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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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