“Nearly everyone is white and everyone benefits from a history of colonialist exploitation.”
You might want to know that up until 1917, Finland was not a country of its own but fully under Russian rule. Before that, under Swedish rule. Before 1860, the year we were made mostly autonomous, we were basically a colony ourselves with no right to govern our own regions, collect our own taxes or have a say in Sweden’s or Russia’s politics. Our language and culture was looked down upon. The ethnically Finnish population was poor, oppressed and pretty much entirely without say in anything regarding our own country. Up until 1902 Finnish wasn’t even an official language in Finland, and even after that Russian was the official language of our parliament until we finally became independent.
And if you want some slavery and strife, of course there have been things like Isoviha: Russians invaded Finland (which belonged to Sweden at the time), slaughtered tons of Finns and shipped about 20 000 of us off to become slaves. For contrast, our population was only 350 000 at the time. The Swedes just sorta shrugged and went “Not our problem”, since, you know, we weren’t Swedes. Then Pikkuviha, another period of Russian invasion.
How about the first and second Sortokausi? Even the name means “era of oppression”. The Russians decided that Finland had it too well and started to forcefully suppress Finnish nationalist movements, shipping people off to Siberia, replacing Finnish officials with Russian ones, making Russian the only official language in Finland - basically trying to destroy the Finnish culture and fully integrate Finland into Russia.
So I’d hardly say that we benefited from colonialist exploitation.
So yeah, sure, we’re white. But it doesn’t fucking matter because we never have lived in a country where whiteness was never of any benefit. In Finland (and most of Europe anyways) being oppressed has always had everything to do with your ethnicity instead of the colour of your skin. We never had a single colony, we never invaded a single country, slavery has always been illegal here - even when we were a part of Russia where slavery was common. Sure, we have less than 1% of PoC - but please tell me why the fuck does that matter? It didn’t save us from being a god damn colony.
And of course I left out shit like the eradication of our native religion but hey, we’re white so it doesn’t matter anyway right?
It must be lovely to sit on your high horse there in the USA and think you know a single thing about the racial and/or cultural dynamics in Europe. Just because the crackers of your precious country fucked up doesn’t mean that you get the right to shit on minorities (population of Finland: 5 000 000. Contrast that with the USA) and ignore the rapid developement of Finland from pretty much nothing, a country 100% dependent on agriculture and wood, to one of the world’s most educated, most liberal, most egalitarian and most technologically advanced countries in less than 100 years. And all of this without benefiting from “third-world” countries or colonies, without by wars or conquest, without by aggressive foreign policies. Unlike the fucking USA.
Fuck you & do your research.
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