I demand that my freedom of expression in my native language be reinstated

In Spring 2006, I was recruited to produce content for a major Finnish web portal, the name of which I will not mention here - those familiar with the story will recognize it. As this blog entry shows, I am of the opinion that my troubles are indicative of more general problems in all Finnish-language media, and consequently, it would be unfair to stigmatize just one media company.

The producer of the site, while recruiting me, didn't spare the compliments lauding my "original" and "talented" use of the Finnish language in this blog. I was obviously happy to be thus extolled, but I was even happier that she promised me eight hundred euro per month for writing commentary for the site. Back then it felt like big money.

I imagined that this money could make it possible for me to go on working on my doctoral thesis, which had been stalling for some years, at least partly because I could not afford relevant scholarly literature. In practice though, I rather lost the last chance to pursue a career in academia, because I had a real job in addition to blogging - I did not have enough time.

In the recruitment interview, the producer of the site told me that she wanted me to write in a polemical vein about stuff that could provoke ferocious debate. As befits a loyal worker, I tried to do as she wanted, but at the same time I understood that having been given a visible position in the media, I had much more responsibility than a mere nameless blogger.

Back in the heady days of the blog culture and the Usenet I had acquired a certain notoriety with my exaggerated provocations, but now I became a more serious character and started, not even noticing it, to embrace an attitude of civic reconciliation. One aspect of this was an attempt to reconcile the "whites" and the "reds", as this confrontation - a legacy of the Finnish Civil War in 1918 - still characterizes Finnish culture and mentality too much. My goal was to combine the best parts of both the "white" and the "red" traditions.

To start with, this attempt was welcomed by many. One example were the mass graves at Huhtiniemi. In Huhtiniemi (a part of the City of Lappeenranta in Eastern Finland), a mass grave was found, and the identification of the dead became a heated topic of discussion back in the day. Some left-leaning debaters suggested that the dead were Finnish soldiers that had been shot by their own as a desperate attempt to stop the chaotic retreat when the front collapsed toward the end of the Second World War. (In reality, it turned out that the graves were older, and the dead were Imperial Russian soldiers who in the 19th century, when Finland was yet part of the Russian Empire, succumbed to some epidemic.) In an attempt to pour oil on troubled waters, I wrote a reconciliatory text in the spirit of the Winter War (in the national mythology of Finland, the Winter War in 1939 is seen as the reconciliation between the Whites and the Reds of the Finnish Civil War in 1918), and for this I was praised even by old school militaristic patriots who said it was an exception from the common media atmosphere. Here I want to point out that I wasn't making any concessions to these extremists either, but only condemning the exploitation of past to political ends, whether left or right, and emphasizing truthseeking and truth as a value in itself.

In the beginning of the new millennium, I had happened to have several quite matter-of-fact and productive online discussions with gentlemen representing old-school Finnish patriotism. In many ways they were quite right-wing in matters of national defense and the history of Finland, but when it turned out that I had made some serious study of the culture and history of both the Soviet Union and its dependencies, and that my idea of those countries did not differ that much of theirs, we were able to discover substantial common ground, even though I self-identified as left wing, back then.

The way I interpreted this was, that many of the seemingly irreconcilable conflicts that too long had characterized Finnish political life could now, after the demise of the Soviet Union, be buried. The column mentioned was indeed lauded for its fair and balanced "with malice toward none" approach, even by such eristic patriots who until then had tended to call everybody a Stalinist for not agreeing with them.

Back when I had acquired some notoriety as an online provocateur, I was perceived to be the official misogynist of Finland. Accordingly, online feminists, both real and supposed ones, demanded the company to sack me. My superiors staunchly defended me against such demands, and I could write on undeterred. But everything changed when extreme rightists started to target me, for then the bosses accused me and told me "not to provoke them", although the right-wing propagandists were shouting abuse even in the comments section of completely innocent and apolitical texts, for instance ones about domestic TV shows rerun for the sake of nostalgia. Occupational safety vanished into thin air.

In theory I could exclude troublemakers from commenting my writings, at least if they had registered on the site. My superiors pointed out, though, that the registration and blocking happened through some master site in the United States, so that the visitors I blocked also lost their access to certain important web resources outside Finland. The consequence of all this was, that I could do nothing to defend myself against online trolls.

The first time ever I criticized self-styled "critics of immigration", abuse filled the comments box so rapidly that I soon saw it necessary to stop further comments. But even after that, there was one troll who was able to add his inanities. This can hardly be interpreted in any other way than that the racist extremists had been able to infiltrate the very management of the site.

