Finland: austerity and angst

Though Finland is geographically at the periphery of Europe, over the past few years it has sought to stake a more central political role. There has been closer engagement with NATO, but Finland will be remembered most for the hardline position in took on the Euro crisis in Greece, matched only by former communist EU members in demanding draconian austerity to reign in the Peloponnese. Ironically, as Finland’s economy continues to hit the skids, the government in Helsinki struggles to impose public sector cuts on its own people.
The effective demise of former telecommunications colossus Nokia and sanctions and counter-sanctions over Russia’s actions in Ukraine lacerating trade with Finland’s large neighbour has led to an economic bind which successive governments have been unable to solve. The current centre-right coalition administration, fragile after several years of political instability as lawmakers struggled in the adverse economic climate, took the bold step of over-riding traditional collective bargaining between unions and employers and unilaterally imposing cuts to workers’ overtime pay (such as Sunday shifts), holidays and sickness benefits.
The ideology of austerity still holds strong in Europe, where a country’s finances are still erroneously compared with that of a domestic household making cutbacks to manage. The USA, admittedly with the help of the mighty dollar, took the opposite approach to refloat the economy, with governmental spending and guarantees and returned to growth a lot faster. That, however, is anathema to many politicians in northern Europe who grew up allergic to debt.
Finland has been in worse straits before, not least after World War Two, when it made enormous efforts to fund the reparations to the USSR, which were subsequently revised upwards by Moscow, all without the help of Marshall Aid to avoid annoying the Soviets. Yet to the Kremlin’s frustration and bemusement, Finland paid with everything on schedule, negating a pretext for intervention. But the problems facing Finland today are more nebulous and less easy to define than sating its former overlord.
Even in a country as mild-mannered as Finland, the unions were not going to surrender simply to the government’s diktats and flexed their muscles on 18th September, with a rally outside Helsinki’s Central Railway Station drawing 30,000 and a nationwide strike of 300,000 people (just under 10% of the total Finnish labour force), closing railways, harbours and papermills and disrupting schools and airports. The rain did not deter the protesters in the nation’s capital, who were typically orderly. Antti Rinne, leader of the opposition Social Democrats, warmed the crowd with rousing word – “The economy has not been well, but it will not recover by force, it requires cooperation.” The Confederation of Finnish Industries estimated that the on-eday strike cost the economy €100m.
In straitened circumstances, protests can be darker and more disturbing. A former British ambassador, Matthew Kirk, said in 2003 that because Finland was so monocultural, it was not racist because it did not understand what it was to be so. With the controversial Tintin in Africa widely available and a brand of teacakes labelled ‘N*****’s Kiss’, these were examples of alleged naivety rather than malice. The recent migrant/refugee crisis combined with economic stagnation has allowed extremists to come to the fore.
On 25th September, outside a reception centre in the southern town of Lahti, 30-40 demonstrators, one wearing a Ku Klux Klan outfit, waved the Finnish flag and hurled abuse, stones and even fireworks at a bus carrying asylum seekers. At a reception building in another southern town, Kouvola, a petrol bomb was lobbed at it. No-one was injured and the government was quick to condemn the racist protests but it exposed a virulent and unpleasant strain out of character with the stereotypical Finnish placid nature.
The prime minister, Juha Sipila, offered to take in refugees at his home, drawing a sharp reaction from anti-immigrant Finns Party, the second largest political party in the Finnish parliament, claiming it would encourage more people to come to Finland who would fall into the clutches of human traffickers. Finland was the only European Union country to abstain on relocation of refugees and will take 2% of the total 130,000 identified by the EU. So far in 2015, the number of asylum seekers is more than triple that for all of 2014, with about 500 refugees per day crossing Finland’s Artic Circle land border with Sweden. The town of Tornio in the far north saw protestors forming a ‘human wall’ at a reception building and calling for the border with Sweden to be closed (under Schengen, there are no border checks).
Irked by seeing several protestors at Tornio and in other demonstrations wearing the national ice hockey kit, the national team was moved to tweet officially: “Attention fans: Can we agree that hockey shirts belong in the stands and not at demonstrations.” Whatever anti-immigration activists wear, these protests will not be ending anytime soon, even as the harsh winter draws in.

