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Culture War in Finland: Onrolling Far-Right Scandal Moves on to Forums Poasting
The Finnish government has been up for three weeks and pretty much all of that has gone to abjudicating the various comments and stuff said by ministers belonging to right-wing nationalist The Finns Party. The last few days in Finnish politics have focused on party leader Riikka Purra, now the Finance Minister (and the second most powerful member of the govt, at least formally), and her online posts from 15 years ago.
These posts were made in the online guestbook of previous party leader Jussi Halla-aho, the guy who basically is responsible for kickstarting modern anti-immigrationism in Finland and for the anti-immigration hardline faction taking over the Finns Party. Halla-aho got famous for running a blog and gaining grassroots support through it, and an important part of it was his "guestbook", an old-style webpage guestbook which eventually started functioning as an informal forum (imagine a forum with only one ongoing thread). The guestbook, alongside some other forums, was used for bringing together the faction that would eventually grow strong enough to elect several people as MPs, and these people (and people in their general orbit) now make up the party's elite.
The entire guestbook is still online and searchable, the original guestbook at Halla-aho's website is gone (apparently due to hosting troubles), but there's a mirrored copy of it elsewhere. A number of web sleuths found out that one of the guestbook's posters was nicknamed "riikka". Now, Riikka is a pretty common name in Finland, so that wouldn't alone be enough to connect this to Purra, but sleuths also found out that:
nickname "riikka" has stated that she comes from a left-wing home and that her parents had taken a pic of her as a child in front of Lenin's statue - Riikka Purra has told a similar story on TV
nickname "riikka" stated that she went to same school as leftist MP Anna Kontula - Kontula and Purra have gone to same secondary school in Tampere
nickname "riikka" sent the guestbook greetings from Barcelona on 25 August and 27 August 2008, dates on which Riikka Purra participated in an academic conference there
nickname "riikka" talked about moving to small town of Kirkkonummi in 2008 and asked about the number of immigrants in a specific neighborhood. Apparently the number was low, since Riikka Purra has indeed lived in that neighborhood in that town since 2008
And many other similar congruities, ie. it's pretty obvious to anyone that this is the same person. Nickname "riikka" had also posted on the guestbook posts, where she:
drops the Finnish n-word several times (it's a linguistic question whether that word is the equivalent of English n-word or the word "Negro", but these are angry enough one might say it's the former in this context), as well as talking about a Middle-Eastern man as a "Turkish monkey or whatever", as well as uses some more creative (common in the Finnish racism community) slurs, such as the ones translating to "mocha dicks", "somps" (Somali + chimp) etc.
ironically calls herself and other forums members "raycist" and "Nezi" (net + Nazi), including asking others for beer by saying "Any Nezis in Helsinki today up for spitting on beggars and beating up n-word children?"
states that "if I had a gun there would be bodies on this train" after hearing a black teenager say "I don't care about Finland" and going "BANG BANG!" with fingerguns at her on a train (this happened two days after a notorious school shooting)
After browsing a Finnish Islamic forum describes herself as "so full of hatred and rage she is going to melt on her chair" and says that things like this start to seriously bother her life since "there's nothing else running through [her] head"; also gets angry after seeing a fat Somali family eating at McDonalds at the same time as her family
And other such fare. In other words, at least the most notorious poasts are a mix of edgy injokes and weird ranting. Unsurprisingly these discoveries don't play well in the media, local or foreign (the Finnish foreign minister, while at the NATO summit in Vilnius, actually apologized to Turkey (our new NATO ally, mind) for the "Turkish monkeys" thing.
Purra has copped to being "riikka", and while she originally commented this by saying "there's nothing to apologize or explain", she ended up apologizing and saying that of course the government or she don't tolerate racism and so on. Many of the party's supporters are disappointed and believe that she cucked, but of course if you're in actual government with other parties you kind of have to occasionally do what they demand you will do, if the alternative is your party getting kicked out of the government.
All of this probably serves to indicate what happens when - basically - an Internet forum ends up taking over a political party, and potential for similar things exists might exist in other countries, considering the centrality of Internet in modern communications. I'm pretty sure that Purra, 15 years ago, didn't think that her ranting online might have any importance whatsoever regarding domestic politics or, indeed, that she would even rise to her current heights, but maybe you already have a bunch of groypers in America making edgy jokes on Twitter or wherever who will have to eventually explain that stuff 15 years from now when running for Senate or some other high post.
