Month: June 2007

Often when I hear President George W. Bush speak about his so-called war-on-terror crusade, it’s like returning to some of the darkest periods of Argentinean history, when a ruthless military regime ruled the country in 1976-83.

Many of the barbaric interrogation techniques that the Argentinean security forces used in the ill-fated fight against “atheist” terrorism to defend the country from its “Christian and Western” values was leaned from the CIA.

One of these torture methods that security forces used was waterboarding, or known in Argentina as el submarino, the submarine. Despite having a different name, the aim of the torture technique is the same: to force the victim feel that he’s going to drown and thereby cave in to the interrogators. In some Argentinean detention centers, the water used to submerge the victims in was filled with human excrement.

Other widespread “routine” torture methods in Argentina and Latin America include the use of electricity. Victims in Argentina were normally forced to use hoods, just like captives in Iraq, so they couldn’t identify their torturers.

The short-term success that Argentina’s military had over its enemies made it eager to find new ones. The de facto government started rounding up potential terrorists; ie all those who could become but weren’t yet terrorists.

It took a colossal fiasco, like going to war with in 1982 over the Falkland Islands, known as islas Malvinas in Spanish, for the military to be humbled. Is Iraq George W. Bush administration’s Falkland Islands?

The mistaken path that Bush has taken in its fight against the real and/or imagined enemies of the US bares a spooky resemblance to what happened in Argentina during the dirty war era, when over 30,000 people disappeared.

The methods and reasoning Washington is using in its own war resembles the trademark of despotic regimes like in Argentina a long time ago.

A warning: The methods employed by Argentina’s junta during 1976-83 were so barbaric that the de facto government ended up becoming the terrorist.

The creation of Fennovoima, a new consortium comprising of Boliden , E.ON, Katternö, Outokumpu, and Rauma Energia, aims to build within ten years a 1-1.8GW nuclear plant that would produce cheap power mainly for industry. Being a hydrocarbons poor country, it’s understandable that Finland wants to lessen as much dependence as possible on foreign energy imports from countries like Russia.

Finland is presently building a sixth nuclear plant at Olkiluoto, where there are already two nuclear plants in operation. The country’s two other nuke plants are at Loviisa.

While industry lobbies for more nuclear capacity, Finland’s power markets are mainly operated by two giants: Fortum and Vattenfall of Sweden. The creation of Fennovoima is a healthy sign since it’ll bring a new player to the market.

It’s a lamentable trend in the European Union that the number of power companies is shrinking, not growing. A while back there were nine large power companies in Germany and today there are only four. The same trend is happening in Spain, where three energy companies – Gas Natural, E.ON and Enel – courted Endesa, the country’s largest power utility. After having five power companies — Endesa, Iberdrola, Union Fenosa, Hidrocantábrico and Viesgo — it may end up with two.

While some may argue for more nuclear power, I believe the one important issue to be greater competition in the European power sector. It’s the only assurance that power prices will remain at acceptable levels and that the European Union doesn’t turn into an overgrown and predatory Electricite de France. Competition will guarantee that there’s enough generating capacity for everyone as well.

Finland and Europe doesn’t necessarily need more nuclear capacity — it needs more competition.

Language is a beautiful tool that one can use to express him/herself. Learning how to master such a tool is a lifetime process. Those that are more into important matters like syntax and grammar may forget to mention the most important matter about writing: yourself.

Here’s a saying that expresses that situation and challenge eloquently:

I’d rather not know how to write and have something to say than know how to write and have nothing to say.

While grammar and syntax may prove a formidable challenge to master, they aren’t impossible to tame to express what you want to say. There are other hurdles like society and silence that may follow after you publish.

We’ve seen it throughout history so many times. An autocratic regime takes away civil liberties and only a few cry out. The majority is fed  incredulous-yet-believable-on-the-surface-fairy tales as to why their liberties have been put in the freezer indefinitely. Like being in a trance induced by drugs like nationalism, the common citizen begins to admire their autocratic leaders in the same pathological way as sometimes occurs between the tortured and torturer. Here’s a quote that aims to give you courage to overcome such a foe:

Some end up admiring those that take away their freedom and suspect deeply the motives of those who fight to regain it.

Finland’s beautiful old-growth forests are becoming extremely rare these days. In the Etelä-Savo region where I live, such forests account for under 10% of all forests. In southern Finland such untouched forests are becoming increasingly rare.

While forest companies are destroying and planting forests that look like wheat fields, one should ask how planted forests will affect Finnish culture. One of the cornerstones of this country’s culture and its manifestations through music and art hinges on the forest, which has grown in the past as freely as the Finns.

But what will happen to our culture if such forests that inspired men like Jean Sibelius, Akseli Gallen-Kallela and others exist in emaciated patches here and there?

