Thanks to a Facebook page and a story in Helsingin Sanomat, I became on Monday, a member of a group called “Do I look Finnish?” Nothing wrong with that, but if the page attempts to reinforce stereotypes about Finns, then something is rotten in Denmark.
Understanding how far-right groups like the Perussuomalaiset (PS)*, Suomen Sisu, and too many politicians from parties like the National Coalition Party (Kokoomus) attempt to define a Finn in narrow terms by excluding minorities, such a Facebook page should get the thumbs down. In other words, it is only a place where some people who have lost their Finnish culture after many generations as USAmericans cling to their last hope: whiteness.
The rise of hostile populism and white supremacy politics in the US and Europe is no coincidence. But a reminder of how little historical psychoanalysis we have done to overcome our bigotry, racism, and hostility towards people who are different from us.
While some may disregard these facts as something minor or untrue, they will lead us to that same dark place in our histories drenched in the blood of genocide, exclusion, exploitation, and neoslavery.
Europeans brought slavery to the United States and the New World, thus relegating them into a moral crisis that would never set them free but forced them to whitewash and try to forget their history.
The backlash of racism and the fear of the so-called replacement theory are knee-jerk reactions to the fear we did to black and brown people will be done to us. That is why we are seeing so much racism and nationalist pushback instead of creating an equal society for all.
Like the US, Europe is stuck in its racism illness problem. The only way to cure such a disease is a reckoning and earnest historical amends.
in 1454, Pope Nicholas V (1398-1455) signed a papal order authorizing. slavery. According to him, black Africans are not human beings and had no soul. This permitted European powers to reduce blacks to perpetual slavery. Source: http://uhem-mesut.com/medu/0003.phpContinue reading “Europe is just as stuck as the US in its racism”
I mention only two infamous days on Migrant Tales annually: the coup in Argentina on March 24, 1976, and the man who went on a murderous rampage against 77 people on 22/7.
Let’s offer a moment of silence to the victims, killed, and those who survived this atrocity.
Xenophobia tends to pile up. Like blacks in the United States, Finland’s “black” problem is Russia, and from the 1990s, Muslims.
In the 1980s, when I lived permanently in Finland, and about 12,000 foreign nationals were living in the country, the racist undercurrent that flowed like a mighty river was ever-present. It reminded you whenever you talked about the Russians and later on, Muslims became a part of that shameful picture.
That undercurrent showed itself on several occasions. It did so in the early 1990s when Somalis started to arrive in Finland. That undercurrent, especially nurtured by tabloids like Ilta-Sanomat, acted like a thug’s warning.
You will pay a high price If you get too friendly with foreigners.
That toxic undercurrent has gotten stronger in recent years. Finland’s biggest opposition party is openly Islamophobic and racist. Politicians, even in the government like MP Eveliina Heinäluoma and a long list of National Coalition Party (Kokoomus) politicians in the opposition, have cuddled up to our hostile environment.
I always say that minority rights in Finland will not improve under their leadership. And even less so if the far-right Perussuomalaiset (PS)*, Kokoomus, Center Party, Liike nyt, Christian Democrats ever get power.
Finland’s deep mistrust of Russia and Russians stems from its difficult history with that country. The war in Ukraine has only revived even more such hatred. Matters will get worse for Finland’s minorities.
We saw that in Estonia when the new government of Prime Minister Kaja Kallas announced that it would phase out the Russian language at nursery homes and schools by 2030.
About a quarter of Estonia’s population speaks Russian as their mother tongue. The right to an education and recognition will spell trouble for white Estonians by denying rights to such a large group of people.
After an initial police investigation into alleged sexual harassment by National Coalition Party (Kokoomus) MP Wille Rydman, the National Bureau of Investigation (Keskusrikospoliisi) announced that it had opened a preliminary investigation into the MP’s activities. Rydman is a staunch anti-Muslim who is unofficially Kokoomus’ Jussi Halla-aho.
Halla-aho is the former chairperson of the far-right Perussuomalaiset (PS), who built his political career in the 2000s by writing Islamophobic, homophobic, anti-Semitic, and sexist blog entries.
The first story published by Helsingin Sanomat broke about the MP’s alleged inappropriate behavior towards women and minors was published in June 19.
Keskusrikospoliisi stated: “A preliminary investigation has been opened because the police received new information and the police have interviewed persons who were not heard from in the previous preliminary investigation carried out in 2020. Based on the new information, there are [now] grounds to suspect the person of a crime.”
With all the noise going on in the United States due to the Jan. 6 Committee hearings, which have shown how former President Donald Trump attempted to stay in power with the help of a coup, one wonders if all that is happening is bad karma.
No matter how much exceptionalism people in the United States attempt to show Trump as an aberration, he is USAmerica that came home to roost.
The US has bloodied its hands in so many coups around the world since the nineteenth century. It never apologized publicly for them never mind offering any compensation for the social damage and deep scars they caused to society.
On Tuesday, former national security adviser to Trump, John Bolton, surprised some by admitting that he had helped plan attempted coups in foreign countries.
Jake Tapper: "One doesn’t have to be brilliant to attempt a coup."
John Bolton: "I disagree with that. As somebody who has helped plan coup d’etat, not here, but other places, it takes a lot of work." pic.twitter.com/REyqh3KtHi
As a Latin American, Bolton’s admission that he helped plan coups in countries like Venezuela unmasks the hypocrisy of the United States. Even if some US politicians praise the importance of democracy, Washington’s track record shows how much disdain it has for promoting democracy outside of its borders.
