Articles

Reverse Finlandization?

Finland joins the new Cold War

The good news is that prime minister Sanna Marin was voted out. The bad news is that it doesn’t matter, because, after decades of neutrality even during the Cold War, Finland has joined NATO. 

I don’t even know who’s the new Finnish prime minister, but I’m glad that Sanna is out. I have to say I found her really annoying. Now, I am not necessarily against women rulers, but I am certainly against women like her. All the news about her were that she was the youngest prime minister ever, that she was a woman, that she was pretty, that she went to parties, etc. I’m sorry, you can’t run a country just based on sex appeal. It doesn’t make your nation look very serious. 

But Finland is now in NATO. And this annoys me for several reasons, the main one is that I should be going there soon. When I accepted, more than a year ago, to take part in an arts residency in a remote place in Finland for a month, my idea was to get away from all the worries of the world. I would not watch any news for a month, especially not war news, and would just have a quiet place to write. Well, that’s now gone, as Finland has become a focal point in this new Cold War that we seem to have created. 

They say that the reason is the invasion of the Ukraine by Russia, and that they were afraid Finland could be next. But this is just an emotional explanation, used to convince people. Whatever the reasons for the war in the Ukraine, they are mostly regional reasons that do not really necessarily apply to Finland. Why leave neutrality to become a target? Now they’re going to have a militarized border, more American soldiers stationed there, nuclear missiles, and hostile relations with their next-door neighbour, which were mostly peaceful before. Now, who knows.

The term “finlandization” meant pressure by a bigger country to make a smaller country basically obey their foreign policy rules, while allowing it to keep its nominal independence and its own political system. It applied to the Soviet Union in their earlier relations with Finland, but I suppose now it applies, reversely, to the United States and the pressure it applies on its allies.

Now, what is NATO? Simplifying things, belonging to NATO just means that you are a colony of the United States. That’s basically what it means. Now, they cannot use the American flag, because that would be too obvious, so they use the Rainbow flag instead. I don’t know why they chose this particular flag and this particular topic, but that’s how it is.  

Of course, you don’t need to be a member of NATO to be a U.S. colony, that’s just for the VIPs.

Here is a map of U.S. military bases around the world. 

Here is a map of countries that sanctioned Russia. 

And here is a map of countries that have “gay marriage”. 

Here is a map of countries with large numbers of recent immigrants. 

Except for some differences here and there, all maps more or less match, don’t they?  

Remember, when these people talk about “freedom” or “democracy” — and they talk a lot about it — what they mostly mean is gay marriage and population replacement. The rest is negotiable.

And the countries that are occupied by the U.S., but do not yet accept gay marriage or population replacement, such as Japan, are being constantly pressured to accept them too. Multiculturalism and gay marriage seem to be a proxy for American colonization. 

So that’s where Finland is now. I am not extremely happy about it, because it sort of breaks my romantic idea of isolation from the rest of the world’s problems, but that’s how it is, and we’ll see how it goes from here.