Watch out, American, the jungle has a million eyes
After
the World War II, Finland was lucky to avoid the fate of other European
countries located in the same longitudes and never became an actual
Soviet satellite. For various practical reasons, Finland had to
maintain a cordial relationship with the Soviets. From the economic
standpoint, this was actually beneficial for Finland for reasons too
various and complex to fully go in here. For this reason, unlike in the
Anglo-Saxon world, the socialist and even the communist factions of the
Finnish political scene actually had some political power and
representatives in the Finnish parliamentary system.
The communists never got a political majority or anything like that to fully realize their aims. However, their most rabid and by far most dangerous upsurge occurred in the seventies with the rise of the stalinist faction. This near-cultish ideological movement was extremely efficient in recruiting among the naive student population (especially in the intellectually softer fields, of course) so it quickly became a loud major force in university politics. The bold movement was quite explicit about what happens to the dissidents when the revolution comes, which it waited for with an apocalyptic enthusiasm. The foot soldiers of the movement, of course, liked to recruit allies from environmentalists, feminists, union activists and other useful idiots by telling them how much the movement sympathises with them, and anyways, in the Soviet system their particular problems had already been solved if they didn't happen to be moot by design.
Due to their taking over the journalism departments of universities, the stalinists eventually gained virtually total control over the state-owned national broadcast corporation YLE. As a result, virtually every single radio newscast and documentary defended the actions of Soviet Union and condemned the evil United States, European Union and anything else that smacked of "capitalism". For example, the nuclear weapons of the USA were always a serious threat to the whole world, but the Soviet Union's missiles were good since they were "peace missiles" for self-defense. To make the common people more sympathetic towards socialism, the stalinists also produced "documentaries" which often explained in a handy Q/A format the details of life was in Soviet Russia and how much better all things worked there. Even the wheat grew faster in the socialist system.
The stalinist grip has been released only during the past few years, since the same crowd still sits in their cushy jobs, courtery of the taxpayer. Instead of advocating the open revolution in which the dissidents would be sent to re-education camps while Finland became a part of the Soviet Union, the same people now merely advocate the welfare state and various softer aspects of socialism, and of course the feminist, green and multicultural issues, silencing aways the awkward past in which there is no point or use digging anyways. Once commercial broadcasters got to emerge (despite the stalinist protests of how e.g. the commercial newscasts are just plain wrong), they were always more normal: socialists, of course, knew better than to put their beliefs in any kind of market test.
In retrospect, by far the most comical aspect of the stalinist movement was the music that they produced. The stalinists were, of course, the favourite party of all kinds of "artists", "intellectuals" and other useless people (feel free to stop me if any of this sounds familiar), who would then produce revolutionary music to inspire the people to rise and overthrow the capitalist oppressor. In this new millenium, the stalinist music has become a camp favourite of the next generation that is too young to actually remember the times that this music was sung and played without any irony. A few years back there was even a popular band "Ultra Bra" whose gimmick was singing their (non-socialist) songs using the angry voice similar to the stalinists few decades earlier.
I personally encountered this music when I joined the go boardgame club of our university. In this club, listening to stalinist music was a common staple of all our sauna nights and card playing evenings. Now, I really don't have the words to describe this music to someone who comes from a different cultural background. You just have to take my word when I say that these songs are hilariously absurd.
I can still vividly remember the first sauna night that I participated and the moment when the song "In praise of the Party" started playing. This song, to my understanding based on a poem by Bertolt Brecht, first explains that the party has a thousand eyes and sees everything. By then, the other guys had stood up in attention and were singing along in a voice that you might imagine the grim-faced Russian guard soldier using. After the middle, the song suddenly takes a turn to a far softer and romantic tone, telling how the party is the "frontier of the masses" and guides their fight with "classical methods" that were created by "familiarity with reality". I was so totally rolling on the floor that I couldn't even think of what the next move on the board could be. Later, I learned other such hilarious lines that the club members tried to inject in every conversation and creatively use in other contexts. I sometimes sneaked in these lines to the lectures that I gave at the school, just for the amusement of my own and the club members sitting in the audience. Of course, you can find them in all my books too.
