The ‘Ku Klux Klan’ in Finnish politics
You might think that political life in Finland would be peaceful and quiet in the summer season, with even our MPs on holiday, but things don't always turn out the way you expect. As usual, the latest scandal is connected with True Finns, the demagogues of the country. The party won the parliamentary elections with racist hate phrases, but now the euro crisis has stolen the show, and the situation has given a new lease of life to Timo Soini, the legendary Euro-sceptic and chairman of the party.
The racists in the party have consequently been somewhat marginalised, and they don't exactly like this, and some of them are trying to attract new attention with coarse anti-Islamic or anti-African statements. This time the culprit was James Hirvisaari, a True Finn parliamentarian, who was repeating the ideas of Anders Behring Breivik by comparing “multiculturalists” – basically everybody who isn't supporting the racist attitudes of his party – with robots one cannot reason with, and announcing that there already is ”a war on”.
Actually, this is the sort of thing you might expect of Hirvisaari. Some time ago he earned his racist credentials with a blog entry titled ‘Kikkarapäälle kuonoon’, which means ‘Smash the Face of the Curly-Head’. The headline is enough to tell what the message was.
It's difficult not to hear Breivik's voice behind Hirvisaari's words. The Finno-Argentinian journalist Enrique Tessieri proposed another comparison: he juxtaposed Hirvisaari's statements with those of David Duke, the main ideologue of the Ku Klux Klan in the United States, and came to the conclusion that anyone would find it difficult to tell them apart, due to major similarities in both wording and ideas.
In Norway, Breivik's terrorist attack so profoundly affected society that even the radical right had to admit that there had been a sea change in public attitudes. Many of them reconsidered their positions, having themselves been shocked by the incident. As Prime Minister of Norway Jens Stoltenberg said, democracy has strengthened in the country, and Breivik failed roundly and soundly to reach what he aimed at.
Finland is another story, of course. Although individual bloggers, such as the military historian Jussi Jalonen, were doing hard work to expose the connections between the racist faction of the True Finns party and the international ‘counter-jihad’ networks, mainstream journalists were lazy and reluctant to make these facts available to their readers. Thus, there never was a real public discussion of the onslaught of the extreme right in Finnish politics or of their Breivik connection.
Panu Petteri Höglund is a translator and linguist who studied German, Polish, and Russian at Åbo Akademi University in Finland.
