Shadow Over Finnsmouth
I didn’t quite understand it before I visited SF but in Finland there’s this strange atmosphere of clean oppressiveness and control, and upon my return it hit like a barrel of intangible psychological bricks.
The State owns you. You don’t belong to yourself. You belong to everyone else. They decide. The state tracks you from cradle to grave. You’re a number. Your gender is hard-coded into the number. The State will hurt you. It only does it because it loves you. The State will take care of you. The State knows better than you do. Don’t try to fight it. The State reigns supreme. The State does whatever the fuck it wants and gets away with it. They will support it anyway. They understand that everyone belongs to everyone and that’s why you can’t decide anything for yourself. Vox populi, vox dei. You are not an adult. You can’t choose for yourself. Live a DIN-standardized life. The only other option is the squalor of 19th century industrial slums. Do you want the squalor of 19th century industrial slums? Then shut the fuck up and accept the oppression. There are no other choices. Any attempt to create other choices will be destroyed. Submit or be destroyed. Submit and be ground down anyway because you’re too young, too poor, too strange.
In SF things felt “out of control” in some really strange, subtle backgroundish way. The visa system emphasizes that people regularly overstay their visas and they only get in trouble for it if they’re caught. The rules for changing one’s name are “just use it” instead of several pages of strict regulations. Even the regulations, where they showed up, felt like attempts to impose some degree of control onto something that is inherently out of control, instead of the inherent structure of society outside which nothing is allowed to happen. In Finland I feel safe and controlled, afraid to be the nail that sticks out because the welfare statism has been so thoroughly internalized that I constantly feel like someone is watching even when nobody is. In SF I feel alive.
The US federal government feels like an empire that loots and oppresses people to enrichen its cronies and prop up its mechanisms of violence, but ultimately is something “over there”, while nordic welfare corporatism feels like an entire machine made of paper in which people are just tiny cogs running the faceless monstrosity in its uncaring emergent abominableness. The US government tries to control life. In Finland the corporatist system has succeeded in it. Or at least that’s what it feels like. In Finland I constantly have to fight some subconscious instinct not to deviate from the system’s scripts, not to rock the boat, not to try to crawl out of the bucket. Afraid of the mallet that isn’t really there. Well, not always because often it actually really is there, just quite a lot of the time.
That’s probably why I get along so well with both anarchists and libertarians despite them otherwise not getting along with each other at all. Among them I can feel like I’m sane, safe from the constant gaslighting about the way the welfare state only has the best interests of its citizens at heart and surely it can’t be that bad and the people who claim it is that bad are just lying and whining and probably trying to grab too much for themselves. Safe from the cultists chanting “de-mo-kra-si de-mo-kra-si” and insisting that I join them in their strange rituals of putting pieces of paper in boxes and pretending that it absolves the system and the people composing it of all their sins. Safe from the people who think that everything must be strictly controlled, regulated, regimented, and standardized just so that it is. Safe from the people who think that nobody must have any alternative, that even the idea of people living on an artificial island somewhere without bothering anyone else is such an aberration that it simply Must Not Be Allowed. Safe from the people on disguised welfare, who loathe those who lack that privilege and have instead fallen onto overt welfare. Safe from the people who consider society’s most important function to be the punishment of those who do “wrong” according to the will of the majority, without regard for the consequences.
That hobo in a Ron Paul t-shirt, raving about some imaginary rugged individualism only he can perceive, may be utterly disgusting and otherwise several times detached from reality, but he is also a person who knows what’s really lurking behind the smiles of the scary socialdemocrats of Finnsmouth. Such people are rare and valuable and I treasure almost every single one of them, no matter how frustrating and fractally wrong and obnoxious they otherwise are. Because they understand.
3 months ago · tagged #bitching about the country of birth #this is a social democracy hateblog #this goddamn continent · 28 notes · .permalink
just-shower-thoughts:
If you aren’t at least a little ashamed of your country’s history, you don’t know your country’s history.
@ozymandias271 had asked me about this:
I am SO CURIOUS what is shameful about Finland.
my understanding of Finland is that you guys fought the Nazis, which is cool
so if you wish please enlighten me and my American lack of understanding of other countries’ history :)
And everyone knows that I’m always up for shameful things about Finland, so here’s the dirt.
