There are many similarities between Hitler’s rise to power and far-right parties like the Perussuomalaiset (PS).* Even if the context is different from the 1920s and 1930s, the same nationalist and racial hatred and fuel arepresent today.
The most recent example of funding policies for the social and healthcare sector by social welfare and health, Wille Rydman, could not highlight this threat more clearly.
Like his party, Rydman is tainted by hubris and racism. Just like Nazis were given legitimacy during Hitler’s reign in power, Rydman has found a similar home in the PS and Prime Minister Petteri Orpo’s government.
Rydman is no stranger to Migrant Tales. In 2022, Helsingin Sanomat published an investigative story where several young women, some of whom were minors, claimed he had harassed them.
Rydman has called asylum seekers who came in 2015 “desert monkeys” and used other racist words for blacks, Muslims, and Jews. He wrote that a certain flower, the lily of the valley, spreads and multiplies like Somalis. Rydman said he’d be ready to forbid the person wearing the hijab instead of the veil.
And let’s not forget the selfie with Meghan Markle, who distanced herself after finding out Rydman’s troubled history with minors and racism. The fact that he wanted the selfie reveals Rydman’s conflated ego.
Rydman has taken in the funding policy crisis and outraged critics, his recent decision to slash social work research in half to 4 million euros,
It’s clear that when you go to bed with a party like the PS that is determined to undermine the rights of migrants and minorities, nothing good can come out of it.
Prime Minister Orpo looks toothless to solve the crisis with Rydman and the PS.
Welcome to modern Finland, where racism and bigotry are normalized.
Migrant Tales context:The column was published in Finland Bridge (Suomen Silta), commemorating my first year in Milan.
Time has gone by flying in Italy’s financial capital Milan, since I arrived from Bogotá, Colombia, in July 2000 after a two-year stint in that troubled South American country.
Moving to Italy was not as easy as I had originally thought. When people tell you that the city is closed for business in August, it means that the urban center of almost 1.4 million people turns into a ghost city during the summer’s slowest month.
Just because you know Spanish does not mean that you’ll earn Italian instantly. Finding a place to live in September felt like an almost impossible endeavor. I slept from hotel to hotel for about three weeks until I was able to rent a humble bedroom in an old apartment for a modest sum of 500 dollars!
From August to September, when it’s very hot and humid in Milan, I naturally didn’t have any time to romanticize about returning to Italy, even if my great-grandparents were from these parts before departing for the shores of South America in the late 1890s.
But I got lucky. I eventually found a very nice place to rent in the heart of the city in an over-century-old, picturesque apartment building. Every month was a big leap forward in my integration process with Italy. The more I learned the language, the closer I felt to my new home.
Mediolanum
Even if I have thought on and off about my Italian great-grandparents, Dante and Ida, I started to think more about them a few weeks ago.
I have tried to picture what Milan was like at the end of the 19th century, when Italy was a kingdom. Would the irt matter to greet me back then be the sound of horse-riven carriages? Would I see well-dressed men and women contrasting like night and day with the mass of illiterate and impoverished Italians walking on Via Torino, a main street in the heart of the city that leads to the breathtaking Gothic cathedral, the Duomo? Or would I feel the strong undercurrent or revolt against the autocratic King Umberto I?
Sometimes I wonder what would happen if, by some odd circumstance, I had the chance to meet and speak to my great-grandparents. If magic and mystery would answer my wish, I’m certain that after our initial surprise, my encounter with my great-grandparents would be overcome by happiness. We’d also be scratching our heads on how we were able to fool the one-dimensional, black-and-white picture, which always allows me to see my deceased relative but keeps them caged in their opaque world, looking out.
Being 141 years old, my patriarchal great-grandfather would speak first. The past is a strange place because secrets are always kept in theftproof vaults. For this reason, there’s not much that I can tell you about my life because Death is a good guardian of such matters. But if you look around carefully, however, I have left a lot of evidence of who I was through the name of your grandfather.
As a child, one of my favorite books that changed my life as Juls Verne’s ‘20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.’ I always want to be free like Captain Nemo. He was a polyglot, a wanderer who had been everywhere but was from nowhere. He was a free man in the true sense of the word, together with his submarine the Nautalis. A man can only be free when he lives in solitude.
I also named my son Nemo because, translated from Latin it means ‘Nobody.’ Maybe one becomes somebody when you acknowledge you’re a nobody.
Tell me about the future, the place you live now.
