The cyber-uglies take on Finland: introducing a three-part series
Finland is the social democratic miracle that's crept up quietly on us all while we were struggling to take neoliberal economics seriously.
Unlike Sweden, which has been an advanced country for at least a century, Finland only began working its way up into the top league in the 1970s. Writes Peter Ford, 'Fifty years ago, Finland was known for little more than the wood pulp from its endless forests. A poverty-stricken land of poorly educated loggers and farmers on the edge of the Arctic Circle, few paid it any attention. Today, this small Nordic nation boasts a thriving hi-tech economy ranked the most competitive in the world, the best educated citizenry of all the industrialized countries, and a welfare state that has created one of the globe's most egalitarian societies.'
Finland's success, which in most respects now equals that of Sweden (and excels Sweden and all the other Nordic countries in the area of education), makes the country just as much of a threat to the neoliberal 'new world order' as Sweden itself. For, as Noam Chomsky pointed out long ago, what the U.S. fears most is a good example. Finland is living proof that the social democratic welfare state works - and, to rub salt into the wound, proof that you don't have to be Scandinavian to make it work. (Danes, Norwegians, Swedes and Icelanders are Scandinavians; Finns are not. Genetically, the Finns' closest relatives are the Estonians. The similarities between Swedish and Finnish culture are entirely historical in origin.)
Few people can be unaware that the American right has been waging a war of defamation and innuendo against Sweden since at least 1960, when President Eisenhower, sulking over Sweden's neutrality during the Cold War, dismissed the country of his forbears (and those of his wife) as a land of 'sin, nudity, drunkenness and suicide.'
From 1960 down to the present, you'd be hard pressed to find an article about Sweden in a mainstream American newspaper or magazine whose real intent is not to convince you that Sweden is not all that it's cracked up to be. Most of the time, the aim is to persuade you that the reality is far worse than you ever imagined. But we won't go into the long history of American Swedophobia now, because the topic for today and for the next two posts is the recent emergence of a parallel phenonomenon, American Finnophobia.
One of the most bizarre features of the blogosphere at present is the American attempt to portray Finland in as dark a light as possible. From an Australian perspective, this looks utterly absurd: after all, Finns today enjoy a level of generalized affluence - over eighty percent of Finns enjoy a middle class lifestyle - that has only ever been accomplished in one country before (Sweden). In the US and the other English-speaking countries, on the other hand, the share of the population that is middle class is of the order of only about sixty percent.
And, really, it's not just a case of there being just a few good things about Finland; from no matter which angle you look except the cold weather and the inherent disadvantages of living in a thinly-populated country, the place has everything going for it.
So who could possibly want to knock Finland? Let's look at two blogs substantially devoted to persuading us that Finnish reality is, well, far worse than we could ever have imagined: Finnpundit: Casting a Wary Eye on Freeriding Finland, and Finland For Thought: An American's Blog in Finland. Today, I'll be casting a wary eye on Finnpundit.
Part I: The conservative who ruptured his spleen (or so we can only hope)
Finnpundit is a stridently pro-Bush, pro-war businessman living in the U.S. who is consumed by hatred for liberalism, the welfare state and social democracy. His blog ran from April 2004 to December 2005, and fortunately hasn't been updated since.
Few quotes could serve to introduce Finnpundit better than the following, in which he suggests that social democracy could be worse than communism because, unlike communism, it's 'so benign': 'In the end, social democracy is a benign form of communism, but perhaps because it is so benign it is more insidious than communism.' Presumably, the proper thing to do is support the least benign political ideology because only then can you be sure that you're not supporting communism!
Finnpundit's expertise in matters Finnish amounts to the claim to be of Finnish ancestry and to speak Finnish fluently. Whether either claim is true or not, he only cites articles from the online Finnish English-language media, which suggests that he's not so much interested in discussing what's happening in Finland as in influencing what Americans using the net think about Finland. (He also deletes readers' comments written in Finnish, since he wants to make sure American readers don't miss a single moment of their indoctrination sessions.)
Finnpundit's first aim is to ensure that his readers perceive the European welfare state negatively; since that's old ground for the American right, I won't linger over it. His second aim, though, is startling: it's to convince Americans to begin to think of themselves as its victims. For Finnpundit's core claim - and I am not making this up - is that the European welfare state is an economically unviable perversion that only survives through the exploitation of the American 'worker-consumer.' (See the entry here.)
