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There was a similar small to-do in Finland about a planned screening of the Drag Kids documentary. It was basically stillborn since the cultural festival that had planned the screening quickly withdrew it from lists, citing threats sent. However, while the fracas was going on, much of the discussion basically consisted of both sides flinging "You're just importing American culture wars!" accusations to each other; pro-LGBTQ types saying that this is a copy of American conservatives tactically making up mountains from molehills over LGBTQ culture and conservatives retorting that the whole "drag kids" thing is just an American folly to begin with (even though the documentary appears to be Canadian, but that's not exactly a large difference from this side of the pond anyway).
Of course they're both correct, but it's like... of course this country is going to import culture, discussions and ideologies wholesale from some other country, in this case the most powerful country in the world, the undisputed global hegemon, with never-seen-before opportunities to broadcast its ideologies at scale everywhere. What else are we supposed to do, invent all the local ideologies and policy points ourselves? There's just 5,5 million of us.
The entire Finnish history consists of people importing ideologies from elsewhere. Christianity through Sweden and Russia, later Lutheranism from Germany, then nationalism from Germany (the founding father of Finnishness, J. V. Snellman, basically based his nationalist visions on Hegelianism), socialism from Germany, environmentalism from, yes, Germany... When one reads Social Democratic magazines from the start of the century they're already bashing each over basically over whether German Socialist 1 or German Socialist 2 was correct, and adjusting their own views on the basis of such debates elsewhere.
The biggest difference to past centuries is where the importation of ideology comes from, but that it's mostly imported from somewhere says.
Drag queens aren't a political ideology. They're a cultural particularity tied to an ideology. Like how afros can be associated with "woke" people (in the original sense of "progressive black person"). Would be odd if progressive Germans were sporting it.
Importing the basic idea of socialism and adapting it to local conditions is one thing. This is the equivalent of importing Chinese classical music and having culture wars over it.
The two can go together (Islam and Arabism overlap to say the least) but there are reasons to be suspicious of how certain ideologies manifest in different countries. There's nothing wrong with an anti-racism movement in the UK in theory, but why does it involve things like kneeling down which are tied to anti-black racism and police violence which should be lesser factors in the UK? Blacks aren't - or shouldn't be - the totemic minority in the UK. So it's suspicious.
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About the same as the number of Ashkenazi Jews in the US. That didn't stop them from having an enormously outsized influence on American culture and politics.
Finnish isn't a religion that predates the Western civilization.
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I'm sure multiple ideologies and political theories originate from polities even less populous than that.
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Valid point, and if Irish progressives could just be honest and admit that they've imported their politics from abroad, I wouldn't really care that much. But people get very defensive when you make that argument, and claim that to do so is "invalidating" their opinions or identities. I think it's a kind of reflexive assumption of Bulverism: even though I'm very careful to point out that, just because something is imported, doesn't make it morally or factually wrong, a lot of people seem to hear "you just got that from the US, therefore it can't be true".
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Yes? Otherwise why are you even using written Finnish instead of Swedish, or Latin (or Russian, I suppose)?
A large reason of why we're writing in Finnish is that a large group of Swedish-speaking gentry got enamored with the general European trend of national awakening and decided that such an awakening in Finland could only be done using the people's language (and, in Snellman's case, in large part due to his readings of Hegel), and because the Russian Empire happened to find it useful to foster such a movement. Of course it might have happened otherwise in other conditions. At the very least it must be noted that none of this happened in a vacuum.
According to Paul Hazard's history of european ideas intellectual began moving away from latin and greek at the end of the 1600s and therefore it is a precursor of the enlightenment rather than a consequence.
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A problem that can easily be solved by PsyOps, and forced assimilation.
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