…this is an interesting quote. Possibly it explains why citizens and country are two different matters.

If people behaved in the way of nations do they would all be put in straightjackets.

Tennessee Williams (1911-83)

Global world

In the future, nations will turn into vague provinces; distant cities will become suburbs of a vast metropolis called Earth.

Traveler

A traveler feels a special type of contentedness and freedom at airports, harbors and railway stations because he’s in a land of nowhere — in a transit hall with a sense of being somewhere else.

Terrorism and War

If terrorism is war waged by renegade groups aiming to overthrow or destabilize a government or occupying force, then war waged by legitimate armies are only terrorists with suits.

It wasn’t too long ago when energy companies from Europe, United States and Canada came in droves to invest in countries like Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Brazil and others.

Some of these countries were at the time opening up their economies to outside investment through schemes like deregulation and privatization. The reasoning was pretty simple: In order for Latin America to fuel economic growth, and thus raise living standards, such countries had to attract foreign investment to build and modernize infrastructure, especially in the energy sector.

There was so much optimism back in the 1990s that the pace of foreign investments blinded some companies that invested in the region. I’ll never forget one Repsol YPF director who said: “Matters look so rosy [in Latin America] that it’s difficult to make out what could go wrong.”

Many matters went wrong: the Asian crisis; devaluations of currencies like the reais of Brazil in 1999; Argentina’s economic meltdown in 2001; and the worrisome rise of nationalism and regulatory uncertainty in countries like Bolivia, Venezuela and Argentina.

Even if foreign energy companies helped modernize the energy sector of some South American countries, their investment policy was short-sighted and in making a quick buck without grasping too well the social, economic and historic realities of the region.

The regulatory mess of some countries like Argentina and the rise of nationalism in Bolivia, Venezuela and the growth of large state-owned majors like Petrobras of Brazil, prove that very little has changed in the region.

High poverty levels continue to be one of the region’s greatest challenges. Governments and companies are still a long way off from alleviating this onerous social ill.

Dear Arthur,

May I call you by your first name?

Even if we never met, because I wasn’t born when you lived in 1871-1920, I feel I somehow know you.

You left a lot of clues about who you were: There’s the study on the Kaale Roma (Finnish Gypsies) and the travels you made, imaginary and real, to distant lands like Tibet, Madagascar, the Sahara and Argentina.

It was in northeast Argentina where you founded a hundred years ago a Finnish colony. Bad press at home and the setbacks the first group of Finns encountered there dashed your hopes of establishing a colony settled by hundreds of Finns.

There were a lot of challenges for the over 100 pioneers that settled Colonia Finlandesa. Some of these were with the authorities over partioning land, locusts, drought, forest fires and living in very primitive conditions.

Didn’t you abandon the colony in 1909?

Despite the initial setbacks, there were enough Finns at Colonia Finlandesa to attract new settlers. Some of these came from Brazil in the 1910s and from Kitee in the 1920s.

Even if the only thing Finnish that remains today at Colonia Finlandesa is its name in Spanish, it continues to capture our imagination and interest. Is it because some of us are still lured by what Colonia Finlandesa attempted to become: a place where its inhabitants could live contentedly in eternal summer landscapes?

I bumped into your name for the first time in Buenos Aries, when I started doing fieldwork as a young man on Colonia Finlandesa. When I visited the colony for the first time in November 1977, I never got the opportunity to witness the vibrant beauty of the virgin Atlantic Rainforest you saw at the turn of the last century.

Huge trees towering over 30 meters like the lapacho (Tabebuia impetiginosa) anchico colorado (Parapiptadenia rigida) and less ambitious ones like palms (Euterpe edulis) must have impressed you.

Misiones has the richest biodiversity in Argentina. Apart from some 2,000 plant species, and a rich quantity of reptiles and fishes, the rainforest you saw has been on the defensive for quite some time. According to some sources, deforestation in Misiones has destroyed the original forest by about 60%.

Each settler that settled Colonia Finlandesa was doomed to poverty. Since the land there is poor and rocky, settlers had to constantly clearcut and burn in order to grow new crops. Each time they felled trees they become poorer. It was like a noose that tightened slowly around their necks.

If you had the opportunity to peek 100 years in the future, you’d be disappointed by the abandonment and desolation your eyes would reveal.

Even so, it was during my last visit to the colony in 1998 when I realized what had lured you and so many others to this part of Argentina. The answer rested by a puddle of fresh rainwater on the path that took me deeper into the colony.

As I passed the puddle, hundreds of green-and-white colored butterflies flung and decorated the air like confetti. A few of them flew ahead of me like guides before turning back.

While the sheer beauty of the butterflies pitted against the green, lush, rolling late-afternoon landscapes are a feast to my eyes, I’m soon slapped back into reality by the chronic poverty that abounds in these parts.

In the interviews and fieldwork I did, there’s one scourge that emerges over and over again: alcohol.