Dear Dante: there were no red carpets when I arrived in Milan. The only Italian I wore on that clear, very hot summer day was my surname and a few rudimentary sentences in Italian. Strange how time turns matters around. The cultural and linguistic shock I suffered during the first months in Italy must abt womthing similar to what you and Itda must have felt when you moved to South America.
How were your first years in Buenos Aires like, Dante?
When we arrived in Argentina after a brief stay in Brazil with It nd little Nemo, Buenos Aires had seen one of its hottest summers ever. The capital city of Argentina felt like home in many ways. The facade of the newer buildings reminded me of those you could find in a big city in Italy.
Buenos Aires, however, feels as if it were divided into many tiny principalities. If you walk, and it would be a very long walk at them from one end of the city to the other, you could hear people busily conversing in foreign languages like Italian, French, Turkish, Armenian, and, of course, Spanish. The 1914 census showed tat halo of Buenos Aires’ population was foreign-born!
Even if I were in a plot to assassinate King Umberto I and sent to a prison on the island of Pantelleria, I had to escape and leave Italy. My life changed radically when I came to South America. But this does not mean that I cannot continue to believe in a better future, even if I had faily miserable in building a better world as an anarchist.
I always had hoped of seeing my parents gain in Tuscany, but it never happened. My farewells to them were final, like the one that I will give you now…
Afterthoughts
I consider myself fortunate even if I know so little about my great-grandparents in Italy and Finland. But we’re not really supposed to know too much about them because it would interfere with Death’s work, whose job is to guide such people to worlds where most likely past names, antionlities, professions, and other human details have little meaning.
Or is it that whenever a relative dies, that person’s spirit sometimes passes as a phantom baton to the next generation with secret writings of wisdom? Sometimes on that baton, there are maps, even a compass, to assist you in your future travels.
How do you think I made it to Milan?
‘During the Roman Empire, Milan was called Mediolanum.
Since March, hysteria has struck some municipalities in Finland. Even if it is not in the government program, the far-right anti-immigration Peruuomalaiset (PS)* have done their best to fuel anti-Muslim racismas the April 2027 general election nears.
One of the questions that the Finnish media, in particular the tabloids, which are responsible for reinforcing and spreading xenophobia and anti-Muslim racism, leads with a provocative headline: Lahti prohibits the burka at comprehensive schools.
The burka, which covers the face of a woman?
How many burka-users are there in Finland? According to some, there are none.
The term “burrka” was incorrectly used to mean niqab.
Should we be surprised that the initiative came from the council members of the PS?
Writes Ilta-Sanomat: “No widespread practice of covering the face has been observed in schools in Lahti. According to the initiators of the proposal, the issue concerns safety in the school environment.”
One of the characteristics of the ban is not only its mixed message, but the fact that at Finnish comprehensive schools, there is no widespread use of the niqab and buka, which is nonexistent. All of the initiatives to ban such clothing have come from the PS.
Even if it is clear that the PS are campaigning on their racism, the qustion that should concern us is why Swedish People’s Party Education Minister Anders Adlecreutz has not stood up for the Muslim pupils at schools but allowed such bans to spread? Caving into PS pressure, Adlecreutz approved the removal of Salam, a textbook used to teach Islam to comprehensive school pupils.
Sanewashing: the act or practice, especially in the media, of trying to make actions seem sane and normal when they are not.
Tabloids like Iltalehti and Ilta-Sanomat are the worst sanewashers and help to further spread racism and tear teeth off the media.
We haven’t seen this recently but historically tbloids have been the first to strike at migrants and minorities.
A billboard by Ilta-Sanomat that claims “10,000 illegal refugees” will come to Finland this year. As everyone know, there is no such thing as an “illegal” refugee.
There are many stories that the tabloids have brought to public attention to make life more difficult for disadvantaged minorities. One of these reporters is Mika Koskinen, whose demonization of migrants and minorities has found fertile ground thanks to the government of Prime Minister Petteri Orpo.
Below, is an interview where he paints with a single brush all refugees during the hysteria of the Oulu sexual assault cases. He is quick to lambast refugees and turning a blind eye to pedophilia of white Finns.
He was recently responsible for getting Salam, a schoolbook for Muslim children taken off the shelf because it taught the wrong things about Islam.
Timo Haapala’s question during a presidential debate is a bad example of how tabloid journalists suck up to prejudiced expectations. Haapala asked the presidential candidate if they would do away with dual citizenship of Russians.
Only Jutta Urpilainen (Social Democratic Party) and Li Anderson (Left Alliance) were opposed to such a plan.
