Month: June 2022

Migrant Tales will launch stories about how the cold war, or Finlandization, encouraged self-censorship and censorship. My journalism career began in 1986, when I made a living from writing. As a journalist writing for the Finnish and foreign media, the foreign ministry warned me several times about questioning Finland’s foreign policy and human rights violations in the former USSR. One official said if I didn’t stop writing negative things about the Soviet Union, I’d be blacklisted by the foreign ministry. It was a shameful period that we must never repeat.

Since September 19, 1944, just after Finland signed an armistice with the USSR, which concluded the so-called Continuation War, the lights of that period of turmoil were turned off. Those who turned off the lights did so in the hope that no-one would ever find his way back into that era characterized by so much irrationality and rivers of blood.

Two years previous, in April 1942m a book on Field Marshall Carl Gustaf Mannerheim had been published by one of the country’s leading publishers, WSOY. Field Marshall Mannerheim is a leading figure in Finnish history; he was one of the main architects in keeping Finland free from the communists.

The Continuation War should not be mistaken for the Winter War (1939-40) when, for over a period of 105 grueling days, the vastly outnumbered Finns miraculously kept the Red Army in check. During the Continuation War, Finland fought side by side with Nazi Germany against a common enemy – the Soviet Union.

The recent article and editorial in Helsingin Sanomat about social segregation in Finland is a good example of how white privilege deals with growing social segregation.

Finland’s largest daily, Helsingin Sanomat, published an editorial Thursday about how social segregation is growing in Finland. That follows a story about how some schools in Espoo have more pupils who speak other languages than Finnish, Swedish, or Saami.

One of the most important matters in a story written by a predominantly white newsroom about migrant and minority groups is what they overlook in the story. What the story discards can be seen as a Freudian slip.

Thus urban segregation is the unequal distribution of different social groups based on occupation, income, education, gender, and ethnicity, according to the EU. In recent years, the gap has widened.

Why the Helsingin Sanomat editorial does not address the core issues behind urban segregation reveals volumes about the daily and its editorial board. One possible reason why they are not mentioned is a common phenomenon: denial.