Tag: United States

What we should reflect on Finland’s Independence Day

Posted on by Migrant Tales

By Enrique Tessieri

Since I grew up in three countries, I have the opportunity to celebrate three independence days every year. Today is Finland’s turn. What should we be reflecting on this day? Should it be nationalism, patriotism or neither?

Some make a big distinction between nationalism and patriotism. While I consider them basically the same thing, the former is used to stress how much better better one group is compared with another. Patriotism is generally supposed to mean a sense of community.

While the term patriotism has a nationalistic connotation to it, that feeling of community it is supposed to bring out in us is crucial to any well-functioning society. We all belong and work for the betterment of all the members and parts of our society.

A key component of these celebrations, in my opinion, should be the opportunity to embrace our diversity and be inclusive to new members so they may enjoy that sense of community.

We should be a model of a small world community where all peoples from all backgrounds can live together and reap strength and meaning.

Too many independence day celebrations in different countries are just the opposite. They are too nationalistic and do nothing to mend the injustices brought on other groups when these nations were built.

If Karl Marx was the founding ideological father of the former Soviet Union, relatively unknown social thinkers to many like Baron de Montesquieu had a huge impact on the then nascent republic of the United States.

As most people know, The Declaration of Independence of the United States took place on July 4, 1776. A revolution usually gives birth to great men and ideas like that of Thomas Jefferson.

He wrote that if any government didn’t offer its citizens unalienable rights such as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, it is the right of the people to either alter or abolish such government, even by force.

We must not forget, however, that the those unalienable rights that Jefferson spoke of were meant for white Europeans not for groups like Amerindians never mind blacks, who were slaves at the time.

Argentina’s declaration of independence from Spain happened on July 9, 1816. The country, which had at the beginning of the nineteenth century a population totaling a mere 400,000 people excluding Amerindians, which may have accounted for about a third of the total population, was enormous and practically empty.

Juan Bautista Alberd, one of Argentina’s most influential statesmen of the nineteenth century, coined the phrase: “To govern is to populate.”  His thinking inspired the 1853 constitution, which was one of the most immigrant friendly in the world at the time.

While immigration changed the face of Argentina, it was a death blow to the Amerindians and the country’s black population.

Just as Jefferson forgot the black slaves’ unalienable rights, Alberdi held Amerindians in similar contempt and did not see them forming part in Argentina’s future.

Contrary to the United States and Argentina, Finland’s independence happened such a short time ago (94 years) that my grandparents saw that day. If Finland didn’t have blacks or Amerindians, it had socialists and communists that had no place in our society especially after the 1918 Civil War.

In all three of these countries, persecution and exclusion of groups were factors that helped create these nations.  With this in mind, shouldn’t this important day be a moment when we reflect on the greatness of our society measured in correcting historical injustices, reconciliation as well as promoting social equality, justice and inclusion?

On that this day we should make a vow that we’ll never commit such atrocities as war on others ever again.

If this is what we are celebrating today, I wish from the bottom of my heart to everyone a very wonderful Independence Day!

Extremism in Finland and elsewhere grows on the same soil of hatred

Posted on by Migrant Tales

By Enrique Tessieri

The video clip blow is a frightening example of how far-right groups like the Nazi Party of the United States use the First Amendment (freedom of speech) to justify their hate speech. While it’s unlikely that the Perussuomalaiset (PS) party or even Muutos 2011 and Vapauspuolue will have summer camps with Nazi flags and members dressed in SS-like gear, they do believe in racial purity and loathe Muslims.

Even if these parties may not go to such extremes as the American Nazi Party to drive home their message, there is always a probability it may lead to that if the time is right. If we listen to PS MPs like James Hirvisaari or Juho Eerola and read what Jussi Halla-aho has written about Muslims, a big question mark emerges.

It would be naive and foolish to brush aside these Suomen Sisu members as an innocent group. Even if they do not carry Nazi flags their thoughts and visions of Finland are in the same ball park as some white supremest groups in the United States and Europe. People express themselves different culturally even though they believe in the same ideological goals.

Suomen Sisu, of which Halla-aho and his cronies are members of the far-right association, recommend reading Alfred Rosenberg, a Nazi war criminal hanged in Nuremberg, and are against Finns marrying foreigners.

