Migrant Tales insight:I stumbled upon this posting published over twelve years ago. I reposted it because it shows the fuel that I have used to push the blog ahead. Finland is a very different country than it was in 2012. We are slowly but surely awakening to the fact that racism is a dangerous social ill that robs us of our potential.
I write about racism and social exclusion in Finland because it affects me and those I care about. I should know because I used to live marginalized from this society for decades.
I didn’t live marginalized because I was maladapted. I was marginalized because I was well-adapted.
Too many didn’t consider me a “real” Finn for a number of reasons. Was it because I wasn’t white enough or was it because the name I carried made me stick out ethnically like a sore thumb?
But what could I have done in 1978, when I moved back permanently to this country? There were so few immigrants never mind people of my ethnic background that you were culturally and ethnically unimportant and out of the loop.
It is a paradox, but the very matters that I loved and admired the most about this country back then were the very things that marginalized and excluded me from this society.
The prototype Finn is a case in point. This social construct of the so-called model Finn that was taught and reinforced in the last century is being challenged as our society becomes more culturally diverse.
Finnish society’s lack of inclusiveness was and still is the main obstacle to equal integration and acceptance.
If you want to find where racism grows its roots in this society, you will find it in the arguments that some white Finns use to exclude you from society. If you want to challenge Finnish racism, the best place to begin is to contest the arguments and actions that reinforce white Finnish exclusiveness.
I write a lot about racism and social exclusion on Migrant Tales. I write about this topic because Finland is my home and because I want a better future for visible and invisible minorities. In cultural diversity we will find strength.
I am grateful that I have found such a platform and opportunity to be a part of an ever-growing national debate and social movement that aims to make our society inclusive to all groups.
Watching political events in the United States and the Donald Trump’s inauguration as the US’ 47th president, brought despair and forced me to dig deep for hopeand consolation. One of the matters that I will never forget is the last military dictatorship (1976-83) of Rafael Videla in Argentina.
His stranglehold over the country was near-complete. But then the years revealed his weakness: the first indication of his decline and loss of power when he believed he was invincible.
You don’t need an army are weapons of mass destruction to defeat your foe. There are many, many example below of people that ignited a spike at the right place and right time to begin a social movement. Trump, therefore, looks like a president in decline.
The list below is not complete of some who challenged a system and won with their bravery and suffering.
On the first of December 1955 Rosa Parks refused to give her seat on a bus to a white passenger. That moment of defiance was one of the sparks of the Civil Rights Movement.
Dedication and a love for freedom turned Harriet Tubman into ray of hope for many black slaves.
The Cuban Revolution is one of the best examples of being at the right place at the right time. It proved that you don’t need an army to defeat a large organized and corrupt army.
Even if Sacco and Vanzetti were falsely executed by the electric chair in 1927, they are still fondly rememberd. Their only crime was that they were anarchists. Their death led to protests around the world.
The October 17, 1945 demonstration, which freed Juan Domingo Perón from detention, showed a remarkable event where his charistmatic wife, Evita Perón, rallied the masses and changed history.
Deportation is one of the cruelest matters about migration.
Another deportation ruling hangs over an Iraqi family of five who has lived in Finland for ten years. Tragic is the fate of the children, aged 16, 14 and 7 years, who don’t read and write in Arabic and remember their parents’ former home country through tales and online meetings with their grandmother.
The deportation order was given on 7 January and can happen at any moment.
“We came in 2015 to Finland and our journey lasted 13 days from Iraq,” said the father with evident concern about their future. “My wife is sick and needs to be operated.”
Their eldest daughter, who is 16 years old and is a ninth grader, speaks perfect Finnish and saw the deportation order of her family as “an injustice.”
The family has received 10 rejections for asylum from the Finnish Immigration Service.
She does not remember the long trip from Iraq to Finland but remembered that Turkey was a beautiful country and that she slept a lot during the journey. “The four-hour trip on a [rubber] dinghy from Izmir [Turkey] to the [Greek] island of Lesvos was scary,” she continued. “We the children sat in the middle and the men on the side so nobody would fall overboard.”
The family’s future looks uncertain in Iraq.
“I don’t believe that Iraq is a good country,” the daughter continued. “Iraq has suffered from wars, people are mean and life is difficult. I will not be able to succeed at school because I do not know how to read or write in Arabic even if I speak the language.”
Despite all the uncertainty and hardship that the family has endured in Finland, the father said that he did not hold any grudges on Finland.
“We are still hopeful that we may stay in Finland,” he concluded.
Twenty-eight years ago I wrote in a Finland Bridge column about the greying of Finland. Even if Finland has the third-oldest population in the world after Japan and Italy. Has anything changed since 1997 and what are the solutions to our demographic woes?
