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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023

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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:

The pious complaints by Helsingin Sanomat* about the demonization of the Russians are as out of touch with reality as the recent outrage that Ukrainians may have also committed war crimes in the war, such as by executing surrendered soldiers.

The war was started and is sustained by Russia. The war will only end when enough Russian soldiers have been killed that it becomes politically or militarily impossible for the Russian regime to continue the war. Thus, killing Russian soldiers is a good thing, and the Ukrainians should be helped in killing them.

And that is, in fact, what we are doing. Why, exactly, does Helsingin Sanomat think that Finland is supplying Ukraine with lethal material?

We are thus unanimous in our view that the killing of Russians in this situation created by Russia is justified and necessary, regardless of whether the Russians being killed are on the front line of their own free will or as conscripts.

However, there exists a strong in-built inhibition in humans against killing other human beings. In normal times, this inhibition allows society to exist as we know it. In times of war, it is a hindrance. This inhibition is suppressed by stripping the enemy to be killed of his humanity, i.e., by demonizing him or describing him as a rat, cockroach or some other disgusting animal.

Corporal Rokka** sums this up when asked what it feels like to shoot a human being: 'I don't know. I've only shot the enemy."

If killing Russian soldiers in this situation is right and necessary, then anything that contributes to their killing is also right and necessary. Demonization and the carnivalization of killing are right and necessary. If we consider Russian soldiers as dignified human beings and are NEVERTHELESS kill them, this will, I believe, have far more damaging consequences, both for the mental health of the Ukrainian soldiers and the Westerners who help them, and for the reconstruction of the normal society after the war.

Everything bad that is happening in this war is the result of Russia starting the war. If the war continues, the bad things will inevitably continue. The bad things will stop when the war stops, and since Russia cannot be convinced with words, the only way to stop the war is to kill Russians.

I bought one of the signed artillery shells from https://signmyrocket.com/. I urge all those who hate war and want peace to do the same.

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.

There are two practical reasons to avoid war crimes:

  1. They encourage a defect-defect race toward the bottom, as the enemy is encouraged to reciprocate by killing your own soldiers.

  2. They create bad optics. Given that Ukraine is highly dependent on foreign aid, its public image is important. Tarnishing that image in order to kill small numbers of enemy prisoners and thus jeopardize large amounts of foreign aid seems like a poorly calculated strategy.

So the Halla-aho guy's reasoning seems poor. (Also, killing enemy soldiers is just one of many factors that could advance one's war aims.)

Also, if you have reputation of treating PoW decently then enemy is more likely to surrender than make doomed last stands.

In addition war crimes are bad also to people doing them and people around and is making harder to have stable sane society after war if typical soldier in your army is a torturer and rapist and whoever else.