After reading this daft diatribe, I realized that the man is trying to channel the discontent of American 'worker-consumers' with their deteriorating living standards against a useful external threat. It's the same strategy as, say, blaming Castro for the Kennedy assassination, except that in this case the scapegoat is utterly implausible. No matter how dumbed down Americans have been by their deteriorating education system there can't possibly be many who'd take the idea seriously.
Like most diehard American conservatives, Finnpundit would also like to find a convenient scapegoat for the 9-11 attacks. So his proudest moment comes when, at the conclusion of the above piece, he triumphantly fathers the attacks on 'European welfare state academia.' After asking myself the question whether the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg might not deserve to take the blame for Mohammed Atta, I found myself agreeing with 'TA' who posted the comment, 'I'm all for being challenged by different viewpoints to my own, but now you are just starting to sound silly.'
The problem with American conservatives, though, is that they are no less dangerous for being silly. One day, when another rightwing American president, a Bush III, IV or V, seeks to persuade Americans that he has no choice but to drop nukes on Stockholm and Helsinki to save their country from the corrupting influences of 'welfare statism,' it might just be Finnpundit's preposterous take on how the European welfare state exploits and oppresses Americans that makes up the most coherent part of his argument.
As for Finland: no matter how Finnpundit tries to rationalize his hostility towards his land of origin, he cannot conceal the real source of his grievance, which is that the country didn't commit troops to Iraq. (If Finland had sent troops, and Denmark hadn't, I expect I'd be talking now about Danepundit's theory as to the previously overlooked evils of Danish co-operative dairy farming.)
Finnpundit's mysterious disappearance from cyberspace five or six weeks ago has been greeted with relief by a few Finnish bloggers, to whom such ignorant rants against their country are obviously a source of irritation, and hopes have been expressed by some that the blog may even be defunct.
A possible explanation for Finnpundit's disappearance would be that he worked himself up into such a frenzy composing a forthcoming screed against European 'welfare-statism' that his overactive spleen actually ruptured. Either that, or he's Jack Abramoff, and he's got other things on his mind right now.
Finnpundit?
Coming next: Part II: Freerider Phil
Unlike Sweden, which has been an advanced country for at least a century, Finland only began working its way up into the top league in the 1970s. Writes Peter Ford, 'Fifty years ago, Finland was known for little more than the wood pulp from its endless forests. A poverty-stricken land of poorly educated loggers and farmers on the edge of the Arctic Circle, few paid it any attention. Today, this small Nordic nation boasts a thriving hi-tech economy ranked the most competitive in the world, the best educated citizenry of all the industrialized countries, and a welfare state that has created one of the globe's most egalitarian societies.'
Finland's success, which in most respects now equals that of Sweden (and excels Sweden and all the other Nordic countries in the area of education), makes the country just as much of a threat to the neoliberal 'new world order' as Sweden itself. For, as Noam Chomsky pointed out long ago, what the U.S. fears most is a good example. Finland is living proof that the social democratic welfare state works - and, to rub salt into the wound, proof that you don't have to be Scandinavian to make it work. (Danes, Norwegians, Swedes and Icelanders are Scandinavians; Finns are not. Genetically, the Finns' closest relatives are the Estonians. The similarities between Swedish and Finnish culture are entirely historical in origin.)
Few people can be unaware that the American right has been waging a war of defamation and innuendo against Sweden since at least 1960, when President Eisenhower, sulking over Sweden's neutrality during the Cold War, dismissed the country of his forbears (and those of his wife) as a land of 'sin, nudity, drunkenness and suicide.'
From 1960 down to the present, you'd be hard pressed to find an article about Sweden in a mainstream American newspaper or magazine whose real intent is not to convince you that Sweden is not all that it's cracked up to be. Most of the time, the aim is to persuade you that the reality is far worse than you ever imagined. But we won't go into the long history of American Swedophobia now, because the topic for today and for the next two posts is the recent emergence of a parallel phenonomenon, American Finnophobia.
One of the most bizarre features of the blogosphere at present is the American attempt to portray Finland in as dark a light as possible. From an Australian perspective, this looks utterly absurd: after all, Finns today enjoy a level of generalized affluence - over eighty percent of Finns enjoy a middle class lifestyle - that has only ever been accomplished in one country before (Sweden). In the US and the other English-speaking countries, on the other hand, the share of the population that is middle class is of the order of only about sixty percent.
