Finnish News Recap, week 45: Ritual Sacrifice edition
RITUAL SACRIFICE? There have been police investigations on Nazi terrorism going on for a long time, and last weeks have certainly introduced a new twist. One of the persons fingered for potential connections to terrorism is an unnamed (and I won’t name them here) person the news called “Maisteri” (i.e. a “master”, a master’s degree holder), a Satanist accelerationist who has participated in terrorist planner chats to get them to commit acts of terror for their own nefarious reasons. The police are even suspecting the “Maisteri” might have made plans for a ritual human sacrifice.
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”.