who have taken control of both the studio and its intellectual property. While the full details of the case remain opaque, it reveals that Estonia has reached the apogee of liberal statehood. It not only has a corrupt, homegrown political class willing to topple governments in order to thwart the will of the people, but also now has a predatory financial class who will gleefully crush art for profit. The simple wooden peasant cabins that were the backdrop of Tallinn’s sleepy streets have been demolished now, replaced by modern high-rise buildings. The first immigrants can now be seen working in fast-food restaurants in the capital, while the new tech elite push for a loosening of citizenship and migration rules to bolster the labor force. One must only look to the Republic of Ireland to see how quickly the transformation will take place.
But while the corruption and greed of those who would willingly sell out their countrymen runs deep, their machinations are not yet completed. This is not a lament, but an appeal. The best cure for the scourge of liberal multiculturalism is preventive: to never let the case develop in the first place. Estonia is travelling down a dark path from which there will be no return. Thousands of years of struggle will be lost, more assuredly than in the case of a foreign invasion, if the traitors are allowed to continue to dominate the nation. Do not allow them to fleece your birthright with honeyed words promising security and prosperity. Instead, embrace the raw-boned folkish peasant tenacity of those forest-dwelling Estonians who, since time immemorial, have refused to be remade, and who have refused to collaborate with any occupiers, foreign or domestic, despite the insurmountable odds.
As a dislodged Estonian, the product of centuries of those stubborn and sturdy tillers of the earth, I am calling on the great Kalevic tribe to once again pull off another superhuman act of collective defiance. Together we can sweep the Eurocrats and land rapists into the dustbin of history. They will be righteously judged in the hall of our ancestors, who they have betrayed, valuing our people only in terms of shekels and dollars. And to all those nationalists who are unconcerned with the fate of foreign and tiny nations that are far from their thoughts, it is time to reconsider your duty. The avarice corrupting the heart of the Estonian elite is the same one which tempts Polish politicians to import Filipino workers, and the same that has poisoned the Emerald Island and so noticeably darkened Dublin. If we are true advocates for our people, we stand with them everywhere, united as one unbreakable front, casting out those who would betray us — those who would let their people suffer for nothing more than mere personal enrichment. Capital may wreck nations, but only if the people allow it to do so. We will never allow it. Eestlane olen ja eestlaseks jään!
Reprinted from Transcendental Titans
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7 comments
The rewards of selling oneself to Globohomo are great for those who “take the ticket”. It does appear that all of Europe, at least up to the Russian border, will be absorbed into the Global American Empire, for as long as it lasts.
An excellent essay, filled with trenchant observations, but also posing serious questions. What is the proper relationship between national preservation and international capital, and how is this to be maintained in the face of the undeniable, if, from an historical view, short-term, material benefits that foreign investment brings to less economically developed nations? Is the author saying that the very fact of foreign investment is threatening, similar to mass immigration? I’m not sure how that can be theorized. Immigration of genetically dissimilar persons (or even of a sufficient number of foreigners of one’s own race but not ethnicity) is clearly an invasion – demographic as opposed to military warfare. Even mere worker-migration (allowing foreigners to work in your country, but not to immigrate there – ie, become citizens) is a threat insofar as it psychologically and legally normalizes the physical presence of aliens, which can be a prelude to grants of citizenship and thus to demographic capitulation.
One can say, then, that the white nationalist agenda for white nations holds that all immigration and migration of nonwhites should be outlawed, with illegal aliens summarily deported (what to do about existing nonwhite citizens allowed lawful residence by past race-treasonous governments is a separate and more theoretically and practically difficult matter). This of course should be considered a if not the nationalist ‘minimum’.
But what is Hessler saying about foreign capital? That it should be banned, too? Is this really necessary for a true volk? IOWs, if a people is so enervated in ethnonational consciousness that allowing, say, Hyundai to build a car assembly plant there threatens ultimate national disintegration, doesn’t that imply something disturbing about the prior failure of proper patriotic formation among the people? A tribally well-bred people would gladly accept foreign capital to jump start domestic economic growth, and would only be the better for it in terms of the development of national power (wealth being a precondition of military strength, which alone guarantees national survival for small white – and possibly all small – powers in this totalitarian marxisant age).
Look at China. The US and other white capitalist entities have poured countless trillions in investment dollars into China since the latter’s accession to the WTO. In a mere quarter century, this rank idiocy has allowed China to become arguably the world’s most comprehensively powerful nation – with absolutely no loss (as far as I, who don’t speak Chinese and have never been to Asia, can tell) of Han-supremacist consciousness.
