The August 18, 2010 issue of Newsweek declared Finland the world's best country. I lived in Finland for five years, and married a Finn. I also wrote a novel (Temping, Black Heron Press, 2006) which is set in the country. I am an American. Perhaps I can offer a point of comparison.
The Newsweek cut was made using five criteria: education, health, quality of life, economic dynamism, and political environment.
Cuba was 50th.
America, 11th.
Finns are educated (they generally speak English and Swedish better than Americans but Swedish not as well as Swedes), they live longer than most (late 70s), the quality of life is good (their food is a bit bland, but there's plenty of it, and it's healthy food), they have high-functioning companies such as Nokia, to name only one, and they are politically stable, and there is almost no corruption (they're Lutheran).
Bill O'Reilly in today's Daily Star editorial attacked the country for its weather which is more amenable to polar bears than to people. Generally, I like O'Reilly, but this column was fairly poor, although meant to be jocular. First off, there are no polar bears in Finland. The southern reaches of Finland are relatively mild (it rarely dips below zero, and the winters are beautiful with snow piling on fir trees as far as the eye can see). Florida's Gulf Current abuts Finland, and creates a relatively mild although lengthy winter throughout the southern reaches.
O'Reilly says that there would be no mosque controversy in Finland because he doesn't think there are Muslims in Finland. There are mosques in the three major cities of Finland. They are tiny, but they exist. O'Reilly is having fun attacking the lack of diversity in Finland. There isn't much "diversity," and it's funny that Newsweek, a liberal rag, chose an almost homogenous country for its #1 spot. O'Reilly's got a point.
O'Reilly says there are 60,000 lakes, but you'd get hypothermia if you got in one. The lakes are reasonably mild in summer, and you can swim in them from late May to early September. After October you'd be skating, or driving a car across the lakes.
I liked Finland, but I prefer America, even if it only #11. Part of it is the diversity. There are many different kinds of restaurants here. Outside of Helsinki, you are dealing with potato dumplings and fish. I think one thing that the Newsweek article doesn't acknowledge is that a person becomes accustomed to where they grew up. Leaving that home is difficult. Few people can make the jump. Newsweek invites you to move to one of the good countries, and enjoy their lifestyle, as if it's that easy. Finland is nice for Finns, and if you grow up speaking the language, eating potatoes, getting drunk with your friends, taking sauna together, it is all quite good. For outsiders, not easy. Finnish language is very rich, and the literature is (apparently) unbelievably good. But this is closed to outsiders, as is the television humor, the cinema, and the theatre. I learned some Finnish and can read children's books. They are very high quality. The clothing is high quality. The people shine with a certain innocence. Many are brilliant.
Still, I'm happy to have Finland in my house, but live in America. My wife is Finnish, and my kids speak Finnish, but I can't speak Finnish. I admire the Finns, especially those in my own home. If I met a Finn on the street, I would do my utmost to help them. Finns are good eggs, but they are very difficult to really understand. No outsider can ever really understand a Finn.
Helsinki is beautiful. Tampere is beautiful. Turku is beautiful. My wife is beautiful. My children are beautiful. All of Finland has its beauties, both in the people, in its nature, and its buildings.
Still, I prefer the beauty of the Brooklyn Bridge, houses falling down in the Catskills, the weirdness of walking through cities and seeing weird eggs from everywhere, some dressed like Ukrainian easter eggs and some like sticks of butter, still others like slobs. In Finland, most people are dressed the same, and look the same. This provides uniformity, and uniformity of quality, but it does pall in terms of diversity.
The Finnish military took on the Soviet Union and beat them in World War II. Stalin invaded, and within two months, the Finns sent two million Russians home to be buried. That's more than you could say for Germany, or for Hungary, or for the Czechs. Russia outnumbered Finland 50-1, and got its ass kicked.
Outside of the five criteria that Newsweek used to spin the country closer to Finnish socialism, they also forgot to think about how Lutheranism is the backbone of Finland and what makes the country so habitable, which is also what drove Iceland, Denmark, Sweden and Norway toward the top of the list. Finland may be the most Lutheran country on earth. You see their churches, and inside, you know that the people have things about as right as you can get on this earth. I became a believer in Finland. This is the real criterion that is missing in the Newsweek article. It's what the left can't think about, because they are so busy with this multiculturalism thing (all societies are equal). When they do a comparative ranking, they leave religion on the cutting-room floor. But it is Lutheranism that drove the Finnish armies to destroy Russia's godless juggernaut. It is Lutheranism that makes the country have the lowest corruption rate on earth, and to take care of their children, their poor, their sick, and to allow for equality in education and yet to strive for quality in arts, in literature, in style, and in the military (mandatory two years' service). More than anything else, it's the religion, stupid.
