An ignorant mediahouse failed again in historical facts

World War I ended exactly  a century ago. The war was started by Germany, and it resulted in a collapse of European emperors of Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary and freedom of many nations previously governed by them.

The world entered in a new time, dominated by competition between western democracies and versions of socialism, both national and international. That time ended only in 1991 and thereafter, when Soviet Union and its socialistic satellite governments in East Europe collapsed.

During that time the world had to face the World War II, seeded in the Treaty of Versailles, the peace agreement, by stringently sanctioning Germany. But not so stringently, that it could not have recovered to challenge the world after 20 years, and lose again with even more stringent peace agreement.

This all was celebrated by the main Newspaper in Finland, Helsingin Sanomat, which published an article with a picture on border changes in Europe between 1914-1919. Surprisingly, in those pictures Finland was drawn as independent of Russia already in 1914, although we received our independence only in 1917.

It is not long since I was amazed on the ignorance of the same media house on the number of Stalin´ s victims. In spite of that I would not have imagined that any journalist in this country might have been so unaware of his own history, that such a mistake could have happened even accidentally.

Under the map published was a text "Jukka Himanen/HS". That is the name of the artist and the acronym of the journal. Right now I cannot resist recommending to him and other employees of the newspaper a short history course.

That might help in avoiding such embarrassing mistakes as the one today. And perhaps the general level of Finnish journalism would increase, as the articles which I had interpreted to be agenda journalism may actually have been based only on pure ignorance and lack of civilization.

PS (10:18 CET): very interestingly the picture with the false information has now been removed from the newspaper netpage.

The original story in Finnish:
HS: Suomi oli itsenäinen jo vuonna 1914