The great replacement [Islamization] spells the end of the welfare society, the end of Finnish society.
Riikka Purra, finance minister and chairperson of the Perussuomalaiset (PS)* party
Wednesday’s A-studio with PS Vice President Teemu Keskisarja, Pia Kauma of the National Coalition Party, and Sofia Virta of the Green League was an eye-opener, a stark reminder of the racist undercurrents flowing beneath Finnish society and how the media perpetuates the social ill.
Even if Keskisarja has received a dubious reputation for his vocal fear-mongering of Muslims, his hateful ideology is rooted deeply in PS and Finnish ideology.
“The feast will not improve by changing [replacing the ethnicity of] people,” he was quoted as saying in A-studio. “Rather, the opposite is true. Those who enable this replacement will turn [Finland] into a developing country of pig stys and bloodbaths. These are the reasons why the great replacement angers me and the Finns Party.”
And the icing on the cake, he said that migrants have already destoyerd the Finnish welfare state but have partly created a catastrophe.
PS Vice President Teemu Keskisarja.
While some blame the PS’s poor showing in recent elections and opinion polls, the truth is that what Keskisarja said is not only harmful to migrants trying to find work and a place in society, but the toothless pushback from Prime Minister Petteri Orpo’s government, which is set to take the country down a runious path to weaken labor laws and social security benefits.
We are nearly constantly being bombarded by Purra’s apocalyptic warning about the end of Finnish society due to the great replacement, as well as by Interior Minister Mari Rantanen’s aim to prohibit children from wearing veils, such as the niqab and burka, at school.
The tragic matter that the latter campaign by Rantanen, and even by National Coalition Party Social Security Minister Sanni Grahn-Laasonen, is a storm in a teacup. Have politicians who make such Islamophobic statements ever seen a child at school wear a niqab, never mind a burka?
Kauma, who was embroiled in a scandal about baby carriages in 2014, offers some pushback to Keskisarja’s and his party’s outrageous claims. She said that “Riikka Purra’s and Keskisarja’s statements are directed at their own supporters. They do not in way represent the government’s position.”
Even if Kauma makes such statements, many of us believe it is baloney because she justifies the tightening of migration policy spearheaded by the PS.
“The most important thing is work-based immigration, and we have made some very good guidelines for this in our government program,” she said. “But of course, if necessary, we must also help people who are in real need of assistance in terms of humanitarian immigration, but here I emphasize the word ‘real,’ meaning that in this government program, we have tightened up the rules on asylum seekers, among other things.”
What Kauma is saying is that we have shelved the human right to asylum and are asking people to leave the country if they do not find work if they are laid off.
Kauma and her party are a good example of how mainstream parties enable and how they appear to talk sensibly about migration, but don’t really mean it.
Unfortunately, the A-studio talk show revealed what we already knew: Finland has a serious racism problem and would not mind treading the same xenophobic path as Trump’s USAmerica by victimizing and attacking migrants.
