Winter War Archives - Migrant tales

YLE in English: Finnish Sports Federation apologizes after 75 years to a Finnish-Jewish runner

Posted on September 21, 2013 by Migrant Tales

As Finland races into the depths of the new century and distances itself from the Winter (1939-40) and especially from the Continuation War (1941-44), I’m certain that there will be more proof about our collusion with Nazi Germany. One such story appeared Friday, when YLE in English reported on the Finnish Sports Federation’s (SUL) apology to a Jewish runner.

Read full story here.

In a 1938 athletics meet, a Jewish runner of the Helsinki Makkabi sports club was placed fourth despite winning the 100-meter dash race.

The sprint runner, Abraham Tokazier, won the race but Arne Savolainen was declared the winner with Tokazier coming in fourth.

The apology by SUL took 75 years and was only possible after Finnish author Kjell Westö mentioned the incident in his new book, “Kangastus 38.”

”Any manipulation or distortion of results is shocking and against basic sporting values,” SUL chairman Vesa Harmaakorpi said in a statement. ”The judges clearly made a mistake in the 1938 meet. I would like to offer a humble apology to the athlete and his relatives on behalf of the Finnish Sports Federation.”

Leo-dan Bensky, honorary chairman of Makkabi Helsinki, said that the apology wasn’t good enough since SUL doesn’t want to retrospectively change the result of the race.

”It’s a step in the right direction, but until the result has been corrected, we don’t see the matter as resolved,” he was quoted as saying on YLE in English.

Historians like Simo Muir and Malthe Gasche state in a book called “Finland’s Holocaust” that Urho Kekkonen, the Finnish Sports Federation chairman and Finland’s president (1953-81), may have influenced the final result of the 1938 race.

Finland was allied militarily with Nazi Germany during the Continuation War. Why is it still so difficult to open up this questionable period? Was Finland Adolf Hitler’s ally because it hated and wanted revenge against the Soviet Union or was it because it generally believed in Nazi Germany’s new world order and racial policies?

Citing newspapers from the time, Muir and Gasche state that there was a drive to make sure that Finnish Jewish athletes did not participate or represent the country in the 1940 Olympic Games in Helsinki.

Helsingin Sanomat claims that there may have been high-ranking Nazi German officials at the 1938 athletics meet, which forced SUL to change the final result.

Migrant Tales (May 26, 2011): Racist propaganda during Finland’s Winter War (1939-40)

Posted on August 28, 2013 by Migrant Tales

Consequently, racial prejudice and discrimination are nonexistent (in Finland). Heikki Waris, An introduction to Finnish Society (1965), p. 2

Finland was also denying in the 1960s that racism did not exist because there weren’t any foreigners living in the country. Racism has, however, been part of our culture for a very long time: Kongoshoe polish, Neekeripusu (n-word kiss) chocolate, the Fazer licorice Gollywog are some examples of how this social ill had implanted itself in the national culture.

If Waris and other researchers wanted to find out if racism existed in our culture, all they’d have to do was study Finns that emigrated to Africa, North and South America. I once asked a second-generation Finn in Argentina how many races there existed in the world. “There are three,” he said. “White, black and pitch-black.”

We can even see racism prevalent in a Suomen Kuvalehti Easter 1940 issue: “In the East Indies Islands there appears a strange form of sudden mental disorientation that is called ‘running amok,’ or being taken over by horror and then reacting in a mad fashion. Even while running away from battle with a dagger in hand, the inflicted person rushes here and there striking anyone dead (that gets in his way).”

And then on the next page of the story is a picture of two Finnish solider representing the “civilized” world who know how to keep calm in the face of shocking situations. “Can somebody imagine for example that these Finnish soldiers would “run amok?” the caption reads.

The gist of the story by PhD Jan Gästrin, headlined “Spiritual discipline,” is that blacks are uncivilized and Finns civilized. In battle Finnish soldiers don’t “run amok” but can withstand the most rigorous tests of war: rats, lice, poisoned air etc.

The first page of a Suomen Kuvalehti article published in 1940 that attempted to show how the European white man was superior to blacks.

