Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism", by Kuusinen et al.

Reading a book like this is the opposite of watching a movie with a twist for the first time. In Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism, the audience knows what the twist is. The authors—a committee of committed communists working on behalf of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union during the late fifties—did not.

Out of the big modern ideologies of the 19th and 20th centuries, communism has been the most insistent in codifying its beliefs to a creedal form. Not in short creeds like the Christian churches but in large, extensive volumes of texts meant to serve as the one-stop shop where anyone, a current or potential believer or even an opponent, can quickly check what, exactly, it is that these communists believe. And that was indeed the intent of this book, first published in 1960 and revised in 1963.

One reason for this codification was the party structure. In communist parties, you weren't a mere activist but a militant. Party cadres were issued specific agendas with tight schedules—sell papers at three, Organizing Committee at six, and discussion circles on Saturdays. For these discussions, you needed text in an easy-to-chew format.

A book like this would not only elucidate the party's view or as a part of an ideological debate; it would be an educator that would be accessible to the broad party masses, telling them what to think on every issue. Not every issue, as "it need hardly be said that one book cannot encompass all the wealth of Marxism-Leninism. This book deals only with its fundamentals" (p. 15), but the ones considered significant.

Eight hundred pages of dry text is not an easy feat to chew. Once chewed, though, it would arm you with arguments for every opponent, not least the small voice inside your head that might question why you are a member of a movement like this.

Those who are not members will ask why we should even care. A book like this does not even seem to deserve a debunking. It might still be, amazingly enough, used as study material by recluse cells of Marxist-Leninist micro sects. Most of the rest of us, though, would consider history itself enough evidence against as much as cracking it open. Even in countries where movements declaring themselves Marxist-Leninists still rule or form a considerable political force, the studied texts would likely be of domestic origin.

This, then, is a vantage point to an ideology at its arguable apogee, soon facing an eventual downslide and then a crash but currently confident that its victory was at hand. It's a book that's wrong, but anyone sharing a mindset as sure of its victory might heed well to take stock of why and how it's wrong—and why there are still people who would share this mindset.

After the first section, this review is divided into five sections that share names with the five parts of the book, though they also cover other subjects than those discussed in the particular part under review. The page numbers for the direct quotes refer to a version of the book that is accessible in the Internet Archive here.

THE APOGEE OF COMMUNISM

In 1960, a vastly more significant amount subscribed to the beliefs outlined in Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism. Hundreds of millions of people held a genuine belief in the superiority of communism to capitalism. As the book says, "today, the socialist camp embraces percent of the world's population, i.e., about one thousand million people." (p. 322)

The Soviet Union had already pulled itself together after the Second World War and had dramatically announced its head start in the space race by launching Sputnik. Dozens of countries were officially Marxist-Leninist, with economies being run entirely or almost entirely by the state, with that state ruled by the local Communist Party.

In the background, the stage was being set for the coming twist. Khruschev's secret speech exposing Stalin's crimes had circulated. While communists could still speak of Stalin's "outstanding abilities as an organizer and theoretician, iron will-power, implacability in fighting the enemy," it is also said that "Stalin's character possessed other features—rudeness, intolerance of the opinions of others, a morbid suspiciousness, petulance" and that "Stalin carried centralization to the extreme, concentrated excessive power in his own hands and violated the principle of collective leadership which is inherent in Communist Parties." (p. 229).

Insofar as the rest of the world cared, the Soviet Union and the PRC were still mighty friends, forming two pillars of a united block that held a third of the world's population. Behind the scenes, the Sino-Soviet Split was taking place. The actual expected audience of the book, the working-class communist sympathizer, did not yet have a view behind the scenes, nor did they care much if the Communists had to break a few thousand eggs to make omelets, like in Hungary in 1956.

And the Cold War-era Western communist parties, apart from the English-speaking countries, tended to be very working-class-based. "The Italian Communist Party, for example, consists of 44.6 percent workers, 18.6 percent agricultural laborers, 13.4 percent sharecroppers, 5.3 percent small peasants, and 5.6 percent handicraftsmen. The French Communist Party has 40.3 percent workers, 5 percent agricultural labourers, 8.2 percent peasants, and 12.2 percent office employees. Of the Communists of Finland, 85.5 percent are workers" (p. 411), the book states.

Whether those numbers are correct or not, they still point in the right direction. The middle-class types were a minor factor in the mass communist parties on both sides of the Iron Curtain, though they started getting more prominent in the 70s.

Here are some notable names leading communist countries and their professions before politics: Nikita Khrushchev was a metalworker, as was Władysław Gomułka, the general secretary of the Polish Communist Party. Walter Ulbricht of the German Democratic Republic was a joiner. Yugoslavia's longtime leader, Josip Broz Tito, was a machinist. The same applied to the Western communist parties. Maurice Thorez, the longtime leader of the Communist Party of France, was a miner, for example.

"The relations between these classes always remain antagonistic, based on conflicting interests. The capitalist, for example, is interested in compelling the worker to produce as much as possible while paying him as little as possible. The worker, naturally, is interested in exactly the opposite." (p. 188) Such words would have been very understandable to a worker of this era and, of course, to many workers of the current era. Communism seemed to solve this contradiction: no capitalists, no antagonism.

THE PHILOSOPHICAL FOUNDATIONS OF THE MARXIST-LENINIST WORLD OUTLOOK

We might thus expect the book to start with a description of the struggle between the working class and the capitalists. It doesn't. It will get there eventually, but instead, the book starts describing two philosophical outlooks: "The history of philosophy is the history of the struggle between these two camps, these two parties in philosophy—materialism and idealism." (p. 25)

The side of idealism represents religion, all the various “bourgeois philosophies” from positivism to existentialism (with Heidegger, Sartre, and Kierkegaard, among others, mentioned as examples of such ideological perversions), to theoretical physics. The concept of an ever-expanding universe, for example? That's just Catholic neo-scholasticism—automatically false.

During this time, anti-communists in the West would have frequently been religious. Organizations like the John Birch Society or the Christian democratic parties of Western Europe strongly promoted the idea of godless communism. Even so, throughout the book, religion is treated less as the most concrete of enemies but as something that is already outmoded, not something a serious person would believe, as “science has conclusively shown the untenability of such fantasies. There is no place for God in the true, scientific conception of the world. The eighteenth-century French astronomer Joseph Lalande remarked that he had searched the skies but did not find any God there." (p. 39)

Materialism, on the other hand, is a simple yet powerful doctrine. The world is real; what you experience is what is, and the universe observes laws fundamentally understandable to science. Objective truth exists, is verifiable by observation, and is comprehensible to the human mind, as "man's cognition is all-powerful. It has no bounds, no limits." (p. 126). There's no space for any postmodernity in such declarations. And, of course, all this leads to the triumph of communism as the final form of ideology, with the endpoint of any logical materialist being joining the Communist Party to build socialism and then communism.

…what? Isn't that a bit, well, underpants gnomes? At the time, the presumed reader would not have conceived it that way. The connection between the materialist mindset and Marxism-Leninism was thought of as solid, so strong that for many people, after concluding that God and other supernatural things do not exist, becoming a communist was only the logical next step. Marxism was ready to present itself as the ultimate science and as something useful for them, especially if they were proletarians by class or bourgeois offspring looking to rebel against their parents.

The book explains why some would not: "In our day the reactionary bourgeoisie does not burn progressive scientists and philosophers at the stake. But it has other means of exerting pressure on them: dismissal from universities and scientific institutions, factual deprival of opportunities to publish their works, moral and political discrediting, etc. (…) By these methods and by the propaganda of reactionary ideology, the ruling class "conditions" people's minds, instilling ideas it wants them to accept and obstructing the spread of progressive, materialist ideas." (p. 24) Still, the ones who joined figured such cancel culture efforts could surely not hinder an ideology whose time has come.

THE MATERIALIST CONCEPTION OF HISTORY

In the 1950s, the Marxist-Leninists could still claim a mighty ideological power: the power of prediction, that “crucial developments in the first half of the century thus provide irrefutable proof that the Communists, armed with the Marxist theory, on the whole, correctly predicted the general course of history.” (p. 19) They believed this power was granted to them by the correct understanding of dialectic materialism, particularly its contradictions.

Marxist-Leninist understanding of the processes of historical development goes through contradictions between two societal or material forces, leading to the resolution of this contradiction one way or another in a way that creates something new. Particularly important are antagonistic contradictions, like the one between workers, who want a larger share of the fruits of their labor, and capitalists, who want a larger share of the profits created by that work. As such contradictions resolve themselves and society progresses to greater and greater levels, the forms of society must change.

"Marxists have on several occasions predicted events many years in advance of their occurrence, such as the victory of national-liberation movements in the colonies and the dependent countries, the victory of the revolution in China, the destruction of the fascist regime in Germany, the victory of the democratic countries headed by the U.S.S.R. in the Second World War, and many others. (…) On the other hand, the countless prophecies of bourgeois politicians and sociologists about the inevitable collapse of socialism, a great revival of capitalism, and so on have proved a disgraceful fiasco", the book proclaims, before adding "Such will be the fate, too, of the many hysterical babblers of the present day who shout about the "crisis of communism" and foretell the "destruction of human culture."" (p. 181)

Fate decreed otherwise. The national liberation movements in colonies and the dependent countries gave birth to regimes more concerned with staying on the West's good side than opposing it. The revolution's victory in China led to China turning on the Soviet Union and then transforming itself into a non-democratic national social democracy. The same applied to many Communist parties in Europe, Africa, and elsewhere, with European parties succumbing to reformism and postcolonial ones becoming apolitical parties of power. The workers began leaving the parties of the workers, turning towards nationalism or simple consumption.

For some time, communism could survive with new appeals to young radicals. They, too, eventually started to increasingly find new muses that were more alluring. New Left members tended to get heavily disenchanted with Marxism-Leninism after noting that the boring bureaucrats in ill-fitting suits, like Khrushchev, Gomułka, and Thorez, were, actually, quite similar to the boring bourgeois bureaucrats in ill-fitting suits doing the same in their own systems, especially when students wearing similarly fashionable clothes and carrying similar slogans of socialism with a human face on placards were getting beaten up by riot police and soldiers in both Prague and Chicago at the same time in 1968.

Throughout the Soviet Union's existence, plenty of people in the West and elsewhere believed that the Soviet Union was just a tragic mistake, as all reasonable men see progress the same way—democracy, liberalism, moderate though continuous reform. Since it was apparent all that Bolshevik stuff was just a silly and inefficient way to get there, surely, at some point, the Bolsheviks would realize the error in their ways and change courses. Thus, they would peacefully join the community of Western nations, and all would be well.

This shines through, for instance, in H. G. Wells's famous interview with Stalin. Wells keeps trying to confirm that surely Stalin must see things the rational way, in other words, in the way of H. G. Wells. Stalin replies by quite directly confirming that he does not see it thus.

Still, eventually, those finally taking the place that Stalin and his lieutenants once held—Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and their respective henchmen—did indeed see their previous beliefs as a mistake and adopt reformism. This, in turn, meant the fall of the whole Soviet Union, and Russia momentarily joined the community of Western nations. It simply happened much later than many liberals and social democrats believed it would and after many events that may or may not have contributed to this realization. And the eventual results may not have been quite what they hoped for.

POLITICAL ECONOMY OF CAPITALISM

Today, many consider capitalism synonymous with the free market. Those who ideologically define themselves as "capitalist" would certainly prefer to do so. A frequent argument is that the current systems, with their considerable state intervention in all aspects of the economy and society, are something else, like corporatism or even socialism or fascism. This amusingly mirrors the stereotypical modern-day communist argument that the Soviet Union "did not represent communism."

However, Marxist-Leninists consider such a definition wrongheaded. To communists, state intervention was not only part and parcel of the capitalism they opposed; they, quite understandably for the 1950s, considered the present term of capitalism to include increasingly more and more of it. The term for the ideological process of the era was "state-monopoly capitalism," often later shortened to stamocap.

As the book describes it, "a particularly important feature of modern state-monopoly capitalism is the creation of a substantial state market in the form of government orders, allocations for the purchase of surpluses, etc. (…) An ever-increasing part of the National revenue in the form of direct and indirect taxes is concentrated in the hands of the state and redistributed in favor of the monopolies." (p. 327)

Despite this intervention, the natural tendency of capitalism to lead to greater and greater ruin for small producers and the natural tendency of the rate of profit to fall was considered to apply. “The tendency towards a worsened position of the working class as capitalism develops, discovered by Marx, continues to operate at the present day. Opponents of Marxism (…) attempt to show that history does not corroborate Marx’s theory and that modern capitalism opens up unlimited prospects for the improvement of workers’ conditions.” (p. 291)

And yet, capitalism still stands and the predicted tendencies were reversed. Currently, only leftist historians would recognize the word "stamocap." The neoliberal turn in the late 1970s led, at least on a rhetorical level, to a turn away from state intervention to the lionization of competition. It turned out that when "many bourgeois economists, recognizing that monopolies hold up technological progress, have called for a return to the era of free competition," it couldn't be refuted by saying that "Lenin showed how completely unfounded were such hopes for a return to the past.” (p. 309)

During this time, the Soviet economy appeared to be growing in leaps and bounds. "As a result of fulfilling its economic plans, the Soviet Union already in 1965 will surpass the present (1958-59) total output of some key items in the United States and approach the U.S. level of output of other items." (p. 848), the book could predict confidently, even if those numbers, as well, have been questioned later on.

