Don’t look for intolerance in complex and distant places because it sits and hides right under our noses.
A story on the Huffington Post, reveals that researchers from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum found over 40,000 Nazi death camps and ghettos that existed during Adolf Hitler’s reign of terror between 1933 and 1945. The total is much higher than previously believed, reports The New York Times.
Even if Counterjihadists claim to be pro-Israel, that is only lip service to hide their intolerance for diversity. If they ever got rid of the Muslims from Europe like their modern “final solution,” their next target would most likely be the Jews.
While the terror that the Nazi regime sowed is clear to most sensible people and the proof is out there in ever-greater quantities, there are some who are still in denial about the horrors of fascism and the Holocaust. Those who play down such atrocities committed against the Jews, Roma and other minorities in World War 2, can be found in parties like the Perussuomalaiset (PS) of Finland.
One of the matters that has always struck me about Counterjihadists, Holocaust deniers, populist right-wing radicals and anti-immigration politicians, is how they believe that history can be rewritten and forgotten to suit their opinionated ignorance and hatred.
Their denials are the brush that’s supposed to whitewash the truth.
Let’s look at a few of the many PS politicians what they think about fascism and the Holocaust so we don’t forget who they are.
A politician who made his questionable political career on spreading racism and hatred is PS MP Jussi Halla-aho.
What did he say?
- “It’s quite justifiable to claim that the Nuremberg trials are a farce. Their guilt was decided beforehand and the convictions were carried out for absurd reasons.”
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“Retroactively opposing the Holocaust is nicer and easier than getting involved in solving present-day problems. It is nice to accuse the Germans because it’s what everyone does. Armenians are irrelevant because Armenians don’t own Hollywood and the American media.”*
Halla-aho was convicted in June 2012 by the Supreme Court for ethnic agitation and breaching the sanctity of religion.
PS Kotka councilman Freddy Van Wonterghem, who claimed in May 2011 on Iltalehti that even though excesses happened during World War II, the Holocaust was an “exaggerated” fabrication by the former Soviet Union.
An appeals court upheld in February Van Wonterghem’s ethnic agitation conviction.
What did Van Wonterghem write? He said it was ok if Saudis kill a Muslim woman because that person would not give birth to anymore Muslims.
On a Migrant Tales blog entry on Uusi Suomi, Van Wonterghem had no regrets about what he wrote.
And then there’s a long list of others who are dazzled by far right ideology and who don’t hide their admiration for fascism.
PS MP Juho Eerola’s far-right and anti-immigration views are well-known. He once wrote in a blog entry that he liked Italian fascist Benito Mussolini’s economic system because there was full employment.
His aide, Ulla Pyysalo, applied for membership in the neo-Nazi Kansalinen Vastarinta.
Eerola didn’t want Pyysalo to resign. He said he’d be more worried if she’d apply for membership in a far-left group.
PS MP Jussi Niinstö, who chairs the defense committee, showed his political colors in the fall of 2011 when he quoted in parliament Nazi playwright Hans Johst’s Schlageter, “Wenn ich Kultur höre … entsichere ich meinen Browning” (“Whenever I hear of culture… I release the safety-catch of my Browning”).
Niinstö substituted the word “culture” in Johst’s play for parliamentarism.
Heidi Kuittinen is a PS politician from Kirkkonummi, located near Helsinki. She is another Holocaust denier: “Hitler’s mother’s father was apparently related to the Rothschilds. The six million dead have been proven to be a hoax anyway. The amount of Jews in Europe before and after the war just doesn’t match with the numbers of the supposed holocaust.”’*
Occasionally the PS shows its romanticism of Nazism as a group. The PS of the western Finnish city of Pori launched their municipal election campaign with a former Nazi catch phrase: “One city – one leader.”
The Nazi motto was: Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer (One People, One Nation, One Leader).
Here’s what a former PS member, Atte Pulli, was quoted as saying recently: “SIEG HAIL! …Oops, I slipped. I’m drunk.”*
And another one by Amon Rautiainen, a Kotka city councilman: “People are too uptight with Nazism, if someone has a Totenkopf on a shirt or somebody questions the amount of people killed at concentration camps, you’re immediately branded with Hitler.”*
Rautiainen is being investigated by the police for suggesting that Prime Minister Jyrki Katainen and Economy Minister Jutta Urpilainen should be killed and Muslims boiled alive, according to YLE in English.
In the face of playing down Nazism, fascism, the Holocaust and, of course, racism, it’s important that we the voters do not forget who these PS politicians are and what they really stand for behind their populist sound bites.
* Original source: truefinns.tumblr.com
