By Enrique Tessieri
Are the Perssuomalaiset (PS) party to blame for checkmating the status quo in Finland on April 17? Or is it a more general and worrying symptom of how Finnish society is changing and how some believe it is now ok to be a racist and hostile to other groups?
There is no return to the old Finland we knew before the April election. Even so, one of the most worrying aspects of the change we are witnessing today is that some political parties and politicians believe that racism and exclusion of other groups are perfectly fine.
There is nothing normal about xenophobia and hate speech.
It would be a very sad day in Finland if the majority of the voting population, fuelled and incited by more xenophobic diatribe in the worst populist tradition, would accept to put our nobel values of social justice for all in cold storage and accept as normal the racism and hatred that is openly spreading within our society.
The battle is not against the PS but what it represents generally in our society and how some want to make normal social ills such as racism. Some politicians in the PS like Timo Soini and others are mere opportunists reaping the fruits that fear-mongering, racism and xenophobia awakens in too many of us.
You are ascribing to a small political party an attribute born and bred into every human bone across the planet. Have you not been following the news of the 19th and 20th Centuries, across Europe, Africa and South America? You should listen to the news of other countries and decades more, get out of that Finnish little box you’re in, and notice that wholesale slaughter of different ethnic groups is as old as the hills. Have you seen the African film TROUBLE ON THE RIVER, a 1930’s film of tribal warfare and murder in the hundreds?
Well, you are right to worry about Finland, since it is a very important country. IF the southern Finns gang up on the Samis of the North just because of racism, that would be very sad indeed. Good God, what if the Russians gang up on the Finns, just plain outnumber them?
Now that would be nasty.
But not as nasty as the various tribal wars throughout the New World, such as the Algonquin of Canada and United States against the Europeans arriving as missionaries. How dare the Algonquin just capture, torture and kill Europeans, simply because they were a different race? How narrow and nasty could they be? Perhaps they also had a PS party back in the 1600’s?
Keep us up to date about the murder rate in Finland, dear Enrique, and the unreported rapes, too.