Why did Newsweek do this comparative ranking without thinking about WHY the different countries are so different? Culture is important, but religion is the basis of culture.
29 comments:
Interesting take on an appallingly weak and evasive article from the windbag O'Reilly. His was a juvenile piece that a Finnish junior school teacher of English would find hard to give a passing grade to.
O'Reilly completely ignored the categories upon which Newsweek based its admittedly flawed study, and the previous similar assays (World Economic Forum, UN Human Development index, Transparency International's Corruption Perception Index, the OECD's PISA studies on education, and a slew of others) that had all placed Finland at or near the top of the pile. He made crass and ill-informed remarks about the weather (he should have been here sweating in July), and as if it was all a huge surprise to him, he shrugged: "Who knew?".
Well, just about EVERYONE knew, Bill, except you and your doting fans. It is not as if Finland was an outsider in this race. But that idea did not sit with O'Reilly's agenda or with his simple anodyne response of "We're #1", as if repeating this mantra will make it so, like taking prozac for a brain tumour.
If this is meant to be national pride, it looks alarmingly like national hubris. There is no nation on earth that cannot learn something from how others do things.
His comments on ethnic diversity, although overstated (there are these days a good many Somalis and people from the Balkans to spice things up), do have a ring of truth, but they are a red herring: contrary to what you took away from the study ("Newsweek invites you to move to one of the good countries"), Newsweek was not in my view saying that Finland is the ideal country for Americans or other immigrants, merely that it is a nation that is doing things well for its people.
It is a fiendishly difficult country for an outsider - not least because of the language-hurdle, which is the one and only means of getting properly into the already comfortably-closed society.
(continued)
(continues)
Where I must differ strongly from your viewpoint is in attributing so much to the Lutheran Church. Most Finns are NOT churchgoers, though many still pay lip-service to the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland (and pay a tax or tithe into the bargain) as a means of ensuring they can dress up and get married in church if they wish. Many are in any event leaving the Church in spite of this, and regular attendance is largely restricted to the elderly.
It IS possibly fair to ascribe the greater weight put on education (as opposed to materialism - "who you are" vs. "how much you are worth") to an earlier, more militant Lutheran Church that basically dinned literacy into people, but that was long ago.
Equally, attributing Finnish lack of corruption to religious faith is misguided: the sheer transparency of the society, and the way in which everyone can know everything about everyone else (not that they go to great lengths to find out) makes it very difficult for anyone to be on the take. Most Americans would be appalled at the amount of information gathered about each and every citizen, but it does mean there are few places for wrongdoers to hide, or for money to change hands under the table. Were it not so, I think the Finns would fall just as others do - our politicians are already mired in a campaign finance scandal as it is.
Furthermore, most Americans would be uncomfortable with the level of consensus and compromise that the Finns are perfectly willing to tolerate - cooperation is seen as the way forward rather than confrontation, as evinced in a sequence of often very broad coalition governments that would never be tolerated in the States.
You also throw out some numbers that do not bear the light of day: there is, for instance, no such thing as two-year national service. It varies from 6 to 12 months and there is an alternative civilian path. Increasingly, the whole conscription exercise is being treated as a means of turning school-leavers into men rather than a means of defence: the serious military stuff is all high-tech and performed by professionals.
You are a good deal too kind, too, in suggesting that as many as two million Russians died at the hands of the Finns. The number was probably closer to 325,000 dead in the two conflicts of 1939-40 and 1941-44, and the striking kill ratio of 5:1 (125,000 to 25,000) in that first war (the Winter War) was as much down to the worst battle-tactics of modern times deployed by the Soviets as it was to the heroism (or Lutheran zeal!) of the Finns. Trust me, my late father-in-law was there in the thick of it. It was the suicidal stupidity of Stalin's generals (he'd just purged the decent ones) against Finland that actually prompted Hitler to believe he could beat the Soviets. Not a good move - the Russians were wiser the second time around.
Last but not least, can we deep-six this "socialism" word? Finland has had a Centre-Right government for several years, and even the opposition Social Democrats are hardly raving socialists unless one is a fully paid-up member of the Rush Limbaugh Appreciation Society. Finland may be "statist", but it is a capitalist country through and through. The term "socialist" is merely a scare-word for the Far Right, and frankly I think it is beneath you to use it. Leave that sort of thing to the O'Reillys of this world :)
Thank you for writing. The casualties that I referred to are from a film by an American documentarian who made a film entitled Fire and Ice. I think he said 2 million, but it has been five years since the film debuted here in a tiny hamlet called Hobart during a Finnish Festival.