Susan Canedy, author, America’s Nazis says in the video clip tells us what Nazi Germany promised its people: “Adolf Hitler when he went to jail and wrote Mein Kampf  wrote what he knew: anti-Semitism was rampant and rife in Germany. What Hitler was able to do was capitalize on that unhappiness and throw some bones. Will you accept anti-Semitism if I give you a job? If I give you a uniform? If I give you a way of life? If I give you something to hang on to, something to bring our children up in and make you feel proud and make you enjoy your life in your community would you do that? Seventy million people did that.”

The video clip may be offensive to some. Migrant Tales recommends viewer discretion.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hViE_lZ7rzg&feature=related]

The face of fascism has changed but the policies of such a political system are still out there. Today’s fascists, which  could be called Counter-Jihadists, despise Muslims as much as the Nazis hated the Jews.

It’s the same ogre with different clothing.

Spiegel Online International: How 9/11 Triggered America’s Decline

Posted on by Migrant Tales

Comment:  The impact of 9/11 can be clearly seen after ten years of that devastating attack that made the United States lose its way in the so-called war on terror declared by former President George W. Bush.

Contrary to Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, who said right after the mass killings by Anders Breivik that Norway’s answer would be more openness and more democracy, Bush went on a $3-trillion foreign policy crusade that has cost the United States dearly.

Writes Speigel Online International:  “For a short time after the attacks, the country seemed united. Americans embraced each other. Even the cold city of New York suddenly seemed warm. But instead of cultivating public spirit, President Bush sought to find a pretext — any pretext — to invade Afghanistan and Iraq. This is his most tragic legacy, the fact that America can no longer even mourn its victims properly — because Americans have long been not just victims, but also perpetrators.”

If there is one party in Finland that can thank Bush it is the Perussuomalaiset (PS). The US’ war against the Muslim world gave rise to Islamophobists like Jussi Halla-aho and a long list of others. Without their anti-immigration and anti-Muslim rhetoric the PS could have never won 39 seats in the April election. 

In 2003 I published an opinion-piece on Suomen Kuvalehti on the US invasion of Iraq and how it would have catastrophic consequences for the credibility of that country. At least for me, the Iraq invasion was a strong whiff of deja vu since it was the way Washington handled its big-stick policy in Latin America.

“Latin America was a region where coups – oops! régime change — occurred on a grand scale. If experience of how the U.S. influenced Latin America in the last century is anything to go by, the people of the Middle East are in big trouble,” I wrote back in 2003.

Probably the saddest matter of 9/11 is that the United States under Bush started to believe its own spin and invincibility.

Where were you on 9/11 and how to do you think that attack, which should be seen as a crime and not as a declaration of war against all Muslims, changed the world?

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The events of Sept. 11, 2001 led to a wave of solidarity with the US. But the superpower has lost that goodwill over the course of the wars it subsequently waged. Now America is mainly seen not as the victim of terrorism, but as a perpetrator of violence itself.

Read whole story.

Community Village blog: What makes us what we are

Posted on by Migrant Tales

Comment: I was kind of shocked to hear last week the views on immigration of a prominent member of the community and a member of a large political party: “Finland must close its borders to immigrants,” he said. What surprised me most about his argument was that he considered Finns as some endangered human group in Europe that once hunted mammoths. The “colonizers” were modern-day immigrants who would wipe out the Finns as Christopher Columbus did with the Amerindians when he landed on the island of Hispanola in 1492.

One matter to keep in mind when hearing these types of arguments is that whenever a person speaks of Finns as a tribe he or she is flirting with racism. If there is one matter that awakens the racist spirit in Finns it is classifying ourselves as a tribe or, worse, as an endangered group of people.

Actor Edward James Olmos in the youtube clip below puts the whole perspective of race and/or ethnicity in perspective. In the US people like to use the term “race” whereas in Europe we use “ethnicity” to mean the same thing. Even so, the US used to classify blacks and Asians as a race but European immigrants as ethnic groups. 

According to Olmos, it is incredible that we use race as a cultural determinant. “To this date you should never invited me here,” he told a group at the UN. “Because I detest what we have done to ourselves. Out of a need to make ourselves different from one another we made the term race a way of expressing culture…There is only one race and that is the human race.”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSFDrOxWCXY&feature=player_embedded]

Why are some Finns obsessed about ethnicity? Is it because it is an effective way of controlling and excluding others from society and its resources?