This is one of the greatest tragedies that Finland is facing today: the rapid loss of its virgin forests fueled by the dynamic duo of greed and profit. Some of these trees, like the spruces, may have taken over 100 years to grow but a harvester can fell them in a matter of seconds.

Ever since I was a child, I have always held a deep fascination for sunsets. I visited Northwest Territories last year and had the opportunity to witness a midnight sunset in Canada’s north. I was driving along Ingraham Trail behind Yellowknife I witnessed some of the most beautiful sunsets I’ve seen in a long time.

The summer sunsets are just as moving in Finland.

Possibly some of us are so moved by sunsets because they’re so surreal. It’s like being in a magical place where two great frontiers meet briefly at a special moment. Those two frontiers are Space and Earth.

We don’t see things as they are,
we see things as we are.
Anaïs Niin

The date and year is not important, but it is a weekday, not too long ago.
Spring has announced its arrival and spreads its magic to these Sub-Arctic
latitudes after a long slumber. Leaves are budding everywhere; trees are
stretching out their branch tips like humans with their arms upon awakening. The
full moon, which seems like a white hole peeking into the darkness, shyly
lightens the night as it follows you with thin clouds moving beside it like
waving silk in the sleepy wind.

I’m driving alone on the motorway from Porvoo to Helsinki amid these landscapes overflowing with beauty. Even if the night has robbed the forest of its individuality because it is now a solid clump of varying hues of darkness,everything is not what it seems…

We see things as they are

Like the dark forest teeming with life on the motorway to Helsinki, it ismade up of infinite particles of matter and spontaneous events. It is very muchlike an image of our culture, also made up by individuals and endless intentions.

When I moved to Finland in 1978, my ethnic perceptions of the Finns did notdiffer very much from what was common knowledge at the time. The way we sawourselves as a people and a nation had very much to do with the geopolitical circumstances of the cold war. Even if we were culturally hamstrung by such a reality, our political leaders, ethnographers, linguists and others added to oursense of isolation.

On the foreign policy front, Finland didn’t officially belong to the East or West. It was in a no-man’s land reaping the best of both hostile worlds. Linguistically and ethnically, we considered ourselves distant from the rest of Western Europe as well.

How many times as a child had I heard from my relatives that the Finns are a people that are not related to anyone in Europe except for with the Sami(Lapps), Hungarians and Estonians.

Ethnically speaking, the cold war was the most castrating period in Finland’s search for its cultural identity. Through the difficult circumstances of Superpower politics, Finns lost contact with their ethnic relatives like the Estonians, Ingrians, and in many ways with the children of the hundreds ofthousands of Finnish migrants who live abroad.

If it weren’t for the parents of these migrant children, who encouraged them to visit their grandparents in Finland during summer, such cultural bonds wouldnot have been lost forever.

It does surprise me that even after the Soviet Union’s fall from grace in the past decade, some policymakers in this country are slowly acknowledging a new group of Finns called the “New” Finns. What these bureaucrats do not understand, however, is that these so-called “New” Finns have always existed but had not been acknowledged before.

Things as we are

One of the first scientific books given to me on Finland was written by a sociologist called Heikki Waris. In his book on the Finns, he stated that one of the outstanding factors that characterized Finland was its homogeneous population.

But how ethnically homogeneous or near-homogeneous is it? At the time of Waris’ statement, close to one million Finns lived as migrants outside of Finland’s borders. What about the children of these Finnish migrants, who grew up in both cultures, and kept
strong bonds with Finland by visiting this country on a regular basis during the summers?

Possibly Waris’ sentence could have shed more truth if it read in the following manner: Finns are not ethnically homogeneous, but have been made culturally homogeneous through the circumstances of history, geography and geopolitics.

There are some studies that now claim that Finns are not as ethnically isolated as previously believed and that they are quite “mixed” genetically with other groups in Central Europe.

The US government asked American anthropologist Margaret Mead after the bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese in 1942 to carry out a national character study on the new nation America was at war with. The reasoning behind the study was to bring forth some “national traits” on the Japanese so that the US could wage a more effective war against its new foe.

The so-called national character study by Mead did not bear any fruit and concluded that it was impossible to produce a clean list of traits that characterize the Japanese. On the contrary, Japanese culture is made up by an infinite number of sub-cultures and therefore impossible to categorize in a stereotypical fashion.

Considering that Japan must have been a much more isolated country at the time when compared to Finland, what would have Mead’s conclusions been if she had done a similar study on the Finns?

To go back once again to the sublime forest and night that hugs the motorway from Porvoo and Helsinki, who can seriously say that there are not an infinite amount of factors at play in creating such a state of beauty?

We must also begin to see ourselves as we are, and not like historical and geopolitical circumstances have dictated in the past.