Naturally the stalinists made children's music too, since it's important to raise them properly from the start. The wistful children's song "Uncle Lenin lives in Russia", sung by an actual choir of small children, defies all my attempts to describe it here. In the song, kids wonder how they could best fight for the always-smiling Unca Lenin and Unca Ho Chi Minh, even though they are still so small and weak in strength. One guy in whose apartment the club sometimes played cards with, when he heard this song the first time, simply noted that this song is simply evil distilled and purified into a concrete form. I guess that pretty much sums it up.
A lot of communist music was about how good things are and peace will come with socialism and everybody is friends and happy. There is one exception, though. The songs recorded by "The Sea Pioneers" positively seethe with frustrated rage against the capitalism and America. The gloves have come off, and the real face of the stalinist movement is grimacing. If you think that the current crop of American anti-war marchers is bad... well, let's just say that they could be a helluva lot worse. Many of these songs are set in the Vietnam war, which was probably at its height at the time, so these songs gleefully describe American soldiers dying in the jungle in various gruesome ways, after they have raped and slaughtered innocent Vietnamese villagers who just wanted to defend their homes. Some songs are sung from the perspective of a simple Vietnamese man or woman who suffers under the rule of Americans and their lackeys, or is wounded or killed by their evil weapons.
There is one song in which the American soldier is a sympathetic character, though, "The Song of a Black Soldier", whose contents you can probably guess without my explaining them. The two most comical songs are by far "The achievements of Western military science", which first lists the effects of various gases on people and then goes to explain how "senators, judges, murderers of negroes" financially benefit from the military-industrial complex, and "The story of a little soldier", in which an American soldier first slaughters an innocent village, for which he gets a medal and a promotion. To celebrate, he gets drunk and goes to buy hookers (one dollar each), but the two hooker sisters turn out to be VC agents who kill him, for which he also gets a medal and another promotion each year, the new rank always carved to his headstone on the fourth of July.
By far the angriest song is "We want to live in this land", of which I shall perhaps put the first verse here (my translation):
The communists never got a political majority or anything like that to fully realize their aims. However, their most rabid and by far most dangerous upsurge occurred in the seventies with the rise of the stalinist faction. This near-cultish ideological movement was extremely efficient in recruiting among the naive student population (especially in the intellectually softer fields, of course) so it quickly became a loud major force in university politics. The bold movement was quite explicit about what happens to the dissidents when the revolution comes, which it waited for with an apocalyptic enthusiasm. The foot soldiers of the movement, of course, liked to recruit allies from environmentalists, feminists, union activists and other useful idiots by telling them how much the movement sympathises with them, and anyways, in the Soviet system their particular problems had already been solved if they didn't happen to be moot by design.
Due to their taking over the journalism departments of universities, the stalinists eventually gained virtually total control over the state-owned national broadcast corporation YLE. As a result, virtually every single radio newscast and documentary defended the actions of Soviet Union and condemned the evil United States, European Union and anything else that smacked of "capitalism". For example, the nuclear weapons of the USA were always a serious threat to the whole world, but the Soviet Union's missiles were good since they were "peace missiles" for self-defense. To make the common people more sympathetic towards socialism, the stalinists also produced "documentaries" which often explained in a handy Q/A format the details of life was in Soviet Russia and how much better all things worked there. Even the wheat grew faster in the socialist system.
The stalinist grip has been released only during the past few years, since the same crowd still sits in their cushy jobs, courtery of the taxpayer. Instead of advocating the open revolution in which the dissidents would be sent to re-education camps while Finland became a part of the Soviet Union, the same people now merely advocate the welfare state and various softer aspects of socialism, and of course the feminist, green and multicultural issues, silencing aways the awkward past in which there is no point or use digging anyways. Once commercial broadcasters got to emerge (despite the stalinist protests of how e.g. the commercial newscasts are just plain wrong), they were always more normal: socialists, of course, knew better than to put their beliefs in any kind of market test.
