The process to turn Finland’s far-right Perussuomalaiset (PS)* party wants to become “a normal mainstream” party continues. You see, they claim, we’re “normal” because we have physicists and party members, like Riikka Purra, working on their PhDs.
Sakari Puisto, who is also vying to be elected chairperson of the PS and Purra, has a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Cambridge.
Whatever the PS and the media want to frame about Purra and Puisto, both are close allies of Jussi Halla-aho, who has a Ph.D. in linguistics but rose to power with his Islamophobic and racist rants.
Many PS politicians like Leena Meri, who are former police officers but believe that white privilege must be protected tooth and nail.
What is education worth if you have no empathy and lost your moral compass?
There were also many people with PhDs in Nazi Germany who took genocide to a new industrial scale.
Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels held a doctor of philosophy degree. That did not put any guardrails against his vehement anti-Semitism and did not stop him from murdering his six children before he and his wife took their lives in front of Hitler’s bunker during the last days of the war.
The list of Nazis with PhDs is a long one that proves over and over again that education does not automatically turn you into a human being with empathy.
While some had one PhD.degree, others, like Emil Otto Rasch, had two doctorate degrees in law and political economy.
Rasch, like all of those that led the death squads of the Einsatzgruppen on the Eastern Front and who murdered an estimated two million Jews and other enemies of Germany, held PhDs.
As the normalization of the PS continues, let’s not fall for their latest ploy: We are educated – we are, therefore, a normal party.
