If there is one good thing that can be said about those who hate everything that bothers their optics in another person, is that they truly help you understand René Girard’s scapegoat theory. Society needs someone to blame, someone to sacrifice when things go south. That’s just how society works, because if we have the good, we also need the bad. So while we look up to our leader(s) we also need someone to trot out as an example for those we are teaching, the one who may even get punished in our stead. Finland, like any proper country with its fair share of conspiracy theories, also provides the usual suspects. The Jew is always at fault simply because he exists. Some even blame America, because it’s a huge country, it’s conveniently far away, and no one really wants to raise the wrath of the Russian, so the last said about that the better. That famous sisu so present when it comes to doing drunk antics is conveniently absent when it comes to potentially voicing a concern about the Russian. Of course things have changed, but still – among all the displays of bravado –  the mantra holds, proceed with caution, do not wake the sleeping bear, do not incur the wrath of the Russian. 

Instead we have the Somali, and since refugees became a subject at the drinking table*, pretty much any Muslim. “We never used to have a problem with things getting stolen from our cloak rooms in school until we had foreign students,” is a narrative I have heard far too often, The first time I heard it, it was uttered by my Swedish-speaking guide who had volunteered himself when I asked on a forum if there was anyone who could show me around and introduce me to the finer points of Finnish society. It was for a project, and quite a few seemed to have thought, alright, I’ll bite because I got a good amount of replies, which set the ball rolling. This same individual is now married to a lady who would not fit the optics of those who desire for the population to stay the same, though it’s true that he met her in her country, on his travels, because like many Finns, he too traveled a lot. It wasn’t the last time I heard this narrative. 

Many years later I started meeting up for coffee with a male acquaintance of mine. Once we got the intricacies of no interest on my part out of the way, he was ok with just staying friends, so we’d shoot some pool at times and others we’d meet for coffee or drinks. 

I wasn’t interested in him for a variety of reasons, but the one thing that stood out to me was there was a certain hardness about him, a sense of rigidity. The only person that jumps to mind immediately is the German actor Till Schweiger or that Scottish-German actor everyone holds up as being God’s gift to women. Cross them with Christoph Waltz as Hans Landa in Inglorious Basterds and you get an idea of whom I’d want to cast if this were a movie. I’m not saying that because he turned out to be ultra conservative to the point of displaying not even the slightest desire to understand why women need maternity leave and instead turned it into an issue of women being problematic hires for precisely that reason. There was just something about him that made it almost a relief when he admitted to having voted for the party that would guarantee him his basic true right as a Finn. Ironically (in terms of current events), he was also Swedish-speaking. I like my real life villains to be completely ugly from within, which then shows on the outside, because when I call a person ugly it’s to say that their soul does not present well through the eyes, which I fully believe are the windows to the soul. 

I’ll call him Kalle, in allusion to a similar specimen I can’t stand, though I really don’t know how that person voted in any election, nor do I care (apologies to the one person very likely reading this who is related to him, though we’ve discussed this in person). Though come to think of it, the second Kalle also merits a mention in terms of conservative idealism when he mentioned that he too wanted to sit in bars and do nothing all day before meeting friends in the evening. The concept of people actually working in public spaces that act as bistros or coffee houses or really anything during the day, was completely wasted on someone who only considered something in Accounting or Medicine or Law to be worthy of anything, and of course since he studied it, also IT. But if he didn’t understand it, it just didn’t exist for him and for some reason every male I met, who came from Ostrobothnia was exactly the same. Their faces changed but never their attitude. 

So Kalle, the protagonist of this story voted extremely conservative because he found his ilk, a group of likeminded Finns who were very dead set in their opinions when it came to helping non-Finns, who saw the refugees coming to Finland as an invasion, and who in actual fact would have preferred to have Finland outside of the EU, never mind freedom of movement (which too many in key positions here do not understand) and of course Oodi, the Helsinki Library even self-deprecating Finns can admit is pretty damn rad and can be proud of. 

I like my villains visibly bad, because it makes it easier to cast them aside. When they are intelligent and well-spoken and if we have discussed ideas earlier and have established some sort of friendly rapport, it makes it that much more enticing to want to dig deeper beneath the surface to try and determine what (could have) made you that way. And if you changed, what was the inciting incident that made you change. And then I want to apply the study I read that people who are into metal present as having more conservative values overall and check that against some people in Finland. But most of all I really want to put to the test whether my theory is true that if you voted extreme conservative, even populist, it’s not just because someone managed to get at you with your own fears in an intricate game of pouring more and more verbal gasoline on the flames of a fire they have started. But that deep down inside, somewhere in your core, you always believed that white people really are superior. But then if you unite with those who think like you from other countries – places that once used to be sworn bitter enemies – wouldn’t that in itself constitute some measure of globalization, so the very thing you are fighting against? And if all of you are superior, who gets the top spot in your system of superiority and how is that determined? 

*Finns eat too quickly for a a conversation or even a debate. I say this with my mouth firmly in my cheek but even though I lived in Germany and those people eat fast, I’ve never seen anything akin to the eating speed of a Finn. 

Needless to say when I ran into Kalle years later and told him that I had been diagnosed with a chronic illness, I never heard from me again. And once more, this was not the first time this had happened, nor – and I am absolutely sure of this – will it be the last. But I find it super interesting how those very same Holy-Scripture-of-Their-Choice-Bashing conservatives tend to run away at the precise moment they could have stood up and be counted when it comes to true representation of their religion, an adherence to which they need to announce at every turn of the way, and twice every mile on the highway. 

This song honestly saved my life because it came at a time when all around me people were acting like it was 1933 and everyone was just waiting for January 30. Some of the kids at the school I attended had mentioned this band even earlier, but I remember them going very quiet when this song came out. I didn’t know the singer was also British, but it was comforting to know that amidst all the Nazi nostalgia I was hearing on the regular, there were other voices speaking out (which should be a post all of its own between the writers some of the teachers opted for instead of having us read The Diary of Anne Frank like one of the only two German teachers did with his students not to mention the Holocaust denial from a History and German teacher and the very telling silence when it was brought to their attention that certain Jewish-identifying students were being verbally harassed by the resident neo Nazi).