There is a neighborhood in northern Buenos Aires called Flores. A number of my relatives used to live there. It is amid those early-20th-century Parisian-style houses and oaks hugging the cobblestone streets where you’ll find everything that went right and wrong in Argentina.

The majority of the residents of Flores despise time because they say it distances them from those they love and who were from European lands. The residents of the neighborhood use ingenious methods to halt time: They park vintage cars like Fords from the 1930s in front of their homes; hang up portraits of ancient heads of state like King Victor Emmanuel II of Italy, Spain’s Francisco Franco and Czar Nicholas II hanging on the walls of their homes.

The stubborn attempt to cling onto the past is like keeping a hope alive. By slowing time the residents of Flores believe that they can protect and cherish those ideals that their migrant relatives brought from faraway European lands.

An uncle called Horacio who lived in Flores would scold me if I brought a modern object like a pocket calculator to his home. “Are you mad!” he’d jump up and say. “Get that contemporary thing out of here – We don’t want to speed the pace of time, now do we?”

Horacio’s home was like a museum. The only modern appliances he had — a television set and fridge — were at least 20 to 30 years old. He’d often talk to me as a child about traveling to Africa on an adventure safari, even if in his lifetime he never traveled outside radius of 100 miles from Buenos Aires.

One day Horacio told me why he had ripped the hands of time off all the time contraptions he owned.

“Time is a migrants worst enemy because it distances us from who we were and shapes us by force into nationals of new countries and circumstances,” he said. “I’m still hopeful that if time is slowed and the past and present are perfectly balanced, the answer why my migrant parents failed to find what they searched for in these parts will drop on my lap like a golden leaf inscribed with wisdom.”

I never knew if Horacio found the great secret that would help him find happiness. The last time I spoke to him was about thirty years ago. I saw an old man who was getting ready to embrace death.

The bitterness brought on by hyperinflation, political and economic turmoil were his death blows.

Here’s to expand on the article in The New York Review of Books, Jonathan Freedland. He quotes Charlmers Johnson’s Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic:

Necessarily, it is Johnson, who has diagnosed a more radical problem, who has to come up with a more radical solution. He cannot merely call for greater powers for Congress, because by his own lights, “the legislative branch of our government is broken,” reduced to the supine creature of large corporations, the defense contractors first among them. Instead, he urges a surge in direct democracy, “a grassroots movement to abolish the CIA, break the hold of the military-industrial com-plex, and establish public financing of elections”—but he has the grace to recognize how unlikely such a development is.

So he is left offering not an eleven- or twelve-step program, but rather a historical choice. Either the United States can follow the lead of the Romans, who chose to keep their empire and so lost their republic. Or “we could, like the British Empire after World War II, keep our democracy by giving up our empire.” That choice was neither smooth nor executed heroically, but it was the right one. Now much of the world watches the offspring of that empire, nearly two and a half centuries later—hoping it makes the same choice, and trembling at the prospect that it might not.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former security adviser to Jimmy Carter, gives a report card to George W Bush, Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush. In an interesting article in The New York Review of Books, Jonhathan Freedland writes a review about three books written about the Bush administration. One of these is by Brzezinski, Second Chance: Three Presidents and the Crisis of American Superpower.

The conservative Democrat and cold war hawk, gives Bush Sr. a B, while Clinton gets a C. Bush Jr. gets slammed with an F.

Quoting Brzezinski, the article in The New York Review of Books gives a very critical picture of the Bush administration:

It is hard to exaggerate the Bush administration’s fundamental miscalculations on Iraq… Small wonder that after nearly four years of warfare, Iraq has been a disaster, costing thousands of lives, requiring the expenditure of hundreds of billions of dollars, stretching our forces and reserve system to the breaking point, and becoming a magnet for terrorists and hostility towards the Untied States throughout the Muslim world.

He continues:

Because of Bush’s self-righteously unilateral conduct of US foreign policy after 9/11, the evocative symbol of America in the eyes of much of the world ceased to be the Statue of Liberty and instead became the Guantánamo prison camp.

It’s pretty evident that the Bush administration has fallen into a trap that has meant the demise of some autocratic regimes. Whenever the leader of such a government believes that he’s on a crusade to save the country or world from some murky enemy like terrorists, that’s the first sign that the government is in self-destruct mode. Wars that such despots declare turn into obsessions that blind them into believing they are indestructible.

It’s unfortunate that countries like Germany with Adolf Hitler and the former Soviet Union with Joseph Stalin had their tragic rendezvous with autocracy. The US is now suffering from the same problem under Bush, even if the president hasn’t been able to destroy all of the US’ democratic institutions.

There’s still hope to salvage US but the main priority must be to get Bush out of the White House.