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CULTURE WAR IN FINLAND: DEHUMANIZATION DERBY
(blog form)
During the present war the Finnish society has been firmly pro-Ukrainian and anti-Russian. Both the state and the civil society have found multiple ways to aid the Ukrainian war effort, and likewise expressions of anti-Russian agitation are, if not formally approved, at least given more leeway than previously. 90% of Finns continue to support giving lethal aid to Ukraine, even while the numbers are falling in numerous other European countries.
For some weeks, there’s been a debate over whether things have been going slightly too far. During this time, multiple celebrities and politicians, including Sofi Oksanen – one of the most important current writers in the country, half-Estonian, known not only for gothy looks but also as a longtime active critic of Russia – announced that instead of spending money on traditional New Year’s fireworks, they’d shell out money on shells – in particular, Ukrainian shells with messages on them.
There’s a service, signmyrocket.com, that promises that they’ll write your personalized message on a shell that Ukrainians will fire on Russian troops. (Some have speculated they’re just using one shell that gets wiped clean and a new message written on it every time the service is used.) Oksanen’s message was “Jaxuhalit” – a maddeningly stupid phrase that is hard to translate succinctly (literal translation would be like “I am giving you a hug for strength”, expect it’s obviously used sarcastically and also written in Finnish equivalent of “I can haz cheezburger?” style argot.)
Anyway, this led to a column (link goes to a fairly readable Google-Translated version) in a major tabloid about how this sort of a thing shows that many Finns have entered into a strange state of mind where they treat the war as a game, engage dehumanization etc. After the requisite accusations of Putinism, it hasled to a surprising amount of nuanced debate on whether this is really the case.
After some back and forth, Jussi Halla-aho, the most important nationalist politician in Finland, made his intervention. A little context about Halla-aho might be in order. He started his political career as a popular anti-immigration blogger, who used his blog followers to form a faction that joined The Finns Party, back then only a minor inchoate populist party, in the early 00s and took it over, turning it into a right-wing nationalist party with immigration as its main issue.
Halla-aho muscled out the former leader’s preferred candidate for party leadership in 2017, leading to some governmental drama as the other parties considered him too extreme, but only stayed in this post for a few years until relinquishing this post to a handpicked successor. Nevertheless, he continues to be the chief intellectual force of the party, and whatever he says will surely have an impact on Finnish nationalist thinking. These days his main method of communication is Facebook, not his old blog.
Now, Finnish nationalism has of course never been pro-Russian, but there has still been a certain amount of division on Finnish populist right on the question of Russian relations. After all, the Cold War era idea that neutrality serves Finland the best and Russia could offer trade opportunities if we ignore all the human rights guff and such continues to have adherents particularly in the older generations having grown up in that era, and pro-Russian narrative from the far-right movements in other European countries have also had some minor effect. Perhaps the only vocally pro-Putin politician in Finnish parliament right now is a conspiracy-theorist bodybuilder who was earlier kicked out of The Finns Party for other reasons.
Halla-aho, however, does not share this view – indeed, beyond being anti-Russia, he can be counted as a genuine Ukrainophile, one of the few Western European politicians to speak Ukrainian (his day job is a researcher of Church Slavonic, so it’s natural for him to know Slavic languages).
Halla-aho’s Facebook post is worth quoting here in full, translated by me by running it through DeepL and doing some light editing:
Halla-aho’s statement carries extra significance since he is the chair of the parliamentary foreign affairs committee, the highest official post his party carries now. (In some other countries opposition parties might be shut out of parliamentary committee chairmanships as a matter of course, but in Finland they will be allotted posts according to their parliamentary strength, and since The Finns are the largest opposition party, they are entitled to this heavy committee and can nominate whomever they wish.)
Halla-aho’s statement has been condemned by many other politicians, and even the party’s new leader thinks it goes too far. Of course, the most obvious point of criticism is that even if one thinks that war requires dehumanization of the enemy, you know, Finland is not actually at war with Russia. There are no bombs falling here or soldiers desperately fighting in the freezing forests of Eastern Finland. Indeed, what annoys myself about the whole signmyrocket affair is that it almost allows chair-warring celebrities to pretend they’re fighting the war themselves, expect without actually having to get a frostbite while guard a snowy dark patch of a forest somewhere or risk getting a bullet in your throat.
Still, others claim that the whole thing is just being direct about what war entails, i.e., shooting and killing, and that the most important thing is supporting Ukraine whatever way there is, and if getting money to Ukraine involves this sort of a gimmick then so be it.