What do you think?

Thank you @getgln for the heads up!

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Ethnicity is amorphous, and only a small fraction of what makes us who we are. “There are no races, there are only clines,”  according to antrhopologist Frank Livingstone.

Rosa Parks and Finland

Posted on by Migrant Tales

By Enrique Tessieri

Rosa Parks (1913-2005) is not only a symbol of the US civil rights movement but of countries like Finland as well. In order for history to change you don’t need a lot of firepower but people who lead by example. Rosa Parks is one of these we should not forget as Multicultural Finns and other minorities struggle for greater acceptance recognition in Finland.

                                                                                                             US civil rights activist  Rosa Parks.

One cannot change the world but one can with his or her example impact those that live around them. That is in a sense the story of Rosa Parks, who refused to give up her seat to a white person on a bus in December 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama.  Contrary to other brave blacks who had refused to give up their seat to a white person, Parks’ arrest sparked a bus boycott in Montgomery.

What is even more important was that Parks’ civil disobedience turned into an important symbol of the civil rights movement and against racial segregation.

Blacks were forced to sit in the back of buses in Montgomery and if the bus was full they were required to give up their seat to a white.

Even if this type of racial segregation does not exist in countries like Finland, there are more ingenious ways of forcing people to sit in back of the bus of society.  Just like blacks were forced to give up their seats to whites on buses, immigrants and minorities in Finland are the last ones to get employed and the first ones to be laid off.

The ways racism is practiced may have changed but it is still the same ogre that segregated blacks in the United States but created one of its greatest symbols.

guardian.co.uk: North Carolina’s reparation for the dark past of American eugenics

Posted on by Migrant Tales

Comment: When we think of pseudo-sciences like eugenics we usually associate them with Germany. However, eugenics was widely accepted in other European countries as well as in the United States. The story below published by the Guardian shows how eugenics led to forced sterilization in the United States and how such practices continue to impact its victims to this date.

The following documentary, The Occult History of the Reich, gives a grotesque view of how eugenics got wide support from medical establishments and how it served fanatics like Adolf Hitler to set his country on a ruinous crusade. 

Even if sensible people know that eugenics is baloney with a capital B, associations like Suomen Sisu continue to flirt with such ideas through their views of “racial purity.” This is odd because Nazis like Eugene Fischer considered Finns of Mongolian stock. 

Apart from not having any scientific foundation, the legacy that eugenics left us is war and mass-murder in the name of racial purity.

Thanks to JusticeDemon for alerting me about this story.

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By Edwin Black

North Carolina’s compensation to victims of forced sterilisation is a chance to illuminate a gruesome US tradition of racial ‘science.’

Twenty-seven American states joined a decades-long pseudo-scientific crusade to create a white, blond, blue-eyed, biologically superior “master race”. Their misguided utopian quest was called eugenics. But only one state, North Carolina, is now readying a massive plan of financial repatriations to its surviving victims. Just how much North Carolina should pay is now the subject of a historically wrenching debate.

Read whole story.

HS: Ihmisrotuja ei voi perustella biologialla

Posted on by Migrant Tales

Comment:  Here is an interesting letter to the editor by Turku University professor of genetics, Petter Portin, who states that one myth that has been constructed by Europeans is the concept of  “race.” Genetic research has shown that so-called racial differences between people are very small.  The only differences that separate us are geographic. 

Even so, classifying people into different races has served many purposes throughout history. One of these has been to dominate groups and to justify their exploitation. 

One of the first to classify people into different races was Carl von Linné (1707-1778), who argued that there were four: white, red, yellow and black.

“The best matter would be to give up classifying people altogether,” Portin writes. “Using terms (to classify different groups) is a way to control them.”

The term ethnic group is used more in Europe than in the United States, where groups like blacks refer to themselves as a “race.” Mexican Americans, for example, call themselves “la raza,” or the race. Europeans that immigrated to the United States and who were “white” were seen belonging to ethnic as opposed to racial groups. 