The earlier centuries are not that relevant as it’s mostly the shamefulness of Sweden’s history instead as not much interesting happened around here before Sweden and Novgorod ran out of the interesting and began fighting over the non-interesting. The Trojan War might be an exception. Yes, there is an actual theory that the Trojan War was actually fought in Finland, because a bunch of names match. Troy is like Toija (the J should be an Y but finnish insists on not making sense), Lesbos is like Espoo, Ascania is like Askainen etc. Yes, people are that desperate to find something interesting.
The actual shamefulness part begins when the Swedish crown began colonizing America. It was really popular at the time, even the tiny Duchy of Courland and Semigallia (or as it’s known today, “a small sliver of land in the western part of Latvia”) tried to colonize Tobago. Because the original residents had turned out not to be that resistant to things like hepatitis and musket balls, there was a lot of sparsely-populated forest to turn into not-so-sparsely-populated not-so-forest. Thus it was really convenient that the swedish had a ready supply of people who had already been very accustomed to being colonial subjects in sparsely-populated forests: the finns. A few important innovations are related to this, such as log cabins (finns built a lot of them and they worked well so a lot of people began to copy them) and Rambo (originally a certain swedish farmer’s surname). Thus, the next time a bunch of paranoid libertarian wannabe-action-heroes with way more armament than is reasonable for any single person to own occupy a federal building built in the traditional American frontier style, you know whom to blame. (The swedish. The swedish are to blame for that.)
Another incredibly important innovation was “we are not like the other white people”. It’s a big deal in Finland that finns were discriminated against in America in the 19th century for their propensity to get drunk, resulting in them starting fights and/or organizing labor, both of which were frowned upon by the locals, and thus signs like “no service for finns or indians” were common in some areas. I assume this is partially because all white people are really eager to get cookies for people vaguely genetically and culturally connected to them not being as bad for the native population as the rest of the illegal immigrants, and partially because finns in particular are really fucking embarrassing in their obsession over what other people think about them. (Nothing. The answer is nothing, most of the time. Sometimes it is “how on earth are they this overrepresented everywhere on the internet”, but that’s simply because nobody else speaks the language so they have to use english anyway, and they are depressive shut-ins who spend their days on their computers because meatspace humans are scary.)
But back to the Old Continent. In the 19th century the swedish-speaking elite of a small piece of land in western Russia (That small piece of land had changed ownership because there was this guy who wanted to rule all of Europe and the people in his country agreed with him and he made a deal with Russia about some borders and Russia invaded Finland and then the conqueror guy got frustrated with not being able to invade Britain because he could not get across some in/conveniently placed water (depending on who you ask) and invaded Russia instead because it always works amirite, and then the winners made agreements to not let such things happen again.) weren’t really feeling like being russian subjects so they instead decided to make up a nation. It was really popular at the time.
Now, all such nations are really artificial but the finnish nation is really, really transparently duct-taped together. The general area was inhabited by a bunch of tribes; the tawastians, the karelians, the savonians, etc.; and the ruling elite made a standard language out of the various different dialects with the result that most neurotypical people never speak it. Instead, they use informal language, which varies very strongly regionally with the result of being extremely inpenetrable. For example, these are all the same word:
metsän – mettän – metän – mehtän – mehän – mesän – messän
But these are very substantial differences in meaning:
pitsa – pita – piha – pisa – pissa – pitsi – pisti – pihti – pihi – piti
Good luck deciphering that. You’re going to need it.
They also needed a mythology because every nation needs to make up some cool shit in their history to be a proper nation. For that they went to Karelia (known for things like not being located in Finland, the people there having a different religion, speaking a different-although-mostly-mutually-intelligible language etc.) and took some stories from there and declared the karelian stories, from karelian people in Karelia, to be the Kalevala, the national epic of Finland and the finnish people. (Then the americans had to one-up it with the Song of Hiawatha which was basically Kalevala, trochaic tetrameter and all, transposed to America with a thin veneer of thoroughly mischaracterized Objiwe on top. Wikipedia says “Longfellow’s poem was taken as the first American epic to be composed of North American materials and free of European literary models. Earlier attempts to write a national epic (…) were considered derivative.” and I couldn’t make this shit up if I tried. Nope, it’s a proud, recursive continuation of the tradition of taking other people’s shit and calling it one’s own and that’s as european as it gets.)