Again, we know the twist. While Khrushchev attempted some reforms, such as "giving the collective farms the right themselves to plan their production, abolition of obligatory deliveries to the state and the change-over to a system of purchases of farm produce, and the sale of machinery to the collective farms" (p. 811), the Soviet economy ended up in deeper and deeper stages of sclerosis as the American economy reached new heights.

Eventually, inevitably, faith in planning then ended. When, during Gorbachev's times, the socialist state was seen even by CPSU members "as an unnecessary bureaucratic excrescence on the social body, which [revisionists] allege, impedes free economic development" (p. 698), free-market liberalism seemed like a natural option. (Its failure in post-Soviet Russia is another story.)

When people think about an equivalent figure for capitalism as Vladimir Lenin for communism, they will often think about another person who lived in St. Petersburg in 1917 and who, very briefly, could have theoretically met Lenin. Alissa Rosenbaum, who would soon flee the revolution with her family to Odessa and eventually to America, took there the name she is better known as—Ayn Rand.

The writer of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged considered herself the opposite of the communists in almost every way. Nevertheless, in many other ways, her ideology shares essential points with Marxism-Leninism. Rand conceived herself as a strong materialist, with a clear image of a world explainable through human reason and modifiable human action, with no room for supernatural explanations for anything. Her worldview, in its black-and-whiteness, has provided moral clarity for many modern atheists who didn't want to get stuck in postmodernity in the same way as Marxism-Leninism has supplied to numerous others and still provides to some.

If one has internalized the logic of Marxism vis-a-vis there being a process of societal change from primitive societies to the classical slavery-based system, then feudalism and serfdom, then capitalism, and then socialism and communism, and one then concludes that socialism and communism are entirely untenable, it would become completely logical for them to become as strident a supporter of capitalism as you can, as that would be as good as it gets. Ayn Rand had not been a Marxist-Leninist at any point, but having grown up in the same milieu, it may not be entirely accidental that her ideology is tailor-made for such a turn.

THEORY AND TACTICS OF THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNIST MOVEMENT

While Rand's books had already been published, they get zero mentions in Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism. It was a movement considerably to the left of Rand that would draw the most ire, at least the most after the “idealists”. These would be the "revisionists" or "right-wing socialists", social democrats who had chosen to side with the West in the Cold War.

When communism was still going strong, there was a dividing line on the left: you subscribed to Marxism-Leninism with all its features, in which case you were a communist, or you didn't, in which case you probably joined the country's main social-democratic party, even though “there is no “third” way between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, between reaction and democracy. The Right-wing Social-Democrats demonstrate it very clearly themselves by actually co-operating with the bourgeois reactionary circles.” (p. 451)

The book is quick to add that they do not mean all social democrats, stating that “Left-wing socialists not infrequently display political inconsistency, but in any event they are the most progressive section of Social-Democracy." (p. 457) However, historically, the acceptability of the left wing of social democracy and its fit under the rubric of revisionism has waxed and waned considerably during the decades.

Among the sins of revisionism, perhaps even more important than affinity for capitalism is a supposed love for nationalism. Communism has always fashioned itself as an internationalist movement. As the book describes, "Without internationalism, without the united efforts of the workers of all countries, it is impossible to defeat the world bourgeoisie and build a new society." (p. 37)

At one time, this did not only mean that it was a movement whose power was spread through a wide variety of nations and regions. It also referred to the Communist International, the organization was meant to formally be a super party above all other parties, uniting communists the world over.

During the Stalinist era it was run down, as "the increased political maturity of the Communist Parties made the existence of a world communist organisation of the previous type superfluous." (p. 437) To Leon Trotsky and his followers, this was not just a random tactical decision but one of the things signaling the betrayal of the entire revolution. Even if one disagrees with Trotsky, it did signal the beginning of a turn from Soviet self-conception as the beacon of revolution to a country among countries with its geopolitical interests.

These geopolitical interests did not always meet with the interests of other communist countries. According to the book, it was not accidental that the “most poisonous flowers of revisionism blossom in the nationalist morass. (…) They pretend that there is a recipe for communism that is fully compatible with national isolation and exclusiveness, that can allegedly be built by a country standing apart from other socialist countries and even being in hostility to them, renouncing all loyalty to the principles of proletarian internationalism and class solidarity." (p. 774)

At this point, this was a direct reference to Tito's Yugoslavia, which, after a short while of cooperating with the other communist countries, soon split from them over regional issues and grew closer to the West. The same was attempted by leaderships in both Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968, the impetus for reforms that eventually culminated into a break had come from nationally-minded communists who did not mind the socialism thing but felt their country chafed in a Soviet leash.

Instead of improper, revisionist nationalism or bourgeois cosmopolitism, the book promotes a good, progressive nationalism that is fully compatible with socialism. "The nations and national consciousness in the countries of Asia and Africa are being formed in the struggle against imperialism and feudalism (…) All this imparts to the nationalism of the contemporary East a democratic, progressive content” (p. 493) as the national liberation movements of the Third World are described.

However, national sovereignty from American rule is also used in appeals to Europeans: "For the financial oligarchy of the U.S.A., cosmopolitism has proved the best way of disguising its struggle for world supremacy and for doing away with the independence of other states. For the West European monopolists, it has become a convenient excuse for their betrayal of the national interests, for their bargains with the U.S. finance capital at the expense of their peoples." (p. 539) This campaign against “rootless” cosmopolit(an)ism had been conducted quite literally in the postwar period by Andrei Zhdanov, one of Stalin's top lieutenants—and was connected to the worsening climate for Soviet Jews during that period.

During the time of the book and increasingly onwards, the Soviet Union would come to rely on "Soviet patriotism" as a legitimizing ideology, eventually even more so than in Marxism-Leninism. Such patriotism was intended to simultaneously rebuke the Western-oriented cosmopolitanism and the nationalist movements that troubled the Soviets inside and outside the Soviet Union.

Eventually, even this proved too weak for the Soviet Union to keep going, as the Baltic nations, Ukrainians, and others demanded their independence. Its remnants were included in the current Russian national identity, allowing for Russian troops hewing to the memory of the Russian Empire to fight for the same cause in Ukraine with other troops flying the Soviet flag.

The precise function of Marxism-Leninism was ensuring that the parties wouldn't become bourgeoisie, revisionist and prone to siding with their bourgeoisie for reasons of national unity, as Lenin, etc., had concluded that parties without the specific Leninist party structure would become. That didn’t succeed, but 64 years ago, it was still possible to believe it would.

And the final argument was always the Marxist-Leninists could retort that while others were prattling, the communists were Getting Things Done, building socialism right there in the Soviet Union, warts and all included. This was a persuasive argument to many, no matter how many warts there were.

SOCIALISM AND COMMUNISM

The book's final chapters describe the coming socialist and communist society that would result from that building effort: a paradise of abundance and free time, with unlimited resources for everyone. This seems quite natural, as it's hardly like the communists would author a book about their ideology that would predict it's destined to fail. Still, today few movements, including the ones that call themselves communists, possess faith in their own ability to make the world a better place.

Rote modern declarations that "a better world is possible" are far removed from the continuous drumbeat of doom. Climate change, acidification of oceans, the “peak oil” and other such resource peaks, overpopulation, a fascist onslaught lurking beyond every corner, or technologies like AI only ushering in dark corporate feudalism.

While environmentalism was, during the Cold War and after it, seen as a socialist plot, it played a part in the social movements that would play a part in bringing the East Block down. This is partly due to its criticism of environmental catastrophes of the Soviet Era, like the death of the Aral Sea and the disaster at Chernobyl, but even more so because of its secular challenge to the thesis that science, development, and the use of natural resources would automatically bring humanity almost nothing but benefits, whether under socialism or capitalism.

Neither did the Soviets, who gloried in their defeat of fascism in the field of battle, see doom lurking around other corners: "The best that the authors of contemporary bourgeois utopias [such as Aldous Huxley or E. M. Forster] can promise the world today is a society where a certain material well-being is achieved at the cost of complete rejection of democracy, culture, and human dignity, a society inhabited by people who have nothing human in them, people who have become mere appendages of the machine, its slaves. Frequently, they prophesy an even grimmer future for humanity—a return to barbarism. All that will remain of civilization, so these "prophets" tell us, will be the ruins of cities and desecrated graves, where starving crowds of brutalized and degenerate creatures will scavenge for clothing and ornaments." (p. 243)

In the book, the potential for computer developments and AI is seen differently from becoming “appendages of the machine”: "The development and further improvement of electronic computers open the greatest prospects for the further progress of science and technology. These devices make it possible to automate the control of machines; more than that, complicated logical processes (for example, translation from one language into another) can be performed with the help of computers." (p. 804)

Today, such positive visions of human grandeur and advancement are generally offered by distinctly non-Marxist technologists, such as Elon Musk in the most populist form. Whatever other things Musk might have said or done, he has been able to, often crudely, elucidate an idea of humanity's quest for the stars in a way that brought him fame.

When the book states that "despite the assertions of some bourgeois sociologists, disciples of the reactionary Malthus, about the "over-population" of the earth, mankind has every opportunity of satisfying its growing material requirements" (p. 176) it is Musk who it comes closest to sounding like, in all of its confidence. All that is part of why, even after all the follies and scandals, Musk continues to have his fans.

At the end of the book is a grand prediction of the future tasks of communism. In the vision of Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism, "science, which will take an outstanding place in communist society, will be faced with ever new problems. It is already clear today that their range is truly immense. Academician V. A. Obruchev, the well-known Soviet scientist, reflecting on what people have a right to expect of science, wrote:

"It is necessary:

"to prolong man's life to 150-200 years on the average, to wipe out infectious diseases, to reduce non-infectious diseases to a minimum, to conquer old age and fatigue, to learn to restore life in case of untimely, accidental death;

"to place at the service of man all the forces of nature, the energy of the sun, the wind and subterranean heat, to apply atomic energy in industry, transport, and construction, to learn how to store energy and transmit it, without wires, to any point;

"to predict and render completely harmless natural calamities: floods, hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes;

"to produce in factories all the substances known on earth, up to most complex—protein—and also substances unknown in nature: harder than diamonds, more heat-resistant than firebrick, more refractory than tungsten and osmium, more flexible than silk and more elastic than rubber;

"to evolve new breeds of animals and varieties of plants that grow more swiftly and yield more meat, milk, wool, grain, fruit, fibers, and wood for man's needs;

"to reduce, adapt for the needs of life and conquer unpromising areas, marshes, mountains, deserts, taiga, tundra, and perhaps even the sea bottom;

"to learn to control the weather, regulate the wind and heat, just as rivers are regulated now, to shift clouds at will, to arrange for rain or clear weather, snow or hot weather." (p. 876)

Even today, many continue to hold out for a world where technology allows us to do these things – and a few more; Sputnik aside, the conquest of space does not yet feature in this vision, and advocates of singularity and transhumanism would consider 150-200 woefully inadequate a lifespan.

THE CONTINUING ALLURE OF THE RED

The sickle and the hammer continue to hold appeal to some small but visible groups in the West and sometimes surprisingly large groups elsewhere. Communist groups still organize protests in various countries, with Soviet banners most recently visibly popping up in the university campus occupations in support of the Palestinian cause, one of those national liberation causes the communists found so progressive during the Cold War, too.

Within social media, the "MAGA communist" Jackson Hinkle draws out thousands of likes—and also considerable befuddlement from people who find it evident that "MAGA" and "communism" are two opposite poles. Many summarily dismiss Hinkle as a mere far-right charlatan. His actual audience is most likely not Western far-righters but various social media users from the Global South, who find nothing strange about a mixture of communism and patriotism, such as Palestinians, whose cause has included communist movements like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Some of his followers might also find the modern left not only too feminist but even more importantly too feminine. The old socialist imagery of manly workers, aggressive strikes, guerrillas with a rifle in hand and so on, has been replaced by pastel tones and images of care. To those for whom the Age of Man is not over on the left, the Soviet imagery of strength and manly valor offers an alluring point of reference, one not connected to capitalism or fascism, movements they might not feel comfortable in supporting for other reasons.

The Soviets, of course, too proclaimed women's rights, but in terms that might sound conservative to our ears: "The socialist system (...) not only gives women equal rights with men, but it also accords the mother honour and respect. The state grants working mothers long paid maternity leaves, gives monthly allowances to mothers of large families and unmarried mothers, and decorates mothers of large families with orders or medals.” (p. 742)

A charlatan Hinkle may be. Ideologically, his "communism" is a combination of anti-American talking points, social conservatism and personal promotion. Most Western communists would not trust Hinkle farther than they can throw him. Instead, they tend to trust progress in the modern progressive sense, feminism and environmentalism included alongside Old Left methods and symbology. Even the economic models that they implicitly support may be closer to stamocap than to the Soviet trust in a state where the state explicitly ran the great majority of the economy.

We should consider what "communism" really symbolizes in this debate. For a long time, the left has run away from organizations for anarchist-influenced inchoate models of "uprisings" and from belief in the forces of technological and material progress to doomsaying and postmodern criticisms of the same. Authoritarianism and even the body counts of tens of millions are not, then, an argument against the ideology to such people. Instead, they symbolize the idea of Getting Things Done. Are those things sensible or sane? That's a whole different question.

To the rest of us, a return to a book like this does not only offer a history lesson or a potential mirror for our foibles in predicting a sure victory for our chosen ideology. It provides a chance to try and understand a mindset that started with a bang, burned like a flame, charred tens of millions in the process, fizzled out, and died. It is a fire that may return, at least if there are no better alternatives to those who have historically felt the heat.

