I was recently interviewed by two students of the Mikkeli University of Applied Sciences (MAMK), who asked me why I’m so passionate about anti-racism. “Finland is a good country to live in with good laws that should protect everyone,” I said. “I don’t want our country to be fed to the dogs by racists, nationalists and populist parties. Our country deserves better.”
Certainly I am not waging such an effort for myself, but for my grandchildren and great grandchildren so that they may live in a society where there is social justice and equality for everyone irrespective of their ethnic and cultural background.
The biggest shock to ethnic purists is the discovery that the Garden of Eden never existed in their country. How come Adam & Eve are “white?”
It saddens but does not surprise me that we are not heading towards such an ideal society. On the one side, you have Finns who are trying to do everything possible to discredit and undermine your presence in this country or are indifferent, while on the other side there is a courageous group of people who are challenging intolerance.
Gathering from much of the near-unchallenged prejudices and discrimination roaming freely in our society and spread by parties like the Perussuomalaiset (PS)*, those very dangers that such parties and anti-immigration politicians warn us of is being inflicted by them. The greatest threat to our peace and social cohesion in this century are these types of parties and politicians, not the migrants and minorities they commonly target.
Some good recent examples of the hate campaign against migrants and refugees are PS MP Maria Louhela, who makes outrageous claims about so-called “humanitarian migration,” a term used by anti-immigration politician to mean asylum seeker who didn’t get asylum but for humanitarian reasons cannot be sent back to his or her war-ravaged country.
The use of a term such as “humanitarian migrants” speaks volumes about Louhela and her red herrings. If refugees are “migrants allowed to stay in the country because of humanitarian reasons,” it suggests that they aren’t real refugees and only seeking to come here to live off our social welfare, a common argument used by anti-immigration groups.
Another PS politician from the city of Salo, Heikki Tamminen, claims that migration is bad because one of the consequences is that people from different ethnicities mix genetically.
What answer would Tamminen give if you asked him if the Garden of Eden was in Finland? Since modern Finns never migrated anywhere, as Tamminen suggests, they must have then magically appeared from nowhere in a Garden of Eden in Finland.
Ludicrous!
Tamminen and other anti-immigration politicians could take a look at what DNA exposed about European hunter-gatherers that lived in this part of Europe around 7,000 years ago, who had blue eyes, black or brown hair and dark skin, according to the Guardian.
* The Finnish name for the Finns Party is the Perussuomalaiset (PS). The English names of the party adopted by the PS, like True Finns or Finns Party, promote in our opinion nativist nationalism and xenophobia. We therefore prefer to use the Finnish name of the party on our postings.