Finnish Karelia, Salla, and Petsamo were territories ceded to the former Soviet Union after the Continuation War (1941-44). Counterjihadist Perussuomalaiset (PS) MP Olli Immonen sent a parliamentary question Friday asking the government to investigate whether Russia offered in 1991 then President Mauno Koivisto (1982-94) the possibility to buy back the ceded region. Koivisto, who was…
Tag: World War 2
Far-right groups and anti-immigration extremists in Finland and Europe flirt with fascism
When far-right groups and anti-immigration extremists flirt with fascism nothing good can ever come out of it. Even if it sounds incredible, we have in Finland our own holocaust deniers or those who claim the Nuremberg Trials were a farce.
Ilta-Sanomat tabloid ad (lööppi) from December 28, 1992
Migrant Tales will begin to publish Finnish tabloid ads* (lööppi in Finnish) from the 1990s. Taking into account that Finland’s immigrant population started to grow during that decade, it is easy at least through the main stories of tabloids like Ilta-Sanomat and Iltalehti to see how they reflected some people’s xenophobic and racist views.
The "us"-and-"them" smoking-gun statement that once justified mass murder in Europe
One of the matters that surprises me about some Finnish politicians is how they continue to flirt with ideologies that led Europe to its destruction in the 1940s. The younger they are, and the further they are in time from fascism, the more some flirt and idolize this ideology. To them I would like to give them a quote by Rudolf Hoess, the notorious commandant of the Aushcwitz concentration camp during 1940-43.
The "Winter War" that visible minorities face in Finland
Even if we speak proudly about the heroism of the men and women who fought against a formidable foe in the Winter (1939-40) and questionable Continuation War (1941-44), many Finns with culturally diverse backgrounds are facing today a different yet similar kind of war on a daily basis. One of these “veterans” is fourteen-year-old Rebecka Holm, who published her moving story on Swedish-language daily HBL.
guardian.co.uk: Tory MP Aidan Burley sacked over ‘Nazi’ stag party attendance
A Conservative MP who attended a stag party where guests dressed as Nazis has been sacked as a Commons aide for “offensive” behaviour and placed under investigation by David Cameron.
The New York Review of Books: A New Approach to the Holocaust
It is fruitless to reduce the manifold evil of the Holocaust to a single cause. Ideology, charisma, conformism, hatred, greed, and war were all very important, but each was related to the others and all mattered within rapidly changing historical circumstances. In his profound study Holocaust, Peter Longerich puts forward an analysis that includes all these factors and shows how politics or, as he puts it, Politik, set them all in motion. In this amplified English edition of his Politik der Vernichtung (1998), Longerich preserves the German term Judenpolitik, and with good reason. In German Politik means both “politics” and “policy,” and the compound noun (Juden + Politik) gives a sense of a joining of concepts that English cannot quite convey.
Immigration debate in Finland and Europe: Turning the lights off
I remember a long time ago reading an editorial by the Buenos Aires Herald on how the military coup of 1976 was able to shut off information lights of Argentina. It argued that since outdated infrastructure such as telephones and telecommunications were in a wretched state, it was easy for the junta leaders to literally turn off the lights and keep the country in an information bubble.
Mannerheim and Finnish provincialism
I heard yesterday an interesting talk on Marshall Carl Mannerheim (1867-1951) just a few days before the outbreak of the Winter War (1939-1940) exactly 70 years ago. The talk centered on different aspects of the Civil War of 1918 and how Mannerheim saw the world.