Thoughts of the Professor: South Ostrobothnia

Showing posts with label South Ostrobothnia. Show all posts

11 September 2024

The Difference Between Left-Wing and Right-Wing Envy

In Finland, a humorous anecdote is occasionally shared, in which the ethnicity of the characters change. One version goes as follows.

When a person from Kainuu sees that his neighbor is becoming wealthy, he becomes envious and immediately starts to think about how to bring the neighbor back to being as poor as he is. However, if someone becomes rich in South Ostrobothnia, the neighbor also becomes envious but instead starts feverishly thinking about how he could achieve the same success.

The anecdote is said to illustrate well the cultural differences between the populations of these two Finnish regions. The same story is also often told with the Kainuu resident replaced by a Finn and the Southern Ostrobothnian by an American. In this version, the story is said to depict the cultural differences between the inhabitants of the two countries.

In reality, the story best illustrates the difference between the political right and left. A socialist always aims to equalize income differences, so they naturally start thinking about how to tax the income and wealth of the rich as effectively as possible. In contrast, an economic liberal sees successful people as role models, whose achievements he should aspire to emulate.

This applies both to economically poor Kainuu and to the stronghold of Finland's political right in Southern Ostrobothnia. And it applies just as well to largely social-democratic Finland as to the United States, which thrives on market economy principles.

Previous thoughts on the same topic:
Freudian slip, 9-year-old girl and cultural appropriation
Traditional beliefs turned out to be wisdom
Current status of mankind and its culture

4 August 2023

History of Finland XIII: The far-right's rebellion

This is the thirteenth part of a blog post series where I go through the most significant stages of Finnish history. In the twelfth post, I described how Finland gained democracy after its independence and the Civil War, characterized by an exceptionally strong executive power.

Like many other European countries, Finland also experienced attempts by the far right to seize power in the 1920s and 1930s. This movement emerged as a reaction to the active activities of communist groups supported by the Soviet Union that were channeled into trade unions and resulted in continuous strikes.

Initially, these strikes were attempted to be suppressed with strikebreakers, which were mainly collected from Southern Ostrobothnia. When this did not work, the right-wing became increasingly radicalized and formed the violent Lapua Movement, which targeted communists and those believed to be sympathetic to them.

Finnish right-wing radicalism was strongest in the region of South Ostrobothnia, as the region had traditionally adopted a more active attitude towards economic activity through tar burning and other pre-capitalist activities, but the landless population that generally created instability had left - inspired by the same activity - to seek their fortune in America. Thus, the population of South Ostrobothnia was wealthy and economically unusually equal.

As a result, the people who remained in the region adopted a more conservative attitude towards world events than the rest of the country. In the 1920s, this even took on some far-right characteristics: particularly Italian Benito Mussolini was admired.

However, there were only a few openly fascist people in South Ostrobothnia. In addition, the majority of the population remained on the side of legality, which had a decisive impact on later events in 1932.

The support for the far-right first rose all over Finland but turned quickly to decline after representatives of the Lapua Movement mistakenly abducted the former President Kaarlo Juho Ståhlberg and his wife on October 15, 1930. At the same time, the core of the far-right movement radicalized further, and in February-March 1932, they rebelled against the lawful authority in Mäntsälä, South Finland.

The rebellion was stopped by a speech by President Pehr Evind Svinhufvud, emphasizing the importance of legal proceedings for the whole nation, and the Lapua members, who attempted to recruit people from the countryside, failed to gather support in Mäntsälä. As a result, the entire movement was banned, and the Patriotic People's Movement, that emerged from its ruins never became a significant political force.

Thus, Finland returned to being a law-abiding and peaceful democracy, with the Social Democrats and the Agrarian League, who had distanced themselves from the far-left, being its guarantors. The Agrarian League's peasant supporters had already refused to join the far-right's bandwagon earlier. As a result, the grip of the far-left and the far-right, which had created successive pressures at the beginning of Finland's independence, loosened, and the country could be developed through peaceful politics towards a better future.

The original blog post in Finnish:
Äärioikeiston kapina

29 July 2023

History of Finland XII: Bloody civil war

This is the twelfth part of a blog series where I go through the significant events of Finnish history. In the eleventh entry, I described how Finland became a democracy, ensuring equal political participation for all citizens, as a result of the oppressive measures taken by Russia in the country.

As such, Finland gained independence in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. However, led by the Social Democratic Party, then including also communists, the Finnish Civil War began. According to Professor Ylikangas, the war resulted in the deaths of as many as 36 640 people - more than in the similarly-lengthy Winter War, and in proportion to the population, more than in the three-year Continuation War.

As we know, the war was ultimately won by the Whites, led by Mannerheim, although they initially struggled to recruit even in South Ostrobothnia, where the war was being fought against fellow countrymen. This situation changed when Mannerheim managed to disarm 7 500 Russian soldiers with a small group of men in Ostrobothnia. Thereafter, recruitment was marketed with the need to remove the Russians from the country, which solved previous problems.

The parties of the war were initially quite equal in terms of their skills, but the outcome was decided by the Jäger troops - Finnish young men who were trained and arrived from Germany - and ultimately by the German military unit that arrived in the country. In reality, the latter alone would have been sufficient to achieve the same outcome even if there had been no Jäger troops.

In the white Finland that emerged as the first outcome of the war, power was taken over by the educated classes, civil servants, owners of estates and factories, as well as farmers. On the other hand, the defeated industrial and agricultural workers and the landless inhabitants of sparsely populated areas were marginalized despite their right to vote.

The second significant outcome of the war was the emergence of a strong far-left party (The Finnish Communist Party) in our country. Its success was fueled by the white media, which highlighted the red terror, but remained silent about all the memories of the white post-war atrocities.

Finland was driven into a civil war primarily due to the power vacuum created by the fall of the Russian Tsar. The well-known social injustices - popularized by Väinö Linna and still cherished by the Left today - were more of a driving force for the war rather than the cause.

Two militant organizations, the Red and White Guards, emerged to fill the power vacuum, and their confrontation was ensured when the Senate, dominated by the political right, declared the Civil Guards as the government's armed forces. The Red Guard leadership could not accept this, and they set out on their ill-fated military campaign.

After the war, there was a multi-stage political struggle over the country's political system and the government structure that reflected it. The result was a democratic structure with a very strong executive power, which was entirely different from the other European states that became independent after the World War I.

Thanks to its strong executive power, Finland remained a democracy while other post-World War I democracies drifted towards right-wing dictatorships. This was despite the fact that communists in Finland were forced underground and the far-right sought to take power through extra-legal means.

The original blog post in Finnish:
Verinen sisällissota

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