Note: The author apologizes for the racist content of the Suomen Kuvalehti article and wants to make clear that he does not play down the valiant fight the Finns put up against the former Soviet Union in the Winter War.

This blog entry was originally published May 26, 2011.

Where are you from?

Posted on June 10, 2013 by Migrant Tales

Even if I have lived most of my adult life in Finland and my mother is Finnish, I’m still asked occasionally where I’m from. In a spirit of mutual respect, I ask the person the same question. Some don’t like it.

The innocent question, where are you from, reveals a lot about our prejudices and ignorance about who we consider Finns.

In order to emphasize their Finnishness at the cost of your Otherness, you’ll even get sometimes a lesson in race-and-blood myths and how their ancestors have lived for centuries in Finland.

When faced with such exclusive views of who is a Finn, I ask them how many ancestors they’d have if they went back 20 generations. The answer is about one million.

Read full story here.

Then there are those who claim they are as old as Methuselah, a biblical figure who died at the age of 969. Those who play Methuselah claim that their great grandparents fought in this and that war and built this land from scratch even if they had never seen war never mind suffered poverty.

I ask them a simple question: Are you 150 years old?

One matter that gives hope about building a more inclusive society is that we are still a young nation. Our national identity, which is nothing more than a social construct, was built by and large on wars and our loathing of Russia. This must change in order to make our society more inclusive and acceptant of cultural diversity.

Certainly we should respect our veterans. Even if they had no choice but to fight in trenches and die in battlefields, we don’t have to be there with them since the Winter (1939-40) and Continuation War (1941-44) ended over sixty years ago. We have to forgive and move on. The longer we stay in those trenches the longer we’ll be resentful and suspicious of the outside world.

Despite all the challenges facing us during this century as we become a culturally diverse society, I’m confident that we’ll succeed at the task.

Our Nordic democratic social welfare state values and the spirit of our laws ensure success.

Finland’s biggest threat is itself

Posted on February 23, 2013 by Migrant Tales

As Finland awakens to the reality that it is a culturally diverse society, one of the biggest threats and challenges we face doesn’t come from abroad but from our backyard. When the Civil Rights Movement ended in the United States in 1968, the first matter that we learned we should stop doing is generalizing about blacks and other groups.

It’s sad to admit that some prejudices in Finland are so old that people believe them to be scientific fact. Prejudice is a powerful political force that was capitalized by the anti-immigration Perussuomalaiset party in the April 2011 election.

Finns are even prejudiced against themselves. Some believe that Hämäläinens in southern Finland are “slow” and that people from Savo in eastern Finland are “crooked.”

Racism has powerful roots in Finland. One could even see it on a Suomen Kuvalehti article published in 1940 that attempted to show how superior the Finnish white soldier was to blacks.

Blacks are no longer found on racist ads but other ethnic groups like Latinos. This picture was taken at the Pieksämäki train station in July 2007. The owners of the café no longer use this sign outside their premises.

Giving up one’s prejudices isn’t easy but not impossible.

We fortunately have great laws that are based on social equality (tasa-arvo) and respect. Our successful society would be nothing today without these laws. Instead of building bridges of acceptance, respect and tolerance, we’d be destroying those bridges with intolerance.

How, then, is it possible that such an exemplary society like ours could breed people with so much hatred and prejudice against other groups?

While there are many people who understand the importance of cultural diversity in this country, there are still too many who are reactive to it.

Despite the spirit of our present laws, they mean little and are robbed of their power if they are caged by prejudice, racism and above all by our silence.

Blaming our history on some of our intolerance is a too simple but it is one answer that sheds light on the present problem.

Few young people in Finland know that we used to be a very closed country only thirty years ago and our laws reflected this situation as well.

Foreigners were not only barred from investing in the country but the Aliens’ Office made everything possible to ensure you didn’t move here.

If is shameful that a country that saw over 1.2 million emigrate between 1860 and 1999, treated immigrants in Finland like stateless persons who didn’t even have the right to habeas corpus. Immigrants were seen at the time as a threat to national security.

