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Extremism in Finland and elsewhere grows on the same soil of hatred

Posted on by Migrant Tales

By Enrique Tessieri

The video clip blow is a frightening example of how far-right groups like the Nazi Party of the United States use the First Amendment (freedom of speech) to justify their hate speech. While it’s unlikely that the Perussuomalaiset (PS) party or even Muutos 2011 and Vapauspuolue will have summer camps with Nazi flags and members dressed in SS-like gear, they do believe in racial purity and loathe Muslims.

Even if these parties may not go to such extremes as the American Nazi Party to drive home their message, there is always a probability it may lead to that if the time is right. If we listen to PS MPs like James Hirvisaari or Juho Eerola and read what Jussi Halla-aho has written about Muslims, a big question mark emerges.

It would be naive and foolish to brush aside these Suomen Sisu members as an innocent group. Even if they do not carry Nazi flags their thoughts and visions of Finland are in the same ball park as some white supremest groups in the United States and Europe. People express themselves different culturally even though they believe in the same ideological goals.

Suomen Sisu, of which Halla-aho and his cronies are members of the far-right association, recommend reading Alfred Rosenberg, a Nazi war criminal hanged in Nuremberg, and are against Finns marrying foreigners.

Susan Canedy, author, America’s Nazis says in the video clip tells us what Nazi Germany promised its people: “Adolf Hitler when he went to jail and wrote Mein Kampf  wrote what he knew: anti-Semitism was rampant and rife in Germany. What Hitler was able to do was capitalize on that unhappiness and throw some bones. Will you accept anti-Semitism if I give you a job? If I give you a uniform? If I give you a way of life? If I give you something to hang on to, something to bring our children up in and make you feel proud and make you enjoy your life in your community would you do that? Seventy million people did that.”

The video clip may be offensive to some. Migrant Tales recommends viewer discretion.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hViE_lZ7rzg&feature=related]

The face of fascism has changed but the policies of such a political system are still out there. Today’s fascists, which  could be called Counter-Jihadists, despise Muslims as much as the Nazis hated the Jews.

It’s the same ogre with different clothing.

Weekend FT (January 1991): The last wall in Europe

Posted on by Migrant Tales

By Enrique Tessieri

Of all the features I wrote for the Financial Times as Helsinki correspondent (1989-91), I am particularly proud of one that I co-authored with Christian Tyler.  The last wall in Europe, which was published on January 26-27, 1991, was a long feature that attempted to shed light on Europe’s last wall, the Finnish-Soviet border, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

It seems odd, even strange, that a country like Finland that has had a sweet-and-sour relationship with its formidable neighbor Russia has yet to study with no strings attached what happened during the cold war era (1945-1991).

Elina Sana published in 2003 a book on the refugees, ethnic Finns, and Jews that were either sent to the Soviet Union or handed to the Gestapo of Nazi Germany.

In March 2000, Prime Minister Paavo Lipponen offered an official apology on Finland’s behalf to eight Jews that were deported to Nazi Germany in 1942. Some rightfully claimed that Lipponen should have included in his apology 56,500 mostly ethnic Finns (Ingrians) and Estonians that were returned to the USSR after the Continuation War (1941-44).

It is a positive matter that Finns are beginning to debate this murky period.  Last month, YLE showed an interesting documentary called Loikkari on the plight of an Estonian captain called Herman Trial, who died in Finland in 1951. The video clip below is a trailer of a movie filmed in Finland in 1963 about the Estonian captain’s short-lived escape.

The cold war era could provide an answer to why some Finns see immigrants and refugees as a threat. How can we have empathy for asylum-seekers if we returned such people to the Soviet Union and had no regard for their human rights?

Finland can learn a lot about itself if it opens the closed doors of its cold war past.

Distinguished former diplomat Max Jakobson sums Finland’s policy towards refugees in the cold war. “The period of stagnation (cold war era) was not bad for Finland,” he was quoted as saying in the Weekend FT issue. “There is nothing wrong with stagnation if you can do it on a high-income level as we did. Our obligation is to look after our own interests.”

Migrant Tales has written on Soviet asylum-seekers in Finland in the past and how they were returned to the USSR to suffer a gruesome fate in psychiatric wards and prisons. One of these is Aleksandr Shatravka, who visited my home last month with his wife Irina.  Thanks to Aleksandr, whom I met on Migrant Tales, I published in February 2010 one of Finland’s first-ever extensive human- interest stories on a former asylum-seeker who was forcibly returned to the Soviet Union in 1976.

The demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 brought big challenges to Finland. At the time, there were anti-immigration populists like Keijo Korhonen who were capitalizing politically on the situation by claiming that we’d be soon overrun by Russians.

“There are 9m (million) frightened Soviet citizens living around Finland’s borders. The collapse of the Soviet system, the winter food shortages, and the shooting matches in the dissident Baltic republics have made the naturally xenophobic Finns more nervous of the Russians than ever,” we wrote in the Weekend FT.

We end the feature by stating “unless the Soviet Union is dragged back into its communist past, the last wall in Europe seems certain to crumble.”

Has Europe’s then last wall crumbled and has anything significant changed in the past twenty years?

Our ignorance of others and our ability to change

Posted on by Migrant Tales

By Enrique Tessieri

Sometimes when hearing the arguments of some Finns and Europeans on immigrants, minorities and immigration is like returning to the nineteenth and/or part of the twentieth century. Our educational system has failed miserably if in 2011 people still believe cultures have certain predictable traits or that our genes guide our behavior like robots.

 We’d probably end up with the following conclusion if we studied the hate speech and arguments made by anti-immigration groups and then compared them with what people said over a hundred years ago: Different enemies and players, same reasoning.

The racism, xenophobia and prejudice we hear today is nothing more than the plagiarized arguments used in the past.

A good example is a claim by populist groups in Finland and elsewhere that Islam is the biggest threat to Europe. If we turned the hands of time back about 70 years, the same claims were made about the Roma, Communists, and Jews, who were seen as a threat to society.

Even if some Finns, who should know better like Aalto University senior lecturer Kyösti Tarvainen, believe that all one needs is a pocket calculator to see the Muslim threat, the future rarely reveals itself in such a simple fashion.

Similar predictions were made about the Jews in Finland in the 1880s about their high birth rates. Today, however, Finland’s Jewish population totals about 2,000. That is a far cry from “the millions” that were supposed to take over this country.

One of the biggest flaws that anti-immigration groups make about other ethnicities is a claim that such groups are incompatible with our society’s values. Even if they don’t use a pocket calculator, they employ their ignorance and prejudice to conclude that “other” people (not us) are controlled like robots by culture and never change. Any elementary social science student can prove this claim false.  Cultures and people change constantly.

If these cultures that are constantly ostracized by populist Europeans groups like the Perussuomalaiset party of Finland never changed,they would provide them a service. Since they cannot change they would in time die off. If such groups vanished because they were maladapted it would likewise spell then end of  the popularity of anti-immigration political parties, which base their support on hate rhetoric.

Even if  the same arguments are still out there being fed by a more modern version of our ignorance than over a century ago, it seems incredible that in the age of the Internet and modern technology we still seek refuge in our petty views and stereotypes of others.

If I could draw a cartoon of modern man and women and our relationship with other cultures, I’d picture it with the missing link ancestor sitting in front of a laptop speaking on his iPhone. The primate ancestor may have evolved in tool usage but is still in the “stone age” when it comes to understanding the world never mind how to interact with other cultures.

Ramapathicus was a more evolved primate than our missing link ancestor. It existed 8.5-12.5 million years ago. Source:  Leccos Ramapathicus.

That is why when we speak of racism, xenophobia and discrimination we have to ask a simple question: Why are these matters a threat to our society?

Answer: Because they are based on plagiarism and ignorance but, like all humans, we have the ability to learn and change.

YLE: Yritykset mainostavat työntekijöidensä suomalaisuudella

Posted on by Migrant Tales

Comment:  Is this how equal opportunities never mind social equality is supposed to work in Finland? The Finnish Broadcasting Company (YLE) claims in a story below that a number of small cleaning companies in Finland advertise that they only use Finnish employees.

Husein Mohammed of the Ombudsman for Minorities believes that this type of advertising may be illegal since it discourages employers from hiring immigrants.  

At least for an immigrant, such a claim by a company is a clear message to non-Finns: Don’t even waste your time asking for a job here.

The European Union as well as in Finland make it very clear in the laws that this type of discrimination is illegal. In the United States they call it intentional discrimination. 

“If they (cleaning companies) keep their promise (that all of their employees are Finns) then they are guilty of discrimination, which is illegal,” said Muhammed.  

The Ombudsman for Minorities official does not directly blame employers but clients who demand that Finns to do the job as opposed to immigrants. 

Last month in the city of Salo a black odd-job man  was laid off because of his ethnic background.  He was rehired after the case received wide coverage in the Finnish media.