Some far-fetched solutions I suggested back then was to raise the retirement age to over seventy and to cut pension benefits to near-starvation levels.
Isn’t that were we are heading?
The fact that Finland has opposed migration and cultural diversity tooth and nail, means that today we have one of the smallest migrant populations in the world, according to MoveHub. It’s clear that we are paying a high price economically and socially for doing nothing, or very little, to invite migrants to the country.
I wrote in the column that “turning Finland into a gerontrocracy will not benefit anyone. It will signify the demise of this nation.”
Setting aside our propensity to scapegoat migrants, especially Muslims and those from outside the EU, we have to rethink who we are and foster a new sense of citizenship and inclusion.
Here are my suggestions for an about-turn in citizenship and inclusion:
“Being” Finnish means being from a multitude of ethnic and cultural backgrounds.
Since all ethnic groups in Finland have a history, we must remove the whitewash they have undergone.
Teach anti-racism from comprehensive school.
Teach children not to hate and that difference is normal.
Draft new laws recommended by the European Commission Against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) to tackle social ills like racism and hate speech.
More studies are needed on racism and Islamophobia in particular.
Mainstream media should use minorities in stories about them.
Promote cultural and ethnic diversity in civil servant jobs, like the police, in a concerted effort to dismantle institutional racism.
Racism is a crime that and is punishabe by law. It is a shameful act.
Parties that promote racism, like the Perussuomalaiset,* and whose members have ethnic agitation convictions should be prohibited from holding office.
Do you like to sare some suggestions to the above?
Former Perussuomalaiset* and today Center Party councilperson Tanja Hartonen’s attack on me is a good example of political revenge aimed at silencing me and Migrant Tales. I am sure that all these made-up stories about what I said at city committee meeting will not stand the light of day.
The truth is that Hartonen became furious with me at the meeting and raised her voice and would not let me say a word. As she has fabricated with the blessings of the local newspaper Länsi-Savo, I never called her a racist. Länsi-Savo’s reporter Elina Partio, has shown her worst and most biased side in her reporting. Shame on her and the newspaper.
My mistake, of course, was to remind Hartonen that she once wrote some pretty offensive articles.
I founded Migrant Tales in 2007 and you can find a lot of writing there, over 5 000 posts. An important reminder to Länsi-Savo: when you leave out the context of news stories, you leave the door open to bias.
In a world where migration constantly weaves new identities and is even seen as a threat to national identities, countries in Europe are throwing all their political weight to slow such a natural process. Being from a multicultural and multinational background can be a problem in a world that sees new identities as a threat.
On my life’s journey, I made over four decades ago one of the greatest discoveries and found peace with my multicultural self in my native Buenos Aires, Argentina, at the Finnish Seaman’s Church. Even if such pleasant landscapes no longer witness my patient silence and stance, they are now memories that have turned into imaginary cities of the mind, where every building stands out eager to tell you a story.
Even though I have visited the Finnish Seaman’s Church on many occasions, the days I spent there as a brief tenant in 1999 brought me back to the beginning of a long journey I began in the 1990s.
The Finnish Seaman’s Church at aт San Juan 234, Buenos Aires. Photo by Enrique Tessieri.
For months, I kept the secret to myself. I didn’t even dare reveal it to my wife. Living a few years later in the northern part of South America, in the twilight quagmire of the violence and strife that has gripped Colombia for decades, I have decided to share the secret with you.
Dante and Jacob
William Blake (1757-1827) once said that improvements make straight roads but the crooked ones without improvement are roads of genius. Was my multicultural background my crooked road?
Both of my great-grandparents had migrant migrant backgrounds. One of them, Dante, was an anarchist sent to a prison on the island of Pantelleria, located between Sicily and Tunisia. Jacob’s great-grandfather, Jacob Weikain, a tinsmith, had emigrated to Finland from Latvia in 1799.
My family has been on the move for generations. A journey may take generations to complete, if ever. Is this the reason why in my deepest thoughts I am always traveling somewhere else, searching elsewhere? Does it reveal why I feel many times like standing alone in a railway station waiting for the last train home, feeling like being in the land of nowhere with a sense of being somewhere else?
At the end of the last century, the Finns were sowing the seeds of their independence from the Russian Empire. Italy comprising several kingdoms, duchies, and city-states, became a unified country in 1861.
Even if Dante and Jacob are talks of the past, and when they were alive I was talk of the future, I can say confidently that the yearning and restlessness that I feel is because of them or possibly it has to do with the fact that I was born in an enormous transit lounge called Argentina. I am like many that were born in that land: my great-grandparents arrived as migrants and after three generations, their great-grandchildren became migrants again.
Due to my multinational background, I used to feel out of place but understand such feelings were nothing more than my prejudices. Thanks to the Finnish Seamen’s Church of Buenos Aires, I don’t feel out of place at all no matter where I am.
