Yesterday I boosted a post over on Mastodon that was a sort of meme about all the ridiculous ways the US thinks China is spying on it. It was then commented on by a comrade, a Vietnam refugee who has almost died of polio back in the day in a refugee camp. To this then a "Finnish leftist" follower of mine had the nerve to descend and started sealioning and schooling this other person on all the lib talking points about China, like Uyghur genocide. Threw in Russia and "our brave smol bean country struggle" of fighting Russia for centuries.
Then today I got the latest edition of our Left Alliance newspaper. It opens with an editorial headlined: "Russia is still warmongering, alone". This is saying that Russia and Russia alone is and has and will do all the pushing for war. The link is to this, but its paywalled and in Finnish for which I am sorry (can take a pic of the editorial later if someone wants it, will still be in Finnish though and its really not worth anyones time).
Then we have a presidential election here, also strikes going on.
In my uni none of my lecturers took part in the walkout, the only measure the labor aristro union got together, they were all like "can't disrupt a legally chosen government".
The two presidential candidates are both turbo level neolibs. Basically Macron, times two. They perfectly embody our situation here and if you don't vote for either you are a bad person for democracy.
If anyone is familiar with the history of Finland and the very strong fascict project we had and have here it is both scary and depressing to see the level in which this liberal thought and rewriting of history has saturated most minds in my lifetime. I remember as a young adult when the capitalist takes on things like finlandization still got pushback. It feels like it all fell apart as the Soviet fell and neoliberalism was made hegemonic.
The takes I see today about this country and its history and on world politics and history are all ahistorical carbage that is so hegemonic you can't even start to debate on it as what people think they know, is so far removed from what actually happened, the gap would need years of re-education to breach.
I sometimes think about all this and feel like here the fash have already won. They did win originally too, but we had some progressive forces and the Soviet right there that kept them in a sort of leash, but not a day went by without them pushing their right wing anti-communist propaganda on everything. Media, entertainment, arts, public discourse. Everything. Even comics were brought here with the capitalist mission in mind as the capitalist class wanted to re-educate the working class fully after the civil war.
The nationalistic rise in the beginning of the 90s was when they reframed the ww2 war time in its entirety and we all bought the winter war myths and other crap.The nazi soldiers that Germany trained for us were framed 100% as heroes for example. There were an endless parade of teary eyed veterans and Karelian refugees talking about the scary Soviet and the price of our independence. I bought a of it at the time too. There was never a mention of the nazi question. Not in school, not in public discourse. This has sufraced just in the last few years and has mostly been swept under the rug, but there are some good studies and writing by the petty bourge academics on how leftists were treated here during the war. None of this reaches the mainstream though, our media is all controlled by the capitalist class.
I think a part of why making people see the fascism here is that if they did, they would have to admit to themselves that we were and are on the wrond side of history and for all the wrong reasons.
This makes for one lonely place to be a communist. Even though I have my kid and partner who are also comrades, the rest of my social surroundings mostly feels hopeless. I look at the endless liberal whining about this and that on social media or listen to it in real life, and all I want to do is yell to them to read even one book outside the isle of "How to be the most obnoxiously privileged & clueless, but confident Nordic person."
We do have a communist workers party, I get that newspaper too. It's like a handful of peoole who are very stigmatized and shunned by being comrades. This took the capitalist about 100 years to reach, but they got there. There is no Left left here now. How do we come back from this?
The Left Alliance really did a speed-run to moderate fascism, huh?
"Can't disrupt a legally chosen government (with Nazis)" is certainly one of the most
things I've heard in a while...
Still, Europe is on its way out. The neoliberals and their bar buddies are probably going burn the garden down, but at least the global south has some more hope...I hope!
They really did. Like I always knew they were the bourge left, but with the Nato stuff they never even blinked before siding with the empire and them European values.
I too was once sold on things like the EU like they are, because that never was framed for what it actually is in the public discourse here, but come on! The nazi government is seriously talking about raising VAT and these guys are focusing on this? The most toothless left there ever was that essentially just muddies the waters and whines, and that I suppose is their actual function in this capitalist system.