Gunilla Lundgren gives a description of your home in Stockholm, according to Rolf Lageborg:

His home was a mixture of a museum and an antique shop. …There were also the skins and horns and teeth and claws of mysterious animals such as an unborn calf, and birds as small as butterflies and butterflies as big as birds, and all this mixed together with pictures of the Madonna, piles of manuscripts and relics from the pyramids. 1)

Ruined financially and into excessive drinking, those were the last landscapes that accompanied you when you took your life on a Friday, December 17, 1920.

Knowing your lack of fear of the unknown, did you face death as another great journey – or was it a place where your restless soul finally found peace?

1) The blond bandit Arthur Thesleff committed scholarship in early Finnish Romani Studies and today; Gunilla Lundgren.

Often when I hear President George W. Bush speak about his so-called war-on-terror crusade, it’s like returning to some of the darkest periods of Argentinean history, when a ruthless military regime ruled the country in 1976-83.

Many of the barbaric interrogation techniques that the Argentinean security forces used in the ill-fated fight against “atheist” terrorism to defend the country from its “Christian and Western” values was leaned from the CIA.

One of these torture methods that security forces used was waterboarding, or known in Argentina as el submarino, the submarine. Despite having a different name, the aim of the torture technique is the same: to force the victim feel that he’s going to drown and thereby cave in to the interrogators. In some Argentinean detention centers, the water used to submerge the victims in was filled with human excrement.

Other widespread “routine” torture methods in Argentina and Latin America include the use of electricity. Victims in Argentina were normally forced to use hoods, just like captives in Iraq, so they couldn’t identify their torturers.

The short-term success that Argentina’s military had over its enemies made it eager to find new ones. The de facto government started rounding up potential terrorists; ie all those who could become but weren’t yet terrorists.

It took a colossal fiasco, like going to war with in 1982 over the Falkland Islands, known as islas Malvinas in Spanish, for the military to be humbled. Is Iraq George W. Bush administration’s Falkland Islands?

The mistaken path that Bush has taken in its fight against the real and/or imagined enemies of the US bares a spooky resemblance to what happened in Argentina during the dirty war era, when over 30,000 people disappeared.

The methods and reasoning Washington is using in its own war resembles the trademark of despotic regimes like in Argentina a long time ago.

A warning: The methods employed by Argentina’s junta during 1976-83 were so barbaric that the de facto government ended up becoming the terrorist.

The creation of Fennovoima, a new consortium comprising of Boliden , E.ON, Katternö, Outokumpu, and Rauma Energia, aims to build within ten years a 1-1.8GW nuclear plant that would produce cheap power mainly for industry. Being a hydrocarbons poor country, it’s understandable that Finland wants to lessen as much dependence as possible on foreign energy imports from countries like Russia.

Finland is presently building a sixth nuclear plant at Olkiluoto, where there are already two nuclear plants in operation. The country’s two other nuke plants are at Loviisa.

While industry lobbies for more nuclear capacity, Finland’s power markets are mainly operated by two giants: Fortum and Vattenfall of Sweden. The creation of Fennovoima is a healthy sign since it’ll bring a new player to the market.

It’s a lamentable trend in the European Union that the number of power companies is shrinking, not growing. A while back there were nine large power companies in Germany and today there are only four. The same trend is happening in Spain, where three energy companies – Gas Natural, E.ON and Enel – courted Endesa, the country’s largest power utility. After having five power companies — Endesa, Iberdrola, Union Fenosa, Hidrocantábrico and Viesgo — it may end up with two.

While some may argue for more nuclear power, I believe the one important issue to be greater competition in the European power sector. It’s the only assurance that power prices will remain at acceptable levels and that the European Union doesn’t turn into an overgrown and predatory Electricite de France. Competition will guarantee that there’s enough generating capacity for everyone as well.

Finland and Europe doesn’t necessarily need more nuclear capacity — it needs more competition.

Language is a beautiful tool that one can use to express him/herself. Learning how to master such a tool is a lifetime process. Those that are more into important matters like syntax and grammar may forget to mention the most important matter about writing: yourself.

Here’s a saying that expresses that situation and challenge eloquently:

I’d rather not know how to write and have something to say than know how to write and have nothing to say.

While grammar and syntax may prove a formidable challenge to master, they aren’t impossible to tame to express what you want to say. There are other hurdles like society and silence that may follow after you publish.

We’ve seen it throughout history so many times. An autocratic regime takes away civil liberties and only a few cry out. The majority is fed  incredulous-yet-believable-on-the-surface-fairy tales as to why their liberties have been put in the freezer indefinitely. Like being in a trance induced by drugs like nationalism, the common citizen begins to admire their autocratic leaders in the same pathological way as sometimes occurs between the tortured and torturer. Here’s a quote that aims to give you courage to overcome such a foe:

Some end up admiring those that take away their freedom and suspect deeply the motives of those who fight to regain it.

Finland’s beautiful old-growth forests are becoming extremely rare these days. In the Etelä-Savo region where I live, such forests account for under 10% of all forests. In southern Finland such untouched forests are becoming increasingly rare.

