An Outside View/Léargas Taobh Amuigh
The first public polemic of the year in Finland was about racism – who could be surprised? Shortly before New Year's Day, Helsingin Sanomat, the biggest newspaper of the country, published a column by Umayya Abu-Hanna, a Palestinian-born woman who came to Finland 30 years ago as a 20-year-old. Abu-Hanna was quite well known in Finnish public life during all those years: as a politician of the Green Party, for instance. Now, though, the atmosphere in the country has become so virulently racist that she had no alternative but to leave Finland.
What disturbed her more than anything was the way her African adopted daughter was treated. She said that she had already got accustomed to all kinds of insults from Finns, who were calling her a terrorist or worse things. However it came as a surprise to her what a magnet of hate her daughter's skin colour was, what abuse the little child had to hear from grown-ups in Finland. This was why she left for the Netherlands, where she felt much more welcome, as she wrote – although the racists and neo-Nazis of that country have made lots of headlines these days.
Soon after Abu-Hanna's column, the first riposte was published in the tabloid Ilta-Sanomat, authored by its editor Ulla Appelsin. Her journalistic fame is mainly due to her writings about the exploits of Finnish soldiers in the Second World War, a fact that suggests a nationalist conservative outlook. Thus, it was no wonder she took offence reading Abu-Hanna's column: when racism was being criticised, it came naturally to her to side with the racist.
As jokesters said, Appelsin's article was as sour as a lemon – the surname Appelsin happens to mean ‘orange’. She accused Abu-Hanna of over-generalising the bad manners of one woman – an octogenarian who gave Abu-Hanna's daughter a racist scolding, as told in the original column – to all the people of Finland (although Abu-Hanna did mention what she saw as Finnish national virtues, as well as her own nostalgia for her years in Finland, notwithstanding all the racist abuse). Additionally, Appelsin was of the opinion that Abu-Hanna should at least partly blame herself. I wonder whether Abu-Hanna's five-year-old adopted daughter should blame herself for being black.
The lynch mob that started to rampage on the internet after that had obviously only read Appelsin's riposte, because they completely ignored the important, uncomfortable questions raised by Abu-Hanna. She was, above all, unhappy with how unwilling Finland is to recognise the patriotism of immigrants – their love for Finland – and accept the immigrant as one of the sons and daughters of Finland, entitled to love the country and to defend it, as well as to criticise it when necessary.
This particular polemic did not yield much substance, but at least it showed how the racist right wing had succeeded in mainstreaming its discourse with the help of more traditionally conservative allies such as Ulla Appelsin.
The most interesting opinions were heard from Finnish expatriates. One of my acquaintances who has spent many years in the Netherlands and Germany told me she did not expect how much the atmosphere changed in Finland while she was abroad: being black-haired, albeit a pure-bred Finn and a native speaker of Finnish, she now has to put up with abuse from people who think she is a Muslim, a Jew or some kind of foreigner. One of those who insulted her called her ‘Anne fecking Frank’.
The story of this woman shows how wrong racists are when they tell us that they are only concerned about the ‘unity’ of the nation. Actually they only completely destroy that unity, separating one group after another from the ‘true’ nation: Muslims and black people to start with, then Jews, and in the end just about everybody with black hair.
As Martin Niemöller, the German churchman who saw the horrors of Nazi Germany with his own eyes, said: “First they came for the Jews, and I said nothing, as it wasn't about me... and in the end they came for me, and nobody was left to defend me.” What is often forgotten is the fact that Niemöller himself started as a nationalist conservative with Nazi sympathies, and thus his famous words about the importance of solidarity were not inspired by any kind of idealism, but by bitter experience.
Panu Höglund is an Irish speaker from Finland currently translating a number of books from English into Irish.
