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Culture War in Finland: Onrolling Far-Right Scandal Moves on to Forums Poasting
The Finnish government has been up for three weeks and pretty much all of that has gone to abjudicating the various comments and stuff said by ministers belonging to right-wing nationalist The Finns Party. The last few days in Finnish politics have focused on party leader Riikka Purra, now the Finance Minister (and the second most powerful member of the govt, at least formally), and her online posts from 15 years ago.
These posts were made in the online guestbook of previous party leader Jussi Halla-aho, the guy who basically is responsible for kickstarting modern anti-immigrationism in Finland and for the anti-immigration hardline faction taking over the Finns Party. Halla-aho got famous for running a blog and gaining grassroots support through it, and an important part of it was his "guestbook", an old-style webpage guestbook which eventually started functioning as an informal forum (imagine a forum with only one ongoing thread). The guestbook, alongside some other forums, was used for bringing together the faction that would eventually grow strong enough to elect several people as MPs, and these people (and people in their general orbit) now make up the party's elite.
The entire guestbook is still online and searchable, the original guestbook at Halla-aho's website is gone (apparently due to hosting troubles), but there's a mirrored copy of it elsewhere. A number of web sleuths found out that one of the guestbook's posters was nicknamed "riikka". Now, Riikka is a pretty common name in Finland, so that wouldn't alone be enough to connect this to Purra, but sleuths also found out that:
nickname "riikka" has stated that she comes from a left-wing home and that her parents had taken a pic of her as a child in front of Lenin's statue - Riikka Purra has told a similar story on TV
nickname "riikka" stated that she went to same school as leftist MP Anna Kontula - Kontula and Purra have gone to same secondary school in Tampere
nickname "riikka" sent the guestbook greetings from Barcelona on 25 August and 27 August 2008, dates on which Riikka Purra participated in an academic conference there
nickname "riikka" talked about moving to small town of Kirkkonummi in 2008 and asked about the number of immigrants in a specific neighborhood. Apparently the number was low, since Riikka Purra has indeed lived in that neighborhood in that town since 2008
And many other similar congruities, ie. it's pretty obvious to anyone that this is the same person. Nickname "riikka" had also posted on the guestbook posts, where she:
drops the Finnish n-word several times (it's a linguistic question whether that word is the equivalent of English n-word or the word "Negro", but these are angry enough one might say it's the former in this context), as well as talking about a Middle-Eastern man as a "Turkish monkey or whatever", as well as uses some more creative (common in the Finnish racism community) slurs, such as the ones translating to "mocha dicks", "somps" (Somali + chimp) etc.
ironically calls herself and other forums members "raycist" and "Nezi" (net + Nazi), including asking others for beer by saying "Any Nezis in Helsinki today up for spitting on beggars and beating up n-word children?"
states that "if I had a gun there would be bodies on this train" after hearing a black teenager say "I don't care about Finland" and going "BANG BANG!" with fingerguns at her on a train (this happened two days after a notorious school shooting)
After browsing a Finnish Islamic forum describes herself as "so full of hatred and rage she is going to melt on her chair" and says that things like this start to seriously bother her life since "there's nothing else running through [her] head"; also gets angry after seeing a fat Somali family eating at McDonalds at the same time as her family
And other such fare. In other words, at least the most notorious poasts are a mix of edgy injokes and weird ranting. Unsurprisingly these discoveries don't play well in the media, local or foreign (the Finnish foreign minister, while at the NATO summit in Vilnius, actually apologized to Turkey (our new NATO ally, mind) for the "Turkish monkeys" thing.
Purra has copped to being "riikka", and while she originally commented this by saying "there's nothing to apologize or explain", she ended up apologizing and saying that of course the government or she don't tolerate racism and so on. Many of the party's supporters are disappointed and believe that she cucked, but of course if you're in actual government with other parties you kind of have to occasionally do what they demand you will do, if the alternative is your party getting kicked out of the government.
All of this probably serves to indicate what happens when - basically - an Internet forum ends up taking over a political party, and potential for similar things exists might exist in other countries, considering the centrality of Internet in modern communications. I'm pretty sure that Purra, 15 years ago, didn't think that her ranting online might have any importance whatsoever regarding domestic politics or, indeed, that she would even rise to her current heights, but maybe you already have a bunch of groypers in America making edgy jokes on Twitter or wherever who will have to eventually explain that stuff 15 years from now when running for Senate or some other high post.
You mean like one gigantic thread where a bunch of mostly right-wing, onlinefolk post their culture war angst? Hard to imagine.
To be fair, most of what she said wouldn’t be acceptable here.
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Yes, precisely, though even beyond the obvious comparison a single thread at an old-style "flat" forum, not a threaded forum.
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