Then when Finland became independent in the First World War, people promptly settled their differences over which direction to take the young republic in the remarkably civilized fashion of shooting everyone who disagreed. The whites shot more people than the reds and imprisoned the rest so they died of hunger instead, which saved bullets, and thus they got to decide. They initially wanted to give the country a german king, but it was the year 1918 and such ideas soon turned out to be remarkably bad, so they instead decided to call the position “president” and threw in some elections as well. Then they discovered that shooting everyone who disagreed didn’t make the problem of landless and destitute tenant farmers disappear, and instituted a land reform just as the reds had demanded, and over time pretty much everything else as well. The whole embarrassing debacle could have been avoided if the conservatives and the liberals had just skipped straight to the “do most of what the socialists wanted to do” part without trying the “shoot and imprison the socialists” solution first.
And the first thing the country did was invading Russia. Because that always works. Russia had that “civil war” thing going on, and the white finns got involved because of lofty altruistic idealism about liberating their karelian brothers from the bolshevik menace… I’m kidding of course. In reality they saw that the karelians’ shit was up for grabs and they wanted to take it and call it their own. To defend it from people who wanted to take other people’s shit and call it their own. Because it’s different or something. Such integrity, so idealism.
There was a prohibition too, and it went exactly as well as prohibitions tend to go. To this day, finnish drinking habits are fucked up in the expected ways; an emphasis on secretly drinking lots of hard booze whenever it’s available, instead of enjoying alcohol in a civilized european manner. And to this day, they are afraid if they sell anything stronger than a weak beer in grocery stores everything will collapse into Mad Max, like in such post-apocalyptic wastelands as the Netherlands.
In the WW2, Finland did indeed fight the nazis, but that was after they had been spending the previous years being really close buddies with them. You see, there was this guy who wanted to rule all of Europe and the people in his country agreed with him and he made a deal with Russia about some borders and Russia invaded Finland but this time the matrix glitched and that thing about spearmen and tanks every Civilization player is familiar with happened and Finland only lost most of the Karelia on its side of the border.
Then the conqueror guy got frustrated with not being able to invade Britain because he could not get across some in/conveniently placed water (depending on who you ask) and invaded Russia instead because it always works amirite, and Finland was totally neutral and definitely hadn’t spent the temporary peace fuming with irredentism and dreaming of taking the karelians’ shit and calling it their own and making a Greater Finland extending all the way to the Ural mountains or anything like that, no sir.
For some completely innocent reason Finland responded to the unprovoked aggression of the USSR by invading deep into the parts of Karelia that had never been legally parts of Finland or Sweden, building concentration camps, and having the northern half of the front full of german nazis. They promptly discovered that the karelians actually had a very different culture, a different religion, a different language etc. but it didn’t prevent them from liberating their brothers from the bolshevik menace taking the karelians’ shit and calling it their own, and if necessary imprisoning the karelians who objected. They also got promoted into honorary aryans instead of the disgusting mongol untermenschen they had previously been and this staggering discovery of new racial 100% truthinesses just coincidentally happened the exact same time Finland turned into a valuable ally for Nazi Germany.
Then they found out that invading Russia remains the absolutely fucking brilliant idea it’s always been, and got pushed back, but they were such a gigantic pain in the ass that they only lost the territory they had conquered from the USSR in the early 20s and were told to take out the trash in Lapland, which they promptly did. So yes, Finland did fight the nazis because Finland fought every single side in the war they could reach because finnish politicians are fucking geniuses. I think I said something about the finnish propensity to get drunk, start fights and organize labor (in the early 20th century Finland had the greatest popular support for socialists any country has ever had without resorting to dirty tricks to eliminate the competition).
Also, among the mandatory WW2 shenanigans are the way molotov cocktails got their name from finnish snark about soviet propaganda presenting incendiary bombs as food aid (molotov bread baskets), or the incident with the vodka warehouse when the finns were fighting the germans in Lapland over who would be allowed to take the sami people’s shit and call it their own (we’ll get back to this later).
After the war the winners made agreements to not let such things happen again, and Finland was, like all the other axis allies, thorougly denazified the only country which still retains the same basic system of government which had allied with the nazis and fought alongside them and built concentration camps etc. and to this day The flag of the President of the Republic of Finland has a swastika in it. It may be hard to see but it’s impossible to unsee. And if that’s not obvious enough, there’s the flag of the Air Force Academy with one really blatant swastika (it’s not upright and goosestepping in the german style, but drunkenly slumped over on its ass in the traditional finnish style), one subtle swastika, and in its physical incarnation the flagpole also has a swastika in it to make it absolutely certain that everyone knows that Finland is Swastika Country.