Wikipedia accords rather well with your estimates, in turn based on soviet data. I'd personally distrust Soviet data, but what else is there?
Here's something from a wiki foonote:
There are many estimates of the number of the Soviet casualties. The official Soviet figure in 1940 was 48,745 dead. In 1990, Mikhail Semiryaga claimed 53,522 dead and N. I. Baryshnikov 53,500 dead. In the early 1990s, Grigoriy Krivosheyev claimed 126,875 dead and missing, and total casualties 391,783. Yuri Kilin in 1999 claimed 63,990 dead, total casualties 271,528 men; in 2007 he revised the estimate of dead to 134,000 dead.[16]:91 The results of the Krivosheyev's research group has a "semi-official" status.[citation needed]
It's quite difficult to understand on what basis these numbers fluctuate. Numbers meant nothing but propaganda to Stalin, and what he wanted, he pretty much got, in terms of numbers.
As for your other assertions that "socialism" not be used to describe Finnish government -- Finland is often used by American Marxists (who know no Finnish, and nothing about the country at all) as a successful Marxist country.
I'd disagree with your assessment of the Lutheranism within finland. While it's true that few go to the churches except for those who are preparing to die, and young people who want a laugh on a Sunday, I think that the ideals of Lutheranism are so widely and deeply spread that they form a basis for the country and its people, which will last even two or three generations without actual church-goers.
I can't remember the name of the doctor who set up the preventitive system for the children. But he was a Profound Lutheran!
I think this was the case until probably 50 years ago.
Also, in the countryside, there is a more Lutheran ethos (sort of like the red state blue state split in America).
It was fun to get your perspective.
O'Reilly was clearly out of his depths here, but few know much about Finland in America, and to stir a bit of interest of any kind at all in this fascinating country was a good thing on the part of Newsweek and O'Reilly even if admittedly both were well off the mark in many ways, as, I'm sure, am I!
Kiitos. Hei.
The difference between a socialist and a Marxist country is enormous, of course. Marxism allows only one party.
Socialist countries -- like those of Europe -- often bounce between presidents like Sarkozy and others who are further to the left.
Finland has probably 50 functioning parties. Some 15 or more get representatives.
It's a very complicated picture.
Finland is incredibly complicated.
I don't think it can even be understood. But I do think that Lutheranism underwrites the country, even down to its Marimekko aesthetic. Luther outlined aesthetics as being simple and clear.
The whole country looks like it was made from a Luther blueprint, even the honesty of each person.
OMG
finnz
ths
iz gttn
rll E
wrd
it's easy to impose rational order upon people who could very well freeze to death and have dark dispositions because of the weather
sure bring them light bring them the nice things
they'll paint a real white culture they'll be well behaved
all the scandanavian countries are like that they impose machines upon themselves in order to survive upon every nordic mind there is an immense rumbling machine a penchant for survival and occasionallhy a good tune
FINLANDIA now that is a very nice tune i often wish i had penned that tune
but finnz are known for absolutely nothing aren't they they have no celebrities they have now dynamic heroes they are all failures at sports they own no world records they are all inescapeably trapped in the whitefish of mediocrity and they love it ... it seems to me like a country that has purposely refused excellence o f any sort a deliberately negligible culture with nothing to offer the world and no excuse just a dark dreadful shrug of the ethnic shoulders
one of the things that has been seriously wrong with this blog for a while was the absence of craig someone who offered substance to counteract the rest of the drivel we have to read
it seems these days we're playing on a 3-D tennis court and everybody is lobbing
i'm beginning to think ed may be right
blogging is bullshit
maybe horseshit
lots a chickenshit
dogshit is the worst
we all knew the windbag o'reilly
was gassin o ever so slyly
the truth about finns
and their cold wicked grins
but his blather was proferred most bilely
it takes a lot to laugh
it takes a train to cry
jh
By the American documentary director I assume you mean Ben Strout. He was over here about five years ago shooting footage with volunteers.
The numbers in that footnote refer exclusively to the Winter War of 1939-40, which is the one where the Russians took a real beating before they got their act together. The Continuation War of 41-44 adds another 200,000 or so to those figures, but by the same token the Finnish casualties were also a good deal higher in the later conflict, especially in the latter stages.
The "socialist" jibe was born out of a sense of frustration and some puzzlement at the "separated by a common language" nature of political discussion, though it may also reflect the vast gulf that exists between West European concepts of left and right and American ones. To us, the last truly socialist states in Europe vanished with the Wall and the break-up of Yugoslavia, but apparently in the minds of many Americans places like Sweden still live under the socialist yoke.
