I received a call from an old Migrant Tales reader who was distraught about a letter to the editor written by the Perussuomalaiset (PS)* Youth of Lappeenranta. The headline? “The nation-state is our best protection.”
Is it?
The reader continued: “How can Helsingin Sanomat publish something that openly excludes non-white Finns and other minorities in Finland? I’m worried about my child. What kind of a country are we heading? Nazi Germany?”
After reading the letter to the editor, I agreed and understood the reader’s concern. Like the Republicans in the US, the PS of Finland are openly subverting our Nordic democracy by replacing it with an autocratic system like Viktor Orbán’s Hungary.
Apart from excluding minorities in Finland and forgetting what racism and hatred of Nazi Germany in World War 2, the PS Youth claims the following:
“I would argue that the defense of the nation-state is not about the myths that justify defending it, but purely about community. The nation-state is, by definition, an ethnically and linguistically homogeneous entity whose purpose is to protect the people within its territory and to promote their interests globally. In a nation-state, therefore, people are united by a common language, culture, history and often also by their heritage.”
The idea that one culture gives a nation strength and that other minorities weaken it is straight from the Nazi playbook. Alfred Rosenberg, a convicted war criminal concted and hanged in Nuremberg, argued through writings like The myth of the twentieth century that ethnic diversity had undermined Germany from realizing its racial greatness and becoming the master race.
The letter to the editorby the PS Youth is just one of many examples that expose the party’s danger to Finland and especially to racialized people and minorities.
We recently saw how the great replacement theory became the ideological bullet of death in New Zealand, Texas, and Buffalo. The PS spreads the same message by stating how Finnish and Swedish speakers are dwindling in size in municipalities like Espoo against migrants.
The great replacement theory is a false racist belief that white Finns are being replaced by asylum seekers, immigrants, and interracial marriages. As long as the PS and other politicians condemn such racism, they are entirely complicit if violence turns to bloodshed.
States Wajahat Ali, writer and author of “Go back to where you came from,” said recently: “Something that was fringe is now mainstream…[T]his has incited and radicalized people to commit hate and terror against vulnerable communities here and abroad. This is no longer a lone wolf, a domestic terror threat but an international global terror threat. New Zealand, Texas, last week in Buffalo. They attack Jews, blacks and Muslims. We are all seen as invaders attacking white folks.”
The same message made by far-right groups elsewhere is echoed regularly by the PS.
Last year, the Finnish Security Service’s (Supo) 2020 annual report warned that the great replacement theory is a conspiracy theory used by far-right terrorist groups.
The PS disagrees with Supo. It recently warned in April how the number of Finnish and Swedish speakers are dwindling in municipalities of Helsinki and surroundings due to migrants.
Despite what happened in Buffalo recently and Supo’s warnings, the PS under Riikka Purra is not deterred and still spreads false racist beliefs like the great replacement theory.