The claws are sheathed permanently

With the passing of Brian Sewell today meaning he joins the late lamented Alexander Walker, the critic section of The Evening Standard has lost the last of its patrician old guard tribunes of taste.  A handsone man (as was Walker), I remember his searing contempt for some admirers who made a waxwork out of him - true to form, he criticised it from an artistic perspective.

Mitteleuropa morass

The case for civilisation is all the more pressing as it takes a battering.  Hungary is pursuing the hardline stance that was all too predictable from the power-hungry Viktor Orban and his on-the-egde-of-the-centre-right government, with the noxious but powerful minority interest of (Kremlin-funded) virtual neo-Nazis Jobbik.  Jobbik has such influence it even runs a television station but fired one female news reporter not for kicking immigrants but being filmed doing so.  And so the 'migrants', 'refugees', however they may be categorised, suffer largely through no fault of their own, Syrians especially caught between the rock and a hard place of Assad and Daesh.  The 'wall' Hungary has built with its border with Serbia is now being extended to fellow EU member Romania. 
Of course, there is natural bad blood between Magyars and Romanians over possession of Translyvania, where exist a substantial Magyar minority and some military theorists even thought possible a war between the two in the early 1990s once freed from Moscow's shackles.  Hungary is not best pleased with Serbia's possession of Vojvodina, north of the Danube.  Croatia was also stripped from Hungary under the terms of the 1920 Treaty of Trianon and as with hydraulics, you close off one entrance will merely redirect to another place.  Thus, though Croatia has a small border with Serbia, it has a considerably longer border with Hungary.  With this nationalist government in Budapest, maybe part of the problem stems from Hungary angry at places where it ruled, entirely or partially, not doing what it wants.
Football gave us a warning with racist fans in parts of Eastern Europe when English teams played in places like Slovakia.  These countries' governments are now the ones taking the harshest line with the migrant issue.  It all resembles that school rhyme: Austria felt a little bit Hungary/ Dipped a bit of turkey into a bit of Greece/ Long-legged Italy kicked poor Sicily/ Into the Mediterranean Sea.

