Finland has decided to buy weapons from Israel. This was agreed to by army generals, in processes which could not be effected democratically. In an effort to understand them I imagine generals perceive societies being led by competing interests, where contracts, such as the borders of states are formed as compromise to ensure that the interests of different groups are respected. The negotiation of competing interests as a foundation of politics, is an easy model to understand.
For me the pandemic taught that contracts made with this logic will not sustain us through real crises. For example Finland had to compete with Germany and other EU nations in acquiring life-saving equipment such as N95 masks… And we lost many times over.
For me it is clear that forming contracts with an apartheid state, which is accused by a growing number of people to be in the process of committing an ethnic cleansing and even a genocide, is a bad idea and will have hick-ups along the way.
Why are Finnish generals ignorant of human rights?
I trust the military’s capacities in assessing the effectiveness of different weapon systems, but assessing effectiveness, which is how generals ground this decision publicly, is not a sustainable model. This arms trade represents some lives more valuable than others. I find it clear that if Finnish children are protected by weapons, which have been used to kill children in Gaza, our children are not protected, they are made complicit in what the State of Israel is doing in Gaza today.
Sustainable politics are rooted in values. Looking at the turmoil which Finland, Europe and the World is in now, I see that shared values and goals which seem unrealistic to achieve within a lifetime, such as undivided human rights, provide and set trajectories towards which we can organize sustainably. The situation is too dire for us to loose hope. The right to live cannot be bargained with because it is lost in the trade. This is what it means to be “complicit”.
I’ve noticed that the same people who voiced concerns about the declining human rights situation in Russia, before the attack on Ukraine, have also voiced their concerns about buying weapon systems from an apartheid state… Why is their critique systematically shunned? Finnish state led companies continued with business as usual while people were jailed for fighting for human rights… Even after Crimea was annexed. For me this illustrates that vital knowledge on what it means to lead has been lost from Finnish institutions.
The past five years have been a battle for what it means to be a human. The pandemic established a collective understanding of frightening bio-class relations. For example people who had stable jobs in Finland, could form social bubbles and sit the pandemic out. Thanks to economic preconditions, which many did not notice underlying our society, some became richer in the process. This is well illustrated by how government substitutes benefited business owners but not workers.
Finnish politicians and ruling classes unanimously accepted that “hygiene” and “health” meant that people in the service industry should work in unsafe conditions. Low income workers who continued working, risked their lives. For example the nurses strike was not met with public support nor sympathy. This grand reveal of the foundations of Finnish wellbeing is within living memory.
But there is an asymmetry in knowledge which the pandemic produced. People who chose personal “hygiene” and “health” do not understand the mechanisms which constituted their wellbeing. With out an understanding of how privileges were maintained, Hygge is death! If a war breaks out in Finland, the same classes of people who were made richer by the pandemic will profit and the people who are forced to servitude, such as Wolt Couriers, forced entrepreneurs and low ranking wage labourers will be put at risk.
A leading researcher of the The Finnish Institute of International Affairs Charly Salonius-Pasternak was provided a platform on YLE to give people instructions to prepare for a war in the next two years. They are telling people to be physically fit for war by 2025. Their prompt is a performance of the absence of political imagination of our corrupt elites. They have lost hope and do not understand what they are asking for.
We are not witnessing Finland and other warmongering European nations revealing “double standards” or stumbling with rhetorical inconsistencies in their support of Israeli apartheid politics and the bombing of Gaza. Our leaders are involved in this genocide with intent. The critique which postcolonial thought has underlined is revealed as truth: The concept of human rights is used primarily as a tool for imposing whiteness, Eurocentric models and geopolitical power relations that are favourable to the West.
The post-war momentum has been appropriated by parties which are organized for growth and are willing to bargain for human rights for profits. This has to be changed. If we start bargaining with human rights, we will lose. People who can imagine, negotiate and discuss, listen and understand are more needed than ever.
Enjoying to read Israelin kansanmurhataktiikat – havaintoja epäinhimillistämisestä, eläimellistämisestä ja vegaanipesusta [Israels geneciotial tactics…] (2023) by Freja Högback, Sanna Karhu, Lumi Kauppinen and Helinä Ääri.