The European Parliament elections happened. The European Parliament elects 720 members of the European Parliament (MEPs) from the member countries to represent the legislative assembly (one of the three main institutions) of the European Union. While the European Parliament is often castigated for weakness compared to the executive branches, the European Council, and the European Commission, it still has a fair bit of power when it comes to, for instance, the various regulations of the European Union.

The elections also act as an ideological barometer for political developments in Europe, though since the turnout is low, this factor is by necessity diminished.

On both the European and the Finnish levels, the theme for this election was the feared/desired rise of nationalist groups and the possibility that EPP, the center-right of the European Parliament consisting of various center-right parties from member states, would start cooperating with the nationalists like center-right parties do in many member countries.

The rise did indeed take place, though in a milder form than expected, with nationalists making big gains in countries like France and Germany but getting beaten back in the Nordic countries. There's still a high chance their influence will grow in the coming parliament, at least for the "moderate" ones (ie. the ones that do not challenge the basic idea of the European Union or the general Western foreign and security policy, like support for continuing to fund Ukraine.)

In Finland, the Finns Party crashed, getting one of their worst results in well over a decade. Since the tiny further-to-right microparties went down even harder, this probably reflects partially movement to the center-right National Coalition, increasingly growing more right-wing as the Finns Party’s co-partner in government, and partly party supporters just staying home and not voting for anybody.

Probably the main reasons are twofold:

• The Finns ran a very underwhelming campaign concentrating on things like the new EU regulation mandating bottlecaps that stick to the bottle after opening. The caps are, I guess, mildly annoying and might cause dribbling when using some packs, but heavy concentration on this sort of issue just comes off as frivolous. In general, since EU membership is more popular than ever, they're in a bind. Moving to the center pisses off the remaining hardcore Euroskeptic base while doing an "EU is pretty lame, Finland has no influence" spiel just evidently makes their supporters think there's no point in voting.

• They're in a government that's doing, on a Finnish scale, hard austerity and anti-union policies, which their supporters don't like. Also, anti-migrant measures, which their supporters do like - but getting the center-right to cosign those only makes it easier for their educated wealthier voters who have voted the Finns to cut immigration (but still consider them too redneck and embarrassing) to return to the center-right. This was aided by the center-right National Coalition running several prominent “security” candidates, easy for conservative men with bookshelves full of war novels to vote for.

The Finnish Left got a huge surprise result, beating all the parties other than the National Coalition, the obvious winner. This has been speculated to be due to the vast personal popularity of Li Andersson, the party leader who was running as the main candidate, and partly was probably a protest vote against the government.

However, it also reflects the growing acceptance among the general “red-green voters”, the mass of left-wing urbanites smoothly moving between Social Democrats, Left, and Greens as they fit, of the reformed post-Communist party, particularly as Andersson had many chances to distance herself from the anti-Ukrainian voices on the European Left, promising to marginalize them in the coming parliament. Future polling and elections will demonstrate if it is possible to build further success on these grounds, with the municipal and regional elections next year being a particular test.

There's little chance that the new parliament will be much improvement compared to the previous ones in terms of getting Europe out of its deep-set economic funk. Most likely the centrist coalition will continue, which offers more stability than the right-wing cooperation with parties that continue to at least somewhat retain their Euroskeptic instincts, but this is the stability of business-as-usual, not an enticing proposal when the business-as-usual has been 15 years of little to no growth in the EU.

This is exemplified by the results of the onslaught of Marine le Pen's RN and some other nationalist parties in France leading to Macron calling for new parliamentary elections. While they wouldn't lead to Macron himself getting thrown out, if RN and the other groups do well or even get a majority, France might get gridlocked for at least three years. These would hardly be three years that the EU, with France of course being one of its most important countries, can afford to waste.

Such rumors were quelled pretty fast when more information was received on the main suspect, an 18-year-old native Finnish man. Indeed, in an ironic turn, it turned out that the assumed murderer had been posting his rape/murder fantasies on the imageboard in question. The admins had removed the thread and alerted the police. However, several users had agreed with the OP and egged him on, probably sarcastically, perhaps not.

This has, then, led to a fair amount of debate on the amount of woman-hatred on imageboards, and Finnish culture in general – the “woman or bear” meme, previously not a particularly popular one in Finland, has gained a new lease on life, as the whole case did, indeed, show that in some cases it is dangerous for a woman to meet a man in the woods. A young man was also found dead in nearby Nokia, receiving less attention, though that might also be because the police quickly ruled out homicide as a probable cause.

EURO ELECTIONS: The advance voting for the European elections is going on. European elections tend to have low voting rates, and while this one has seen a slight uptick in voting rates, it still does not qualify not a particular exception. The European Parliament continues to be a far-off institution to the Finns, and no wonder, considering how much of the European politics is still basically decided between the countries – particularly the large ones.

In Finland, as in the other countries, the main narrative has been the rise of the (far) right, with the various far-right groupings predicted to become a major player in European politics and a potential partner for the center-right EPP group, which has thus far governed the European Union mostly in cooperation with the liberals and the social democrats. A particular worry in Finland has been what this would do for EU support to Ukraine – while many nationalist parties in the EU, including the local Finns Party, generally support Ukraine, many others have a history of taking a more pro-Russian tone.

At the current moment, it doesn’t seem like the Finns Party is advancing locally – the polls suggest it will elect 2 MPs – so the main topics include whether the Swedish People’s Party, somewhat less-than-willingly associated in the government with the Finns Party, will lose its sole seat due to usual voters protesting against the perceived loss of liberal values. Even if the party is elected, it may not retain its position in the liberal ALDE group, as some other parties have raised complaints about whether parties in government with far-right parties can still be considered liberal.

MARITIME BORDERS: According to news in Russian media, Russia has drawn up plans to unilaterally adjust its maritime borders in the Baltic, i.e. its maritime borders with Russia and Estonia. While this caused a bit of a shock in the countries – with some even wondering if this is a sufficient reason for NATO Article 4 or Article 5 consultations – the Russians themselves later stated that these were only draft plans. Even if they did implement them, it would not be obvious whether the actual changes in maritime borders would affect Finland’s maritime borders or only the international ones.

At the same time, Russia may be ramping up the level of anti-Finnish disturbances as the war in Ukraine seems to be heating up and Western nations are considering their level of involvement. For instance, a show of Finnish “Russophobia” was put up near the Finnish embassy in Moscow, with complaints ranging from actual ones – like the Finnish participation in Operation Barbarossa – to odd ones, like Finnish vodka tourism in the Soviet Union in the 60s and the 70s.

In a recent poll, a majority of Finns indicated that they believe that the EU should send troops to Ukraine if Ukraine was losing, a rather surprising result as the Finnish political class continues to be skeptical about the idea. An even bigger surprise is that such views are the most common among Greens and Left Alliance supporters – well, not Greens, who have been trending towards Atlanticism even before 2022, but before that date, Left Alliance was firmly anti-NATO and pacifistic.

IN OTHER NEWS, a lawsuit on whether the Covid passport of 2021 was constitutional was thrown out with heavy fees to the plaintiff and the attorney, the law on selling strong alcohol in stores advances, and a berry picking firm’s CEO was convicted of human trafficking due to using maltreated Thai labor.

Image: Valkeakoski. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Valkeakoski#/media/File:Valkeakosken_kanava.jpg

EUROVISION AND ISRAEL: Eurovision is the big song contest for European nations (and some others) organized by the European Broadcasting Company every year. You can read this if you want more information about Eurovision or this on why the contest was taken particularly seriously in Finland last year.

Finland’s “No Rules” is a comedy entry by a duo consisting of a largely unknown singer, Henri Piispanen, and only somewhat more known visual artist / DJ Windows95Man. It did not do particularly well, getting to the finals but not even placing there among the ten best. At least it avoided coming in last—that was for Norway’s entry, Gåte, the one I voted for (I’ve been a Gåte listener for over a decade).

What interested people rather more than the Nordic countries was what would happen to Israel – either whether it would end up winning or if the whole contest would or could get canceled because of Israeli participation. As is known, Russia – not a particular fan favorite even before the recent events – was booted out of Eurovision in 2022 after the invasion of Ukraine. This, then, led to many wondering whether a similar fate would befall Israel after the brutalities in Gaza.

It did not, despite several other Eurovision participants demanding it. The demands for boycott probably spurred many people to vote for the Israeli contestant Eden Golan out of spite—though so did the organized voting campaigns concocted by Israel. Some voters probably did not watch Eurovision, simply reacting to circulating text messages or WhatsApp messages. Finland was a popular vote winner in many countries, including in Finland, though the actual popular favorite was Croatia, also a solid entry.

A large controversy was when Dutch artist Joost Klein, whose song Europapa was an early favorite for a winner and who had taken a strong boycott-Israel stance, was disqualified by murky reasons. Some have said it was because of threatening behavior by Klein due to non-Israel-related reasons, others noted that Klein reacted understandably to Israeli harassment. All of this was not sufficient to win – what won was a reasonably traditional Eurovision ballad by a nonbinary singer from Switzerland, thanks to an extensive and probably coordinated jury vote.

(Why is Israel in the Eurovision in the first place, even though it’s not a geographical part of Europe? It is because Israel’s public broadcaster is a member of the European Broadcasting Union. Most Middle Eastern countries have public broadcasters who are members of EBU, too, so theoretically, many more countries could participate. They’re just choosing not to do so since they couldn’t block Israel from their broadcast, concretely demonstrated by Lebanon in 2005. Also, Australia gets to participate since they really really want to.)

Meanwhile, the college protests in the United States and other countries have spread to Finland, and there’s a small gaggle of tents at my local university, too, but it’ll lead to any major new developments. Finland will probably continue to its standard line of occasionally saying that, though Hamas is also evil Israel should also pipe down, while continuing the usual business relations with Israel, recently demonstrated by abstaining on UN vote on whether the State of Palestine should be recognized.

In other news:

•            Tarja Cronberg, a former Green Party leader, was stripped of a university honor after it turned out that she had participated in a Russian seminar in Kaliningrad last month. The seminar was ostensibly held to honor Immanuel Kant, but the real purpose was justifying Russia’s war in Ukraine. Cronberg participated as the leader of a peace organization – peace organizations were recently defunded from government contributions, and things like this do not help their cause. Cronberg’s participation was slightly surprising in that it’s not the staunchly liberal and nowadays even Atlanticist Greens usually blamed for being too pro-Russian. Still, she has held similar views for a long time, putting her at odds with many other Greens leaders.

•           The parliament has finalized its law on limiting political strikes. After weeks and weeks of strikes, it passed with comparatively little notice, signalling the government’s victory over unions, at least for now. However, it’s perhaps one particular factor in the Social Democrats having their support go higher than ever since 2006 in the polls.

•            One of the government’s populist centerpieces has been alcohol law liberalization, with the first step (raising the alcohol volume limit for drinks sold in convenience stores to 5,5 %) already passed. However, the next step (raising it to 8 %, allowing for mild wines and strong beers to be sold) is experiencing a bump in the road, as the Christian Democrats – particularly their most notable politician Päivi Räsänen, fresh from her free speech trials – are now signalling opposition, not only in the way of voting against it in the parliament (which they’ve been given a special permission to do) but also opposing it in the committee. It is interesting that after being pliable towards absolutely everything else the Christian Democrats, by far the least influential party in this government are choosing this to draw their line.

•            The Finns Party MP Sebastian Tynkkynen claimed that he was a target of political violence while the Finns were campaigning in Oulu. While there have been some cases of political violence in Finland, it’s unclear what happened; Tynkkynen posted a speeded-up video where some people appeared to be shouting at him (with no sound attached), but it’s unclear whether he was actually under any threat. The Finns Party chair Riikka Purra also told some other counterprotestors to get a job, causing a bit of a stir related to whether this is correct behavior for a Minister.

•            The Northern Lights, thanks to the recent solar storm, were visible in large parts of the country, though I didn’t manage to spot them.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Windows95man.jpg

On the night between Thursday and Friday, Timo Vornanen, an MP of the ruling Finns Party, got into an altercation outside of a bar, which ended up with him taking out a gun, waving it at the people he was having squabbling with, and shooting the ground before he left. This happened around four in the morning. Vornanen had apparently been at work at the parliament until 11 PM, went home to pick up the gun and then went to the bar, and eventually got into a fight over another guy over who could sit next to 18- and 19-year-old girls (Vornanen is 54 himself). After some wrestling, the two eventually ended outside, where the notable events happened. This was witnessed, among others, by Sanna Antikainen, another Finns Party MP, who had been accompanying Vornanen. Vornanen was duly arrested and spent some time in the jail.

Apparently, Vornanen, who worked as a police officer before his election, does own and can carry the weapon legally for self-defense due to the threats he had received. It is unclear how old this license is and, initially, whether he had had the gun inside the parliament as well – many people in Finland were surprised to learn that MPs are, indeed, permitted to store firearms inside of the parliament, typically for taking it to hunt or shoot targets after a session. 

However, in any case, taking a gun inside a bar is very much not a permitted activity in Finland, and shooting a weapon as a threat while drunk is even less so. As such, it was immediately apparent that the Finns Party would have to respond. They took their time, as the party’s active members and leadership were on a cruise (political parties often take their active members on cruises as a rest and recovery / group-formation activity). This wasn’t aided by the fact that the police took their time to come up with information, with many suspecting that the forces are implicitly protecting one of their own, especially one who has reached a high-level position in society like this.