While forest companies are destroying and planting forests that look like wheat fields, one should ask how planted forests will affect Finnish culture. One of the cornerstones of this country’s culture and its manifestations through music and art hinges on the forest, which has grown in the past as freely as the Finns.

But what will happen to our culture if such forests that inspired men like Jean Sibelius, Akseli Gallen-Kallela and others exist in emaciated patches here and there?

This is one of the greatest tragedies that Finland is facing today: the rapid loss of its virgin forests fueled by the dynamic duo of greed and profit. Some of these trees, like the spruces, may have taken over 100 years to grow but a harvester can fell them in a matter of seconds.

Ever since I was a child, I have always held a deep fascination for sunsets. I visited Northwest Territories last year and had the opportunity to witness a midnight sunset in Canada’s north. I was driving along Ingraham Trail behind Yellowknife I witnessed some of the most beautiful sunsets I’ve seen in a long time.

The summer sunsets are just as moving in Finland.

Possibly some of us are so moved by sunsets because they’re so surreal. It’s like being in a magical place where two great frontiers meet briefly at a special moment. Those two frontiers are Space and Earth.

We don’t see things as they are,
we see things as we are.
Anaïs Niin

The date and year is not important, but it is a weekday, not too long ago.
Spring has announced its arrival and spreads its magic to these Sub-Arctic
latitudes after a long slumber. Leaves are budding everywhere; trees are
stretching out their branch tips like humans with their arms upon awakening. The
full moon, which seems like a white hole peeking into the darkness, shyly
lightens the night as it follows you with thin clouds moving beside it like
waving silk in the sleepy wind.

I’m driving alone on the motorway from Porvoo to Helsinki amid these landscapes overflowing with beauty. Even if the night has robbed the forest of its individuality because it is now a solid clump of varying hues of darkness,everything is not what it seems…

We see things as they are

Like the dark forest teeming with life on the motorway to Helsinki, it ismade up of infinite particles of matter and spontaneous events. It is very muchlike an image of our culture, also made up by individuals and endless intentions.

When I moved to Finland in 1978, my ethnic perceptions of the Finns did notdiffer very much from what was common knowledge at the time. The way we sawourselves as a people and a nation had very much to do with the geopolitical circumstances of the cold war. Even if we were culturally hamstrung by such a reality, our political leaders, ethnographers, linguists and others added to oursense of isolation.

On the foreign policy front, Finland didn’t officially belong to the East or West. It was in a no-man’s land reaping the best of both hostile worlds. Linguistically and ethnically, we considered ourselves distant from the rest of Western Europe as well.

How many times as a child had I heard from my relatives that the Finns are a people that are not related to anyone in Europe except for with the Sami(Lapps), Hungarians and Estonians.

Ethnically speaking, the cold war was the most castrating period in Finland’s search for its cultural identity. Through the difficult circumstances of Superpower politics, Finns lost contact with their ethnic relatives like the Estonians, Ingrians, and in many ways with the children of the hundreds ofthousands of Finnish migrants who live abroad.

If it weren’t for the parents of these migrant children, who encouraged them to visit their grandparents in Finland during summer, such cultural bonds wouldnot have been lost forever.

It does surprise me that even after the Soviet Union’s fall from grace in the past decade, some policymakers in this country are slowly acknowledging a new group of Finns called the “New” Finns. What these bureaucrats do not understand, however, is that these so-called “New” Finns have always existed but had not been acknowledged before.

Things as we are

One of the first scientific books given to me on Finland was written by a sociologist called Heikki Waris. In his book on the Finns, he stated that one of the outstanding factors that characterized Finland was its homogeneous population.

But how ethnically homogeneous or near-homogeneous is it? At the time of Waris’ statement, close to one million Finns lived as migrants outside of Finland’s borders. What about the children of these Finnish migrants, who grew up in both cultures, and kept
strong bonds with Finland by visiting this country on a regular basis during the summers?

Possibly Waris’ sentence could have shed more truth if it read in the following manner: Finns are not ethnically homogeneous, but have been made culturally homogeneous through the circumstances of history, geography and geopolitics.

There are some studies that now claim that Finns are not as ethnically isolated as previously believed and that they are quite “mixed” genetically with other groups in Central Europe.

The US government asked American anthropologist Margaret Mead after the bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese in 1942 to carry out a national character study on the new nation America was at war with. The reasoning behind the study was to bring forth some “national traits” on the Japanese so that the US could wage a more effective war against its new foe.

The so-called national character study by Mead did not bear any fruit and concluded that it was impossible to produce a clean list of traits that characterize the Japanese. On the contrary, Japanese culture is made up by an infinite number of sub-cultures and therefore impossible to categorize in a stereotypical fashion.

Considering that Japan must have been a much more isolated country at the time when compared to Finland, what would have Mead’s conclusions been if she had done a similar study on the Finns?

To go back once again to the sublime forest and night that hugs the motorway from Porvoo and Helsinki, who can seriously say that there are not an infinite amount of factors at play in creating such a state of beauty?

We must also begin to see ourselves as we are, and not like historical and geopolitical circumstances have dictated in the past.