When Finland heard the results of the parliamentary election in April, many people were shocked, but hardly surprised. The party of the True Finns advanced most, and in went several candidates who had been known as racist agitators for some time.
At the beginning of the millennium they were just writing abuse about immigrants on their web pages, and it didn’t look like they could ever be supported by middle class people. Much has changed since, though.
From 2007 onwards, Finnish racists have embarked on a comprehensive propaganda campaign on the Internet. Their web commandos were first visible in blog comment boxes. Then hosts of them invaded the discussion forums of the most important newspapers spreading the same quackery. Often the same message was posted again and again in a war of attrition against moderators.
The content was the same old story that had been told by this kind of people since time immemorial, and although they boasted about themselves being able to ‘argue well’, they couldn’t provide evidence to vindicate their generalisations about immigrants.
Of course the horror stories about the ‘Muslim threat’ and ‘Eurabia’ were the most substantial part of their propaganda, but the agitators didn’t shirk from pure racism against black people, either. The most frequently disseminated message was that you must be very naive and gullible to accept the immigrant, the Muslim and the African as a human being of equal status.
As the election results show, if there is a group who keeps hammering about this for a long time, a lot of people will eventually believe them. If people are repeatedly told that there is something like an ‘immigration problem’, they will eventually yield.
Actually, the immigration rate in Finland is quite low when compared to the countries of western Europe, as local industry wasn’t welcoming foreign workforce in the decades after the Second World War. On the contrary, Finns were looking for jobs in Sweden, and only a handful of foreigners settled in Finland.
However, the same buzzwords and rhetorical clichés are employed by anti-immigrationists in both Finland and Sweden, although the immigration history of the two countries is not comparable at all. A typical example of this rhetoric is that agitators in both countries call rape by a foreign man ‘cultural enrichment’. This sarcastic saying hardly occurred to them independently of each other.
Ironically, Swedish anti-immigrationists say that they want to copy Finnish immigration laws in their own country! It looks like objective ‘problems’ with immigration are not necessary for inspiring anti-immigrant convulsions in politics.
The present one is an international intellectual fashion that comes from websites of racist groups in the United States. It is a bad sign in many ways. Above all, it is the kind of intellectual fashion that is mostly propagated among computer geeks who don’t pay as much attention to real life around themselves as to the Internet, especially websites in other countries, even in other continents.
If somebody is more interested in propaganda that does not even concern his own country than in his own surroundings, can he be called an active citizen?
Panu Höglund is a Finnish online writer and translator