Then President Kekkonen happened. Finland is basically a third world cargo cult eastern bloc knockoff of Sweden (not that Sweden is actually that much better; it once gave a popular children’s book author a 102% tax rate because she hadn’t thought to gather enough deductions and tax evasion schemes), and Kekkonen is a brilliant example of what “democracy” means over here. He ruled from 1956 to 1982, after which everyone agreed not to let such things happen again and made explicit rules that presidents aren’t allowed to stay in office longer than two six-year terms, and began swiftly eroding the powers of the president.
In 1968 he was the candidate of five different parties. Thus the people had the extremely genuine and substantial and democratic choice between Redneck Kekkonen, Social Democrat Kekkonen, Communist Kekkonen, Swedish Kekkonen etc.
In 1973 the government decided that they don’t feel like holding elections because Kekkonen was going to win them anyway so they changed the constitution to extend his term by four years just because.
In 1978 Kekkonen was the candidate of almost every party; now the people could freely elect Crony Capitalist Kekkonen or Liberal Kekkonen as well. Social Democratic Kekkonen won with 74 electors, Redneck Kekkonen finished second with 64 electors and Communist Kekkonen was a close third with 56. I’m not bullshitting you.
In the 1980s Finland was really keen to first-world-ize without actually having a clue about how first-world financial systems work and crashed straight into a Great Depression Redux: Electric Boogaloo in the early 1990s. The Communist Party lost all its money in real estate speculation because they had wanted to become Donald Trump (I don’t think that’s how one is supposed to be doing communism…) and that’s why there is The Party Formerly Known As The Communist Party. Earlier in the 80s the Liberal Party joined the Redneck Party because being opposed to free markets and gays is exactly what liberalism means or something don’t ask me I don’t have a clue about how this works finnish politics simply make no sense okay.
Also, in 1972 Finland criminalized cannabis with a coin toss. The outcome of this literally random decision has since then been heavily entrenched in popular attitudes, new versions of Kalevala were censored to replace references to hemp with flax, the previously thriving and widely accepted use of medical marijuana withered away, and nowadays cops regularly commit illegal searches to catch hippies just in case they might have some weed on them for which they could be punished and placed in the drug abuser registries so they would be unable to get a job because if anything helps with drug “problems”, it’s becoming terminally unemployable.
And there is no recourse for the victims of illegal searches because the cops do whatever they want. The bureaucracies do whatever they want. The state does whatever it wants. Being on the wrong side of a high-trust society is really fucking scary because everyone else trusts the state when it’s lying through its teeth that the cops aren’t using lethal weapons against unarmed and mostly non-violent protesters (the cops started it), then stripping away all kinds of legal rights in jail and punishing people for the crimes that either nobody or at the very least somebody else committed (I know this because I have connections to places where the antifa actually honestly announce who did what without sugarcoating it, and people are given advice like “regardless of whether you did it or not, say this and do that”, so when someone there says they’re innocent I know they actually are because admitting guilt is the cred-earning move). 2015/12/06 never forget. That night like half my friends were locked up for protesting against very literal fascists. Also, the cops even protected the fash from a priest who was simply standing next to their march with a placard, doing nothing else. Meanwhile the fash shoot rockets and throw rocks at refugees, nobody gives a shit. Rural areas are like 1920s America with muslims playing the part of african-americans, lynching attitudes are fanned with false rape accusations, etc. and nobody gives a shit.
There is no constitutional court, instead MPs have a constitutional comittee which decides whether or not the law they’re preparing is constitutional, and it runs entirely on a honor system, aka. nobody gives a shit. The communists actually had a plan to make a revolution by getting a majority in the parliament, passing whatever laws they wanted and using their majority in the constitutional committee to declare those laws perfectly constitutional. It would’ve totally worked.
Finland has political prisoners, including one of my friends (however seh is in a form of house arrest which is available for some offenders whose sentences are short enough). There is actual conscription which means that anyone listed as “male” in the citizens’ ID registry must go into a shitty LARP in the woods to learn violence and obedience for 6-12 months, or alternatively face 12 months of forced labor or 6 months of prison. This is blatantly unconstitutional but nobody gives a shit. Jehovah’s Witnesses get an exemption, which is also blatantly unconstitutional but nobody gives a shit.