FEMEN Rock the Casbah

It is not a complete misnomer to think that the provocative feminist group FEMEN and the punk rock group The Clash (the band behind songs like Rock the Casbah) would find themselves kindred spirits, in the manner of cocking a snook at the existing order. There are no sacred cows for them, who often brandish topless torsos and, with a main base in France, the targets are as diverse as disgraced World Bank chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn and the far-right Front National.
On Saturday 12th September, in the north-western suburbs of Paris, a Muslim conference featuring controversial speakers had the FEMEN experience. With their protestors well-chosen, one of Tunisian origin, the other with Algerian roots, both from Muslim families according to Inna Shevchenko, FEMEN’s head, their activists took to the stage with slogans daubed across their chests, one in English, the other in French. The messages read, “I am my own prophet. Nobody submits me,” alluding to the Muslim saying of ‘submission to the will of Allah.”
The actual moment whereupon the 25-year old and 31-year old shouted feminist ideas in Arabic and French is open to dispute but essentially tells the same story, Rashomon-style. Shevchenko says the two imams sharing the stage were in the process of debating whether it was just to beat one’s wife, whereas the infuriated organisers claim the speakers were concluding that because the Prophet Muhammad was not recorded as beating his wives, nor should good Muslims. If we take the latter version, that this should have to be stated is not just startling but makes a grim parody of an event meant to be discussing the role of women in Islam. That the two FEMEN activists were the only women at the conference reinforces that.
It had already attracted thousands of signatures to ban it from even taking place, one of the speakers set to be Nader Abou Anas, who is alleged to have previously tried to legitimise rape in marriage (has he met Donald Trump?). Certainly, women were among the roster to appear on stage.
What is not in doubt is the reaction the two FEMEN members provoked. To cries of ‘dirty whores’ and ‘kill them’, a group of around 15 men from the audience rushed the stage, jostling with security guards to lay their hands on the women, who disappeared under the welter of bodies. Slaps and kicks were directed by some of the men before the scuffle transferred behind a screen, out of sight of the cameras. Buzzfeed France confirmed that one of the activists had been punched several times. Given the subject of the interrupted talk, the imams have some way to go to convince their audience members of not using violence towards women.
The organisers of the conference (grandly called a ‘salon’ in French, though a far cry from the usual social sets associated with the word) said they will press charges against the two young women, presumably for gross indecency and trespassing, not passing comment on the melee that followed. Shevchenko, who was outside the event later, tweeted in French that “Femmophobia is illegal.” The fists and feet of fury that rained down upon defenceless women suggest that the injured activists could fairly go to the law themselves. As it was, they were taken into custody and, after questioning, released without charge, with an investigation pending.
This is not the first time FEMEN have taken on Islamic authorities. On 4th April 2013, it proclaimed an ‘International Day of Topless Jihad’, in response to official threats to a Tunisian women, Amina Tyler, who had posted naked pictures of herself online, having written ‘I own my body, it’s not the source of anyone’s honour’ on her chest. A religious commission said she should be stoned to death to prevent her example becoming an epidemic. A month later Tyler was on trial for possessing a can of pepper spray and, though acquitted, was not released from detention until August, whereupon she left FEMEN saying its actions towards the Muslim world were disrespectful.
Since the Charlie Hebdo and Jewish supermarket massacres, the French state’s attitude to Islam has been febrile, though one could trace this back further to the 2005 banlieue riots and the later banning of Muslim headscarfs in public. The thwarted attack on a high-speed train has merely heightened that. But there exists a problem of non-violent extremism or toleration of it, just as some Nationalist and Unionist communities in Northern Ireland tolerated the terrorists among their kind (and to an extent still do so). You can see it in evidence where Muslim neighbours of those who have gone to fight in Syria and Iraq for Daesh give interviews to mainstream news channels with their backs to the camera, if at all onscreen, for fear of being ostracised by their peers, instead of garnering rightful praise for speaking out. The majority of Muslims in the West are law-abiding but there are some who wield power who loath their home country. This conference in Paris completely misses the point that the best way to beat extremism is not to find a rationale for it in the first place in seeking to obviate it.

Narcoclepsy-infused insomnia

When I have early shifts in my home-working tenure (soon to end) and I don't go to bed early, my subconscious repeatedly wakes me through the night in fearful pre-emption of over-sleeping - entirely counter-productive as when my alarms do go off at 5.40 a.m. my body wants to sleep through exhaustion.  Last night, I put my head down at a reasonable 10 p.m. but my mind wasn't having any of it.  It even invaded my dreams as I time-travelled through to 5.45 a.m., woke up found it was 1.30 a.m., dropped off, sped forward to 6.05 a.m., woke up finding it to be 2 a.m., fell back asleep again to find myself at 6.15 a.m., quarter of an hour past the start of my work shift before being agitated to wake up a final time at 3 a.m., staying awake for another two hours.
I now know what Captain/Ambassador Jean-Luc Picard experienced in the final episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation - All Good Things... - as he was thrown across multiple time eras to test that he could think across them.  It was most confusing in my half-sleep as to what was the real time - the later one that I had experienced or the one I checked on my phone.  I did plump for the phone time but it was tenuous.  Now off to bed for me.