I put this one in blog format and added some other stuff, like this tidbit:
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How awful and disgusting. Does anyone know where else on the internet race realist blonde chicks in their late teens to early 30s hang out? Just so I know which places to avoid.
marsey_taking_notes.jpg
“Somp” has the added bonus of sounding like the name of those angry grey spiky cubes that try to smush you in Mario games.
/r/yesyesyesno
Well Riikka was unusually bad with her opsec, using her real-life nickname and leaving copious details about her life in time and space that could be confirmed. Not posting about your personal traits or your location is a good start; some even advise to imply false details about your life to throw potential priers off your trail. This is why I never posted much about the Rotherham scandal when it occurred, despite it being the city where I was born and grew-up before I left for uni in London as a 5’5” 120 lb woman.
Now I'm wondering if you actually were born in Rotherham and grew up there or if this is a lie to preserve opsec.
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As much as I'd love to imply false details about my life, I get too much social credit and approval in other places for revealing that I'm tall, good-looking, extremely wealthy and have a huge penis to give it up.
That said I still think that this incident is interesting, and I'm eager to see what ends up happening as a result. I can't believe that anyone in the modern generation actually gives a shit about online posting like this - you're either on the left and think that these people are nazis anyway, or you're on the right and understand that's just what young people do. I can't see this outrage being anything but performative for most people.
I'd say the chances are 80 % that nothing happens (the main party in the government is still intent on keeping the government together to enact their agenda) and 20 % that the govt falls (not due to just this incident but cumulated weight of a several of them).
Sure, but before this the party had specifically cultivated Purra's image as a more rational breed of a politician than their biggest blusterers and noisemakers, so it's a bit of a surprise that she has expressed herself quite this harshly in the past.
She was 30 when posting this stuff, so it's not like that young.
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Remember, people, always be aware of your OpSec.
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You mean like one gigantic thread where a bunch of mostly right-wing, onlinefolk post their culture war angst? Hard to imagine.
To be fair, most of what she said wouldn’t be acceptable here.
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Yes, precisely, though even beyond the obvious comparison a single thread at an old-style "flat" forum, not a threaded forum.
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Huh?!
An online forum for Muslims living in Finland. I mean, there's not that many as a percentage (1-2 % maybe?), but that's still a large enough a constituency to run a forum.
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The obvious response should be to point out that the mainstream parties have done far worse. Invading Afghanistan killed 200 000 people are tenfolded their heroin production. Two decades of bombing a country can't remotely compare to edgy forum posting. Nationalists in western countries are too quick to accept being the boogeyman when the mainstream parties have flooded Syria with support for jihadists, destroyed Libya for decades to come, invaded Iraq twice, starved the population of Iraq and blocked medicines to Iran during a pandemic. The mainstream parties tears for the migrants seem hollow when the migrants are fleeing their bomb wars.
Compare pointing finger guns on a train and sending soldiers to their home country with the rules of engagement that every boy above the age of 16 will be counted as a combatant.
Why don't politicians who caused a week of rioting in France have to appologize? When will the politicians that caused dozens of terrorist attacks with hundreds of dead have to appologize? When will the politicians whose policies led to a massive increase in rapes appologize? When will they appologize to all the people who have effectively been ethnically cleansed by being forced to participate in white flight due to immigration policies that make life intolerable in their neighborhood.
The true Finns should never appologize, never cede the moral high ground and make it clear which side they percieve as the evil ones.
This reminds me of the RFK Jr nomination. Many people label his vaccine skepticism as a red line. Yet Joe Biden believes and does things far more destructive (eg supported covid lockdowns, supported numerous terrible wars, supports so called gender affirming care for minors, running trillion dollar deficits as a matter of course, disinformation boards that censor Americans, the unilateral ability to cancel rent payments, student loan principals, or to force people to be vaccinated against their will, conspired to undermine the Trump admin using the fbi). But because the latter are done by a majority party head honcho (and with the party beloved by the media) it is within the Overton window.
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Ask me how I know you never heard a ROE brief.
