Finland knocking on NATO's door. Does this look like winning?
When Putin started this shitty war, I wrote that it was only going to strengthen American imperialism, not stop it. Now it looks like it’s about to be official: Sweden and Finland are knocking on NATO’s door. They’ll be entering a military alliance that’s at this point a textbook definition of “American military imperialism.”
Which means that Putin — in his quest to stop NATO dead in its tracks on Russia’s southern border — is about to get almost 1,000 miles of NATO on its north-western border. And if this deal goes through, NATO will now control both sides of the Baltic Sea and the Gulf of Finland — a strategic naval chokepoint that Peter the Great staked everything to wrest from Sweden three hundred years ago.
Give it to Putin to make NATO relevant again and to help confirm all the propaganda narratives that pro-NATO lobbyists and military contractor-adjacent experts have been hammering for decades about the Slavic Threat from the East. And for what? All so that Russia can grab a bit more territory in Eastern Ukraine? If that’s all Putin wanted he could have done a limited “humanitarian mission” there right from the beginning and avoided his big and failed regime change invasion. He didn’t have to push tanks all the way to Kiev. But he did and failed. And now he’s got everyone riled up and against him, with little to show for it. Even hardcore Russian imperialists, who are far to the right of Putin and really want this war, are highly critical of how badly Putin’s generals have bungled the operation.
I don’t have any special insight here. But from my own limited perspective, this whole “special operation” has been a disaster — even if all of Putin’s now scaled-back war aims can be achieved at some point in the future. It’s pretty obvious
Putin has long cultivated the image of a crafty and careful strategist, someone who’s always multiple moves ahead of his “western partners.” Now he’s shown himself to be just as strategically incompetent and full of bluster as they are, with one major difference: He doesn’t run a global empire that can act with impunity and pass the costs of its mistakes down to the locals it fucks over. He’s smaller and weaker and can be much more effectively isolated.
Anyway, here’s the FT yesterday on the flip that happened in Finland:
Helsinki’s announcement is expected to be quickly followed by neighbouring Sweden, which has been neutral since the Napoleonic wars of the 19th century.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has fuelled a rapid change in public opinion towards membership of Nato in both Nordic countries. The principle of collective defence is enshrined in Article 5 of Nato’s constitution which means that any attack on one of the alliance’s 30 members is an attack on all.
For years, public backing of Nato membership hovered between 20 and 30 per cent in Finland, even after Russia’s incursions into Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014. But the most recent poll showed 76 per cent of Finns backed joining Nato, and only 12 per cent opposed. Support for Nato membership in Sweden has also grown since the start of the conflict in Ukraine.
Makes me think that maybe it’s not a joke after all. Maybe Putin really is a NATO sleeper agent, secretly brainwashed by NATOists when he was stationed as a KGB agent in East Germany. His handlers had been waiting for the right time to trigger his programming…and now he’s become an unwitting tool in NATO's bloodthirsty conspiracy for global domination. Say hello to Putin, the Saxonian Candidate.
Speaking of Finland…Last time I came close to stone-throwing distance to it, Evgenia and I were living in St. Petersburg and went out for the weekend to Vyborg, a medieval Swedish fort town not far from Russia’s border.
Like a lot of provincial towns in Europe, Vyborg has traded hands quite a bit. It became part of the Russian Empire in 1710, when Peter the Great defeated Charles XII on a battlefield in, of all places, Ukraine. The town became Finnish briefly after Finland declared its independence from the Russian Empire in 1917. Finland ceded it to the Soviet Union after the Winter War, then took it back during World War II just a few years later, only to lose it again to the Soviet Union in 1944. Now it’s in Russia’s hands again…and will probably stay that way — unless the Karelian separatist movement manages to get a foothold!
We were in Vyborg in December 2016. It’s was cold and gray and dreary. Much of the town center was totally dilapidated, with carcasses of ruined buildings all over the place. The city was half-destroyed during both the Winter War and World War II. When we visited some blocks looked like they had never repaired or even touched since then. They were sitting there, reminders of a war that took place over seventy years ago. There was a nice Lenin statute, though. The restored modernist Vyborg Library was spotless and gleaming.