A disappointment

Last Saturday, I finally caught up with a film I had desired of watching for ages - Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.  It featured a reappearance of the character Khan Noonien Singh, a genetically enhanced warlord exile from the '20th century' (as Trek history would have it) woken from suspended animation aboard the spaceship Botany Bay, who appeared in Star Trek (retrospectively known as The Original Series or TOS) in the episode Space Seed.
I thought I should see the initial storyline and despite a vaguely silly backstory for Khan (a totalitarian who ruled a quarter of the world before the rest of the world rose up and overthrew him in the '1990s'), Space Seed was an enjoyable episode, capped with the brutal, demanding charm with which Ricardo Montalban invested his portrayal.  Captain Kirk was remarkably magnanimous in letting Khan, his 'people' and an Enterprise crew member he had seduced settle on a tough, empty but habitable planet after Khan tried to seize the Enterprise.  So I keenly anticipated the cinematic sequel sequel.
Star Trek films have acquired a mythos about their production, with the odd-numbered movies tripe and the even-numbered decent or better.  I watched Wrath and I watched and I watched and frankly I was not impressed.  It was satisfactory, just about but I can't square it with fans who rave about how great it is.  The loose remake (and fan-loathed) Star Trek: Into Darkness isn't perfect but it is superior.  In Wrath, Khan is more a space pirate than a galaxy-threatening megalomaniac - this latter is hinted at by achieving possession of the 'Genesis' device, a life creating (or rewriting) torpedo, but Khan does almost nothing with it, not even specify a target for us to be concerned about.  He is more consumed with rage at Kirk for, as he perceives it, abandoning him but his 'wrath' never manifests itself more than chasing Kirk and the Enterprise around like eighteenth-century ships skipping round the Caribbean, loosing off broadsides every now and again.  Not exactly a rip-roaring adventure.
Montalban, reprising his role, walks away with the movie and comfortably dominates every scene he is in.  He is even a figure of sympathy with an acceptable grievance, though his means of redressing that grievance are not.  His genetically enhanced comrades are wasted in mostly passive roles.  Yes, he maroons a Starfleet crew in his stead after his planet being knocked off its orbit by its neighbour exploding, wrecking the ecosystem.  Yes, he slaughters the crew of the spacestation.  Yes, he implants hideous beetles into Pavel Chekov and the new captain he serves under, that has echoes of Alien and a forerunner of Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Conspiracy.  Yet at no point does Khan do anything other than small-scale banditry or pose a wider threat.  The brief allusions to his '20th century' past are just that brief and of no further consequence it seems.
There are attempts at developing characterisation with Kirk sunk in gloom at being an Earth-bound admiral rather than a starship captain and that's it, really, the actors reinvesting their roles with the old traits and attributes.  The addition of Lieutenant Saavik adds another dimension, principally female to a generally male cast and Kirstie Alley is game, even if they must refer to her as 'Mr Saavik' in some bizarre form of equality.  The big macguffin of Mr Spock's death has been so done to death that though it might have been surprising to Roger Ebert reviewing it on release (raising it in his estimation) and other Trekkies more intimately entwined with Leonard Nimoy's Vulcan (albeit half-human) logician, it no longer carries the same impact.  You're waiting for it to happen rather than a shock plot twist.  It's like being told that Darth Vader is Luke's dad before seeing Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back.  To mix metaphors, once you know Santa isn't real, the genie can't be put back in the bottle.  By comparison, Kirk finding out he has a son is rather underplayed and leads to an uncertain mood..
There are other inconsistencies - why does the bug crawl back out of Chekov's ear unprovoked, to be destroyed?  Why does Scotty take a severely injured cadet to the bridge instead of sickbay?  There's a continuity error of Khan developing a laceration across his chest that wasn't there before while sitting around talking to Kirk.  The admiral is not Q.  Biggest of all, one might say, is that for someone with 'superior intellect', Khan doesn't display much of it, even if it is obscured by rage - the script goes as far as to acknowledge this when Spock critiques Khan displaying 'two-dimensional thinking': another contradiction.  One is led to conclude the scriptwriters didn't really know what to do with Khan and were more obsessed with inserting Spock's death and Kirk's son into the scheme of things.
Wrath I think got its reputation with posterity being far better than its predecessor Star Trek: The Motion Picture and its successor Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (which is essentially just that, with some Klingons thrown in to bulk it out, plus the deaths of both Kirk's son and the Enterprise - if you didn't know, it's a poor film, so I've saved you the effort of watching it).  Star Trek IV and VI advance their plots rather than have them stationary and have more at stake.  Space Seed is on another level to its big-screen spin-off.  Wrath could have been so much more with the richly malevolent figure it had, but as it is, barring Star Trek: Insurrection (which killed off Trek films until J.J. Abrams brought them back, if in a parallel dimension), it is the weakest of the even-numbered Trek saga.