Another matter that the US has condoned is the spread of torture. Such an outlandish method was used by military dictatorships thanks to the CIA and School of the Americas, blamed for teaching and equipping de facto dictatorships in repression techniques and human rights violations committed by former students of different Latin American armies.
Even if France offered the military regime in Argentina its know-how on torture gained from the Algerian War (1954-62), the US was responsible for training security personnel in torture.
One of many terrible military dictatorships supported by the US was Rafael Leonídas Trujillo y Molina of the Dominican Republic, who ruled the country for thirty-two years (1930-61), was also a torturer.
Writes John Gerassi in “The Great fear in Latin America:” “Trujillo’s SIM (Military Intelligence Service) used slow-shocking electric chairs, or an electrified rod known as “The Cane,” especially effective on genitals, or nail extractors, or whips, or the Pulpo (octopus), a many armed electrical device screwed into the skull. Kilometer Nine [the jail] also featured a water tank with bloodsucking leeches.”
Gerassi continues quoting a Look senior editor who visited the country: “I still shudder about Snowball, a dwarf – now jailed – whose specialty was biting off men’s genitals.”
Strange world we live in, no? The US destroys and impoverishes Latin America by not allowing it to realize its own social, political, and economic potential, and then complains about why so many Latin Americas are desperately attempting to enter the US by any means.
Europe has the same issue highlighted by the cartoon below.
At last there has been a decision of the world’s nations to put an end to the burning of fossil fuels. It took the world at least 50 years to arrive at this point which happened in Stockholm June 3rd, 2022 in the closing statement of a conference to observe the 50th anniversary of the UN’s first Environmental Conference in 1972.
In 1972 the US was waging a cruel war in Vietnam against an enemy supplied with weapons from Soviet Russia. Critics were saying it was a farce to have talks about the environment and make no mention of the
US´s destructive military intervention. Olaf Palme was famously outspoken on the theme.
Now the shoe was on the other foot. Russia had invaded Ukraine in February and the US was shipping weapons to repel the attackers.
NGOs led by the Climate Action Network lobbied and demonstrated energetically to have an end to fossil fuels renounced in Glasgow at COP 26 but were stymied in the last hours, mainly by the fossil fuel lobby. It took another International conference to get there.
Scientists have been warning the world about fossil fuels as the main driver of the climate crises for years, but the way climate politics works, we needed to have fossil phase-out on the books or we will never get it done.
In 1972 when the first Stockholm conference convened acid rain and a loss of ozone were serious environmental concerns. Measures were put into place to alleviate these in the following years. But in 1972 the human biological footprint was at approximately the level of natural replacement. Since then we have lost about 60% of living creatures and are consuming renewable resources at nearly twice their rate of renewal.
After Highland Park shooter Robert E. Crimo III, 22, murdered six people during the July 4th festivities and was apprehended by the police, social media is buzzing with his use of a symbol that is similar to the one used by Suomen Sisu, a far-right neo-Nazi association that used to recommend the works of Nazi war criminal Alfred Rosenberg.
Even if Suomen Sisu likes to call itself a “nationalist movement” that seeks the preservation of European states and white culture, it’s been called by the Finnish secret police Supo an “extremist organization.” Others like the Finnish Criminal Police (KRP), and the Council for Mass Media (JSN) called the association “Nazi spirited.”
Above is the official description of Suomen Sisu in English. Others read it differently: “Suomen Sisu is a Finnish far-right movement which objects to Muslims and people of color and supports the preservation of national states and white European heritage with white supremacy. Through its activities, the organization seeks to protect white Finnish culture, and racist, ethnocentric views, by promoting white Finnish far-right views. Suomen Sisu builds a society in Finns where there are no non-white people and this fact makes us happy.”
Whether the symbol used by the Highland Park killer is a copy or not is like arguing if Suomen Sisu is a far-right white supremacist association or not.
What has happened is that Suomen Sisu’s real face has been exposed thanks to a murderer who is attracted to far-right ideology.
The polarized debate in parliament Monday on renewing the Border Guard Act and Emergency Powers Act is just another example of how Finland has lurched into a dark place where human rights are a nuisance and should not take presedence The far-right Perussuomalaiset (PS), with the helping hand of the National Coalition Party (Kokoomus), and other minor parties like the Christian Democrats and Liike Nyt, are picking on their favorite target: asylum seekers.
According to some, the new laws are not in conflict with the EU, which does not allow member states to stop people from seeking asylum. Others, like European Union Institute professor of international law and human rights Martin Scheinin, believe the new laws will send Finland back thirty years.
Scheinin tweets: “Today, Parliament will finalize the content of the amendments to the Emergency Powers Act and the Border Guard Act. The idea is to introduce a constitutional derogation found in Section 23 of the Constitution, which deals with exemptions in times of crisis. This [the exemptions] turns back the clocks at least 30 years.” Section 23 of the Constitution states that fundamental rights and liberties in situations of emergency cannot breach its human rights obligations.
Here’s the question: Are the draft Border Guard Act and Emergency Powers Act in conflict with EU laws? Looking at parties like the PS and Kokoomus, who speak of asylum seekers as a threat to Finland, would be the first parties to trash human rights or severely water them down.