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Petter Portin

Mitä pidemmälle ihmiskunnan geneettisen muuntelun tutkimus on edennyt, sitä selvemmäksi on käynyt, että mitään selviä ihmisrotuja ei ole olemassa. Antropologian historian aikana ihmiskunnassa on erotettu kymmeniä eri rotuja. Ihmisbiologiassa ollaan kuitenkin nykyään luopumassa tai on jo luovuttu rodun käsitteestä.

Read whole story.

Finnish Americans tell us what immigration is

Posted on by Migrant Tales

Here is an interesting 18:18-minute video on some interviews of second- to fourth-generation Finnish Americans who give their insight on immigration.

Two comments I liked were by Dan Karvonen, a fourth-generation Finnish American, and  second-generation American Eric Salonen.

Karvonen said that when people in the United States criticize immigrants for bringing their relatives and friends they forget that that was exactly what Finns did 150 years ago. “Many siblings and friends came from the same place (in Finland),” he said.

Karvonen believes that eventually the stigma of being an immigrant will go away because their children will be part of society.

Salonen asked the following question, which is topical in Finland and elsewhere in Europe:  “Too many… politicians who are obviously using the (immigrant) issue simply to gain political advantage and that don’t really have any realistic proposals in mind. And so where are we going to find people who are actually seriously address the issue?”

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/22125388]

I would like to thank Gerry Luoma Henkel  for sending me the video clip. He is editor of New World Finn.

Obama’s mother had the right idea about cultures

Posted on by Migrant Tales

President Barack Obama remembered his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro, as “the most generous spirit I have ever known.” In a touching article in The New York Times, we get a view of this remarkable woman who understood the beauty and strength of diversity. Having been raised in Kansas, her first husband was from Kenya and the second one from Indonesia.

Multicultural marriages are in many respects the pacesetters and molders of new cultures.  It was no easy matter for a woman from Kansas to be wed to a black man in the 1960s.  In many states, marriages between blacks and whites where forbidden until these laws were overturned in 1967. She died of ovarian cancer in 1995 at the age of 53.

From the article I would like to share a quote by Obama’s half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, about her mother:

She felt that somehow, wandering through uncharted territory, we might stumble upon something that will, in an instant, seem to represent who we are at the core. That was very much her philosophy of life – to not be limited by fear or narrow definitions, to not build walls around ourselves and to do our best to find kinship and beauty in unexpected places.

Racism debate: Finland today – United States in the 1970s

Posted on by Migrant Tales

By Enrique Tessieri

Some Finns argue today that they are automatically labelled racists if they speak out too strongly against immigration. The statement resembles very much the atmosphere in the United States in the early 1970s, when blacks started to win legal as well as social rights after the civil rights movement.

The fact that some openly question racism in Finland should be seen as a welcome and positive matter. The knee-jerk reaction of different anti-immigration groups show that society openly questions their agendas.

Such a debate in the 1990s and before would have been impossible on such a scope since the racial ideology of the country was different due to the underwhelming size of Finland’s immigrant population and far-flungness.

If the United States awoke from its segregated deep sleep thanks to the civil rights movement led by men such as Martin Luther King, Finland is also awakening to the same reality. I remember very well the new USAmerica that the civil rights movement had helped forge. We too were sensitized into a new way of thinking and interacting with blacks and other minorities. For many of us, our old views and fears of other groups had been thrown into the trash can of history.

Contrary to the civil rights movement of the United States, the ever-growing immigrant population in Finland is awakening the country to a new century. At least today racism is being questioned when before it was normal, accepted and even promoted openly as something “Finnish” and “patriotic.” In post-civil rights United States, racism got a hard blow. Such behavior became shameful and socially inappropriate.

What is important about the shift in social behavior in the United States and Finland today is that it ushers in and questions old stereotypes that are based on racism.

One of the greatest achievements of the US civil rights movement was that it started to do away with the racial stigmas labelled on different groups by whites. With respect to the blacks, this happened almost overnight in some parts of the country.  Seeing is believing today: President Barack Obama.

Whenever a Finn uses the “fear-of-being-labelled-a-racist” argument because he/she is against immigrants, immigration and/or refugees, it should be seen as a knee-jerk reaction of an ever-dwindling minority.

Openly and vociferously questioning our racism is unique, courageous and a watershed in our society. It is the brave new face of Finland in the new century.