Tarand says Parliament can turn Lossi Square into parliamentary showcase

Parliament has the power to transform Lossi Square into a representative space celebrating parliamentarism, Kaarel Tarand writes in a commentary published by ERR and originally printed in Sirp.

During the peak of onion peeling, no one can avoid the golden-coloured processing if they want to be among their people. The outermost layer is inedible, of course, and is useful only for collecting to dye Easter eggs the following spring.

But stupidity is protected as freedom under the Constitution, and no one is forbidden from making a fool of themselves. Estonia’s advertising agencies and leading clients have known for at least 30 years, since the famous advertisement saying “Mother will hit me if I don’t eat soup,” that the best advertising is amplified free of charge and in enormous quantities by a scandal. Social media now offers unlimited opportunities for sowing one.

The favourite for next year’s Kuldmuna advertising award has therefore already emerged, and useful idiots have done their work for the benefit of business.

Fortunately, Estonia still protects the inedible layer whose core message is: “You must not use words that may hurt my feelings.” This is a message of control and supremacy. But how am I supposed to know which ordinary vocabulary may hurt someone, or whether people pretending to be offended have any genuine feelings at all?

The demand places an obligation of self-censorship on opponents. Police officers trying to catch illegal immigrants are already diligently complying with it in their public communication, with the result that the world map has filled with countries where “people with a different skin colour” live. It is also an unavoidable step towards rewriting the past.

Folk heritage databases contain numerous references to “onions” and “onion Russians” that should be cancelled by deleting proverbs, riddles and sayings such as “go with your talk to the onion bog, or there to defecate” and “it smells like a Russian onion.”

A proud person familiar with Estonian culture would have responded to an onion joke not by taking offence but with an ancient riddle from Väike-Maarja: “I am a little man, yet your eyes water.”

Few people could immediately answer in a quiz in which Estonian town Sibulaküla is located and what its most important building is. The correct answer is Tallinn, and the building is the Ministry of Foreign Affairs beside Islandi Square. It would be entirely natural to have called all Estonian diplomats onions for decades, because what else is done while working in Onion Village but growing onions?

Did all the excellencies take offence? Or do they instead kindly explain to friends that the name Sibulaküla comes from the fact that no other neighbourhood has so many agents of Moscow’s top onions wandering around as the area near the foreign and defence ministries, nor so much visible agricultural work to drive out an invasive alien species?

These are still small onions, however, and deserve less attention than the equally topical large ones on Toompea that spoil the cityscape, waste space and indirectly undermine the constitutional order and national security.

This story has been rolling on for roughly as long as the saga of Tallinn City Hall, apart from the period of pre-war independence. Historian Margus Lääne, who gave a detailed overview of earlier disputes in the journal Tuna in 2009, summed up his article with the hope that “since times have changed, it is unlikely that anyone will demand the demolition of the cathedral any longer, and so it will continue to stand above the city in the future.”