As rundown and destroyed as Vyborg is, I really hope that it, and the rest of us, don’t get nuked totally out of existence.
The Russian government yesterday threatened “military-technical” “retaliatory steps” if Finland enters NATO and accused it of violating a previous treaty the two government signed back in 1992. Sounds ominous. But what the hell are they gonna do? Invade Finland like it’s 1939? My grandfather fought in that Soviet-Finnish “Winter War,” by the way, in which the Soviet Union lost huge numbers at a ratio of something like 10:1, but ultimately won.
Meanwhile, all the political and media and military types here in America are high on what they think is an imminent victory over Russia. They’re openly gloating and thinking they can now push this conflict to its ultimate conclusion: the collapse of the Russian state. I can’t stop thinking of that Lloyd Austin clip, where he — the Secretary of Defense, the head of America’s military — can be seen smugly smirking and telling reporters — on camera and in public — that America’s support for Ukraine is about something much more fundamental than just helping Ukraine repel Russia’s attacks: it’s about crippling Russia. Watch the clip. He keeps getting “them” and “we” mixed up when talking about Ukraine and America. Pretty clear that to him there’s no real difference. This is America’s war. It’s been hoping for it. And Putin’s delivered in a spectacular way.
As I’ve been saying since the start: our collective foreign policy brain bug has been loving this war. They’ve been openly hoping for it for years and years. Putin gave them what they wanted by pursuing his reckless and egoistic regime change invasion. Now that he’s fucking up, they’re giddy as hell, full of fake moral outrage and cackling into their sleeves between their melodramatic outbursts. These people here really think they can escalate this thing and win and make Ukraine do all the fighting, without any spillage — military or economic. Or maybe they really want to go into full military confrontation? Who knows. But they think they smell weakness and they want to push it as far as they can, and Putin’s not about to stop this thing until he can claim some sort of victory. It’s all very scary and messed up.
It really does seem like we are being marched into a global war — and that this path will seem very obvious in hindsight to whoever remains alive in the ruins. Evgenia and I were talking about it the other day. To sit here in California, with people going about their lives like nothing is happening, while Europe is arming up and the United States is sending weapons, keen on fighting about as a direct war with Russia as it can get away with without actually pulling the trigger…it all feels very strange and on the brink. You try to not think about it all the time. Because, really, what can you do? But the unease is always there and seeps into everything.
—Yasha Levine
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I can't tell you how helpful your writings and podcasts have been for me the last few months. I have appreciated your perspectives over the past few years--and sometimes felt compelled to thank you for your (both of you) rare, searching kind of honestly, including intellectual honesty. Now I appreciate it more than ever. Thanks so much..
I'm browsing random stuff, so not completely sure about the timeline. But the last time I heard your takes on Finland, it was in some podcast episode where you both had this take on why some Finns are these blobby doughfaces and the rest look more Scandinavian or something, then pulling this so edgy, self-deprecating and totally satirical fake-eugenicist/Nazi hypothesis out of your asses about the Swede as the handsome Übermensch dominating the formless Finnish gnome. I didn't mind the stupid joke that much. But as I recall it, it was too much to listen to Yasha confidently mansplain about how Finland gained its independence from Sweden (!!), and then some stuff about the Finland Swede minority that made little sense. Glad you got the independence right this time. 😂
As for the substance, there's actually a reeeally tiny grain of truth to it, although more than anything, the whole thing probably has more to do with Finns carrying a higher share of ancestry from hunter-gatherers, both European and Siberian, who probably were prone to binge-eating and were built to bothinsulaye themselves as well as store the fat more evenly for the long winters (just think about fat distribution and facial features in Arctic people like the Inuit). Plump faces, along with some traits and cultural norms that especially still a few decades ago almost resembled some more recently modernized hunter-gatherer populations, like binge-drinking preferences and alcoholism, propensity to gain weight, silent demeanor... Those I have come to associate with Eastern and Northern Finns in particular. The land there is barely or often not at all arable, so even the HG lifestyle survived there for quite long among the Sámi. Even with Finns' more versatile sustenance toolkit, the areas have staid very sparsely populated. Genetically, there's a big faultline running through Finland NW to SE: just try to draw the line south enough, slicing only the peninsular part in half and leaving Lapland and its southern vicinity on the eastern side.