In retrospect, by far the most comical aspect of the stalinist movement was the music that they produced. The stalinists were, of course, the favourite party of all kinds of "artists", "intellectuals" and other useless people (feel free to stop me if any of this sounds familiar), who would then produce revolutionary music to inspire the people to rise and overthrow the capitalist oppressor. In this new millenium, the stalinist music has become a camp favourite of the next generation that is too young to actually remember the times that this music was sung and played without any irony. A few years back there was even a popular band "Ultra Bra" whose gimmick was singing their (non-socialist) songs using the angry voice similar to the stalinists few decades earlier.
I personally encountered this music when I joined the go boardgame club of our university. In this club, listening to stalinist music was a common staple of all our sauna nights and card playing evenings. Now, I really don't have the words to describe this music to someone who comes from a different cultural background. You just have to take my word when I say that these songs are hilariously absurd.
I can still vividly remember the first sauna night that I participated and the moment when the song "In praise of the Party" started playing. This song, to my understanding based on a poem by Bertolt Brecht, first explains that the party has a thousand eyes and sees everything. By then, the other guys had stood up in attention and were singing along in a voice that you might imagine the grim-faced Russian guard soldier using. After the middle, the song suddenly takes a turn to a far softer and romantic tone, telling how the party is the "frontier of the masses" and guides their fight with "classical methods" that were created by "familiarity with reality". I was so totally rolling on the floor that I couldn't even think of what the next move on the board could be. Later, I learned other such hilarious lines that the club members tried to inject in every conversation and creatively use in other contexts. I sometimes sneaked in these lines to the lectures that I gave at the school, just for the amusement of my own and the club members sitting in the audience. Of course, you can find them in all my books too.
Naturally the stalinists made children's music too, since it's important to raise them properly from the start. The wistful children's song "Uncle Lenin lives in Russia", sung by an actual choir of small children, defies all my attempts to describe it here. In the song, kids wonder how they could best fight for the always-smiling Unca Lenin and Unca Ho Chi Minh, even though they are still so small and weak in strength. One guy in whose apartment the club sometimes played cards with, when he heard this song the first time, simply noted that this song is simply evil distilled and purified into a concrete form. I guess that pretty much sums it up.
A lot of communist music was about how good things are and peace will come with socialism and everybody is friends and happy. There is one exception, though. The songs recorded by "The Sea Pioneers" positively seethe with frustrated rage against the capitalism and America. The gloves have come off, and the real face of the stalinist movement is grimacing. If you think that the current crop of American anti-war marchers is bad... well, let's just say that they could be a helluva lot worse. Many of these songs are set in the Vietnam war, which was probably at its height at the time, so these songs gleefully describe American soldiers dying in the jungle in various gruesome ways, after they have raped and slaughtered innocent Vietnamese villagers who just wanted to defend their homes. Some songs are sung from the perspective of a simple Vietnamese man or woman who suffers under the rule of Americans and their lackeys, or is wounded or killed by their evil weapons.
There is one song in which the American soldier is a sympathetic character, though, "The Song of a Black Soldier", whose contents you can probably guess without my explaining them. The two most comical songs are by far "The achievements of Western military science", which first lists the effects of various gases on people and then goes to explain how "senators, judges, murderers of negroes" financially benefit from the military-industrial complex, and "The story of a little soldier", in which an American soldier first slaughters an innocent village, for which he gets a medal and a promotion. To celebrate, he gets drunk and goes to buy hookers (one dollar each), but the two hooker sisters turn out to be VC agents who kill him, for which he also gets a medal and another promotion each year, the new rank always carved to his headstone on the fourth of July.
By far the angriest song is "We want to live in this land", of which I shall perhaps put the first verse here (my translation):
We want to live in this land
and we intend to eventually cleanse it
of your filth, yankees, and of you,
you have already experienced it all.
(Edited for grammar and content)
When living in Finland I had been told by Finns (a number of times) that I need to hold back my comments about communism, what a failure the USSR was and how many people died because of communism as "many Finns supported communism during the Soviet times."
Now the horrors of the USSR is all fact and thankfully we can put the USSR in the pages of history.
What is really funny is that while I am busy holding my tongue, these former commie lovers are busy berating me about my criminal of a President.
What a bunch of cluebats!