Is the real problem capital – or the evolutionary maladaptedness (ie, the seeming innate lack of innate racial fellow-feeling) of so many whites? A white ethnostate mighty in tribal consciousness could easily absorb vast amounts of Japanese or Saudi investment capital, and be all the stronger for it in the long term.
Comparing the development of China (and other ‘low cost production centres’) to Western nations in the 21st century is misleading.
Global capital is more likely to be taking that Hyundai factory to India or Indonesia – or indeed China – than it is to be jumpstarting any healthy economic activity in a developed, white country.
You say that a white ethnostate mighty in tribal consciousness could absorb Saudi investment, but why would Saudi investors want to sink money into a place with a strong social bonds? Saudi Arabia is a clear case of a spoiled, degenerate community that uses masses of servile Filipino and Indian labour to get stuff done. Without a divided and exploitable workforce (or a highly disciplined one, like China’s) the only investment global capital will care about will be extractive industries, or real estate. Even service industries are moving to the third world, driven by online shopping and call centres. The kind of social solidarity that produces good wages and working conditions is not highly attractive to prospective manufacturers, or any kind of productive industry.
A healthy community with a healthy economic system would build alternatives to international debt slavery, not simply try to retrospectively manage its worst consequences.
The author is right, IMO, to identify global capital as a clear and direct threat to national integrity.
Is the real problem capital – or the evolutionary maladaptedness (ie, the seeming innate lack of innate racial fellow-feeling) of so many whites?
The racial sentiments of Westerners have been so manipulated over multiple generations by one-world (anti-white) propaganda – in schools, churches, newspapers, magazines, books, films, radio, television and now video games and individualised emails and social media feeds – that it is difficult to remember that as recently as the 1960s (maybe much later in some places) a significant majority of people held very sustainable and healthy views on the desirability and ‘rightness’ of white ethno-states. Certainly ethnic clustering doesn’t seem to have gone away in prisons and from my observation in schools, albeit there is a tendency for the ‘nerds’ in schools to be a multi-racial group of Chinese, Europeans and Sub-continentals. I think the current default self-loathing position of most white people is maintained only through near-constant exposure to full-spectrum propaganda. This is why our access to enemy media has been so definitively curtailed over the last five years.
It seems there are two fronts. One is beating down the traitors who take loans to undertake immediate and rapid “growth.”
The second is to have your own plan and vision. The vision has to be at the levels of ethnos, nation and individual. It must be a new fuedalism that is our neo-feudalism where ours emphasizes reciprocal duty.
Do we want to be culturally and economically rich and flourish? Yes. Okay. If that means being technologically advanced what reciprocal duties do we all fulfill to ensure we can attain those goals without importing Filipinos and Hindus…?
We acknowledge all dimensions of humanity as we are noble. We are not this rabble that borrows and spends and wrecks in a never ending ponzu spiral that degrades our humanity.
We must take the reigns and sit at the tables and walk the halls of power. We must rise and be prepared to achieve individual and national greatness but by our rules. Being on the outside looking in is certain defeat. That video game company and developer community is essential to have Estonian nationalists at the center of the decision making process.
Well either you are an empire or you’re part of one it seems. So I guess European countries can unite and therefore be able to push back against Russia and America, or they can support regimechange in either empire. I guess by supporting Counter-Currents we are doing the latter.
Recent conversation on Hungarian television. Participants:
Gábor Mező, journalist, researcher of Communist and post-Communist elites and networks.
Gáspár Maróth, head of Hungary’s rearmament program.
András Schiffer, green politician, black sheep of a prominent left/Jewish political family.
Maróth: “If I look at all the surrounding countries around us, then, to put it bluntly, there is no country apart from us where the government cannot be removed within a week or two with a well-planned foreign power operation.”
Schiffer: “Yep.”
Mező: “How simple it is. It’s pretty scary.”
Schiffer: “Bulgaria.”
Maróth: “Bulgaria. The Czech Republic. Slovakia. Let’s go on? Romania.”
Schiffer: “Last summer it was announced who would be the next Bulgarian Prime Minister. In Washington.”
Maróth: “Yes. Ukraine.”
Schiffer: “Austria.”
Maróth: “Yes, Austria. What really happened there is a very interesting question. The first round proved to have been a clear secret service operation, but the events of recent days also make it very doubtful what’s happening there.”
Schiffer: “It’s interesting because if you look after ’45, there were chancellors who were in power for an incredibly long time. In the last five years, if we count Kurz as two, because he was chancellor twice, then together with the acting chancellors, I think they’re about to consume their seventh one. In the past, however, they absolutely represented stability.”
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