This kind of ancestry has been less prevalent in Western and Southern Finland, the arable parts basically, which have almost always been more populous and went through a couple of instances of more significant North-Germanic/Swedish gene flow. By far the more significant one of those dates to about 1800 BC, after which the coastal areas in particular, and also the more-arable SW corner and the Western flatlands were occupied to a large degree for a long time by the Scandinavian master race.
That is, until the Finnish tribes with a language with relatively recent roots somewhere in Yakutia (or maybe more south near Lake Baikal, it's still disputed a bit) and 5%+ of very distinct East-Siberian ancestry (the rest doesn't differ much at all from the neighboring Scandis and Balts too) started crossing in increasing numbers from the Estonian side of the Bay around 500 AD or so, going straight for the best land in the SW and mixing with the Scandinavian inhabitation. Or mixing especially with the women: the rapid expansion of the Uralics — the name of the whole language family, unlike Finno-Ugric (or Ugoric...😁) — which was likely related to the Seima-Turbino phenomenon at first, was curiously heavily male-mediated pretty much all the way. Apparently much the same happened in Finland when the Finns start mixing with the North-Germanics in Western Finland, and later with their Sámi linguistic cousins. At least one thing is certain: they brought no women with any Siberian ancestry with them but rather opted for the Germanic and other local ladies, and en route, maybe even some Indo-Iranian chicks (who at this point would have looked broadly European, maybe a bit Slavic), since they were engaged in active bronze trading and hustling with them during the Seima Turbino period when drought and climate abnormalities forced these pastoralists closer to the forests and river routes of the Siberian taiga. The paternal haplogroup I1, associated in Finland with the 1800 BC Germanic expansion is still quite common in Western Finland, so it's not that the Finns wanted, could or did wipe out the North-German male lines wholesale:m — something the Indo-European themselves have at least attempted to do regularly theoughout prehistory. Looking at the scarce DNA findings from around this time, it looks like the west and SE coasts of Finland were more like busy places of trade and interaction by people from the Estonian and Swedish side, with at least Finns, North-Germanics and also the Sámi maintaining a presence merely on Finnish soil.
The other influx of Swedish genes came about mostly during the Middle Ages, and again to the West and SW coasts mostly. This was already the Kingdom of Sweden, so they kept their language. Actually, up to late 1800s at minimim (yes, even during the autonomous period under Russian rule) Swedish was the language of the elites, whether you were originally of Swedish stock or not. Relatively small populations don't have people to waste, so the Finnish side of the kingdom at least was comparatively meritocratic for that age: e.g. military hoovered talented Finns who could rise in the hierarchy, get knighted and sliden into the elite perhaps changing their name if not already done.
Even the biggest proponents of a Finnish nation and language during the mid- to late 1800s' "Fennomania" were natively Swedish-speaking, had Swedish names and so on. About names btw: Finnish and Swedish (last) names are easy to tell apart, but you shouldn't make any assumptions based on them. Except for some residents of certain rural Swedish-speaking communes on the coasts, all Finland Swedes (about 3–4% of the population in total) are basically bilingual. However, many people with Swedish last names can't actually speak Swedish above the general rudimentary "school Swedish".
So no, we weren't subjugated by the well-featured Swedish Aryan elites. You were probably to Helsinki where you can see all of the regional variation because everyone moves to the only real metropolitan area at least once on their lives. But you might detect a difference of proportion in the genetically Western and more stable SW regions and cities, Turku being the biggest. And more Finland Swedes and Swedish names in general.