The annual of the xenophobic Perussuomalaiset (PS)* in Seinäjoki will elect Saturday the party’s next chairperson after Jussi Halla-aho announced in June that he would not seek a new term.
While it is a foregone conclusion that the PS’ first vice president Riikka Purra will be the party’s new chairperson, it is also clear that the party’s main selling point will be xenophobia.
Purra is one of the most vociferous Islamophobes of the PS. She is also an ethnonationalist who believes that brown and black people will take over white Finns. Conclusive evidence of this is a tweet below, where a person with a master’s degree from a Finnish university doing her Ph.D. claims that she can intuitively spot who a Finn is.
Her racist and ethnocentric comment, which supposedly does not include brown or black Finns, is as big of a mystery as the PS. How is it possible that a country with one of the best education systems in the world has created fertile ground for the growth of Finland’s biggest opposition party that is openly racist?
Each country hides a big lie, which enables those in power to perpetuate their power.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr., who wrote an insightful bibliography of one of the US’ greatest social thinkers, James Baldwin, considered the “lie” to be a “broad and powerful architecture of false assumptions” by which the value gap is maintained.
In the same light as Baldwin exposed and spoke candidly about the “lie,” Finland also houses and defends its lie.
The lie permits most of the media to treat the PS with kid gloves and help them gain more power through uncritical opinion pieces and editorials.
One of the biggest enablers of the PS is the Finnish media, which gave it a platform to transform itself from a small party to one of the biggest in Finland.
The lie has also blinded us from our bigotry and exceptionalist sandbox. It has also emboldened racists to attack and create a hostile environment for migrants and minorities.
How many migrants and minorities believe that they are equal before the law even if this is one of our inalienable rights?
Whoever is elected to lead the PS today will continue its stranglehold on Finland’s lie.
The PS is a lie.