Once the Finns Party got around to reacting, they swiftly and expectedly announced that they were booting Vornanen from their group. This means the government now has 108 seats out of 200 backing it – still not too close to the edge where it might fall, but with less room to play around. The government just survived a confidence vote and the Justice Minister’s habit of meddling with expert panels might also come around at some later point. Then again, at this phase, it doesn’t particularly likely that anything would happen. Whether Vornanen can keep his seat in the parliament appears to depend on what the charges would be in the eyes of the law and whether he’d be convicted – it’s not easy to lose your seat entirely due to legal troubles.

Whatever happens, things like this don’t reflect well on the party in general. There are probably many people who agree with the Finns Party on immigration or want the country generally to be more conservative but who still hold out from voting for them and continue to vote for their usual preferred center-right precisely because they feel the party is plagued by constant antics like this. At least in r/Suomi (i.e., the main Finnish-language Reddit sub for Finland), an oft-recurring opinion in election threads was, “I would vote for The Finns, but I cannot deal with this white-trash stuff, so I have to grit my teeth and vote for National Coalition once again).

One possibility might be that Vornanen now joins a right-wing micro party, giving them a seat. The openly fascist Blue-Black Movement, which recently lost its registration as a party due to lying about their program when getting registered, is almost certainly not an option, but the anti-vax and anti-EU Freedom Alliance has probably already sent feelers. Just a few days ago, Finns Party MEP Teuvo Hakkarainen – also notable for past drunken violent antics – announced he’s running on that party’s lists for the coming EU elections, also stating that he no longer feels straitjacketed by the Finns Party and can thus criticize their formal new line of being more “euro reformist” (i.e. change EU to a looser confederal model from the inside) than “Euroskeptic” (wanting to quit EU, or even euro, directly).

In other news, the press has been going gaga over new president Alexander Stubb’s wife, Suzanne Innes-Stubb (particularly during the new president’s visit to Sweden). The local Museum of Lenin is closing, and the lowering birth rates are now even afflicting the high-fertility Laestadian religious movement. 

Plotwise, it was threadbare. I kept thinking about how this would still provide a good setting for a computer role-playing game (CRPG) (why are there comparatively few CRPGs situated in a present-day-style wartime setting?), and it then struck me that the plot, such as it was, was already a CRPG plot.

We start with a water-riot-based tutorial where we get a refresher on using action points, taking photos, communicating, and even transferring an item to a party member. Then, at the hotel, the main quest starts, and the party is assembled.

An early random encounter demonstrates that one party member needs to be more experienced or have a suitable skill set. The narrative tells us that the main quest's final encounter will be difficult, so the party grinds side quests for levels. They even visit a literal shop and a literal rest site.

During one of the side quests, the party encounters an enemy, a Nazi played well by Jesse Plemons, that's a bit too high for their current levels. Hence, in addition to two temporary party members who were hardcoded to be killed anyway, they lose one of the main party members. After this, they discover that the main quest's time limit has run out, and they're locked out of the best ending. However, the story graciously lets them go through the final battle for another ending.

Alex Garland has also served as a video game writer, so I guess it sticks.

Thematically… already before the movie, I knew that it would try to present a "second American Civil War" without getting too political—a befuddling decision in itself—but the movie doesn't really commit to any narrative beyond the basic plotline.

Are the Western Forces, the California-Texas alliance that is pushing on towards Washington DC, justified in rebelling against the authoritarian president? Maybe. They vaguely indicate that the president is bad (he's on a third term!) Still, the loyalist forces are not shown doing anything particularly bad unless you count that riot police officers are tetchy in a situation where a suicide bomber might strike at any moment. All the war crimes are committed by WF or the presumably WF-affiliated Hawaiian shirt irregulars who execute surrendered uniformed troops.

But since neither side has any weight, it's not really a "war is hell, but both sides are bad" thing, either. It could have been that if there had been more worldbuilding. We barely know anything about the conflict's history beyond some mentions of "Portland Maoists" or an "Antifa massacre."

Are they trying to portray Wagner Moura's character, a muscular and mustache-sporting journalist partnering up with Kirsten Dunst's main character for a story, as someone doing toxic masculinity? Maybe. Is it bad that the one community (with the shop) has decided to go on conducting life as normal, except with snipers on roofs? Maybe.

They hint that Trump might influence Nick Offerman’s president character, but he's not. His mannerism is not particularly Trumpish; he gives some speeches where he mentions the flag and God and such, but those would be more normie-Republican coded, and he could even be a Democrat. He is a non-entity. I get the idea of trying not to take sides in the current American culture war battles, but it just doesn't work.

The clearest narrative arc is the Kirsten Dunst character on a suicide run after "losing her faith in journalism" and, in the end, willing her photography mojo to Cailee Spaeny's character, the low-level party member who then levels up. Since we've already established that photojournalism is useless for anything besides taking cool photos and seeking thrills, should we care?

Garland probably tried to make a comparison to civil wars in those *other* countries in the Third World as just being confusing and involving barbarous foreigners shooting at each other for no reason. Syria, Lebanon in the 1980s, Bosnia-Herzegovina in the 1990s, and even something like the civil war in Myanmar now.

But in all those cases, there were apparent underlying ethnoreligious conflicts! (Orthodox) Serbs, (Catholic) Croats, and (Muslim) Bosniaks, the various religion-based groups in Lebanon, Alawites and Sunnis in Syria, ethnic minorities, and Bamars in Myanmar. You can't fully explain these conflicts without reference to those divisions.

Sure, the conflicts weren't as simple as these. You had Shiites or Christians fighting each other at times in Lebanon. If you go to some random village in Myanmar, it might well be ruled by a militia that's not really affiliated with either "major" side in the civil war. And so on. But still, there are a lot of cases in these wars where the battle lines are clear and which side you're on is also evident.

If you try to transpose a conflict like that to the US without transposing the ethnic and religious divisions, the idea you get is that wars really have no meaning at all. It's just people killing each other due to the Bestiality of Man and our native ape bloodlust, and that just makes the Kirsten Dunst character an (even bigger) moron for thinking at any point that this could be changed by taking a photo, making the whole quest even more useless for anything expect thrills, cool images, and a bit of personal development.

The only scene with actual tension is the one with Jesse Plemons and his racist militia, and that's partly because Jesse Plemons is a great actor but also in large part because these guys at least hold an actual ideology and are doing things that happen in actual civil wars, i.e., running a death squad on ethnic/religious basis. I've seen some state that they find that the whole rest of the movie is a long intro and outro to the Jesse Plemons scene.

It was a clever idea for them to make a war movie about reporters. Since many journalists are obsessed with the idea of their social relevance, getting 5 stars in magazines doesn't seem particularly hard. 2.5/5 stars for me, some good cinematography, and 0.5 stars extra for Plemons.

Image: Jesse Plemons’s Nazi character. They probably ended up getting some good EXP out of this encounter!

The government’s latest round of measures, a part of the traditional spring budget negotiations, has finally intruded on the wallets of all these categories. This appears to have been due to an effort by the smaller parties in the government, the Swedish People’s Party and Christian Democrats – insignificant by themselves but able to affect policy when joining together. A particularly notable one is a 1.5 % increase in the general VAT,  giving Finland the highest general VAT in Europe – 25.5 %. The half a percentage point might cause problems simply because the most popular accounting software is built on the assumption that the VAT percentage will always be an integer.

The lower VAT rates on food, medicine, and specific other categories stay put at 14 %, but this is still bound to have an inflationary effect on prices for various goods and services, as well as be challenging for countless small and micro enterprises that cannot simply wrap the increase up in their prices since that would lead to fewer customers. Micro entrepreneurs (I am one) were already quite affected by the latest government’s pension reform, which pushed up mandatory pension contributions from quite a few. The VAT price rise also negates the cut on gas prices the Finns Party had achieved previously through direct gas tax cuts.

Likewise, for the first time, pensions are becoming limited. Not through direct cuts but by increasing their taxes, which has the same effect, really – and even the high earners get new taxes by adjusting scales. Tax subsidies for voluntary retirement savings are also being pared down. The whole package is being considered a major betrayal by a substantial number of right-wing voters, though it remains to be seen if they’ll find a party to switch to in protest. The last election’s attempts to build libertarian(ish) parties that explicitly campaigned on a series of cuts, which could have replaced these tax hikes, went precisely nowhere.

In other cuts, health services are being limited, vocational education slashed, student housing benefits cut, and certain state employment services ended—there is little to like for anyone. What remains to be seen is how all of this will interact with the worsening economic situation since it will further reduce consumption and make people suspicious of starting new economic activity.

SCHOOL SHOOTING: As mentioned last month, just at the start of April, there was a school shooting in Vantaa, a large suburb (well, a collection of suburbs) of Helsinki. While there has been only one death (for a moment, it seemed like there would be more, but there have at least not been updated news of serious injuries turning to fatalities), of course, a lot of people have been particularly shaken by the fact that the assailant was just 12 years old. The motive is probably bullying, but the police have still not shared the full details.

Finland has a legacy of school shootings – two very notable cases happened in the mid-00s, the Jokela and Kauhajoki shootings, where a disaffected 20-something shot up their school, causing multiple deaths and leading to a lot of debate about whether the gun laws are too lax. While the Finnish gun laws are considerably tighter than in the United States, obtaining and shooting guns is much easier than in many other European countries.

Right after Kauhajoki, in 2008, the then-Interior Minister called together a working group that suggested restricting the availability of handguns, but nothing came out of these restrictions. It is not particularly likely that the current government would do so, partly because the governing parties might have gun-owning voters, but even more, since the idea that wide availability of guns has the positive side of allowing Finnish reservists to train personally for a potential war has been gaining a fair amount of cachet after 2022. And in any case, gun violence continues to remain a comparable rarity in Finland.

In other news, it seems that the significant strikes are over for now despite still no clarity on labor market reforms; a citizen’s initiative to legalize euthanasia got 50 000 signatures, sparking a new debate on this contentious subject, as most Finns support legalizing euthanasia, though doctors are far more reticent. The current government’s parties aren’t that fond of citizen’s initiatives in general. Furthermore, a strange stench troubled Helsinki, prompting many jokes. There’s been an uptick in stories on increasing religiousness among some sectors of youth, and a notable celebrity talking head has been in the news a lot about his recent conversion.

Image: “The tax bear” is a popular name for taxmen in Finland. Image created by Bing.

Following the leaderships of Soini, Halla-aho and now Purra, the Finns party’s leadership will likely fall next to the younger generations. Unlike Soini, creating a new party out of the ashes of an existing one, and Halla-aho and Purra, who essentially arrived in Soini’s party as interlopers, this younger layer has spent their entire adult lives in a situation where the Finns Party is a known, increasingly accepted, entity on the political stage, and where Halla-aho’s dark writings represent a bygone era.

Yet while their chosen media is Youtube and TikTok, addressing vast new audiences in the so-called “Zoomer generation”, their tone is much the same – combative, hectoring, sarcastic. The message is the same, too, with opposition to immigration and support for right-wing economics at its heart. Anti-immigrant views that were once radical heresies of liberalism are now something that a generation has been exposed to – online and off – their entire lives. It is no longer the politics of a radical fringe, to be advanced through populist political crusades, but rather the subject of “normal” politics, a march through the institutions, and the strengthening of an ongoing paradigm shift.

Perhaps one prudent reminder of this is three Finns Party MPs – Tynkkynen, Bergbom and Vigelius, the latter two under thirty and the first one a bit older but still very important for the party’s youth success as a product of the multimedia age – starting a podcast that quickly became the most popular Finnish podcast in Spotify, probably aided by angry reaction by social media lefties who can’t help but boosting it by vaguely tweeting how bad it is that these right-wing figures are, indeed, saying right-wing stuff in their podcast.

Anyhow, there haven’t been particularly striking *new* developments regarding long running issues. There has been a school shooting today with at least one dead, but since we don’t know more beyond that the shooter was a 12-year-old, it’s hard to comment this beyond noting it as a tragedy.

To recoup the usual stuff:

·       Finland’s low fertility rates (1,28 last year – there are signs this year there might be some modest improvement) have been a national on/off topic for quite some time now. Finland’s newspaper of note, Helsingin Sanomat, dramatized this quite effectively last week with a story on how, in 2100, the amount of Finns (defined here as someone who has been born in Finland with at least one parent also born in Finland), might drop to as low as one million. By itself, the number is not the most important thing, as there has been a period in history when the population of Finland has been one million previously, too (somewhere around 1816-1817) – but rather the age structure, which wouldn’t be the same as in 1810s but rather heavily lopsided towards the pensioners, unless the fertility crisis is turned around or there’s considerably more labor-based immigration, which would then lead to its own issues.

·       Debate on whether pensions should be cut as a part of the government’s austerity process continues, as the government’s first social security cuts entered in force on April 1. These mainly cut housing benefits, leading to some fears of housing market – already extremely wobbly, with exceptionally new number of new housing projects on the agenda – being affected. The non-means-tested portion of the unemployment benefit, meant to allow small-scale part-time work while unemployment, is also being removed, presumably in hopes of getting people to take full-time rather than part-time jobs. It is hard to see how these might improve, for instance, the fertility issue.

·       The union strikes and the debate on cuts will probably continue for a good part of the year, if not the whole year. After the hopes for a settlement came to naught, the unions have extended their industrial strikes by a week. While there had been a promise that the strikes would this time not affect the lives of the ordinary people too heavily, the fuel prices have been edging up – of course embarrassing for government parties who had run heavily on bringing the high fuel prices down in 2023, but also potentially lowering support for strikers among the rest of the population.

