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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.)

There's also the third and fourth one, in that war crimes generally do not work to advance victory, and do contribute to bad order and discipline in your forces. These are related, but not synonymous, with the 'bad optics' role.

While 'war crimes' is a broad category, ranging from deliberately targeting religious structures (often used as observation posts for local tactical advantage) to mass atrocities, in general the arguments for expedience often disguise broader issues of national capacity. The conceit of 'we must break the rules in order to win' is more a relic of intellectual delimmas, or just self-justification, than a meaningful evaluation of national capacity. War crimes in general just don't help you win wars- by the time you could pull them off and win, you could generally win without them, and if you can't win without conducting war crimes, your margin of strategic victory is far more dependent on other factors... including external support, which comes back to the implications of 'bad optics.'

This is, indeed, the point made by the Finnish Defence Forces on this topic.

The battles and casualties of war inevitably also cause anger and a desire for revenge in soldiers. This means enemy soldiers also easily become demonized.

  • Combat situations are about extreme emotions and physical conditions. Excesses may then occur, military professor Aki-Mauri Huhtinen says.

However, feelings of anger and desire for revenge should not be allowed to guide the actions of the troops. Such sentiments are not known to improve troop success in war, military experts say.

  • If discipline and respect for rules are lost, troops often become unpredictable and ineffective, says Aki-Mauri Huhtinen, military professor in the field of leadership.

According to experts, the key to successful warfare is above all the discipline of the troops. This can be achieved with good training and leadership. Troops leadership also includes how to discuss the enemy with them.

There's a number of ways you can take that further as well. One of the key insights of Clausewitz- the 'war is an extension of politics by other means' as it's often raised- is also relevant in this. When war is remembered to achieve political objectives, the conduct of soldiers- if that conduct carries political impacts- also impacts the political strength of the state to resolve the conflict favorably. Given the ever-increasing cost of war, both when it extends in time and the 21st century quality of arms support, political impacts from war crimes can far, far outstrip both short-term advantages of breaking laws of war, but also the direct military impact of poorly disciplined forces.

One of the key points in the early Ukraine war, what I would call a seminal moment that galvanized war support for an extended conflict and moved 'a cease fire as soon as possible, to mitigate the costs' outside the Overton window, was the Bucha massacre. In the last week of March, there was an ambiguous period where it was clear that the Battle of Kyiv had been lost by the Russians, but it wasn't clear what should follow next- the Russians had major gains in the south, the east wasn't lost but was precarious, and while the Ukrainians were starting their counter-offensives in the north it wasn't clear how hard the Russians would fight for the territory. There was quite a bit of discussion in the foreign policy / diplomatic circles about what should follow, and 'Kyiv should make concessions for a cease fire at least vaguely on its terms, even at territorial cost' was still being mooted in key circles, especially in Europe, which was just getting over the initial crisis response but hadn't worked a consensus on how much / how long to support Ukraine.

If there was a time Russia might have been able to use a near-miss and leverage it into a diplomatic concession, this was probably the last time... until Bucha.

Bucha changed both domestic and foreign Ukrainian politics. For domestic Ukrainian politics, the massacre in Bucha- a city northwest of Kyiv and so outside of even the most 'moderate' of territorial concessions or Russian-speaking areas of influence- served as a demonstration of sorts for Russian intentions for all of Ukraine. Ukrainians already under Russian control from occupation- not combatants, but under the administration- being imprisoned, tortured, murdered, and in some cases raped- was a natural template for what Russia was likely not only already doing, but would continue to do, to other Ukrainian areas. Leaving members of the nation-tribe to Bucha- where the atrocities preceeded the fighting and couldn't even be blamed on fighting for the city- made a national-level political concession basically untenable in the short-to-medium term. That alone would have extended the conflict by several months- and thus a considerable amount of Russian military expense of prestige and hardware.

But Bucha also affected the international space, because it suddenly discredited everyone who had been willing to argue that leaving the Russians in part of Ukraine wouldn't be so bad, and that Russian actions would be limited to the ethnic-russian areas of interest and could spare the rest. Bucha- far outside any claimed Russian area of interest, and not in the context of ongoing military operations- made that sort of concession, a requirement for any sort of Russian sphere of interest in eastern Ukraine, a politically impossible stance for even the most war-fearing European diplomats to push, lest their own publics vote the governments out. And so European elements who might have tried to pressure Ukraine to concede were disempowered, and were largely unable to gather any sort of force for another several months, leaving the gates open for expanding European aid across time and types.

For Russia- whose war plan success hinged on a political capitulation by the Ukrainian government, and political concession by the Europeans- Bucha was an absolute disaster and counter-productive incident at a decisive part of the war. Whatever the goal was at the time, the consequence to the war was absolutely against Russia's strategic interests.