And, really, it's not just a case of there being just a few good things about Finland; from no matter which angle you look except the cold weather and the inherent disadvantages of living in a thinly-populated country, the place has everything going for it.
So who could possibly want to knock Finland? Let's look at two blogs substantially devoted to persuading us that Finnish reality is, well, far worse than we could ever have imagined: Finnpundit: Casting a Wary Eye on Freeriding Finland, and Finland For Thought: An American's Blog in Finland. Today, I'll be casting a wary eye on Finnpundit.
Part I: The conservative who ruptured his spleen (or so we can only hope)
Finnpundit is a stridently pro-Bush, pro-war businessman living in the U.S. who is consumed by hatred for liberalism, the welfare state and social democracy. His blog ran from April 2004 to December 2005, and fortunately hasn't been updated since.
Few quotes could serve to introduce Finnpundit better than the following, in which he suggests that social democracy could be worse than communism because, unlike communism, it's 'so benign': 'In the end, social democracy is a benign form of communism, but perhaps because it is so benign it is more insidious than communism.' Presumably, the proper thing to do is support the least benign political ideology because only then can you be sure that you're not supporting communism!
Finnpundit's expertise in matters Finnish amounts to the claim to be of Finnish ancestry and to speak Finnish fluently. Whether either claim is true or not, he only cites articles from the online Finnish English-language media, which suggests that he's not so much interested in discussing what's happening in Finland as in influencing what Americans using the net think about Finland. (He also deletes readers' comments written in Finnish, since he wants to make sure American readers don't miss a single moment of their indoctrination sessions.)
Finnpundit's first aim is to ensure that his readers perceive the European welfare state negatively; since that's old ground for the American right, I won't linger over it. His second aim, though, is startling: it's to convince Americans to begin to think of themselves as its victims. For Finnpundit's core claim - and I am not making this up - is that the European welfare state is an economically unviable perversion that only survives through the exploitation of the American 'worker-consumer.' (See the entry here.)
After reading this daft diatribe, I realized that the man is trying to channel the discontent of American 'worker-consumers' with their deteriorating living standards against a useful external threat. It's the same strategy as, say, blaming Castro for the Kennedy assassination, except that in this case the scapegoat is utterly implausible. No matter how dumbed down Americans have been by their deteriorating education system there can't possibly be many who'd take the idea seriously.
Like most diehard American conservatives, Finnpundit would also like to find a convenient scapegoat for the 9-11 attacks. So his proudest moment comes when, at the conclusion of the above piece, he triumphantly fathers the attacks on 'European welfare state academia.' After asking myself the question whether the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg might not deserve to take the blame for Mohammed Atta, I found myself agreeing with 'TA' who posted the comment, 'I'm all for being challenged by different viewpoints to my own, but now you are just starting to sound silly.'
The problem with American conservatives, though, is that they are no less dangerous for being silly. One day, when another rightwing American president, a Bush III, IV or V, seeks to persuade Americans that he has no choice but to drop nukes on Stockholm and Helsinki to save their country from the corrupting influences of 'welfare statism,' it might just be Finnpundit's preposterous take on how the European welfare state exploits and oppresses Americans that makes up the most coherent part of his argument.
As for Finland: no matter how Finnpundit tries to rationalize his hostility towards his land of origin, he cannot conceal the real source of his grievance, which is that the country didn't commit troops to Iraq. (If Finland had sent troops, and Denmark hadn't, I expect I'd be talking now about Danepundit's theory as to the previously overlooked evils of Danish co-operative dairy farming.)
Finnpundit's mysterious disappearance from cyberspace five or six weeks ago has been greeted with relief by a few Finnish bloggers, to whom such ignorant rants against their country are obviously a source of irritation, and hopes have been expressed by some that the blog may even be defunct.
A possible explanation for Finnpundit's disappearance would be that he worked himself up into such a frenzy composing a forthcoming screed against European 'welfare-statism' that his overactive spleen actually ruptured. Either that, or he's Jack Abramoff, and he's got other things on his mind right now.
Finnpundit?
Coming next: Part II: Freerider Phil