·       The government continues to advance its Border Protection Act, designed to allow the so-called pushbacks – i.e. sending back asylum applicants at the border without taking them up for any processing in cases where it’s believed that a foreign power is attempting to utilize a flow of immigrants maliciously. It continues to be unclear how legal or constitutional this would be, though with a 5/6 majority (i.e. what is needed to change the constitution in a rapid process) anything could become constitutional. International treaties are a whole another issue, too. At least the President has endorsed it, though in the Finnish system, this doesn’t really affect the legislative process in any concrete way.

Image: Finns Party (the older generation) campaigning. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Finns_Party#/media/File:Perussuomalaiset_Hakaniemen_torilla.jpg

Many of the cuts will affect the health care system. Finland’s newly established “well-being regions” (regions used for the organization of health care) have, one after another, announced a considerable amount of healthcare station closures, with some of the smaller hospitals also being on the firing line. In many regions, extensive networks covering vast amounts of rural areas are being pared down to locations only being open in central cities, with the rest of the region being served by centers in the more prominent (i.e., 20,000 or so people) regional towns, central city suburbs, and, eh, “innovative solutions” for the rest of the municipalities.

The one thing not targeted for cuts in pensions – the Finns Party might not be as dependent on seniors for votes as the “old big” parties, but they also know that much of their middle-aged voter base will soon enough be on a pension. The one party daring to suggest such a thing is the Greens, whose latest proposal to pare the pensions down in some undefined way was shot down in flames. Whatever the case, it remains that the pension system, despite its insolvency, was not reformed in the 1990s (as in Sweden), which is one of the reasons why Swedish and Finnish budgets and debt situations differ.

UNION STRUGGLES CONTINUE: There is now a clear tendency in the air that various operators in Finnish society want the labor union clash to end. The Center Party, thus far relatively silent and useless in the opposition, has been bolstered by the comparatively successful showing in the presidential election and has now insistently demanded that the warring parties come to a compromise. Not being in the government or as connected from the hip to the unions as the left parties are, this is indeed something they can do more quickly than many other parties. The other opposition parties put up a vote of confidence in Employment Minister Arto Satonen, who survived easily.

The government offered the unions to “come to the negotiating table.” The unions, apparently warned in advance that this would have only included an opportunity to sign the proposed anti-union reforms as written, refused – and soon countered by issuing more walkouts. They’ve switched gears, moving from personal transit strikes, which have been directly visible in people’s lives, to industrial strikes, which have a more significant effect on the economy, already feeling the pangs of an oncoming recession (I have recently heard personally many stories about canceled projects and oncoming pre-firing negotiations).

Which, of course, is the intent; a strike is hardly worth much if it is felt nowhere. The economy has, after all, rarely been moved by Instagram influencers or vegan baristas deciding to go on a strike as a sector. There have been effects that the industrial strikes, including export industries and the transport sector, might affect the fuel supplies, but the unions have stated that this will not be the case. Recently, some signs have been evident that unions and the government might, after all, be willing to negotiate, but we’ll see.

LUTHERAN CHURCH AND SAME-SEX MARRIAGE: The Evangelical-Lutheran Church of Finland is by far the leading denomination in Finland and the closest there is to a “state church” (even if it no longer officially is one – most Finns still refer to it as “The Church”), has long been wracked by division between its liberal and conservative wings. This goes back decades – the original significant liberal cause was women in the priesthood (achieved in 1988); after that, the liberals have pushed for same-sex relationship acceptance, with the cause of the current moment being priests being able to bless same-sex relationships.

As far as I can see, the ELCF tacitly allows them to be blessed. At least the priests offering such blessings have not been punished, though this is still different from formalization. Now, ELFC, or its synod of bishops - has come up with a model that would allow “two views of marriage” to exist in parallel – i.e., that it’s between a man and a woman, and the one that it can also be between two men or two women, to coexist side by side, without much in the way of explanation on how this would, in practice, work in practice. The conservatives don’t like it since it’s an affirmation of same-sex marriage in principle; the liberals don’t like it since it still offers leeway for conservatives to operate. A typical ELCF compromise, in other words.

The most visible expression of conservative distaste is the country’s most famous conservative Christian, Päivi Räsänen, announcing she is considering quitting the ELCF. However, it is unclear what denomination she would join. There are many other Protestant alternatives, including “free churches” (non-denominational in American terms), Baptists, Adventists, and so on, as well as conservative Lutheran splinter denominations. There have recently been stories about newfound interest in Christianity among young men, so it is interesting to see how this trend might be affected.

IN OTHER NEWS, a rare female potential school shooter was arrested after publishing a manifesto with a bit of environmentalism and a lot of high school philosophy nihilism, Left Alliance leader Li Andersson is quitting party leadership in advance to run for European Parliament, and the new Finnish Security and Intelligence Service (Supo) head is a Finns Party member.

Image: Fiskars scissors, classic Finnish design. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fiskars-scissors.jpg

Some time ago back, I managed to finish Randy Shilts' And The Band Played On. In case you don’t know this book, it's about the early phases of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, starting from late 70s and ending in 1985 (the book was published in 1987, with Shilts himself learning that he had HIV only after finishing the book, and dying some years after).

The book was actually written very engagingly. It is no wonder it is probably still the best-well-known "popular" work on HIV/AIDS, something I had seen referenced dozens of times before actually reading it. So popular, in fact, that one of the things that I kept thinking about while reading was: how much has this book, in particular, affected how the world (over)reacted to Covid?

Let us go through some of the things Shilts talks about:

The one thing this book is probably the most famous for is its attacks on Reagan administration’s unwillingness to answer the pandemic right from the start, only belatedly getting into the game during the later phases when Surgeon General C. Everett Koop decided to take initiative on his own to send information on the pandemic to all Americans, recommend the use of condoms etc.

This was probably mostly due to Reagan’s general small government agenda and unwillingness to use federal funds for new efforts. Or maybe due to it being the 1980s in general, as Shilts basically portrays almost every public instance, not only the federal government but also states and cities, particularly New York, as slow to respond and uneager to spend money. On the other hand, during the Covid era, almost every government suddenly decided that money's no thing when it comes to saving lives, with many governments going quite deep in debt at least for a while.

The book is probably the second most famous for Shilts's anger against the 1980s gay community, particularly its unwillingness to admit that having a new, mysterious but fatal STD going on might meant limits on culture that encourages guys to have (unsafe) sex with huge amounts of other guys. A memorable topic is the battle by Shilts, some public health officials and a part of the gay movement to close the bathhouses in San Francisco and other cities.

Anyway, even though Covid and STDs are two very different things, much of debates about lockdowns did revolve around places like bars and other places where a lot of people (gay and straight) mingle. This seemed to include a moral aspect - sheer anger that people would be so selfish as to spread a disease just to have fun. Of course the devil-may-care, who-knows-if-it's-even-real, I'll-get-it-anyway attitudes like the ones expressed by number of subjects of ATBPO, like that of Gäetan Dugas, one of Shilts's villains, were denigrated as "plague carriers" and the like.

One now-forgotten public health narrative of the Covid era was that the monkeypox outbreak of 2022 might become an AIDS-like epidemic, but control was obtained reasonably quickly. Of course, the infrastructure and culture for keeping STD-like diseases has improved considerably post-AIDS, and so have the various cultural practices that might help provide soft landing on sudden STD-like epidemics.

Alongside the bathhouse narrative, Shilts concentrated on the blood banks, which become aware at a fairly early point that their blood is contaminated and poses a considerable risk to hemophiliacs and many others needing blood transfusions. Shilts blames the profit-seeking motive, which is also mentioned when talking about the bathhouses (whose owners often made stack and were moves and shakers in the local gay communities), and there's many cases where the blood bankers and bathhouse barons are shown willing to refer to high-minded ideals about privacy and freedom when they really just cared about not losing the revenue streams. Of course with Covid, states were quite willing to run over businesses, even letting some go under.

Shilts also shows the scientific community being unable to decide on a narrative early on, almost seemingly demanding that the scientists to have immediately converge on the correct narrative from the beginning, whether this was actually possible or not), and much energy being spent on, for instance, turf wars between European and American scientists on who actually found HIV and what to even call it.

With Covid, the scientific community often seemed conspicuously willing to go in lockstep and offer recommendations even with paltry knowledge on what happens, like with the "Covid-is-not-airborne/no-actually-it-is" twists and turns, or the early decision that lab leak is not possible and all suggestions on it would be conspiracy theory, something that might actually have been mostly just European and American scientists being unwilling to do anything that would prevent cooperation with Chinese scientists on this issue.

One specific figure fingered as a source for must misery in ATBPO is none other than Antonio Fauci, who made an early statement that AIDS might spread by touch in some situations, leading to massive panic and increasing considerably people's unwillingness to be in any contact or touch with AIDS sufferers.

Whatever Fauci's role with Covid was, it's pretty remarkable that after this AIDS debacle he still was the one who implicitly became the American pandemic czar, and I think one reason why he was so willing to take this role was the feeling that after his reputation being blackened by actions during one pandemic he now had the chance to repair it by tackling another one.

Where I felt Shilts was being the most unfair was the parts where he accused the authorities of just doing something wrong but then had multiple conflicting views of what they were doing wrong. Shilts blames the media for not reporting on HIV earlier and more aggressively, but many of the cases where media reported on it they seem to just have spread wrong views or caused panic; wouldn't earlier and heavier reporting just have led to more of that?

Again, COVID pandemic and its reprecussions are surely a topic that has enough material for whole libraries of analysis. Certainly it can't be just be explained by reference to AIDS history. If there’s some further reading on this, I’m always open for recommendations.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:AIDS_Memorial_Quilt#/media/File:AIDS_Quilt_at_the_National_Building_Museum_14081_(7617456936).jpg

LABOR MARKET STRUGGLE CONTINUES: I have written more on this topic for the People’s Policy Project so you can read more extensively what’s at stake there.

Thus far, the government has not budged. Its intent is not only setting heavy austerity measures, but also policies that would mean no longer negotiating with the trade union movement on legislation affecting labor matters, indeed, explicitly setting laws limiting the joint negotiation of wages, such as forbidding pay rises higher than those of the export sector industries.

Many prominent Finnish economists, and more moderate center-right politicians, have already sounded the alarm on the dangers of stability this struggle causes, especially considering the precarious situation in Europe regarding Russia. Nevertheless, the government’s intransigence implies it genuinely wishes to break the power of the labor movement for good, in accordance with the long-term wishes of the right wing and the business class.

Nevertheless, the strikes continue. Every now and then the buses and trains are out for few days, at least. The unions continue to have public support, even if the opposition’s challenge to the government on why the government refuses to negotiate with the unions did not succeed. The heightened general tone is evident from the Finns Party’s notorious Minister of Economic Affairs Wille Rydman calling the unions a mafia – a common charge among the Finnish right, indeed because the unions tend to be one of the few non-right-wing forces to get anything done.

SWEDEN JOINS NATO: Well, there are still a few steps on the way – but as the Hungarian parliament has assented to this joining, it is now expected that this will happen in near future, thus implicitly completing Finland’s NATO journey. The original intent was for Finland and Sweden to join together, but Finland then ended up joining before Sweden due to less complications related to NATO’s problem countries. Finnish decisionmakers justified this by stating they could best work to bring Sweden in from the inside, though it was always hazy what was actually being done to achieve this.

Sweden is a very traditional partner for Finland for cultural, geographic, and historical reasons (Finland having been a part of Sweden for centuries), but even more so, the armed capabilities of Finland and Sweden tend to complement each other. Finland has a strong army, particularly one of the largest artillery forces in Europe, the present war of course demonstrating very well the importance of artillery. Sweden, meanwhile, has a very pared-down army but a top-notch air force and navy, these also being quite important, as also ably demonstrated by the current war. Finland, then, is less proficient in those departments.

Meanwhile, in war-related news, Navalny’s death was commemorated by many in Finland (including many Orthodox churches holding memorial services for his memory), though some also made note of his less-than-pleasant statements on things like immigration and Crimea. In one of his last actions before relinquishing the presidency, president Niinistö joined other European leaders in saying that, contrary to how Macron’s statement has been interpreted, the West, Finland included, is not interested in sending troops to Ukraine. And, on that front, here is a story about the first Finn to die fighting there on Ukrainian side. (There has been a rare Finnish Donbass volunteer to have died earlier.)

SWEDISH PEOPLE’S PARTY TROUBLES: The People’s Party has chafed at times under the present government, though much more when the matters under debate were related to immigration than the present policy of austerity, which they share. Much of this has reflected on party leader Henriksson, widely considered to have brought the party to government and currently a minister, and her political fate. Thus far, it was considered likely that she would resign only after the European election, where she will probably be elected to the EP, but she recently announced that she’s stepping down in June in any case.

There will be several candidates for party leadership. The one announcing first out of bat was Alexander Adlercreuz, the x Minister, often considered the informal leader of the party’s liberal faction, a role he maintains by occasionally complaining in Twitter when the government does something not particularly image friendly. Other potential candidates, Otto Andersson, and Henrik Wickström, are not familiar to me apart from the name. Whoever wins, it does not seem likely to me that this will lead to large changes in governmental policy.

Meanwhile, in other political drama related to the European elections, the Swedish People’s Party’s chief governmental opponent The Finns Party refuses to let its current MEP Teuvo Hakkarainen on the list. While the given reason is Hakkarainen’s praise for Hungary’s Fidesz (something other Finns Party politicians, including the top ones, have in fact done in the past, but which is now not considered proper due to Orban’s pro-Russian stance), it’s also possible that the continually drunk Hakkarainen is just too much of a loose cannon, suitable for the previous populist iteration for the party, less so for the current doctrinaire nationalist one.

