By Enrique Tessieri
If there is one matter that I would wish stopped in Finland it is the culture of fear being spread by the Perussuomalaiset (PS) party. We can all remember prior to the April election how some members of the right-wing populist party portrayed immigrants and refugees as gang rapists and social welfare shoppers as soon as they crossed the border into Finland.
The fear-mongering by the PS appears to have no end. It changes constantly according to the political situation. Yesterday immigrants were their favorite target and today it is the financially embattled European Union.
I was quite astonished when I read a letter to the editor published this week in Mikkeli daily Länsi-Savo. A prominent PS politician sounded the alarm bells claiming an apocalyptic end to Finnish culture and language if the EU ever became a federation.
He compared our fate as a “small nation” to other Fenno-Ugric tribes of Russia that numbered a few thousand at the most.
Certainly it is a sad matter that our Fenno-Ugric relatives were devoured by a bigger and more powerful Russian culture but to compare their fate to a nation of over five million is ludicrous.
If Finnish culture is so vulnerable as the PS politician wanted to show to outside encroachment, why didn’t it disappear when Finns formed part of the Swedish and Russian Empire for about 700 years?
What will be the next fear-mongering stunt by the PS?
That we are being invaded by Martians?
This is what I have also always wondered; just how weak do these guys think Finnish culture is? In reality you see that far more young people who have their origins all around the world adopting the Finnish way and that is very natural. The problem is the black and white world view (in this case obviously figuratively speaking as well as literally) of the fear mongerers. Nothing is absolute, of course, and try to spin it that way is to add to confusion, not to clarity. Then again, that seems to be the goal. Also the fact that Finns increasingly are not christians any longer, makes the Islam seem like a threat, but that problem is of course a problem of Evangelic Lutheran church and not the one of someone else. Finland will never become a Moslem country – obviously, I mean come now – but it is becoming secular atheist country which eventually will force the church and state to be separated. I think many patriots don’t like that idea.
Also with the terrifying events in Norway, we need to look into the right wingers and much like Richard Dawkins argues moderately religious people are normalising fundamentalism, these immigration skeptics are normalising the direction of thought that leads into extreme acts of hate by the pseudo-politically driven extreme bigots.