I myself got off the hook by claiming that the law decrees that “male citizens…” must do it, and I am not male, therefore I don’t need to do it. Trans people usually give their doctors’ papers and get a medical exemption, but I specifically refused to provide those because the doctors don’t determine whether I am male or not. I was ready and willing to take the question all the way to the highest human rights courts in Europe (which Finland usually promptly ignores and continues to do whatever violation of human rights it was doing), but the system noticed that I was actually liable to smash it and quickly wrote me a medical exemption (which is illegal because only the state-sanctioned monopoly clinics are allowed to give those diagnoses, but nobody gives a shit).
Finland is a colonialist oppressor country, which is quite a feat for a small european country which has never had any overseas colonies. What we do have is one of the last indigenous peoples in Europe, and especially one of the even laster indigenous peoples still relying significantly on their traditional livelihoods.
Taking the sami people’s shit is a centuries-old tradition and it works pretty much the same way taking native americans’ shit works across the pond. Cultural appropriation for halloween, international mining companies taking the land and giving people only polluted water in return. (In fact, in Finland it’s traditionally been so that anyone who finds minerals on someone’s land is allowed to take that land and keep the minerals to themselves. The mining companies don’t even need to clean up after themselves if their exploratory borings don’t indicate profitable ores because the state will tell the owner of the land to clean up the mess someone else made on their land without their permission, with their own money, or to face the consequences. Yes, this is a real thing which has actually happened.) The sami people faced attempts at eradication that can be rightfully considered cultural genocide.
Then when they started getting some compensatory rights, the Sami autonomous government’s (which doesn’t really have that much autonomy) ballot lists were stuffed with settlers on the basis that those finns’ ancestors had been listed as fishermen in some 19th century census. The Sami government protested, the exact same supreme court which had stuffed the ballot lists got the case and decided that it didn’t do anything wrong with its previous decision, and one actual sami politician quit in disgust. Even now ILO 169 isn’t ratified, constitutional language rights aren’t respected, the government doesn’t give back the land that was taken from the sami because because the previous governments didn’t give them receipts when taking their shit. Remember kids, when colonialists come to take your shit and call it their own, always ask for a receipt.
Then there’s the sterilizations of over 50 000 people (nowadays they’ve gone to the exact opposite extreme and it’s way too difficult to get voluntarily sterilized) which continued in Finland (and Sweden because yay nordic progressive humane social democracy!) way after eugenics went out of fashion elsewhere. Or the impressive number of 1700 lobotomies which per capita is really up there. Or the fact that trans people still technically have to be sterilized, although it’s a soft warm fuzzy hormonally-induced mostly-only-technical forced sterilization instead of the traditional “dragged screaming onto the operating table” forced sterilization.
ETA: then there’s also the Roma. Think “kind of like jews, but without the money and status” and you’ll know how they were treated. They arrived in Finland because Sweden wanted to get rid of them and unlike Australia, Finland was a place that was both already discovered and conveniently close by, so they were sent into the eastern colonies. In the 17th century it was legal to hang the men and exile the women and children for the heinous crime of existing while roma. In the 19th century the situation was better: the punishment for existing had been reduced to forced labor. The 20th century was a more civilized era, so instead of physical genocide, they decided to solve the question with cultural genocide because just letting different people exist side-by-side is not a very european thing to do. The official assimilation policy ended in the 70′s, being replaced by an informal assimilation policy of systematic discrimination. Even in 2016 there are lots of restaurants where roma aren’t welcome (although today the politically correct way to do it is tacit understanding instead of overt signs) and nobody gives a shit.
Relatively recently the cops beat a roma person for the traditional crime of being really suspicious without actually having committed anything illegal. There’s nothing really surprising about that, but the real kicker was that they were caught on tape. The evidence was supposed to be presented at the trial, but the USB stick broke. Because those things are just breaking apart everywhere all the time. And because nobody uses backups. And nobody ensures that the copies are secure before destroying the originals. Yeah. Sure. (Finnish cops are actually often too incompetent to operate anything, so I kind of see why they thought people would buy that explanation even though there’s a well-known tradition of cops and rent-a-cops turning the cameras away when they feel like someone deserves a beating and inconvenient things like the law are standing in the way of justice.)
(via socialjusticemunchkin)
3 months ago · tagged #bitching about the country of birth #this is a social democracy hateblog #this goddamn continent #finland is swastika country #death cw #alcohol cw · 76,997 notes · source: just-shower-thoughts · .permalink