IN OTHER NEWS, it’s the disease season and this year an epidemic of scabies is causing problems for families, data-breaching hacker Aleksanteri Kivimäki was accidentally let loose and then recaptured and there was a bit of back-and-forth whether the Finnish Eurovision  entry would participate in the Eurovision due to Israeli participation. Many Finns have been shocked by a case a 4-year-old being tortured to death (in the area where I grew up, no less) going to courts and getting low sentences of 3 and 7 years for the parents who did it, though this is in line with Finland’s general sentencing practices.

Alexander Stubb was elected with 51,6 % of the vote; a margin that is not ultra-tight but a commanding one either, particularly considering that most polls for the preceding week had promised that he would get 56-54 % of the vote. Most likely result for the discrepancy was that many of the populist Finns Party voters, particularly in the countryside, jus plaint ended up staying home instead of voting between two pro-European liberal candidates they dislike, particularly bolstered in this decision by the chilly weather of the election day.

The margin was tight enough for many Haavisto supporters to decide that the main lesson is that Finland is still homophobic; if only Haavisto had been in a straight marriage or relationship, he would have been elected. This has been bolstered by a poll showing that 40 % of Stubb’s voters gave Haavisto’s relationship as one of the reasons why they voted for Stubb; jury is still out how important it ended up being, considering that half a year ago Haavisto was winning in polls quite handily, and surely his relationship status is old news now.

Many other discussions, too, have focused on Haavisto losing more than Stubb winning. Some have wondered if the refusal of left-wing parties to vote for Fins Party candidate Jussi Halla-aho to continue as the speaker of the parliament might have played a part. Some leftists think that what would have brought Haavisto over the finishing line would have been catering more to the left (unlikely; such catering would have just pushed the rightward supporters out).

I do not think this election was as much Haavisto’s to lose as Stubb’s to win. I, for one, had thought that Stubb was a political corpse, a dead man walking. However, it turned out that he had just been the correct time in the public eye for his previous failures to be forgotten – whereas previously he had been too interesting and exciting to succeed in Finnish politics (yes, this is possible in Finnish politics), now he could reinvent himself as a more of an elder statesperson/technocratic type. Such a figure is genuinely very appealing to many, even if it is not for me.

In the end, many of the people who voted for Niinistö in previous elections probably voted for Stubb simply for continuity; both came from National Coalition, after all, even if the president is not supposed to belong to parties, and in many ways the election was simply an exercise in replacing a conservative center-right politician with a more liberal one. While Niinistö has been mythologized beyond recognition since his election, he used to be more controversial before his election, such as during his position as a finance minister in the late 90s and early 00s, as Finland continued a strict budget line despite economic crisis having passed.

Similarly, while Stubb still arouses strong emotions in many – too European and cosmopolitan for many conservatives, too neoliberal for many leftists, not enough of either for the most hardened neoliberals – the presidency by its very nature is intended to make the president an “unifying figure”, not offering space for controversial decisions in internal policy and allowing the president to represent the entire country in external ones. That will, certainly, benefit Stubb, too.

Some have summarized it as “The biggest surprise was that there were no surprises”. Abroad, the most attention had been received by nationalist candidate Jussi Halla-aho, who had made a late spurt in the polls and did quite well, receiving 19 %. Olli Rehn, Centre Party candidate who managed to catch some buzz, also did fairly well compared to the sad state of his party (and a surprising amount of my friends, usually not a very Centre-party-friendly crowd, voted for him).

However, he was dwarfed by the main candidates, Alexander Stubb from National Coalition and Pekka Haavisto from the Greens (technically independent but who cares), advancing to the second round. The second round will be held in days, so the news has been full of debates between candidates. Such debates mostly appear to be intent on finding something, anything, particularly substantial to differentiate the candidates.

The most substantial question is whether, now that Finland is in NATO (both candidates support this, of course) she should accept nuclear weapons on her soil, with Stubb being rather more open to this idea. Nevertheless, Haavisto has not closed the door fully, either – to me, it would seem likely that if the US really wanted to push this issue, both would eventually accede.

Likewise, the supporters of the candidates are fast at work online. When it comes to issues, I’ve seen some Haavisto supporters go as far as to refer to election quizzes where, on a number of issues, Stubb says that he “somewhat agrees” with whatever claim, while Haavisto “fully agreed” with it. Of course, there are personal factors (ie. Stubb is straight and Haavisto is gay, Stubb comes from an elite background and Haavisto has an activist past etc).

This has become something of a local debate in the days preceeding the election, especially after a surprisingly large number of Stubb supporters – 40 % of them, this of course including a lot of conservatives who didn’t vote for Stubb in the first round – stated that one of the factors why they are voting for Stubb is Haavisto being in a same-sex relationship. I rather doubt *too* many of these would have voted for a Green candidate in the first place, either, though.

For the first time in my life, I've “voted empty” – went to vote, but not for either of the candidates. Not as a protest, but simply because this is the biggest Tweedledum and Tweedledee election I've seen in my lifetime; there's not much difference between the candidates expect in nuance (both are socially liberal, Atlanticist and Europhile), neither particularly causes me a feeling that I should vote for them, neither causes a feeling that I should vote for the other one to vote against them, neither causes much feelings at all.

What finally forced my decision was talking to a Haavisto campaign worker on the local marketplace. After I had discussed my feelings with her on this matter a bit, she said “well, if you feel that way, perhaps you should indeed vote empty” – this gave me a powerful feeling that if even the campaign workers can’t give me more justification than that, how could I do otherwise?

On the other hand, this is probably the perfect state of politics to be in anyway. In the 00s, “politics are boring” was almost a mantra in Finnish media, as the Finns Party had yet to rice and all the three main parties essentially agreed on the most important things – the market, the welfare state, EU, having some immigration but not too much, having some environmental laws but not too much etc. – with only nuances being somewhat different. This was also a time of heady economic growth and people having a positive vision for the future. Neither of the presidents will achieve that, of course. Who knows if anything will.

The Finnish president does not have as many duties as, say, the American president, but is not a completely unimportant figurehead, either. The president does have a status as a “values leader” to put forth their views on moral issues, though they are also supposed to be a national unifying figure, a democratically elected monarch. More importantly, they also represent Finland in foreign high-level meetings, such as the summit hosted by the current president Sauli Niinistö between Trump and Putin in Helsinki, 2018. I mean, that summit failed, but it was still a big opportunity for Finland!

In the recent times, the importance of the President is, if anything, heightened, as there’s a possibility the country might be at war within the next presidential term. Even though Finland would now be a part of a military alliance that would have joint command, the next President would assuredly have a role in keeping the nation together and promoting the Finnish cause abroad, Zelensky-style.

Since all the candidates have been playing it safe to present themselves as true successors to Niinistö, the race has been fairly bland. However, in the recent week or so, the race has been getting a bit of new electricity thanks to the rise of right-wing populist Jussi Halla-aho, one of the most notorious politicians in the country. It would be very unlikely to mean he becomes the president. His opponents fear that him even getting to the second round would bolster his anti-immigration, right-wing views in public debate. This has then led to new debates about tactical voting to prevent this, though it’s hard to say if this has led to anything beyond acrimony between other parties.

But it is the best to go through the candidates (there were several more who attempted to get on the ballet, mostly anti-NATO and/or antivaxx types, but they did not get the required 20 000 signatures to do so). They are presented in reverse order according to their current polling support.

HJALLIS HARKIMO (Movement Now)

What would you get if you had a Trump without sense of humor or a monopoly on his signature immigration issue? You’d get this guy, an egotistical millionaire former Apprentice host who briefly joined National Coalition, walked out in a huff due to not getting a post in the government, and organized his own largely ideologue-free party with the anodyne name Movement Now to advance… well, it’s unclear what is even driving him, besides a strong conviction that what Finland needs is him in charge. Now he is running for President, dropping wisdoms read from tabloids a day before in election debates, clearly anguished by his own unpopularity, his project going nowhere.

SARI ESSAYAH (Christian Democrats)

Sari Essayah, the leader of the Christian Democrats and the Agriculture Minister, is the kind of politician that other politicians, particularly from center-right parties, like to praise as sharp, argumentative and generally solid; probably because, since her party has a hard ceiling of 5 % in the polls due to its conservative Christian views out of sync with the secular Finnish society, she is very unlikely to present an actual threat to them. She will not break this ceiling in this presidential election, as there is no reason (foreign policy skills etc. – her most notable view is a pro-Israel stance that is bit too strident even for the pro-Western consensus) to vote for her – expect for the sort of moral leadership that a clear majority of Finns clearly does not want. Incidentally, one might say that Essayah is currently arguably the most important “politician of color” in Finland, as her father is Moroccan, though she’s almost never talked about this way.

MIKA AALTOLA (Independent)

Mika Aaltola is the only truly independent candidate in this race, i.e., not beholden to any party or endorsed by any party. As the leader of the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, the country’s chief foreign policy think tank, he got fame in 2022 as the country’s chief expert on foreign and security policy affairs. This was maintained by carefully enunciating the recent events of the war while looking handsome. This made him briefly look an attractive candidate for president, until he actually became one, opened his mouth, and started telling his own opinions, which most Finns quickly then considered too belligerent and otherwise weird even in the current heightened atmosphere. Lacking a party structure to maintain support he has then dwindled to almost nothing.

JUTTA URPILAINEN (Social Democrats)

The Social Democrats held the presidency from 1982 to 2012, 30 years in a row, and would usually be automatically a major force in the presidential elections. However, since the center-left vote has been dominated by Haavisto for three presidential elections now, there’s not much room for Social Democrats, and as such they have once again basically thrown a generally relatively competent politician (Urpilainen is a former Finance Minister and the current European Commissioner) out to do her duty for two months, get a few percent of votes and then return to her actual job. Her campaign has shown little interest of her wanting to be a president or believing she could be one, which of course is reflected in her low vote share.

LI ANDERSSON (Left Alliance)

I, personally, voted for Andersson for a simple reason  - I’ve been a long-time member of Left Alliance and Left Youth, I know her personally, she was even in my wedding, and even though I no longer belong to the party or really share the party’s views, how could I not vote for someone who was at my wedding? However, she’s not going to be the President – much like Essayah, her party has a hard ceiling (more than 5 %, perhaps 10 %) due to descending from Finland’s Communist Party, and in this election, she’s concentrated on presenting the leftmost currently plausible policy position regarding foreign policy, i.e. not directly opposing NATO but saying she’s opposed to placement of nuclear weapons on Finnish soil and criticizing the DCA treaty between Finland and the US, as well as saying Finland join the countries that demand a ceasefire in Gaza.

OLLI REHN (Technically independent, actually Centre)

If there is one attribute that most would attach to Olli Rehn, a longtime Centre party politician and former European Commissioner, it would be “gray;” if there was another, it would be “boring.” Finnish politics tend to be quite boring as a rule (being boring can often be a winning attribute), but few have the reputation for boringness and milquetoast centrism, even by the standards of his centrist (it is in the name!) party, like Rehn does.

A mildly liberal, pro-European type, his foreign policy opinions (or other opinions) really do not differ from the national consensus at all – but that might be a strength; surprisingly many of my acquaintances from a wide variety of ideological positions, who would not even think of the Centre Party in other elections, have voted for Rehn precisely because they feel that what Finland needs at this specific point is a boring president, someone who absolutely won’t rock the boat at all. If I hadn’t voted for Andersson, it’s quite likely this is the guy I’d have voted for.

Finally, the top three candidates:

JUSSI HALLA-AHO (The Finns Party)

Halla-aho, the former chair of the party and still the ideological influence, is the current Speaker of the Finnish Parliament and the author of any number of controversial quotes (one of which got him convicted of hate speech) and so on. I have written about Halla-aho many times, like here… but in this presidential race he belongs to the same category as all candidates on the most important questions, as his foreign policy views are well within the Finnish consensus and, if anything, more belligerent on Russia than the others.

While many other right-wing populist parties around Europe have taken a pro-Russian view, this doesn’t really apply to the Finns Party, and *definitely* not to Halla-aho, who has a long history of not only being against Russia but a genuine Ukrainophile; before his political career he’s actually been working on university-level study of Slavic languages and, among other things, can speak fluent Ukrainian and Belarusian, as he has done with politicians from those countries.

However, while it is more likely that goes to the second round than Rehn, it is still less likely that he will become the President. He’s got the widest unfavourability of all the candidates (i.e. almost half of voters absolutely won’t be voting for him), and even with the rest, many might suspect he won’t able to provide a sufficiently unifying figure for the people. Others worry that, in the event of a war, a country led by him would be far too easy by Russian propagandists to present as fascist. Still, being elected as the president might not even his goal; rather, his aim is the normalization of his views, and he has quite succeeded in this in many ways throughout the election campaign (and more extensively considering, for instance, how little pushback the Russian border closure has received).

PEKKA HAAVISTO (Technically independent, actually the Greens)

Haavisto, the former Foreign Minister who has been the also-ran candidate for two elections now, started off as a strong favorite. He still has an excellent chance of making it to the second round by once again cornering the center-left vote (as most Social Democrats will vote for him instead of Urpilainen), but will struggle to beat Stubb, the odds-on presidential favorite. One of the reasons might simply be that at this point he comes off as if he believes he is entitled to presidency – he’s fought for it in 2012 and 2018, all the papers wrote about how he’s the favorite, he has all these merits, It’s His Time.

Of course, there are also other reasons why this might not happen. Some conservative folks might still refuse to vote for Haavisto since he is the most well-known gay politician in Finland and in a relationship with a man. Most Finns won’t give a whit about that, but would still not vote for him in the second round (expect against Halla-aho), since he’s a Green. Greens are not currently at the height of their popularity due to their long history of anti-nuclear activism clashing with the current popularity of nuclear energy, or their historical pacifism not being in tune with the post-February-22-2022 pro-military attitudes.