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Useat pienet palvelualan yritykset mainostavat itseään sillä, että heidän kaikki työntekijänsä ovat suomalaisia. Vähemmistövaltuutetun toimistossa suomalaisia työntekijöitä korostavaa mainontaa pidetään arveluttavana. Jos markkinointi vaikuttaa työntekijöiden valitsemiseen, se voi olla myös laitonta.

Read whole story.

Ten matters that ignite the debating spirit of Migrant Tales

Posted on by Migrant Tales

By Enrique Tessieri

Migrant Tales will never censor opinions that aren’t racist. One of the strengths of this blog has been its diversity of opinions  on immigration,  Finnish identity and other topics.  Even so, some matters get our adrenalin circulating faster than others. Here are the top 10:

  1. People telling an immigrant that while all foreigners live off welfare, he or she is the exception
  2. The Perussuomalaiset (PS) worldview (provincial and simplistic answers of the world like on immigration)
  3. Exclusive views about Finnish culture and what it is (time-warp syndrome)
  4. Tight definitions of who can claim a place under the Finnish sun (denial of immigrants’ and minorities’ historicity in Finland)
  5. Racism repackaged as freedom of speech (eg A PS MP or a Finn assuring us that racism is a minor problem in this country)
  6. Racism as racism
  7. People who still romanticize about fascism in the twentieth century (PS MP’s Juho Eerola’s fascination with Benito Mussolini’s economic policy, for example)
  8. People who romanticize about fascism in the twenty-first century (Counter-Jihadists)
  9. Far-right and right-wing populist parties that lure votes by spreading hatred of immigrants (Danish People’s Party, Progress Party and Sweden Democrats to name a few)
  10. Short-sighted politicians who lack leadership and who are too weak and corrupted spiritually to defend everyone’s civil rights

Multicultural Finns: “Accepting yourself is the first step”

Posted on by Migrant Tales

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. 
Martin Luther King, Jr.

A guest speaker gave on Friday her recipe on how young adolescents from different countries living in Finland could build a space for themselves in society. Two matters struck me from the twenty-one-year-old young woman’s talk: The first and foremost matter is acceptance of oneself and to reach out — if possible — to those who loathe you.

The woman, whose father is a Black USAmerican and mother Finnish, kept the class mesmerized by these two key points.

She said that in Finland and the United States she was always seen as a foreigner. “In Finland people asked me where I was from and in the United States people thought I was from Finland,” she said. “One day it dawned on me that instead of looking for people’s acceptance, I had to first accept myself. It happened on a chat site when I read a comment by a black woman.”

Some may claim that being white in Finland is easier than being a visible minority. Since visible minorities cannot hide from the sometimes hostile stares of society, visible minorities can. Hiding, even denying, one’s identity can, however, have devastating impact on one’s self-esteem.

If one would want to write a shocking book about racism in Finland, all they’d have to do is find Russians who attended elementary and middle school during the 1990s. Apart from being ridiculed at school for having a Russian background by the classmates, this happened with the silent approval of the teachers.

Even if my mother is Finnish, I am happy that I did all my schooling in the United States from grade two. How much ridicule would I have had to take in the Finnish school system in the 1960s and 1970s? At least my otherness was acknowledged, even respected, in the United States.

AFP: ‘Tintin in the Congo’ racism trial opens

Posted on by Migrant Tales

Comment: Bienvenu Mbutu Mondondo, a native of the Democratic Republic of Congo, wants Tintin in the Congo to be removed from bookshelves in Belgium.

“Imagine a seven-year-old black girl discovering ‘Tintin in the Congo’ with her classmates,” he said. Mondondo denounced the book’s depiction of blacks as “lazy, docile and stupid” and “incapable of speak(ing) French correctly.”

Another matter that adds generous quantities of salt to injury is Belgian rule in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Writes Time magazine in a 2010 issue: “Belgian Congo was one of the most bloody and cruel colonial regimes in Africa. The original inspiration for Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, it was claimed for King Leopold II in 1885 by the explorer Henry Morton Stanley. For 23 years, the area — the size of France, Germany, Norway, Spain and Sweden combined — was the King’s personal possession. Leopold’s agents pioneered a ruthless forced-labor system for gathering wild rubber: villages that failed to meet the rubber-collection quotas were required to pay the remaining amount in amputated hands. Some estimates say Congo’s population fell by 10 million during that time.”