I find it indeed at least thinkable that some of the troublemakers in the comments section were neither Russian trolls nor spontaneously acting right wing extremists, but that they had been recruited by the employer. Originally, I had been allowed to write about whatever I wanted, if it was somehow relatable to topical events. But exactly when I found myself on a collision course with extreme rightists, this freedom of expression immediately started to crumble.

I have this theory that the management of the media company really wanted to give extreme rightists more visibility and acceptability in Finnish-language political debate and that I had only been recruited, because my anti-feminist provocations during the first decade of the new millennium could be interpreted as indicative of an extreme rightist outlook. Thus, they expected me to make right-wing extremism intellectually legitimate.

When I wasn't willing to play this role, they tried to force me to, and the outcome was that I was sacked, with the proviso though that the company waited for a plausible economic excuse to end my blogging stint. When the bosses did not defend me against the comments-box troublemakers but rather accused me of provoking them, it is obvious that my writings deteriorated and that readers got tired.

Since then I have not been able to get as much as one word in Finnish published anywhere in Finland, and I have practically disappeared from all Finnish-language media. While I am quite probably the only Finnish person publishing literature in Irish, I am not mentioned even in Finnish-language articles about the Irish language.

Soon after my sacking I was contacted by a freelance journalist, who had visited Ireland and met there young, enthusiastic readers of my Irish-language books. He wanted to write an article about me as an Irish-language writer from Finland, and I answered all his questions and sent him all background materials I could. He could never publish the article, though.

Something similar happened when a left-wing oriented paper - thus hardly sympathetic to any right-wing extremists - published an article about the revitalization of the Irish language. The reader can probably already guess that I was neither mentioned in the article nor interviewed or consulted for additional information, although it is common knowledge that I have participated in Irish language activism for more than twenty years and that I moreover have written fiction in the language.

After my columnist years I have several times been asked or proposed to write in Finnish about stuff I have expert knowledge of. These proposals have never led to anything tangible, because the other party has always inexplicably stopped answering my e-mails before any contract has been signed. This suggests that my name is heading some unofficial black list.

The publisher of my Irish-language books has now started to print Finnish-language stuff I have written, such as collections of my old online columns, but do you think that Finnish-language books printed in a small publishing house in Scotland can influence public debate in the old country as much as they would if they were printed by a renowned media company in Finland itself?

Now, think about this. Without having any previous experience of journalistic work, I was recruited as a writer of commentary as if I was a great star and natural talent, I pursued this career for seven years, and now I have been excluded from any journalistic or media work for another seven years. It is practically prohibited to even mention my name in Finnish-language media, even more impossible for me to get another job as a blogger or columnist, although I have amply demonstrated that it is a line of work I can manage, as far as it is possible to rely on the employer and the boss to provide occupational safety. There are only two explanations.

Either I am - as I above suspected - a lousy writer, and was only recruited because it was erroneously thought that I was a right-wing extremist myself and that I would contribute to the acceptability of that ideology (I am quite willing to consider the possibility that my Finnish-language columns were nothing to write home about). Or I am indeed a talented writer, but all the media are afraid to publish anything written by me, because they are afraid of being pestered by massive amounts of right-wing extremist trolls. (This obviously only applies to the Finnish-language publications - I have never had any difficulties to have my essays on, for instance, Russian literature or the Irish language published in Swedish.)

Both alternatives entail that Finnish media and Finnish press are conducting self-censorship to the benefit of right-wing extremists. It is anybody’s guess if this is due to all Finnish-language media, with the exception of the ones that are not openly left-wing, being programmatically in favour of right-wing extremism, or if said media are too cowardly and unsure to resist the online hatred campaigns of the extreme right.

It is difficult to even fathom the possibility that all the Finnish-language media should be so cowardly as to give in to the alt-right. In any Western society, media wield a considerable power: can you imagine media moguls being afraid of a handful of online troublemakers? The thought of media giants consciously aiding and abetting the extreme right wing does not sound very plausible either, but unfortunately enough it is the more probable alternative.

I was one of the first media voices in Finland who dared to openly state that the new extremist right was cooperating with Russia. This made a lot of people quite angry, and in the comments box I was gaslighted big-time, having the audacity to blatantly denigrate a) Russia (old commies take it as a personal insult when somebody calls Russia fascist) and b) the extreme right (right-wing extremists take it as a personal insult if you accuse them of treason).