Haavisto has tried to change these views through considerable amounts of pandering (such as demanding to close the border before the government did during the present border crisis), but still cannot get support from besides what has been called the “red-green bubble” – roughly 33 % of the population. We will see if – presuming he loses – he will continue running in the future elections; there is already a former foreign minister who has reduced himself to joke level through repeated quixotic campaigning.

ALEXANDER STUBB (National Coalition)

Finally, the odds-on favorite. Stubb, a former prime minister who has held a number of other high posts, is a well-known quality in Finland and abroad, the sort of a figure who has in the past even been mentioned as a potential European Commission president; some have questioned if he even wants the presidency, since it might represent a downgrade to his ambitions. However, he has been gunning for the post, and one of the signs is that he has self-consciously made himself more boring by wearing conservative clothing in interviews and talking in a simplified style; as said with Rehn, being boring is a positive in Finnish politics.

While Stubb is a garden-variety neoliberal by politics, a right-winger of the sort who will wave a rainbow flag rather than a national flag while making cuts, one distinguishing feature is that he’s probably the most “European” figure in Finnish politics in the very meaning of the word; it can well be questioned if he should even properly be understood as Finnish by nationality, rather than a Finnish and Swedish speaking citizen of a (yet-to-be-formed) European Federation.

This is not a particularly common viewpoint in Finnish politics. While Finns are moderately pro-Europeanism is still a no-no, but it’s not even properly understood, leading to Stubb making a number of surprising statements from a Finnish perspective, like saying that Ukraine has already won (considered almost flirting with the idea of an non-advantageous peace treaty) or saying that Europe should in fact not automatically support US in US/China spats, though it should support it most of the time – again, probably a pragmatic idea from a wider European point of view, but also one that doesn’t quite fit the current Finnish dogma of loyal obedience to US in all matters.

Anyway, whatever Stubb says and does, he’s still well-known, a good speaker, the sort of a guy who is electable simply because the media has worked for ages to make him electable, so he’s the most probable new president. We will probably know for sure in two weeks,

DEEP FREEZE: Right after the New Year Finland entered a period of cold temperatures, momentarily dipping under -40 C in the northernmost Finland. Southern regions saw a week of below -20 C temps in Southern Finland, as well. It’s been very snowy, too - most dramatically demonstrated by a 12-year-old boy and his mother killed by a rare avalanche when skiing. Finland is quite a bit colder than the rest of Europe but even so, the winters have tended to get warmer during the recent years. Temperatures like this, especially in sustained form, are still unusual.

What this also has meant was a jump in electricity prices, with prices momentarily hovering at 1-2 € per kWh (that’s right, full euros – if you were an electric heater with a large home, you could easily pay 40-50 € for one day’s use of electricity if you weren’t careful). In the current European situation, with the electricity crisis of early 2023 still in recent memory, any momentary jumps in price will of course lead to panic over the same situation returning – especially since the new nuclear plant, which Finland has relied on for a year, will be undergoing maintenance in March. Of course, as I wrote a year ago, a permanent resolution would require deliberate state planning.

It should be noted that even this cold weather has not completely stopped the refugee crisis, and there were some cases of individuals or small groups trying to push through the border at points that aren’t an entry point, ie. skiing through the forest. This has caused worries there’s going to be more of that when the weather gets warmer and the snows melt, but we’ll see. The issues of Russia/Ukraine war have generally aroused some angst of the possibility of an Ukrainian loss – something Zelensky specifically chose to warn Finland about.

HOSPITAL CUTS: The government’s big theme – apart from the war against the trade unions, which continues without any signs of things changing – has been austerity, but the workings of the Finnish system mean that it often takes quite a bit of time for actual cuts to percolate through in a way that affects peoples’ lives or is otherwise visible. Now this is happening for hospitals, or at least the initial steps have been taken. The bureaucrats at the Social and Health Care ministry have issued a long list of hospitals where services would be pared down a lot, including cutting out services like maternity ward from several of them, or ending round-the-clock service.

Of course, the government parties have already shot down several of these suggestions, but this is all a part of the usual game – it’s left to the bureaucrats of whatever ministry to draft out the initial harsh proposal so that the government can then magnanimously pare it down. It’s quite likely there are going to be some regional hospital pare-downs, and how they’ll fall will depend on how the internal horse-trading inside of the government goes. Presumably at least the Swedish-speaking areas will be spared – the Swedish People’s Party may not get much done, but this is the one thing they must handle, every time.

In any case, if anything, this should get the Centre Party – not the most anti-austerity party, by any stretch, but the party that has always fancied itself to be the party of smaller and less-inhabited regions, and a party whose voters these cuts are going to hurt – going. At the same time, many government parties – especially the ones with much of their support in the countryside, ie. all the others than the urbane National Coalition.

FBC DEFUNDING PROPOSAL: The Finnish Broadcasting Corporation (known in Finnish as Yleisradio, or Yle) has been a national institution for decades, still one of the main sources of news for Finns. For a long time, it has had a left-wing reputation compared to other medias, at least from the 1970s on, when the programming took a turn to the left during the leadership of Eino S. Repo (distant relation, incidentally). As such, it has been a long-time target for the Finnish right, chiefly the Finns Party.

Past Finns Party proposals have included limiting Yle’s editorial independence and specific complaints about specific programs, like “Pillupäiväkirjat” (“Pussy Diaries”), a feminist show about, well, you get the idea. The beginning of the year has revolved around the wish to defund Yle, as Jussi Halla-aho, the Finns Party’s presidential candidate, has suggested cutting away a quarter of Yle’s budget. It should be noted that this wouldn’t affect the government budget, since Yle, technically an independent state-owned corporation, is funded with a special, earmarked tax. Instead of budget cuts, thus, Halla-aho justified his demand by saying that Yle’s budget fosters nepotism and corruption.

Anyway, this has aroused a firestorm of criticism, as it is self-evident that one of the main reasons for these cuts is that Yle has been critical of the Finns Party – it’s arguable, of course, if it’s been critical of it in excess or just the normal amount, considering the many scandals associated with the party. Halla-aho got into an online spat with the chair of Yle’s board, Matti Apunen, assuredly not a leftist figur, and other Yle figures, as well. All of this, of course, is just a part of what has led to his recent rise in polls.

IN OTHER NEWS, basketball superstar Lauri Markkanen gets accolades, the saga of prosecuted politician Päivi Räsänen continues, and there’s been an on-off-again case against some kitschy paintings by celebrity Katariina Souri being accused of cultural appropiation against the Sámi indigenous minority (previously written about me here in other contexts).

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Winter_lapland.jpgv

PISA RATINGS: This one is from the first half of the month; I just forgot it from the last update.

In short, the new PISA rankings – measuring educational achievement – came out about a month ago, and while they are dire for all European countries, Finland suffered a particularly steep drop. Considering how large Finland’s prime position in PISA rankings in the 00s featured in the national consciousness, this is of course considered a huge national blemish on what used to be a point of pride.

Many explanations have been offered, from education cuts to the increased amount of immigrant students to smartphones to various classroom innovations, like open-plan-office style class spaces utilized in some schools. None of these exactly explains the speed of the drop. For instance, while the number of immigrant-background students has risen in Finland, this rise is not steep enough to explain, in turn, the steepness of the fall.

Few concrete suggestions beyond “more money” (which this government is unlikely to issue in sufficient amounts) and “ban smartphones” (already implemented in classrooms!) have been offered. Personally, I believe that this probably reflects trends that can’t be fixed just by fixing the school system; “smartphones” might come the closest – they’re probably even more ubiquitous in the online-obsessed Finnish nation than elsewhere – but they might also be a part of why the PISA scores were good in the first place, which is actually a more interesting a question than why they are dipping now.

COMEDIAN SUED: Iikka Kivi, a comedian who is perhaps more known for left-wing activism than for his actual stand-up comedy chops, has been sued by presidential candidate and Parliamentary Chair Jussi Halla-aho for defamation, for a tweet indicating that Halla-aho is a fascist. Kivi’s comments were made after Halla-aho’s visit to Ukraine, enunciating in English that whatever his accolades related to these trips are, he is nevertheless, as said, a fascist.

It is not particularly common for politicians to sue private citizens for defamation, so this case, however it is decided, would set a precedent. It is of course not uncommon for The Finns Party members, like Halla-aho to get branded fascists – just as they themselves brand their opponents as communists, traitors, anarchists and so on. And, indeed, fascists – Halla-aho himself had called deputy justice chancellor Mikko Puumalainen, a longtime target for the right-wing, a fascist comparable to Oskar Dirlewanger in a blog entry in 2006.

The most recent development is that Halla-aho has sued another figure – Aino Tuominen, a local politician from the Greens. Tuominen has defended herself by stating that she really meant “fascist” to be a neutral descriptor in a tweet that praised Halla-aho for supporting Ukraine.

PRESIDENTIAL RACE: The situation with the presidential race has stabilized, and we know who the candidates will be. A couple of minor anti-NATO/conspiracy-oriented candidates failed to get on the ballot as independents due to a lack of signatures, causing a bit of drama. The strongest of these, old heavy-hitter Paavo Väyrynen who has since been completely marginalized due to his pro-Russia stance, has sued the state to be allowed on the ballot, but with little chance of success.

The race is coming down to Pekka Haavisto (Greens) and Alexander Stubb (National Coalition). Despite one representing a center-left party and one a center-right one, both have been campaigning as centrist liberals, with Haavisto explicitly renouncing the left and answering conservatively to the common election compasses many (most?) Finns use to pick their candidates. Stubb is also taking a more realist route in this campaign, in comparison to his usual neoliberal idealism, such as by stating that when China and America are at loggerheads, Europe might benefit from taking China’s side from time to time.

The one candidate who could make a surprise bid for the second round is Jussi Halla-aho, who has featured in the news a lot lately (due to the above lawsuit, for example), but his appeal is most likely going to be limited outside of his own party circles, and even if he gets on the second round, all the polling indicates he’d face a crushing loss there. The rest of the candidates seem destined for the also-ran category.

DCA TREATY: The most consequential foreign policy news is the signing of the Defense Cooperation Agreement (DCA) between Finland and United States of America. The countries are already formal allies due to NATO membership, but DCA is a bilateral treaty deepening this cooperation and opening Finnish military bases for American use. In some sources this has been portrayed as the US actually constructing new bases in Finland but considering that one of the locations specified in this treaty is my hometown’s airport (which also doubles up as a military aviation field), I kind of doubt they are going to just tear that down to construct a new base on top of it.

The motivation for this treaty – which grants Americans extensive privileges about their sections of bases, as is the usual custom – for Finland should be obvious; the American troops are meant to serve as a tripwire, something to confirm that if Finland faces a Russian attack America has skin in the game. There is other sort of training synergies, as well. Some localities might hope that American troops might bring in extra commerce – and that the sort of grave problems associated with American troops elsewhere do not turn up.

Russia, naturally, is not happy about this, but then again, there is not a lot of things that Finland has done that Russia would be happy about. Russians have announced they have summoned the Finnish ambassador about this, but Finland has countered by saying that it was Finland who summoned the Russian ambassador about the border situation. The border, incidentally, was reopened and closed soon again for until the next year.

In other news, more strikes have taken place (and will take place), and new population numbers continue to show low births and high immigration.

Image: Fireworks in Helsinki, 2016. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:New_Year_2016_in_the_city_of_Helsinki.jpg

Anyway, it’s now about halfway through December, and here’s what’s been going on for the first half of the month, apart from the border closure (where the government very briefly opened the border again just to shut it almost immediately afterwards since the refugees kept coming in):

-        The government’s austerity agenda proceeds, with the Finance Ministry threatening extra cuts for Chrismas. Some of the latest implemented ones are cuts to housing benefits and the lowest ground-floor subsidy for those still lacking money for essentials even after the other benefits have come in. Literal cuts to the poorest, in other words. Also notable was the committee fight of the to stop welfare cuts by the Social and Health Care committee chair Krista Kiuru (Social Democrats), the last government’s families minister who became notorious for being a Covid hardliner, but who – even before this – had a reputatation for being being a hard negotiator with an iron arse. While Kiuru appears to have delayed the decisions a bit, she eventually relented and the cuts could proceed, but she has certainly demonstrated her potential to hinder the government’s processes in other cases.

-        Apace with the austerity agenda there is the government’s struggle with the unions, with the unions organizing another semi-general strike on Thursday, this time stopping the trains, most buses, things like school catering and so on. What the unions want the most, at this phase, would be a place at the negotiation table – something that Finnish governments have traditionally given them when it comes to labor market reform. However, Labor Minister Arto Satonen has stated this would be like negotiating with the agricultural producer’s organization on farm matters or the chief natural protection org on green matters. These, of course, would be something that farmers and environmentalists would also respectively desperately desire...  

-        Some time ago the Finnish border guard caught Yan Petrovsky (now going by name Voislav Torden), a militant of the Russian volunteer battalion Rusich and a known Nazi, accused of war crimes in the Ukrainian War. The Ukrainians have been demanding his extradition, but now the Finnish authorities have decided that he cannot be extradited due to the conditions of the Ukrainian prisons and that they want to investigate him for the war crime charges themselves. Of course the Ukrainians are unhappy with this, and so are many Finns, as Torden would assuredly receive a harsher punishment in Ukraine (an unmarked grave, possibly) than whatever the Finnish authorities would implement.