Prior to our first Aliens’ Act of 1983, which came into force sixty-five years after independence, foreigners could be arrested at will by the police, held indefinitely in jail and deported without the right to appeal.

During the Great Depression, Finland enacted the Restricting Act of 1939 that kept foreigners and outside investment to a minimum. The act prohibited foreigners from owning real estate and acquiring a majority stake in Finnish companies – limiting this to 20% normally and 40% under special permission.

The act stipulated that foreigners could not own shares in sectors such as forestry, securities trading, transportation, mining, real estate and shipping.

To maintain this climate of suspicion against foreigners, the school played an important role in teaching young Finns myths in order to be prejudiced against other groups.

At schools, Finnish children were taught at an early age that “n” stands for the n-word.

Fortunately times are changing!

Finland’s mini Breivik: gunman kills two and wounds seven

Posted on May 27, 2012 by Migrant Tales

What motivates a young man to take the law in his own hands and kill indiscriminately defenseless people? While we still don’t know the motives behind the killings in Hyvinkää, the suspect’s “likes” on Facebook may offer us some clues.

Writes YLE in English: ”Police in the town of Hyvinkää, some 50km north of Helsinki, say a young man dressed in military fatigues began shooting with a rifle from the roof of a building in the city centre at 1:53am Saturday…

An 18-year-old woman was killed. Another victim, a 19-year-old man, died later in a hospital. Seven other people have been hospitalised with gunshot wounds, including a 23-year-old woman police trainee, who has critical injuries.”

Human rights activist and writer, Jussi K. Niemelä, states that the suspect’s “likes” on Facebook suggest the usual far-right ideology. Some of the suspect’s “likes” include the anti-immigration Perussuomalaiset party, Bundeswher, the German Defense Force, and Simo Häyhä, a Finnish sniper nicknamed “White Death” by the Red Army during the Winter War (1939-40).

Some have called the gunman Finland’s Anders Breivik, who killed 77 victims in Norway.

While we have to wait for the final report by the police to know the killer’s probable motives, one matter is certain: The attack was senseless and reveals the illness that has inflicted our society today. It is the same ogre that we saw kill innocent victims in Jokela and Kauhajoki.

Migrant Tales offers its heartfelt condolences to the families of the victims.

Racist propaganda during Finland’s Winter War (1939-40)

Posted on May 26, 2011 by Migrant Tales

By Enrique Tessieri

Consequently, racial prejudice and discrimination are nonexistent (in Finland).

Heikki Waris, An introduction to Finnish Society (1965), p. 2

Finland was also denying in the 1960s that racism did not exist because there weren’t any foreigners living in the country. Racism has, however, been part of our culture for a very long time: Kongo shoe polish, Neekeripusu (n-word kiss) chocolate, the Fazer licorice Gollywog are some examples of how this social ill had implanted itself in the national culture.

If Waris and other researchers wanted to find out if racism existed in our culture, all they’d have to do was study Finns that emigrated to Africa, North and South America. I once asked a second-generation Finn in Argentina how many races there existed in the world. “There are three,” he said. “White, black and pitch-black.”

We can even see racism prevalent in a Suomen Kuvalehti Easter 1940 issue: “In the East Indies Islands there appears a strange form of sudden mental disorientation that is called ‘running amok,’ or being taken over by horror and then reacting in a mad fashion. Even while running away from battle with a dagger in hand, the inflicted person rushes here and there striking anyone dead (that gets in his way).”

And then on the next page of the story is a picture of two Finnish solider representing the “civilized” world who know how to keep calm in the face of shocking situations. “Can somebody imagine for example that these Finnish soldiers would “run amok?” the caption reads.

The gist of the story by PhD Jan Gästrin, headlined “Spiritual discipline,” is that blacks are uncivilized and Finns civilized. In battle Finnish soldiers don’t “run amok” but can withstand the most rigorous tests of war: rats, lice, poisoned air etc.

The first page of a Suomen Kuvalehti article published in 1940 that attempted to show how the European white man was superior to blacks.