Even today both media and authorities in Finland have difficulties admitting that the extreme right in our country cooperates with Russia. Our security police insisted for a long time in their reports that the Russia-friendly attitude so typical of the extreme right in other countries could not spread to Finland, a country where extreme rightists traditionally used to be anti-Russia. The security police continued their insistence even when it already was common on the extreme rightist web forum Homma to welcome the possibility of a Russian occupation, as this would – according to the forum members’ speculations – lead to a massacre of Swedish-speaking Finns and immigrants.

Obviously, if I was excluded from the media because of suspecting cooperation between Russia and the Finnish extremist right before such speculations became generally accepted, it is understandable – you must not be right before it is politic to be right, or as the Polish aphorist Stanisław Jerzy Lec said, those who are ahead of their time often have to wait for it in uncomfortable quarters. When nobody else shared my idea, it was easy to ward off me as a lunatic. But today, when it isn’t possible to ignore the Russian contacts of the extreme right anymore, I think it is discrimination and censorship to continue to treat me as a lunatic or as a persona non grata.

Unlike all those extreme rightist provocateurs who have no difficulty making themselves heard in society, I have all the reasons in the world to suggest that my situation is the same af that of Soviet dissidents in the last decades of the Communist dictatorship (now I am not thinking of the Stalin years – back then you could be shot in the head for the flimsiest pretexts). To be excluded from being published for seven years was quite a typical punishment meted out to a writer in conflict with authorities. And in today’s Finland, mass media respect the alt right more than they respect authorities.

Only one year after I had been silenced, the journalist Jessikka Aro published a major reportage about how Russian agents and collaborators were provoking and intimidating people in the Finnish Internet. This led to her being attacked online in a coordinated campaign of hatred much worse than anything I had experienced. And it is my impression that the support she has been given by her colleagues and the media sector has been quite limited. Even many journalist colleagues are poking fun at her, belittle her suffering, ridicule her and torment her with all kinds of ungrounded allegations.

It is worth pointing out, too, that it was at that time, more or less, that Russia invaded Ukraine and occupied Crimea. Back when I hadn’t yet been ostracized, I had made it quite clear to my readers that I was able to understand Ukrainian and make use of Ukrainian-language news outlets (having studied Polish and Russian on university level as a young man, you could hardly not understand Ukrainain), and as a columnist I had shown I could write in a popularized, readable way about complicated stuff. I almost expected to be called back to work, to write about the crisis in Ukraine. But that didn’t happen, probably because my merits weren’t recruitable merits anymore.

I am not saying that I’d want to be recruited as a Finnish-language columnist anymore. Actually, it was the biggest mistake in my whole life to give in to that stomach-turningly sugary flattery and to accept the suggestion to write commentary for that web portal. This whole wretched episode has convinced me that both the Finnish language and Finnish-language culture is just smoke and mirrors. You can be as much of a polyglot you want, you can be as universally educated as you want, you can be as good at writing in Finnish as you want, all that means zilch, nothing, nada if you want to make as much as a widow’s mite writing in Finnish. Political expediency is all that counts.

Here in Finland, we are hearing all the time that we have the best freedom of expression in all the world. To put it mildly, such suggestions lack in plausibility, when you are only allowed to hold an opinion and to publicize it if it is part of a common opinion complex. You are not supposed to challenge the prejudices of those complexes. I was not allowed to criticize feminism and Russia while simultaneously fighting racism, because someone who is critical of feminism and Russia is supposed to be right-wing and to make light of racism. And in a left-wing publication it would be impossible to be pro-armed forces and pro-Nato, or openly anti-Russia, even though anti-racism were accepted.

On the other hand, in the Swedish language it has always been more possible to speak your mind in Finland. It is so today, too, and it will be, even from now on. This is exactly why both the extremist right and Russia want to abolish the official status of the Swedish language in Finland. This is exactly why all who love freedom in Finland love the Swedish language. Finnish is a prison, Swedish is the key to freedom. And as Thomas Simonsson put it (very much in the Swedish language!), freedom is the best thing you can look for in the whole world.

This is why I am requesting you not to touch anything printed in Finnish. If Finnish-language media and publishing houses are consciously aiming at limiting freedom of expression and moving the Overton window towards the extremist right, you should boycott them. Do not read Finnish-language newspapers, do not read books in Finnish. Don’t give Finnish-language media any interviews, don’t translate either newspaper articles or books into Finnish or from Finnish.