Posted by Fred Fry | 10:02 AM
Ilkka, every day I am grateful that you have made it to a country where you can freely speak your mind without being persecuted, but please remember that there are still people back home who don't have the means to escape. It seems that the government has not yet found your new blog, probably because you are writing in English now, but it's only a matter of time before they do. And remember, blocking the site on their firewall is not the worst thing that can happen. Think of the rest of us. Think of your family.
Things are even worse here now than when you left. Our socialist dictator is about to get herself re-elected and the television is spewing so much propaganda my head hurts. It's almost as if all those people never died. I cannot believe they have been able to keep up the appearance of a democratic society to the rest of the world. What's even more ironic, they have fooled an American talk show host to support the re-election. I think they must be blackmailing him, nobody is that blind.
Anyway, I hope you are doing well. I've been fine. I am writing this from the party headquarters, which I think is the only Internet connection they don't yet routinely monitor, so I think it's safe to send you this message. I am going to sneak back home now, as there is no point in pushing my luck any further. Keep your fingers crossed that they don't catch me.
Posted by Anonymous | 10:01 AM
I'd translate "massojen kärkijoukko" into "the spearhead of the masses".
Among the hilarious stalinist songs there was also Savolainen balladi (=Savoan ballad). It was about bank managers Jääskeläinen and Jalkanen and war veteran Veikko Tiihonen. Jääskeläinen has a problem: he wants to buy war veteran Veikko Tiihonen's homestead but Tiihonen won't sell. A manager without a villa is like a minister of the church without the rank of a military reserve officer. Jääskeläinen goes to Jalkanen to complain about the problem who was a man of Metsäliitto and who bought timber from himself and knew all the tricks. Jalkanen consoles Jääskeläinen: "'Elä sie huoli Jääskeläinen', (narrator:) said Jalkanen. 'Tiihosen tila on kiinnitetty meijän pankillen. Minä myön sen mehtän sinullen ja sinä myöt sen minullen. Minä myön sen sitten Mehtäliitolle harvennushakkuuseen'.". Jalkanen sings in a quivering, high-pitched, and loud old man's voice with a thick northern Savo accent (the stereotypical image of the residents of Savo is that they are untrustworthy and double-talking), telling Jääskeläinen not to worry: "Tiihonen's homestead is mortgaged to our bank". Jalkanen's plan is to sell the lot to Jääskeläinen who is to sell it back to Jalkanen who is to sell it Metsäliitto to have the forest on it pruned. (Don't expect the plot to make sense.) Veikko Tiihonen is evicted from his homestead and has to leave with his dogs and his gun. Later he comes back and shoots Jääskeläinen, now the owner of the lot and the villa built on it, in the forehead with his one-barreled shotgun while Jääskeläinen is sitting in the sauna. And it so happens that "one goes to heaven and the other goes to prison". Jalkanen now purchases the villa as planned, where, in warm summer evenings, lobsters are eaten, liquor is drunk, and poems are recited (the voices of the chorus seething with disgust and anger at the notion of eating lobsters and reciting poems), while Jääskeläinen's ghost is sitting in the sauna.
Another song (not a communist one) was Korholan komia talo (= The Fancy Manor of Korhola). And consistent with a shameless fratboy mentality, we also used to sing Sonderkommando nach Dachau, arranged to the tune of Lentävä kalakukko, an innocent, merry little classic song (composed by Toivo Kärki, lyrics by Reino Helismaa) about a steam engine everybody is excited about.
Posted by Markku | 5:40 AM
Interestingly stalinism goes on among Finland's top politicians, for real!
The European Council decided last week that communism caused human-right violation crimes during its rule up to 1991 in Europe. The Russian delegates (except, interestingly, Zhirinovski) for fear of having to pay back for USSR's crimes, voted against the condemnation.
Finland's sole representative, Mikko Elo, member of ruling party Social Democrats, voted against the condemnation. He told that it was "capitalism propaganda". These words in 2006! As he was the official delegate, also President Tarja Halonen has the opinion that communism was OK and no crimes against humanity were done for example during Stalin's regime.
Ilkka, how to get a canadian citizenship?
Posted by geenistö | 11:17 AM