It's all semantics, or it would be if it were not used as a potent weapon in the liberals vs. conservatives culture wars. From a European perspective, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans would find much support for their views in an average right-of-centre political party. This does not, however, make Europe's democracies "socialist". I suspect that there is a pejorative intent that is all part of the subtext of assuring people that the best and only system is the one practiced in Washington.
As for the influence of Lutheranism, I can only speak from my own experience of 35-odd years of living here as an adult, and 25 years of being a citizen. The Protestant work ethic certainly remains vibrant, but I have the feeling that the events of the 40s and the immediate post-war period did more to shape the way modern Finland is than religious faith. The country was riven with political discords (with even an attempted right-wing coup) throughout the period from Independence to 1939, and could easily have gone the way of the pocket dictatorships of the Baltic States, but came together remarkably in adversity, and that spirit of cooperation and consensus across party lines is still with us, even in the face of increasing income disparities as the rich get richer and the poor get a little bit less poor.
Yes, I suppose it's nice that Newsweek noticed, though probably it would be better still to be in the top three or four (in fact we WERE second to Switzerland, and Newsweek ballsed up their maths), such that somebody else could take the "Who the hell are they?" heat. Finns prefer not to put their head above the parapet too much.
But as for O'Reilly and the FauxNews brigade, well, the patronising and stubbornly ignorant tone speaks more of them than it does of Finland, in my view.
Otyikondo,
The terms socialism, liberalism, and Marxism are more or less synonymous in American discourse, which is indeed unfortunate, since they are entirely separate things.
In England, socialism and liberalism are understood as entirely different. The first term, socialism, denotes a system in which the masses matter more than individuals. In liberalism, individualism is the more important factor.
Liberalism is of course backed by philosophers such as John Locke, and James Madison.
Socialism, in your terminology, is Marxism.
But Scandinavian socialism, in American parlance, is high taxation which results in "redistribution" of income, a crime in conservative discourse since it discourages entrepreneurial initiative (why bother to work, if you're only going to be taxed to death -- why not just go on the dole and watch the tube).
In fact, some Finns do choose that route.
The drinking classes.
O'Reilly is big on work ethic and getting everybody back to work.
He comes out of an individualist tradition. I rather like O'Reilly, generally. He is tough, he does his own research, he's against the fashion plates of the left who can't or won't think for themselves, and he's kind of singlehandedly holding up the American way of life.
Many American academics believe we should be more like European countries, especially more like the Scandinavian societies, of which they know absolutely nothing.
I think most Americans think that Finland and Sweden are utopias in which crime never takes place and everybody's nice, and well-educated. They don't know about the skinheads in places like Tampere, or the hooligans who beat up foreigners or spit on foreign women in Helsinki. There are weird murders in Finland and in the Scandinavian countries.
When I was in Finland, some nut carved up sticks and put them in a popular swimming hole. Some kid jumped in and got impaled.
This sort of thing happens in America, too, but when it does it makes world news, and our provincial academics imagine that it is unique to America.
This is only because they don't know how to read the news from elsewhere.
The closer you get to the Scandinavian utopias, the more you realize they are just people struggling along like everybody else.
Otyikondo,
The terms socialism, liberalism, and Marxism are more or less synonymous in American discourse, which is indeed unfortunate, since they are entirely separate things.
In England, socialism and liberalism are understood as entirely different. The first term, socialism, denotes a system in which the masses matter more than individuals. In liberalism, individualism is the more important factor.
Liberalism is of course backed by philosophers such as John Locke, and James Madison.
Socialism, in your terminology, is Marxism.
But Scandinavian socialism, in American parlance, is high taxation which results in "redistribution" of income, a crime in conservative discourse since it discourages entrepreneurial initiative (why bother to work, if you're only going to be taxed to death -- why not just go on the dole and watch the tube).
In fact, some Finns do choose that route.
The drinking classes.
O'Reilly is big on work ethic and getting everybody back to work.
He comes out of an individualist tradition. I rather like O'Reilly, generally. He is tough, he does his own research, he's against the fashion plates of the left who can't or won't think for themselves, and he's kind of singlehandedly holding up the American way of life.
Many American academics believe we should be more like European countries, especially more like the Scandinavian societies, of which they know absolutely nothing.
I think most Americans think that Finland and Sweden are utopias in which crime never takes place and everybody's nice, and well-educated. They don't know about the skinheads in places like Tampere, or the hooligans who beat up foreigners or spit on foreign women in Helsinki. There are weird murders in Finland and in the Scandinavian countries.
