The assault on the library.
A couple of months ago, a new book about right-wing radical groups was published in Finland. Two of the three authors are active politicians in the Left Alliance (Vasemmistoliitto) and thus there are a lot of people who are for political reasons questioning the book as a source of information. However, the book has been greatly praised even by non-socialist experts. They might not have agreed upon every conclusion of the authors, but they were generally quite satisfied with the information and facts provided.
As regards the right-wing radicals themselves, they’ve lost their self-control altogether as their secret machinations have now been disclosed. To start with they couldn’t really give any feedback other than ugly words and curses. Now things seem to have changed. When the book was being discussed by a meeting at the city library in Jyväskylä, a university city in the very heart of Finland, three or four young men attacked the place wielding big knives. Policemen didn’t come quickly enough, even though they were immediately called. One of the stewards defending the meeting was badly stabbed, but when it turned out that another steward had been carrying a telescopic baton – which you need a licence for in Finland – police and media interpreted the incident as a conflict between two different groups of extremists.
The outcome was thus a propaganda triumph for right-wing extremists in the eyes of the nation. The average reader of newspapers didn’t perceive the library assault as a threat to his own security, but as something that does not concern him at all.
Obviously, both police and media still need to learn how dangerous today’s right-wing radicals are, although a year-and-a-half have passed since Anders Behring Breivik did his crime in Norway. Of course, for scores of years these kinds of radicals have been a joke. Twenty years ago one young man with this kind of ideological connections did attempt to hijack a plane, but as he had no firearms, he had to resort to what he called the “hypnotic-magnetic stare” of his eyes. The captain of the plain obviously wasn’t impressed, but since then the “hypnotic-magnetic eyes” of the extreme rightists have been an everyday joke in Finland. Now, alas, they seem to have weapons more tangible.
It seems that the assault was the work of a group calling themselves Suomen Vastar-intaliike, the Finnish Resistance Movement. They have already become known as terroristically inclined, but this is the first time they have really stabbed someone; a couple of years ago one of them attacked a homosexual parade in Helsinki with tear gas. It is safe to say that they are a neo-Nazi movement, and they do not bother to state otherwise on their web pages. They are even quite openly anti-Semitic, which is not particularly common in Finland, not even among right-wing loonies, and it shows they are heavily influenced by foreign allies.
The relationship of the Resistance Movement to other right-wing radicals is not always friendly. As regards the party of the True Finns (Perussuoma-laiset), a radical nationalist party represented in the Finnish parliament, it is ‘officially’ frowned upon by the Resistance as a bunch of traitors and sell-outs. On the other hand, some of the True Finns are quite happy to flirt with the Resistance. Although the chairman of the party, Timo Soini, frequently asserts that he does not allow racism or other ideologies of hatred in his party, it is difficult to trust him because in practice his party has turned into a zoo of political monsters, who are allowed to have close contact with terrorists who do not at all acknowledge the rule of law.
Panu Höglund is an Irish speaker from Finland currently translating a number of books from English into Irish.