-        The president’s independence day ball happened on the Finnish independence day, December 6. In addition to the traditional focus on the guest’s suits and dresses, a lot of particular attention was paid to what the ex-PM Sanna Marin would be wearing – this tasteful dress with a clear Ukrainian flag influence, that would be – and what the Eurovision almost-winner Käärijä would have on (this gothy creation.) However, what the presses ended up writing the most was that one of the guests ended up shaking hands with the presidential pair *two* times and it was initially unclear who he even was (he turned out to be some minor Salvation Army type). The media focus on the “double handshaker” in the midst of drama in Ukraine and Gaza and who knows where was taken as evidence of deep unseriousness of the Finnish media.

-        As is also the tradition, the independence day was marked by far-right marches – more moderate and presentable 612 march and the openly radical Finland Awaken! with several Nazi speakers – and, as is tradition, these were counter-protested by a medley of anarchists, communists and other antifascists. This year, the police treated the antifascists quite strictly and the far-right marches seem to have processed with minor disruption, and the antifascist march was marred by a scuffle between anarchists and a small looney tunes Maoist sect. There was also a pro-Palestine protest at the traditional Independence Day Helsinki Cathedral church service.

-        Alan Wake 2 from the top Finnish gaming studio Remedy won awards, files on Lee Harvey Oswald’s stay in Finland were declassified, a minor feminist celebrity was busted for plagiarism and had to leave her post as the editor of the journalists’s union newspaper.

Image: a more typical (non-far-right) student’s independence day parade, from 2015. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Finnish_Independence_day_2015_02.JPG

However, what about the border crisis? That certainly featured even in foreign news for a while, and it’s that the recent minor asylum crisis at the Finnish-Russia border and the subsequent border closure were tied to the event is uncontroversially tied to the War in Ukraine, naturally something that has dominated Finnish and European foreign policy and the related things since February 2022 (even before that, in fact).

The foreign event that this one resembles the most happened, however, already in 2021. Those who paid attention to things not related to viruses and vaccines in that year might remember a crisis at the Baltic/Belarus borders; numerous refugees attempted empty to Europe and where, in many cases, physically pushed out by border guards, with tacit acceptance from the European authorities.

At this time already it was considered likely that the refugee entry was a connivance by Putin and Lukashenko to assess the willingness of EU to take in refugees, whatever the situation. As such, it was a part of the long drumbeat preceding the Ukrainian invasion.

Almost immediately after February 2022, Finland started a process to enter NATO. At this time there were widespread speculations that Russia would being “mischief” (a literal translation of the rather odd term “kiusanteko” that has become standard in Finnish media to refer to low-level below-warfare ops) to prevent NATO membership, but despite all the fears that Russians might, for instance, occupy some uninhabited hill to create a fake territorial conflict, there was a fairly restrained reaction from the Russian authorities to this process. Until the actual membership happened, that is.

In September 2023, as a part of the attempts to shore up the sanctions regime and as a part of a tit-for-tat diplomatic spats, Finland started restricting the entry ofv Russian private cars for import and soon after that started limiting tourist visas. In October, as a response, Russia declared the border treaty to have ended. Soon after that, the refugees started arriving.

The Russian claim is that it is a natural consequence of the border treaty being ended, but whatever the case, there have still been heavy signs that the Russians have encouraged and facilitated this migration through online channels or more drastic means, such as allowing people without proper documentation to pass through Russia.

And, in any case, the same happening in 2021 with Belarus and Poland/Lithuania – with Lukashenko just about openly stating that it is a part of a process of punishment for these countries for not pushing Ukraine towards a treaty with Russia – would indicate the same.

Anyhow, after the numbers of refugees had crossed some hundreds and the government quickly concluded that there would be larger and larger numbers coming, it reacted with a progressive closure of border points – first the southernmost four border points (i.e. the ones actually used by most people, including those coming from St. Petersburg or Petrozavodsk, then all but one (Raja-Jooseppi on the bare frozen North), and finally, after getting indications that this was possible, Raja-Jooseppi as well, closing physical entry from Russia for two weeks.

Technically, if one wishes to cross the freezing forest (in parts not covered by the new Finland-Russia border fence) and then got to the authorities, they could still want asylum. This is, as one might guess, quite difficult, and the border entries have stopped (though they had already fallen to low single digits during the one-passing phase). The current permitted method of seeking for asylum is entering through a port or an airport, neither of which necessitates entry from Russia anyhow.

This happened slightly haltingly at first – the government wanted to close the entire border from the get-go but could only do it after getting a sign from the Chancellor of Justice that it is possible, after the Deputy Chancellor of Justice had indicated that one closing would have to be left open. It escapes me what the genuine difference between these was, considering both positions were clearly intended to make trying to get asylum as hard as possible, but there you go.

There are currently no indications as to whether this would be continued after those two weeks. It would depend on what happens at that time – if the refugees start trickling in again, well, the pressure would be great to close the borders again and do it for a longer time.

This pressure would, of course, most affect the nationalist Finns Party, many of whose supporters were hopping mad that the party didn’t close the border immediately, junk all treaties and preferably directly indicate that yes, it will allow asylum seekers to freeze in the snow if need be.

In any case, most Finnish sectors feel that what the government is doing is correct. The parties in the government certainly agree, yet the largest opposition parties – the Social Democratic Party and the Centre – have also given their unqualified support.

The Greens support the line in a more qualified manner and some of their politicians have been critical, yet it’s only the Left Alliance, the leftmost party in the parliament, which has really offered tendentious criticism as a party. Even then it is unclear what the Left Alliance would do differently.

In pre-closure polling 75 % of Finns indicated they support closing the entire border and a third indicated that they do not consider humanitarian treaties something that always needs to be followed. Whatever small demonstrations have taken place have been organized by Russians living already in Finland.

This all, of course, goes to show that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has changed the national attitude quite rapidly and concretely. It is far easier to stop the entry of refugees when one can. Yet there are other factors, as well. I can’t help but think about how Covid era, inasmuch as people want to forget it, offered one example of how quick and easy it is for governments to actually close the borders and prevent entry in case of an emergency – and it’s been very easy to extend this from a pandemic emergency to other sorts of emergencies if need be.

The European union has given its unqualified support for the Finnish line, including sending in extra Frontex guards. This is of course a natural extension of EU’s general anti-Russian position, but also probably reflects a desire to avoid another 2015 situation.

During the 2015-2016 crisis, in fact, there was about a thousand of crossings to Finland from the Russian side, though at this point this was not usually considered a hybrid operation (mostly since there were far more coming from the Swedish side). While the Crimean invasion and all that had happened, the relations between Finland and Russia had not been completely cut off yet, and the Finnish state negotiated a treaty with Russia whereby Russia would prevent entry from third-party nationals, expect those from Belarus.

While there has been much speculation on what Russia’s motivation is, I would guess one of the main motivations would be for Finland to reopen direct negotiations with Russia, just like in 2015-2016. It remains to be seen if the two-week closure helps much after it ends, or if the same rigmarole repeats itself again. If the crisis becomes drawn out and extended, I would not be surprised if there were not eventually figures pushing for such negotiations, especially if the current trends of West slowly mentally detaching itself from Ukraine continue. We will see soon enough.

Image: Bing, “Finland Russia border in the winter”

The seekers arrive, or at least claim to arrive, from a variety of traditional asylum-seeker countries, like Syria, Afghanistan and so on. If such asylum applicants manage to pass the border, they can still apply for asylum in the normal order. Finland can, of course, handle some hundreds of asylum seekers, as has arrived now, but if the numbers start reaching tens of thousands – and that’s the fear of what happens if something is not done – then it’s a whole other question.

Such troubles at European borders are nothing new. Everyone remembers what happened in 2015 in the Mediterranean and Balkans, but even before the war in Ukraine, there was the Belarus-Poland border crisis of 2021, also widely suspected to involve a plot by Lukashenko and Putin to cause chaos within the EU. That crisis actually still continues, though not at the same acute level as in 2021.

The Finnish government, which has to balance national security issues with the international treaties that at least technically demand a real possibility of seeking asulum, has responded to the situation by first closing all southeastern border entry points and later by closing all others too - expect one. The one border closure, Raja-Jooseppi, is already pushing temps under -10, so this is a clear attempt to simultaneously in the rather inaccessible far North of Finland. Clearly the wish is to not get anyone there – while offering the technical possibility of entry for the ones that do.

This is actually the method of operations indicated by the new borders law passed the previous center-left government, which probably explains why the previous government’s main party, Social Democrats, have given their unequivocal support for the actions and even the more pro-immigrant Left and Greens are at least quite careful in their criticisms. It still remains unclear how effective all of this actually is, though the entries seem to have abated at least somewhat.

An attempt to just be done with it and close the entire border and/or limit asylum seeking to Helsinki-Vantaa airport (ie. Finland’s main airport) was shot down by the Deputy Chancellor of Justice (ie. the top civil servant in charge of monitoring whether the government’s actions follow the law) Mikko Puumalainen. Puumalainen has already been notorious among Finns Party members for various lawsuits aimed at them during the previous parts of his career, so this wasn’t taken lightly – but when such a civil servant says that what the government does is illegal, there’s little the government can do beyond changing their own course of action.

Russian authorities have, of course, protested the border closure and indicated unspecific “countermeasures”, though that’s pretty much to be expected. A number of Russian immigrants in Finland have protested the borders closure, arousing predictable reactions about them being on the wrong side of the border if they wish to protest such a thing.

Meanwhile, pro-Ukrainian groups brought a destroyed Russian tank to the Helsinki centre for show. This appears to have, strangely enough, aroused as much ire among Russians – both those living here and the Russian authorities – as the borders closure. Some Russians have brought flowers to place at the tank, pro-Ukrainians then take the flowers away.

IN OTHER NEWS, Christian Democratic MP, who had been on trial for speech charges, again had those charges thrown out, this time by the Court of Appeals, and Finnish-Canadian fashion entrepreneur Peter Nygård was convicted of sex abuse charges. The field of candidates with any actual chance in the presidential elections is complete with Social Democrats formally nominating EU Commissioner Jutta Urpilainen.

Image: Raja-Jooseppi border entry point. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Finland-Russia_border#/media/File:Ven%C3%A4j%C3%A4-kyltti.jpg

Of course, all of this sounds like some heady stuff, but even before this there have been connections to the Nazi/heathen/Satanic Order of the Nine Angles (“O9A”), and that’s what we’re also apparently talking about here. O9A has been internationally connected to a great number of planned and actual crimes, both terrorist attacks and other stuff, so it’s not a completely far-fetched story. Finland does have a previous history of Nazism and Satanism being connected, from the notorious 70s Nazi leader Pekka Siitoin to the modern NSBM scene.

“Maisteri” has denied all connections to terrorism and has indicated that the suspected sacrificial plannings and such are just a part of research book for a fictional book. This is of course always a possibility – folks have done stranger stuff in the course of writing fiction – but he has at least left a considerable paper trail on the Internet showing at least considerable knowledge of O9A ideology and occultism, as well as support for accelerationism and heavy, deep-set elitism and far-right opinions in general.

What has also received attention is that the “Maisteri” is connected to the Finns Party. A number of other terrorism suspects also have a history in the party but have clearly been low-level actors who have left on their own volition, while “Maisteri” appears to have operated within the party as an expert/writer until very recently. The party has indicated that he’s no longer a member and has issued some general condemnations of the terrorists, but is otherwise keeping mum – which isn’t surprising, since this is hardly something the party wants to bring attention to.

COVID WAVE 2023: Yes, it’s 2023, and Covid is still a topic in Finland. The country’s been gripped by a fresh wave (our family went through it two weeks ago), but there’s been a fresh autumn-to-winter wave all around the country. Now, it seems to be subsiding, but it still, at least for a time, burdened the health care system like in the “old days” and thus led to news headlines. Apparently, this is the “Eris” variant that’s been spreading for some time now and causes mostly flu-like symptoms.

As such, there have been fresh demands that the government should do something – while some magazines have even gone as far as to bring up new restrictions and mask mandates (I’m not sure if such have been discussed anywhere else, even in the tabloids). However, most criticism has revolved around vaccinations and the Covid medication Paxlovid not being offered more and fast enough – it’s very unlikely that anything more than that would be enacted, and while I’m seeing somewhat more masks than previously, they’re hardly common. Hand sanitizer sales are down, as well.

Still, the government and the medical establishment have approached this cautiously, reminding people that the current recommendations for Covid are largely like influenzas at large. What seems to have particularly annoyed the remaining zero-Covid diehards was the announcement of Mika Salminen, the Covid-era “Covid czar” (i.e. the most familiar face to Finns bringing in medical analysis, similar to Anders Tegnell in Sweden or Antonio Fauci in US) as the new head of the public health authority THL. While Salminen never quite took Tegnell’s famously hand-offline, he has been associated with Finland’s careful policies regarding vaccine distribution and by modest criticisms of lockdown policies.

IN OTHER NEWS, there were large protests against demanding a Gaza ceasefire in Helsinki (gathering 2,500-3,000 people, a decent number for a Finnish protest) and also in other cities, like my hometown Tampere, and there were also protests at the Finnish parliament, disrupting a parliamentary session to demand a ceasefire. Nevertheless, Finland recently announced a purchase of a new Israeli missile defense system – already agreed in principle by the previous government, but surely something that will be understood as at least tacit support for Israel’s offensive in this situation. The annual day of publishing everyone’s tax information (with the incomes of the richest being reported on national media) caused the predictable reactions of how this reflects envy in the Finnish society.

Image: Bing Image Creator, with the prompt “Sacrificial Altar in Finland”.