When I was in Finland, some nut carved up sticks and put them in a popular swimming hole. Some kid jumped in and got impaled.
cont.
This sort of thing happens in America, too, but when it does it makes world news, and our provincial academics imagine that it is unique to America.
This is only because they don't know how to read the news from elsewhere.
The closer you get to the Scandinavian utopias, the more you realize they are just people struggling along like everybody else.
But of course, like everything else in America, when we think about them, they get caught in the middle of our so-called culture war, which in turn is fed by our two-party political system.
My Finnish wife laughs that everybody in America has to choose to be one of two parties. As if those parties can actually cover all options.
The Democratic party contains everything from Marxists to blue-dog Democrats, the Republican party contains everything from Nazis to fiscal conservatives with liberal social views.
You have to remember that O'Reilly comes out of a conservative IRISH CATHOLIC mentality that has been largely bullied out of American discourse. The blueblooded Episcopalians look down on them, and the mainstream Protestants look down on them.
Sean Hannity comes out of the same group. I love them, and love to hear from them, because they are something different.
The deal they learned is that if you work hard, you'll get somewhere. They feel wronged by the entitlements and the give-a-ways, and by the way they were treated for a hundred years before they became acceptable.
(Irish in English discourse were worse than dogs, and in the days of the Civil War in NYC were paid less than blacks.)
They have their own worldview, and it's an authentic one. We shouldn't turn up our nose with them.
Scandinavians have also been looked down upon in America, but it's been such a long time since we've assimilated that virtually no one remembers. The Irish still remember.
I would love to hear Bill O'Reilly's grandfather talking. He and Hannity come out of a generation in which they remember such people, and those people are still talking through them. It's inconvenient for the left that they still exist, but I'm glad they do. In many respects they speak for me.
It's good to have AT LEAST two viewpoints in this country.
I always think: it could be worse. We could have just one viewpoint: that of the insufferably superior left with all their stupidity.
We now have two grotesque forms of stupidity, but at least with two different forms, we have a trace of perspective, and with the two of them constantly chafing against one another, there are occasional sparks of insight.
The secular left finds Fox News especially appalling because Fox News still presents Christian viewpoints. O'Reilly and Hannity are Catholics. A lot of their viewpoint arises from that -- anti-abortion, pro-family, against ordaining homosexuals. This viewpoint is increasingly ridiculous to secularists who claim to believe in reason alone.
But Fox still has a huge market because Americans are still largely Christian, which is something the secular left can't stand. But from this point of the 21st century, how can anybody believe in the other God -- Marx?
That guy is the true God of many of the secularists.
So it's fun to watch these viewpoints duke it out.
Finland was forced to move above Switzerland and past the math because of the way in which it stands as a text of some kind about socialism. That's why Newsweek pushed it up.
The language barrier keeps Finns from answering for themselves, and makes the whole case especially interesting.
JH --
Sibelius is a Finn.
And Aki Kaurismaki, the world's greatest film-maker, is a Finn.
(Just for starters.)
They have also had many admirable athletes, singers, and writers (but the language barrier is immense -- the language is apparently harder than Chinese to learn).
The reason I think that both left and right have something to learn about Finland is due to the Lutheran aspect.
Lutheranism does have a redistributionist aspect.
It also has strict moral codes based on St. Paul (although those are being dispensed with in some synods).
So I think what both left and right are really arguing about is Lutheranism, when they argue about Finland.
Diversity can't be a good in and of itself.
There are good aspects to diversity, just as there are bad ones.
I think these Northern Countries--Scandanavia--are tempered by their cold, and remoteness.
In equatorial countries, the heat either makes people lazy, or heats up their passions. When it's really cold, you have to temper your life-style, to avoid being frozen to death. In equatorial countries, there's a lot pestilence and rot. I've always thought Africa an inhospitable place for humans, even though we got started there.
These are anecdotal observations, but I think they're true.
I love Sibelius's Second Symphony.
You can see the fjords in it, the stirring nationalistic pride. But its passion is held to a standard. The lyricism is purer for it.
Ride on the snowplough, baby,
Can't buy a thrill.
Bollåx, JH. Enjoyable bollåx, but bollåx none the less.
One of the reasons for leaving that septic isle of England was its burgeoning fascination with celebrity, its growing appetite for creating and summarily destroying idols, whose lifespans have now reached warp-speed and who are famous merely for being famous (and not - as is only right and proper - for playing electric violin on Desolation Row).
