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To be born a Finn by Thanos Kalamidas 2007-11-08 11:02:45 |
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Today the flags all around Finland are at half-mast and the mood of the people even lower, and somehow I feel so angry with myself. It's only a couple of weeks ago when I wrote an article where I often emphasized that something has changed lately in Finland. I used a couple of examples of my life over the last few months to say that there is a new generation with hate feelings.
Nearly everybody around me said that I might exaggerate a bit due to the view of some kids tattooed with hate symbols and my sensitivity to the issue. But then I kept arguing that for me is unbelievable that a young boy or a girl would stamp hers or his body for life with a symbol like a swastika and all that comes with it. When I wrote that article I was angry with the Finnish government that has done nothing for years to show these kids that the Nazis were not the good allies against bad Stalin but the criminal you don’t want to associate with under any circumstances and that’s exactly why in the end even General Mannerheim changed sides.
The enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your friend; actually they can become your worst nightmare. But the Finnish government did nothing about it, instead of trying to build a new national identity they hid in a historic reality and what they got out of it? Eight bodies in a school-yard.
An 18-year old senior student in Tuusuka school in southern Finland walked in the school on Wednesday morning carrying a gun and started shooting people with the result of eight confirmed dead and wounded and number of others, kept himself inside the school till early evening holding hostages a whole country and in the end shot himself according the police.
Just few weeks before the incident the young man, as a member of a shooting club, received a gun permit for the 22 calibre pistol he used for the killings. The questions are many and if what we saw for a few minutes in the popular internet site YouTube, a video supposedly made by the shooter a day before, then Finland is in trouble. Serious trouble.
For the next few days and weeks experts of all kinds will fill television screens analyzing and trying to explain what happened. Having seen the same play before I know that easily they are going to blame the local environment, the poor family, the weather and in the end they will all agree that the boy had shown signs of depression due to the unemployment and global financial crisis ignoring the fact that an 18-year old boy was permitted to carry a gun, that an 18-year old boy has the right to elect and be elected, that in fact an 18-years old is not a boy anymore but a man.
Instead of trying to find whom to blame they should look into the mistakes they have done and the first to talk about it must be the state, not only this government but the governments of the last thirty if not fifty years, the governments that didn’t show what is good and what is evil in a country that saw in five only years the number of immigrants increasing to gigantic figures like 10,000%.
In his ‘manifest’ that he wrote a day before the shooting the 18-years old man says, "I cannot say that I am of the same race as this miserable, arrogant and selfish human race. No! I have evolved a step higher", no comment here, you just have to see around you in Helsinki to see what the young man didn’t like, a young man that grew up believing that only Finns are brave, only Finns have sisu and that is like winning a lottery to born a Finn!
high-school-shooting Nazism Ovi_magazine Finland |
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