Why is the Finnish Government suddenly enacting a Holocaust Denial ban?

I have made some previous updates about Finland’s new right-wing government, which includes a nationalist anti-immigration party, the Finns Party, as well as about the ongoing racism scandal after it turned out that some of the ministers from that party had a history of racist comments, having even played around with Nazi implications. Read this, this or this for more context.

For some time, actual survival of the government has hinged on the government making an anti-racist statement to provide clarity to the racism scandal. This has been demanded by Swedish People's Party, the most liberal and pro-minority (chiefly their own Swedish-speaking minority but also other minorities, generally speaking) party in the government.

The vaunted statement was published this week. You can read the whole statement here, if you wish. Predictably, it was a damp squib. Mostly it just contains platitudes, basic repetition of already-existing laws and parts of the government’s program. It is replete with promises to "launch programmes", "improve dialogue", "strengthen" already-existing things, and so on. Anyone who has followed politics to any degree knows the value of such statements, ranging from very little to nothing.

Many parts are obviously intended to placate Finns Party, such as new campaigns against honor violence, gang violence and so on, as well as a promise to investigate banning Communist symbols alongside with Nazi ones. The last one presumably means hammers and sickles, rarely seen anywhere outside of few Maoists in left-wing demonstrations, but then again so are the red-white-black flags of the NSDAP, apart from this particular instance.

Whatever the statement’s weaknesses, those are beside its main purpose; allowing everyone involved to save face sufficiently to keep the government going on, so that it can get on to doing the other tasks that the governing parties wish to accomplish, i.e., implement a neoliberal economic policy and tell the wrong sort of immigrans to GTFO.

However, the one concrete detail that has aroused discussion, including abroad, has been a promise to criminalize Holocaust denial. While Holocaust denial has been criminalized in several other European (and other countries), Finland has not followed suit – until now. Previous Finnish governments have actually resisted demands by institutions like EU to do so, chiefly on the basis that antisemitic acts could already be charged under ethnic agitation laws if need be.

In practice, Holocaust denial is rare in Finland. There have been only a couple of cases that have seen court action. The Holocaust in general is not as important in Finnish discourses as in many other countries. That doesn’t mean there is no antisemitism – it has existed historically and does exist today. It simply has never become as important a defining force for Finnish extreme nationalism as in many other countries, a considerable number of other groups coming up before the Jews in the hate lists.

Finland has had a tiny Jewish community, staying stable at maybe a few thousand for over a century. During WW2, Finland deported eight Jewish refugees to Germany but otherwise did not follow German demands to relinquish the country's small Jewish community. Jewish soldiers fought on the front while Finland participated in Operation Barbarossa, with three Jewish Finnish soldiers even being offered the Iron Cross by the Germans, who had troops in Lapland.

One reason for the comparatively less attention being paid to Holocaust than in many other countries is that Soviet crimes loom so large in public imagination. Thus far, for instance, while other European countries have commemorated Holocaust Remembrance Day, Finland has had a “Remembrance Day for the Victims of Persecutions", and the local press often uses this day to talk about Soviet persecutions, like the Soviet ethnic campaign against Finns in the 1930s. The antiracist statement includes a promise to change this to make Holocaust Remembrance Day an actual Holocaust Remembrance Day, something that might be more consequential in real life than the Holocaust Denial ban law.

One of the parties to have actively demanded Holocaust denial criminalization and advocated strong actions against antisemitism are the Christian Democrats, a small socially conservative Christian party, which is firmly pro-Israel and based on evangelical movements that often subscribe to dispensationalist theology.

Christian Democrats are also currently in the government after a 20-year break (edit: 8-year break, actually, forgot their participation in 2011-2015 for a moment), and as such it might be surmised that the actual Holocaust denial ban proposal has come from them. It should be noted that this comes at the same time as the free speech trial of Päivi Räsänen, one of their politicians, which has also aroused international attention, grinds on.

Whoever the originator is, the proposal was evidently not that hard for the Finns Party to accept. It is not related to the party’s main issue - immigration - and some of the party’s politicians have a history of offering soft support to Israel simply on the basis that the Finnish Left is quite reliably pro-Palestinian. Whatever grumbling there has been as mostly been on free speech basis, but as shown above, the concept of ‘free speech’ tends to often be highly instrumental in Finnish politics.

I do not expect the Holocaust denial ban to be particularly consequential, since it criminalizes something that has very rarely happened anyway and which could presumably already be banned under other laws. Indeed it’s not even clear that the whole proposal will pass yet, since there’s nothing concrete on the table and any concrete attempt at legislation would have to pass constitutional review, along with the ban on Nazi and Communist symbols – and that’s where both such proposals might well get stuck.

The most obvious reason for it precisely because it is not much of a topic here and largely inconsequential and thus excellent for what, in the end, amounts to virtue-signaling behavior. It might even lead to a slight increase in Holocaust denial, simply since there already a conspiracy theory community suspicious of anything the government does who might be expected to go "If it's banned there must be some truth to it, eh?" Which has never been a good argument for, well, anything, really, but there you go.

Image: Countries with Holocaust denial ban laws on the books, not including Finland yet.