If there is an association in this country that is guilty of whitewashing and killing cultural diversity, one of them is Suomalaisuuden liitto or the Association of Finnish Culture and Identity.
It would be naive to believe that the same structures that aimed at annihilating the Sami culture and the hostile and systemic social exclusion of the Roma in the past have disappeared. You can actually find them everywhere: in our integration program for newcomers, education, and the generally accepted narrative that gives white Finns their identity, power, and privilege to exclude minorities and migrants.
Even if whitewashing is a formidable foe, it doesn’t mean that there aren’t people, associations, and institutions in this country that want to dismantle this racist system. We are, however, still too few and too weak to make a real difference.
I know what whitewashing is because my family was affected by it.
Despite the fact that one of my long lost late relatives, Jacob Weikan (ca. 1785-1848) was the first Jew to get a residence permit in this country in the eighteenth century, anti-Semitism and nationalism forced and encouraged my family from my mother’s side to abandon their Jewish identity.
The whitewashing was so thorough that my grandfather, a captain in the Finnish defense forces and a White Guard, hid his Jewish background all his life with his nationalism. Very rarely did he speak about his Jewish roots but expressed it in a question that wasn’t supposed to be answered: Do we have Jewish roots?
Integration was a different matter in the first half of the last century compared with today. One way was to change your “foreign” surname into a Finnish one.
The document below shows how my grandparent’s family changed their surname in 1931:
In light of the petition made by military instructor Harald Vilhelm Handtwargh, the governor of the province of Mikkeli grants his family permission to change their surname to Harvo; this is backed by statements from the vicar [of the Lutheran church], Suomen Sukututkimusseura [Finnish Genealogical Society], and the Suomalaisuuden Liitto [Association of Finnish Culture and Identity.
Is it a surprise that the chairman of the Association of Finnish Culture and Identity is none other than Sampo Terho, a former member of the Perussuomalaiset* (PS) party and today’s minister of European affairs, culture, and sport?
Continue reading “Groups like Suomalaisuuden liitto were responsible for whitewashing and killing diversity in Finland”