Since being vocally anti-Russia continues to be a right-coded thing in Finland, and worries about whether the society is getting too anti-Russian (in a way that might lead to, say, violence against Russian refugees in Finland) is similarly mostly left-coded (even if these might be the other way around in current America), the whole debate has some equivalence to various other political correctness debates on the left-right axis. Is it important to Say Things Like They Are, or might that lead to problems? Are things even as the people who Say Things As They Are claim them to be, or are they just being edgy?
Whatever the case is, this war is probably not doing good things for the Finnish psyche, but hey, that’s in the eyes of the beholder – there are factions in the Finnish extremely online right who have basically spent the whole war celebrating how the titanic clash with the ancient enemy is making the society more based. And if making Europe more based has ever been Russia's intention, as the narrative sometimes goes - mission accomplished!
*: Finland’s newspaper of record, which was one of the instances to comment negatively on the rocket-signers. Has been a frequent target for Halla-aho for his entire career.
**: The most famous character of Finland’s best-well-known war novel/film.
Does the idea that disarmament, mutually agreed restraint and maintenance of norms are positive-sum not pop up in those discussions at all? At the very least, it doesn't seem like anyone (in your story, or what I see from Russian telegrammers or otherwise) is trying to seriously expand the game tree one step further and reason about how the balance changes if the other side also starts unabashedly executing POWs or whatever other ways of killing more $enemy are proposed down the line. I thought a standard European history education should have put some emphasis on how the various conventions of warfare emerged from Europe's historical experience in their absence (even if you want to have the edgy 14 year old's cynicism and say that it's just that the elites were spooked that the normlessness may come back to haunt them), but perhaps the connection from "Tired Professional Gentleman-Soldiers in colourful uniforms none of whom really wanted to be there anyway" to "the loathsome enemy right now barbarously rejecting the obvious truth of our narrative" is too much to draw.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum has indicated that it works poorly with Russia.
The Iran deal, the US expanding right into Eastern Europe after Russia pulled back and the long list of self proclaimed US exceptionalism gives the rest of the world strong reasons not to trust the US.
Damn, how many invasions did I miss?
In all seriousness, the US (or more broadly speaking, the west in general, don't know why you're leaving western europe out here) didn't "expand into eastern europe", it was invited in, largely because eastern europe was sick of Russia and what Russia had to offer.
Just because a country is invited doesn't mean they have to. The Soviets didn't base nukes on Cuba. If Mexico invited China to join a military alliance they wouldn't be allowed to do so.
Those deals didn't specify that they had to implement mass immigration, a George Soros social policy and end up getting sanctioned by the EU for not doing things that were never in the deal. Furthermore, the either you are with us or you are against us policy of the US gives countries the option of either submitting and becoming vassal states or being more or less blockaded. Countries that want independence from the US either have nukes or are under constant threat or pressure from the US.
And? Note that some fairly minor countries like Poland decided that they prefer to not get it and are not "more or less blockaded" by USA.
UK Brexited over immigration among over things and I do not remember it being "more or less blockaded" by USA.
How that connects to "the US expanding right into Eastern Europe"? Unless you have overly rose image of USA competence and argues that EU is its puppet without any power.
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I fail to see what this has to do with the US, you're describing largely internal European matters here.
Oh don't be so dramatic, if you believe that all the nations aligned with the US/West are vassal states then you have an unusually broad definition of vassal state to be sure.
The point you seem to be flailing towards here, is that choosing to trade/align with someone opens you up to being influenced and I don't think that this was something missed by the leaders of the various nations that have chosen to flee "Russias orbit" in the post cold war era. They chose to align themselves with the west in general (and the US in particular) because they believe that it is a better deal than what they experienced with the Russians and I cannot blame them.
If the Russians (or anyone else for that matter) wishes to seriously challenge US hegemony, they could start by offering a better, credible alternative. The fact that so much of eastern europe is willing to fight, bleed and die in order to remain part of "Globohomo" should probably be a wake up call that Russia is pushing a seriously bad product.
And I suspect that the best thing that homolobby can do for itself in Ukraine is to play on repeat Putin complaining about homolobby and satanist nazi jewish gay Ukrainians.
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That's false — Turkey, Brazil, Vietnam and many other countries are neither American "vassals", not they are blockaded (though I object to the use of the term "vassal" to the US-aligned countries)
Americans didn't base nukes in Poland either (despite Poles expressing their desire to have them there).
So why do you deny their agency? They didn't have to, but they DECIDED to join.
Vietnam is pretty much aligned with the US nowadays, actually.
Probably because it's beneficial for them from the economic standpoint, and also because the US is a counter-weight to the Chinese influence in the region. Not because the US strongarms Vietnam.
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