Hergé, who had never visited the Congo, changed some of the racist content in the book in 1946, when the color version was published. In the first black-and-white scene he said to the pupils about Belgian geograph: “Let’s talk about your country, Belgium!” That was changed to a math class.

“Will we continue to tolerate such a book today?” asked Mondondo, whose case against Tintin’s publisher is backed by a French anti-racism group.

Should we continue to tolerate any kinds of books that reinforce stereotypes and racism of different ethnic groups?

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A Congolese man pleaded with a Belgian court on Friday to remove “Tintin in the Congo” from bookshelves, arguing that the comic book is littered with racist stereotypes about Africans.  “It is a racist comic book that celebrates colonialism and the supremacy of the white race over the black race,” Bienvenu Mbutu Mondondo said as he arrived for the opening of the civil trial in Brussels.

Read whole story.

Iltalehti: Suuntautuminen kerrottava

Posted on by Migrant Tales

Comment: The Perussuomalaiset (PS) have now turned their attacks against homosexuals in Finland. PS MP Mika Niikko said in tabloid Iltalehti that employers should have the right to know whether their employees are gay.

Ignorance or sticking one’s foot in the mouth PS style? 

The suggestion by MP Niikko, who has a murky past with the law, shows that some MPs from the PS still have a long way to go before they begin to grasp the basic concepts of Western liberal democracy.

Here is a link to Ossi Mäntylahti’s blog that exposes Niikko’s murky past and present.

Would an elementary course in civics do the job?

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Perussuomalaisten kansanedustaja Mika Niikko puolestaan sanoo, että hän haluaisi työnantajana tietää työntekijän seksuaalisen suuntautumisen.

Read whole story.

The meaning of the veil and why some want to ban it

Posted on by Migrant Tales

By Enrique Tessieri

Switzerland’s lower house of parliament voted Wednesday 101-77 to outlaw veils like the burqa when using public transport or visiting authorities, reports AP.  The measure, which is being spearheaded by the Swiss People’s Party, will go for a vote in the upper house before federal elections next month.

Oskar Freysinger, a Swiss People’s Party lawmaker, said that the aim of the ban was “to avoid a religious war.”  Freysinger campaigned in 2009 to prohibit the construction of minarets in Switzerland.

What is surprising about these types of bans is the extent some parties and countries will go to brush diversity under the rug. Lawmakers, who should know better in Switzerland, should understand that placing restrcitions on how Muslim women should dress in public is not the only issue. What they are doing is  making a mockery of our democratic values and the important role of  diversity in it.

What is the use of speaking of freedom of worship and freedom of thought if on the other hand we deny diversity?

A colleague put it in the following terms: “Acceptance of difference (and the creative energy from that acceptance) must be done on the terms of those who differ, not the terms of those with power.”

It is important that lawmakers throughout Europe as well as the public should remain vigilant against laws that limit our freedom to be different.

Veil-ban laws in Switzerland expose the weakness of such societies even if they can hide behind formidable military and economic might.

Immigrant’s life: Returning to where we were once from

Posted on by Migrant Tales

By Enrique Tessieri

If you can trace your recent roots to Europe, would it be a good idea to return back to where your parents, grandparents or great grandparents were once from? The same hope and longing for a better life peppered with adventure are some factors that could lure you back to where you were once from.

Returning to where you were once from can be like the immigrant who left and returned many years later to his former hometown. If a journey can change your life why return to the place you were once from?

As the EU’s financial woes continue to mount and as far-right nationalism starts to lift its head, there is an eerie sense of déjà vu that creeps up generations ago from behind.

That creepy sensation is nothing more, like the riders of the apocalypse, the threatening signs of growing nationalism, racism and intolerance that is being sowed in Europe these days.

I returned to Finland thirty years ago and sometimes it does cross my mind as a cold question if my decision was the right one. It’s not myself that I am worried about but my children and grandchildren. Did I return to the Old World from the New and put them in harm’s way?

Just like when my anarchist great-grandfather left Italy as a refugee in the 1890s for Brazil, that decision impacted his family for many generations. Looking at war and the carnage that characterized Europe during the first half of the last century, my late relative’s decision to leave was the right one. By moving to Brazil and then to Argentina we were able to avoid future wars brewing in this part of the world.

It is not my intention to burden the dear reader with my gloom but some hard and honest questions must be asked:  Is the Europe of tomorrow going to be characterized by strife and tin-pot populists who will lead us on the path to ruin?

Now it makes sense to me by Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges once claimed that memory sometimes scared him.