Note: The author apologizes for the racist content of the Suomen Kuvalehti article and wants to make clear that he does not play down the valiant fight the Finns put up against the former Soviet Union in the Winter War.

Banishing the racial myths of Finland

Posted on December 20, 2009 by Migrant Tales

One of the matters that cultural diversity will bring to Finland is challenge the very myths and views of itself especially on the ethnic front.

Even though Finns have created a well-functioning society founded on social justice, these values have basically applied to Finns. Apart from its geographic remoteness form the rest of Europe, some Finns have emphasized in the previous century their cultural and linguistic uniqueness through the hush-hush acknowledgement of “racial hygiene.”

A good example of this is the professor of social policy Heikki Waris, who wrote in the 1950s: “When conditions in Finland are compared with those elsewhere, for instance in central and southern European countries with their many kinds of racial mixes and all the associated unmanageable social problems, the racial unity of our nation must be seen as a great source of strength.”

Contrary to other parts of the world, “race and language” were the driving forces of our independence as well. This fear, and in many cases hatred, of the Russians even unified the Whites and Reds from the Winter War (1939-40). In the post-war period, it gained further strength through Finland’s geopolitical isolation until its full political and economic integration with Western Europe came in 1995 through EU membership.

If one wants an explanation for the deep-rooted prejudice and racism that is still alive and kicking among some Finns, one does not have to go far to find the reasons behind this societal malice. Our history and near-consensus interpretation of it reveals why.

Matters on the so-called multicultural debate in Finland are still in such a diaper stage that even our political leadership takes special care not to step on the foot of those that make racism respectable instead of defending those that are the victims of their attacks.

The highly one-sided debate in Finland on immigrants is seen as a threat by some Finns because new members of our society bring different points of views. As Finland becomes more multicultural demographically, some of our future historians, sociologists, writers, poets, politicians and others will challenge the very myths that were created in the previous century.

Our new identity and the history we write of ourselves as a nation in this century (new myths?) will be based on totally new points of departure. I for one believe it will be a very rich and inspiring debate that will strengthen our country. Given enough time, it will challenge more forcefully than ever those myths that keep the ogre of racism alive in our society.

It will be the awakening of a new Finland that will fit its needs as a nation in the new century.

Mannerheim and Finnish provincialism

Posted on November 28, 2009 by Migrant Tales

I heard yesterday an interesting talk on Marshall Carl Mannerheim (1867-1951) just a few days before the outbreak of the Winter War exactly 70 years ago on November 30, 1939. The talk centered on different aspects of the Civil War of 1918 and how Mannerheim saw the world.

Those who have studied this man, know that he was not the easiest person to get along with and had a mean temper. If he would wake up today from his eternal sleep, one of the matters that would shock him is our liberal, democratic Nordic welfare society.

Without stealing any of his thunder from those difficult decades when he led Finland, Mannerheim’s thinking would have been totally out of touch with these times.

Despite his strong distaste for dissension and the ideology behind Bolshevism (he was trained as an officer of Czarist Russia and had a soft spot for the Menshevics), his view of the world was more open than many Finns when the country became a republic in 1917. How many Finns had back then a broad international view of the world and were not overtaken by the hysteria of nationalism and petty provincialism?

How did nationalism and that narrow view of the outside world impact Finland during those crucial decades that led to the Winter and Continuation Wars? If mistrust and hatred of Russians was the driving force that unified some Finns back in those difficult times, how did it affect its foreign policy? Can we still see this same suspicion and mistrust today sprinkled in our views of immigrants?

Even though it is questionable that Finland could have done something to prevent the Winter War, there are a lot of question marks concerning the Continuation War. Answering, or pondering these queries seriously, will bring to light many things about ourselves as a a people and hitherto-unknown or hidden aspects of our history.

One of these is the reticent attitudes of Finnish authorities towards foreign investment (Restricting Act of 1939) and draconian laws to discourage foreigners to move to the country.

One of the biggest culprits, I am certain, were a small country’s petty provincialism, fear, and suspicion of the outside world.