Month: December 2014

Here’s a question that has been going around in my head for the last few days: Is the intolerance we’re witnessing today in Finland a passing matter? How much good will is there in our society to apply our Nordic welfare state values to others? 

Finland isn’t a country of immigrants but a country of emigrants.

Are we still too obsessed with “us” and “them,” with one-way adaption (assimilation) of migrants and minorities?

If you look around, as an migrant or member of the minority community it’s easy to note that there is too little tolerance in this country. There is still a lot of lip service and silence from officials and politicians but too little leadership to challenge the prejudices that are still alive and kicking in our society.

A good example of the latter is an announcement by the European Commission to take Finland to the EU Court of Justice, about establishing a racial equality body for employment matters, according to the Finnish ministry for foreign affairs.

This case, and the fact that Finland is dragging its feet on this issue for years, is an excellent example why too many migrants and minorities live in a climate of uncertainty and usually end up getting the short end of the stick.

The only way for intolerance to grow is to permit such a social ill to ferment in the undercurrent with the help of our silence. 

Is the intolerance we’re seeing today is only the tip of the iceberg of the hatred that we’ll see in the future? The answer depends on us.

When Finns understand that migrants do play an important role in our society and are needed like the oxygen we breathe, the xenophobic messages of parties like the Perussuomalaiset* (PS) will lose credibility.

When Finland looks behind it shoulder ten years back in 2024, will it see this period as one where we still had a good chance at challenging intolerance?

What are we doing today to not slide on that slippery slope?

The parliamentary elections of 2015 will give us a glimpse of the future and offer an answer.

* The Finnish name for the Finns Party is the Perussuomalaiset (PS). The names adopted by the PS, like True Finns or Finns Party, promote in our opinion nativist nationalism and xenophobia. We therefore prefer to use the Finnish name of the party on our postings.

An interesting spin that the media has echoed about the CIA’s torture program on Tuesday is that all these terrible things happened recently. They neither happened recently nor involved “some folks” as President Barack Obama pointed out, but have been going on for decades. 

Wake up USAmerica.

The Guardian writes:

There are stories in the CIA torture report of “rectal rehydration as a means of behavior control”, threats to murder and “threats to sexually abuse the mother of a detainee” – or cut a mother’s throat. There are details about detainees with broken bones forced to stand for days on end, detainees blindfolded, dragged down hallways while they were beaten. There were even torture sessions that ended in death. The list goes on and on, and on and on.

One of the most incredible matters about the CIA torture report is how its being played played down by the White House.

The CIA torture report exposes once again what we’ve feared to known: we torture as well and behave like the “bad guys.”

One of the outcomes of 9/11 is that it brought home the real face of USAmerican foreign policy. There is no longer a Mr “CIA” Hyde that acts recklessly abroad and a Dr Jekyll that behaves within our borders. Mr Hyde resides in the US today and for a very, very long time.

Dan Mitrione (1920-1970) was one of many CIA agents that worked in Latin America during the Cold War. He advised the Uruguayan police about torture techniques. He used to say that when one tortures it’s important to apply “precise pain in the price place at the precise time.”

Manuel Hevia giving testimony in Havana, Cuba, in 1978: “Several street beggars were picked up whose disappearance would attract no attention. This was a technique that Mitrione had developed or rather perfected in Brazil. Using these beggars, experiments were conduced with different forms of interrogation letting the student see the effects of different voltages on different parts of the human body male and female. All those unhappy people died without really knowing why they were undergoing this pain, without even having the cowardly solution of answering any questions because they were not asked questions. They were simply guinea pigs.”

Calls for the Obama administration by human rights groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch to prosecute US officials responsible for the CIA torture program should be heeded.

The so-called war on terror declared by George W. Bush was a colossal mistake that we’re paying a dear price in the form of credibility and the erosion of our values inspired by the Enlightenment.

The only matter that can save the United States from itself and dealing with its murky CIA past.