No, Finland has no celebrities. Anyone with such tendencies is staked out on an ice floe for the polar bears and the wolverines to devour. We did that with the chubby guy who won the Nobel Peace Prize and the long-distance runner who got more Olympic gold medals than you can shake a stick at, more than anyone except that doping cheat Lewis, and when the guy who invented Linux tried it on, we did the next best thing and exiled him to rot in California. Hope an earthquake gets him. Just a little one, so he suffers for a bit.
I must apologize, however. I seem to have been writing unkindly about the wrong O'Reilly. The man you mention cannot be the one who insisted loudly that Sweden was "not a neutral country" but Switzerland was. And had to be put in his place by a girl. The man you mention as "doing his own research" would certainly not have fallen into that sort of trap.
The girl in question was quite attractive, mind you. Perhaps he planned to sexually harass her, as he did that Andrea Makris some years ago.
I'm sorry, I simply do not like the cut of his jib. I believe he is offering anodyne solutions to an audience that cannot be assed to think for themselves. And for that, he deserves worse even than the polar bears and wolverines. Next time he's over to visit our little capital, we'll bung him into the sauna until he's good and done. We do that with people, you know. Probably set world records for it, too.
P.S. Gus Hall, now HE was a Finn. And a socialist. Hell, I'll even cede he was a Marxist.
Gus Hall was the leader of the AMerican Communist party for decades. He was a Stalinist right up until the end.
And yes, he was a Finn (but with his name, he may have been a Swedish-speaking Finn).
Give O'Reilly a break. Read his books, think about where he's from. He's a marvel of American culture!
Even though his article on Finland was extremely poor, and had as its animus the fight against redistribution.
One of the problems with socialism (although not Finnish socialism) is that the leaders take it upon themselves to redistribute money as they see fit. Obama gave 140 billion to the International Monetary Fund without even going through Congress. He claimed this was his prerogative.
Obama just got smacked down because he had signed a stem cell research bill that conflicted with the law.
His big bill that changes the health care rules has been challenged in at least 15 courts for being unconstitutional (it violates the Commerce Clause).
He's way out of bounds in legal terms.
It's not just redistribution itself that is the problem, it's the power that this gives to the president to redistribute money to cronies, homies, and others, that is the problem. Think of Patrick Mugabe and how he wrecked Zimbabwe, or Kim Jong-Il and how he wrecked N. Korea.
Because Finnish people are largely Lutheran their crime shows are about how some little girl stole a pencil in Mikkeli.
When you watch our crime shows they are quite different. Some bozo shoots up a 7/11, and then smashes his car into the pharmacy, to get whatever drugs he can get his hands on, and then rolls down the street using his car as a tank.
Obama sides with lawless organizations like ACORN. He doesn't care how he gets elected, so long as he does. Once he gets elected he doesn't care what he does, so long as it's in what he considers the nation's best interests, which are actually his interests.
He has no respect for law and order, and passes bills in the middle of the night, and buys senators whose votes he needs by making lawless provisions for their state that scandalize the nation when they come to light.
He doesn't care about the Mexican border. It's more votes for him.
It's chaos here.
Obama is like the id of the left let loose in the candy store of the Treasury Building. He's going to cost us trillions by the time he's through.
We don't actually HAVE any fjords. That was Grieg, and Ole Bull, over the road in Norway.
Don't even have that many Fords, either. Mostly Toyotas and Hondas.
Lakes, though, we got plenty of them.
As for Janne's 2nd in D, most of the heavy lifting was done while he was in Rapallo in Italy, so the jury's a bit out on just how "Finnish" it all was, except it has of course been taken that way retrospectively - though most of that was Robert Kajanus's doing, and Sibelius never liked the idea that much.
Did you know he had coffee-cup neurosis? Sibelius, that is. Well, he called it that, but it was probably mostly the shakes. Never spat in his glass, did Janne. Sold loads of quite good works just to pay off his bar debts. Valse triste was one of them, so they say.
Obama is like the id of the left let loose in the candy store of the Treasury Building. He's going to cost us trillions by the time he's through.
Can I take it that you don't like him, then? :) :)
Gus spoke Finnish. His people were Halbergs, but they would never have called him Arvo Kustavi if they'd been Swedish-speakers. And frankly, I'd argue he was a straightforward Marxist-Leninist by doctrine. "Stalinism" isn't really a political direction.
Sorry, you lose me with "the leaders distributing money where they see fit". Where we part company is that we tend to trust our "leaders" (in other words those from a range of parties we have elected to Parliament) rather than fearing them. So far, we've not had THAT much need to modify this view. I know you lot have, what with Nixon and the bozo that came before this one, but that's the price you get for electing someone to play God. Sometimes the guy wears a dunce's cap. And the next dunce waiting in the wings undoes everything his predecessor did. It's progress of a sort, I guess.
there's a good article on Gus Hall at Wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gus_Hall
He spoke Finnish with his nine brothers.
