Finnish News Recap, week 30: Return of the Tiitinen List edition

IT GOES ON AND ON: The racism scandal came roaring back last week, as Helsingin Sanomat, Finland’s newspaper of note, published racist private messages sent by Wille Rydman – the current Interior Minister from The Finns Party.

Wille Rydman, as stated in a previous update, used to be in National Coalition, the center-right leading party of the government. Indeed, before he was an MP he led the party’s youth organization, also taking the organization’s line considerably rightwards. However, two years ago, Helsingin Sanomat revealed that he has been accused of grooming and even rape by several young women who used to be in the organization.

At the center of these claims was one of the girlfriends, Amanda Blick, who became the public face of the claimants. Rydman has accused Blick and the others of conspiring against him. The police investigated the grooming claims but eventually decided that there was not enough material to sue Rydman. Rydman has countersued Helsingin Sanomat for defamation, with this suit being allowed to recently go forwards to the courts.

Now Blick has delivered Helsingin Sanomat records of her private relationship-era conversations with Rydman, seven years ago, when Rydman was already a MP. These include responding to Blick’s suggestion of Immanuel as a potential future baby name with “Us Nazis don’t like kike names like that”, using racist lingo against Arabs and black people and absolutely blowing a gasket at Blick having liked a FB pic of a half-Arabic member of the youth organization.

While there’s been a wide condemnation of Rydman’s actual comments, there’s also been much discussion on making politics on private messages within the context of a relationship. It’s not illegal, of course, as a person receiving messages has the right to publish them, and Helsingin Sanomat justified this with Rydman’s high political status.

In the short run, this is unlikely to result in anything. Just one more racist incident in the new government’s record. However, it’s also unlikely that private communications would be sufficient reason to immediately bring down the government. We shall have to wait until autumn to see how the government will deal with votes of confidence and such.

RETURN OF THE TIITINEN LIST: The furor on the previous topic soon segued to one of the eternal topics of Finnish politics and historiography: the so-called “Tiitinen list”. Again, this requires a bit of context.

While Finland never became a so-called people’s democracy, she still spent the Cold War close to the Warsaw Pact. After the Soviet Union, the closest contacts were probably with GDR, the German Democratic Republic, also known as East Germany. This was partly due to the idea of GDR as the most advanced and efficient socialist country, but also reflected a longstanding tradition of Germanophilia in Finland, starting from the adoption of Luther’s doctrines – perhaps even previous to that.

Cultural cooperation between GDR and Finland often happened under the watch of Stasi, the East German version of the KGB. In 2002 Seppo Tiitinen, the then-director of The Finnish Security and Intelligence Service (Supo), Finland’s intelligence agency, revealed that in 1990 the agency had received a list of Finnish figures who had cooperated in one way or another with Stasi agents.

However, the actual *contents* of the list remain unclear, as Tiitinen – and Supo – have not budged on revealing the list, which is in a safe somewhere. According to Tiitinen, the list mainly contains mostly unknown figures like researchers and such, and being on the list does not indicate any crimes. Indeed, many of the participants would presumably be unwitting and not aware that their contacts were, in fact, Stasi.

Still, the list has attained the status of a quasi-mystical object, especially in the imaginations of Finnish right-wing boomers, who believe that their political enemies, particularly former left-wing president Tarja Halonen and equally left-wing former foreign minister Erkki Tuomioja, both figures already active in the 70s, must be on the list.

Thus far Supo has held firm against all suggestions of publishing the list, such as by the ministers of the current government, by saying that it’s not an intelligence agency’s business to put random private citizens under implication without a proper reason. The list has been set to be kept under lock until 2050, by which time it would be likely that everyone on the list is dead.

While this whole topic has partly served as a (successful!) distraction from the government’s issues, it also reflects longstanding discourses in Finland connected to the Cold War. This particularly pertains to the idea of Finlandization as an omnipresent, still-existing weight on Finnish society (and with the NATO membership, for many, serving primarily as a vehicle to cast away these remaining shackles) and the need of a local “lustration” to get rid of it.

In other news, the unions fire first warning shots against government’s plans to bring down labor laws, Coldplay continues to be surprisingly popular in Finland and the birth rate continues to reach new lows.

Image source: The Tiitinen List is in under lock and key somewhere, though probably not in this lockbox. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a3/Tiny_lockbox.jpg/800px-Tiny_lockbox.jpg