The world is becoming a very small place as time races ahead. For this reason, I believe that my children and grandchildren will be luckier than I am. In the millennium we’ll be able to enter and leave cultures and lifestyles and be if I wish – from many places and will not be judged as a result.
As long as we are not overcome by racial hatred, greed, and power, life in the millennium will be like being in a vast city like Buenos Aires, London, or New York, where everyone is from somewhere but where no one is a real or imagined native.
If we all learned to understand that we are nothing more than temporary beings on Earth searching endlessly for that hill where the grass is greener on the other side where we can be from nowhere to be from everywhere.
The 5 November US presidential election will be remembered as the alarm that signifies the end of USAmerica and when all of its contradictions caught up with it and destroyed it. Nothing good can come out of a second Trump term except for more global and national chaos.
The US poet Allan Ginsberg (1926-1997) put it in the following words in his book The Fall of America: “In a thousand years, if there is history, America’ll will be remembered as a Nasty little country full of Pricks…”
Only the system is to blame for the downfall of the United States, a history of the unfree. The United States’ predicament has come to fruition thanks to runaway capitalism and the lack of guardrails.
Power blinds, but also destroys.
Whenever a country believes it is invinsible, that is when ita downfall spiral begins.
Right behind the United States is Europe.
Our downfall tells us that we’ll be treated the same way as we treat others from developed countries – with contempt.
Thanks to National Coalition Party (NCP) MP and chairperson of the constitutional committee, Heikki Vestman, Finland regressed to the days of the cold war, when human rights was seen as a negative matter because it jeopardized our relationship with the former Soviet Union.
Vestman, who has been accused of throwing the rule of law and human rights under the bus and allowing politics to taint the credibility of the constitutional committee, accuses Juha Lavapuro, who will begin his term as a member of the European Court of Human Rights, of undermining the rule of law because he criticized the pushback law passed in July.
Even if the law was passed in the summer, Syrian asylum seekers who crossed the Finnish-Russian border in November claim that Finnish border guards started to pushback asylum seekers in December 2023.
The Finnish Border Guards have not confirmed or denied such a claim because they do not comment on such claims.
Lavapuro criticized Monday the constitutional committee and the pushback law in Helsingin Sanomat: “If you consult independent experts and make fun of their legal views by invoking national security, it is fair to say that the constitutional committee has stepped out of its constitutional role and into the political arena,” he was quoted as saying.
Vestman struck back at Lavapuro in a Helsingin Sanomat interview: “In general, I consider as harmful to the rule of law any speech that disputes the decision of a competent institution on the existing legal situation and the obligation to comply with it – whether it is made by a politician, judge, professor or ordinary citizen,” Vestman wrote on X.
Apart from his role in the constitutional committee and making possible the passage of the pushback law, Vestman has spoken lowly about asylum seekers.
Migrant Taleswrote about Vestman in 2021: “When I heard your speech [in parliament] and rationale Wednesday (20 October), I wondered how a young, apparently intelligent person could house such opinionated and unsubstantiated claims about migrants. If you are honest, would you want to [live and] grow up in a country where this type of discourse is ongoing by politicians seeking power and attention? Read some history and check out how the Finns were labeled in Sweden during the 1960s and 1970s.
Does the phrase “en finne igen” [a Finn again*] ring a bell?”
Apart from throwing human rights and the rule of law under the bus, Vestman also does it with asylum seekers.
*In the 1970s, any crime that was reported in the media was assumed to be done y a Finn. They say when reading about a crime, it was “a Finn again.”
President Jimmy Carter, you don’t know me but I’d like to thank you from the bottom of my heart for giving me hope during one of my darkest hours when I was in Argentina during the dirty war (1976-83).
At the time when you mentioned that human rights would form a part of US foreign policy, I was arrested in Buenos Aires and thrown in a prison cell for forgetting my ID at home. There was no habeas corpus, no due process and everything appeared to be left to chance as I stared out through the barred opening into the overcast day from the cold cell.
I remember that day so clearly and didn’t feel forsaken because you had spoken about human rights. I was a young man back then and started to study more in detail the thirty sections of the UN Declaration of Human Rights.
I write this email to you, Mr. President, because I read that President Donald Trump has asked Argentine President Mauricio Macri to rescind a decision to give you the Order of San Martin, Argentina’s most prestigious medal.
I am ashamed and saddened by the actions of Argentina’s president.
Even so, I want you to know that your foreign policy of human rights during your mandate as US president will never be forgotten by me. It gave me hope during one of the darkest moments of my life, when I was physically detained in a cell on a Saturday afternoon.
I recovered from that incident but haven’t ever forgotten it. I work today as a techer and anti-racism activist during my spare time.