He never denounced Stalin, or Stalinism.
He denounced Yeltsin after the USSR fell apart.
I woiuldn't know: was he like Otto Kuusinen?
Finland's leaders do get in trouble from time to time. There was the woman who had to step down recently. The president of this country is virtually immune. Here's the article from the Wall Street Journal about how Obama gave 140 billion to the International Monetary Fund:
http://online.wsj.com/article/NA_WSJ_PUB:SB123966889497015459.html
Obama has given a 100 million to black colleges without any other authorization.
He loves giving money away without authorization.
It's wild.
I think before his term's over he'll try to give the western states back to Mexico. This will just mean that the Mexican Americans currently living in those states will have to move again to get out of Mexico.
Obama's a bubblehead. I love him.
Briefly, no. For a start Otto Wille was a ranking Politburo member (and how!), and had been involved in the attempted revolution back in 1918, and he led the puppet government in Terijoki in 1939, so he was definitely on board with most of what Stalin was doing, and not JUST a believer in roughly the same M/L teachings.
Besides, what would YOU have thought if you were one of those whose relatives went all blue-eyed and bushy-tailed over to the young USSR (not just Finns from Finland but also from the Pacific NW - OR, WA) and got purged with extreme prejudice, but old OWK just kept on rising...? He must have been pretty close to Stalin. Then again, he was also supposedly at the more liberal end of his generation, which accounts for the fact that he kept his seat when Khrushchev took over.
His daughter Hertta was a piece of work, too.
Oh. You mean the Anneli case. Not anything to do with redistributing other people's money, or even with graft.
MUCH more to do with deals of a "coalition of the willing" made by the previous administration's PM in a meeting with Shrub at the White House. She got the details by subterfuge and leak - our own little Deep Throat - and ran with them as a very useful election tool, since joining in an illegal war in Iraq did not go down very well with the electorate. The defeated Social Democrats (try telling me they are "Socialists" - their chairman was behind the deal) made sure she didn't get to keep the trophy very long after election day. She also lied to Parliament, which is never a good move. Hei-hei Anneli. Off to Brussels with you.
But as I tried to point out, the scenarios you envisage are pretty difficult as things are so transparent, and after some dodgy financing of the last election, they will be going through stuff with an electron microscope next spring.
One area where I agree with you 150% is the relative immunity of POTUS to flat-out criticism from his peers. Bush Sr. said something like he thanked God every day he wasn't the British PM and so didn't have to face a hostile Parliament without a teleprompter once a week. THAT'S what democracy is about. Your guy is so mollycoddled it's not true. Dubbya hardly EVER appeared anywhere in public but in Republican safe-houses or on army bases, and spoke only to adoring fans. Pathetic! And this is not a partisan thing: Clinton was equally protected from hostile off-the-hoof questioning. WHY? Can't they take it?
Or is the big flaw in the system that as he's Head of State AND of the Executive, you cannot afford to have the top honcho made to look a complete doofus, as that would make the country look equally foolish - a bit like trashing the flag?
This blog has occasional forays into the Finnish question, or questions regarding Finland. You seem well-versed in this area. Have you read Aino Kuusinen's book, The Rings of Destiny? If not, it's such a wonderful book. She was a young Finn when Otto stopped at her house just outside of Helsinki and asked for shelter. The Russian authorities were looking for him.
It was a totally random event. but the daughter in the house fell in love with Otto, and this marked her destiny.
I wrote about this book several times, but part of it is here:
http://lutheransurrealism.blogspot.com/2009/11/aino-kuusinen-completed.html
I'm reading Vaino Linna's The Unknown Soldier now in an old paperback edition (in English).
Otto Kuusinen was a strange piece of work. He could keep very calm even as his wife made the circuit of the Russian prison system. At least one of his children died in the system.
Otto didn't seem to mind. He was a theorist.
I haven't read the book in question, but I know her story vaguely. She was not the daughter of the house - she must have been in her thirties by that time and was already married. Whether she was married to another Communist or was waiting to be awakened I don't know, but she certainly had quite a career later, even over on your side of the pond.
You're right again. Aino was a bored housewife, who liked the look of Otto, and saw in him a new adventure.
There is a good review of her book online at a journal called The National Interest. It gave a lot more details.
The book is wondrous and I couldn't understand why it doesn't sit beside Solzhenitsyn. apparently, the foreword, which more or less condemns the book, was written by a Stalinist sympathizer.
Communism is dead.
Let's stop talking about it as if it still mattered.
