The hatred became vocalized with the meteoric rise of the political party Perussuomalaiset, or True Finns. In the previous parliamentary election, they took five seats. In the election of 2011, they took thirty-nine, a close third, behind Kokoomus, or National Coalition Party, and SDP, or Social Democrats.
This gave True Finns the right to participate in government and push their agenda, which includes, among other radical ideas, by way of example, withdrawal from the European Union. Not all but many True Finns are anti- immigration and blame immigrants for Finland’s social ills. One influential blogger describes his solution as “the D- word.” Deportation. Shortly after the elections, upon finding that none of the critical items on their agenda had a chance in hell of being implemented, True Finns declared themselves an opposition party.
Finland is far from the only Nordic country to have large factions holding such anti-immigrant beliefs. Other nations have instituted immigration laws that can only be described as draconian. In fact, large numbers of people in all the wealthier European Union nations are angry about the influx of foreigners, in particular Muslims.
Last year,
It was all of these things that compelled me to make politics and social ills prominent themes in this novel.
_________
SHORTLY AFTER I COMPLETED
On July 22, 2011, Anders Breivik bombed government buildings in Oslo, Norway, and then proceeded on to a Labor Party youth camp on the island of Utoya. Disguised as a policeman, he murdered sixty-nine people, mostly kids.
On the day of his attack, Breivik released his one-thousand-five-hundred-word manifesto, entitled
Breivik finds a kindred spirit in the premier True Finn blogger and Finnish parliamentarian Jussi Halla-aho. Breivik writes:
Jussi Halla-aho, running for parliament in Finland as an independent candidate, has come to some of the same conclusions as I have regarding the Leftist-Islamic cooperation in many Western nations: The Left milks the working natives to maintain a predominantly idle immigrant population, who thankfully vote for the Left. The welfare state society thus has to support two parasites, each living in a symbiotic relationship with the other. This will eventually cause the system to collapse. Why would anyone support a policy that leads to certain destruction? Well, because a career politician never sets his sights 20, 50 or 100 years to the future but instead focuses on the next election. The short-term focus of our democratic system can thus, combined with Muslim immigration, turn into a fatal flaw.
But Halla-aho asks an even more important question: “Why do the voters let all this happen? It is because Westerners like to be ‘good’ people and believe that their fellow men are equally good people. It is because they have humane values.” “It is because the moral and ethical values of Western man have made him helpless in the face of wickedness and immorality.”
It’s surprising how much support Breivik’s manifesto has received, even from some European politicians. The usual patter goes something like: “Yeah, he did a really terrible thing…but a lot of what he wrote needed to be said.”
The story
JAMES THOMPSON