Alternately, invading afghanistan created the conditions for Afghans to kill 200k other Afghans. In both Iraq and afghanistan, the number of combat casualties and collaterals was a tiny fraction of the local power struggles and score-settling. It's a bit like saying the police murder twenty thousand people a year because they don't prevent murders.
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A little of that happened in Finland, though. Finland sent some troops to Afghanistan for an ostensible peacekeeping (actually military) mission post-invasion but that's about it.
If the party hadn't apologized, they might have been summarily thrown out of the governemnt, and they then couldn't achieve the goals they negotiated in the program. The "never apologize, never explain" line is quite a bit easier when you don't hold actual power (or presumably if you held all the power, too).
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On one hand, this is a nothingburger. On the other, I might be sheltered but it does surprise me when people in positions of seniority, especially Europeans, reveal such base, zoological prejudice, grounded more in axiomatic disgust than in any moral outrage about population replacement, decay of trust, death of the national Logos or whatever. This was striking in older Germans complaining about Turks – they didn't actually have some abstract case for preserving the racial composition of the Faterland, a sense in which it deserves to exist as a separate project of humanity *; they straight up hated how these foreign people look, smell, move, laugh and decorate their dwellings, on some reptilian brain level. It became much clearer how this nation could take so well to Himmler's gibberish.
But this attitude, unpopular within the ranks of elite human capital, probably explains political woes of the far right somewhat. (And Europeans on average are still much less susceptible to zoological racism than the rest of humanity, WEIRD and all that).
Of course, this is also what is most resistant to indoctrination. Ideological ethno-nationalism is somewhat complex and fragile, it can be discredited and memory-holed through institutional means. Just 'ate 'em can survive with juvenile shitposting alone.
* Of course, people needn't consciously reflect on themselves as members of any such project to carry on its intent, especially if we take the HBD angle seriously. Say, the «project» defended by The Finns would be just their compatriots being maximally Finns. I am partial to project and proposition nations, though.
I suspect this is actually how pretty much all cases of xenophobia throughout the world, and throughout history, operate(d). It never actually mattered who the outgroup was, or what their real behavior was, or even if they had personal spaceships while you lived in a cave. That just means they were crass materialists while you were in touch with the spirits of the world. It's this meme, but unironically, because the meme was always an accurate depiction of reality. It's only relatively recently, and only in some parts of the world, that things like empirical evidence and logical argument started to be considered as valuable, or that beliefs should flow from them rather than the other way around. And so people need to at least come up with a plausible-sounding explanation, grounded in some sort of logic rather than pure visceral tribalism, as to why the other actually is a civilizational threat this time.
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I don’t think there’s any difference in base level individual prejudice between WEIRD and outsiders. The stuff one hears (as you said) older Germans say about Turks isn’t all that different from what one hears Turks say about Syrians or Tunisians and Moroccans say about sub-Saharan Africans. The difference is that in the non-WEIRD countries bonds of extended family and local community extend far beyond the nuclear family (which usually doesn’t really exist in the same way anyway, obviously) so they can ‘mobilize’ this contempt more aggressively. The current anti-immigrant race riots in Tunisia are one example.
What does the typical Indian think of Turkey?
It's a below average choice for the meat in a Subway sandwich, that's it.
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One could argue they need racist bigotry more than anyone else on account of their tendency to favor outsiders.
If you're nice and cooperative to people who will be nice and cooperative back at you because they're the same kind of weird moral mutant, it's mutually beneficial.
It's not advantageous to you to be nice to some subcontinental who is far more ethnocentric and is going to ruthlessly take advantage of your niceness and then keep on lecturing you for years on how racist you are.
How to solve the problem of groups with different levels of favoring their own coexisting in a multiracial framework ?
It seems rather thorny.
Austro-Hungarian ethnic politics were kinda a handful and those were between peoples who were genetically almost identical and only differed by native language and a few cultural differences.
The Prisoner's Dilemma, pretty much. Of course, if you always co-operate, it's obvious what the action of your enemy is going to be.
More generally, this is why people advocate for ethnostates. Of course, states still compete with each other on a political level, so you're merely transmuting the stage of competition to a geopolitical one—unless you go all isolationist, of course, but that's pretty much akin to dropping out of the game entirely.
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