Cuba, Zimbabwe, China, Myanmar, North Korea, Vietnam, American Universities and the political representatives closely associated with American academia. More than a fourth of the world's people still live under the dead weight of communism. It's like a vampyre that doesn't know it's dead. Silver crosses are the only thing that can kill it. They pass bills in the middle of the night.
Hi
I love the vibe of this page.
I am a foreigner living in Finland.
The one thing that you are all overlooking about the Finns, is that thay are probably the world's most efficient people with high standards of excellence. Their organisational skills are quite amazing and the speed and precision in which they get things done never ceases to impress me. They are also very clever people it seems.
I don't credit any of this to the Lutheran ethic. I think they have probably always been like that, with sheer hardships in recent history further shaping the way the Finns are today.
I have written a book about their folk ways and old material culture, and my research has given me a very interesting glimpse into the past. Christianity came very late to Finland, which means that the old ways and old religions
were adhered to long after their pagan world views were abolished by the church. Ironically, the early Catholics gave much more leeway to the old ways than the Lutherans who came later. It seems to me as if the Lutheran austerity sought to knock the stuffing out of any nature affinity or joy. I think they are good people for the most part despite the Lutheran church! I think the way Finns are, is from how their history has shaped them and from living in these climes. They share that with the other nordic peoples, but the Finns have an extra dose of said recent hardships.
And thank heavens for the lack of celebrities. What vacuous, vacuous people they are, and ditto the people who are impressed by them.
The reason why the excellence in literature, for instance, is not widely known, is precisely that hellishly dificult language. Yet,it doesn't stop the publication of books with a very high literary standard to the local market. You see, they don't do it to impress anybody else. This might be hard for an American to fathom. They do it because Finns read copiously (and are in general very well read and very well informed.)
I don't particularly get on like a house on fire with Finns. Finns don't really talk a lot even to fellow Finns. The country, though suits me. I am a lone wolf in a land were there are a lot of lone wolves. You could call the Finns a pack of lone wolves : )
And I'm quite greatful that the aforementioned climate keeps the world and his wife from wanting to live here. I am sure the Newsweek article won't change that. I hope not.
Polar bears do not dwell in any of the Nordic countries, but there is one exception. In the historic past, when there was a lot of pack ice on the sea, one or two icebears could occasionally make it over from Spitzbergen to northern Norway. It was an auspicious event with shamans reading all kinds of signs into it.
For the most part its just us and the reindeer, bears and lone wolves here!
Anni
Hi
I love the vibe of this page.
I am a foreigner living in Finland.
The one thing that you are all overlooking about the Finns, is that thay are probably the world's most efficient people with high standards of excellence. Their organisational skills are quite amazing and the speed and precision in which they get things done never ceases to impress me. They are also very clever people it seems.
I don't credit any of this to the Lutheran ethic. I think they have probably always been like that, with sheer hardships in recent history further shaping the way the Finns are today.
I have written a book about their folk ways and old material culture, and my research has given me a very interesting glimpse into the past. Christianity came very late to Finland, which means that the old ways and old religions
were adhered to long after their pagan world views were abolished by the church. Ironically, the early Catholics gave much more leeway to the old ways than the Lutherans who came later. It seems to me as if the Lutheran austerity sought to knock the stuffing out of any nature affinity or joy. I think they are good people for the most part despite the Lutheran church! I think the way Finns are, is from how their history has shaped them and from living in these climes. They share that with the other nordic peoples, but the Finns have an extra dose of said recent hardships.
And thank heavens for the lack of celebrities. What vacuous, vacuous people they are, and ditto the people who are impressed by them.
The reason why the excellence in literature, for instance, is not widely known, is precisely that hellishly dificult language. Yet,it doesn't stop the publication of books with a very high literary standard to the local market. You see, they don't do it to impress anybody else. This might be hard for an American to fathom. They do it because Finns read copiously (and are in general very well read and very well informed.)
I don't particularly get on like a house on fire with Finns. Finns don't really talk a lot even to fellow Finns. The country, though suits me. I am a lone wolf in a land were there are a lot of lone wolves. You could call the Finns a pack of lone wolves : )
And I'm quite greatful that the aforementioned climate keeps the world and his wife from wanting to live here. I am sure the Newsweek article won't change that. I hope not.
Polar bears do not dwell in any of the Nordic countries, but there is one exception. In the historic past, when there was a lot of pack ice on the sea, one or two icebears could occasionally make it over from Spitzbergen to northern Norway. It was an auspicious event with shamans reading all kinds of signs into it.
For the most part its just us and the reindeer, bears and lone wolves here!
Anni
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