Will we protect Finland's border and not our own?

"Should Finland join NATO, the United States, under Article 5 of the NATO treaty, would be obligated to go to war with the world’s largest nuclear power to retrieve Finnish lands that an enraged Russia might grab.

Moscow has already indicated that, should Sweden and Finland join NATO, Russia will introduce new nuclear weapons into the Baltic region.

Why is it wise for us to formally agree, in perpetuity, as NATO is a permanent alliance, to go to war with Russia, for Finland?

Given the war in Ukraine and concomitant crisis in Eastern Europe, it is understandable why Stockholm and Helsinki would seek greater security beneath the U.S. nuclear umbrella."

Pat Buchanan has been needling the right and left for as long as I've been paying attention.  He didn't like President Bush.  You won't be able to accept all his warnings and logic, but often right, and I don't mean just politically.

https://buchanan.org/blog/should-we-commit-to-fight-russia-for-finland-159291

Fearing for the safety of Finland and the world

Note to a friend in Finland, which was at one time part of the Russian empire.

"I do hope no one in Finland is counting on Biden to save you from Putin. When he's reclaimed Ukraine for his restored empire, he'll come after the rest of you. Biden is worthless. Our military is very weak. He's making deals with Iran and so is Putin. At first he was a laughing stock; now he's just evil."

https://www.republicworld.com/world-news/russia-ukraine-crisis/finland-and-sweden-receive-letters-from-putin-demanding-security-guarantees-for-russia-articleshow.html

And in March 2014: "After annexing Crimea and with troops massed on the border of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin will not stop trying to expand Russia until he has “conquered” Belarus, the Baltic states and Finland, one of his closest former advisers has said." (Independent, pay wall)

https://inews.co.uk/news/world/will-russia-invade-finland-why-not-nato-how-likely-attack-putin-1496734

Finland’s government resigns due to failures

I don't understand how governments that resign work. They should just use the adversarial system like ours where one party spends all their time, our tax dollars, and energy trying to undo the last election rather than have an election. It's been awhile (2006) since we've been in Finland, a fabulous country, but I did notice there were 2 health systems. One for the base, usually the low income and young adults (who are basically healthy) depended on that, and then a private pay system which the wealthier, older and well educated use to supplement that. Taxes to pay for this were unbelievable, but education was "free." I was very impressed that the African grocery clerk spoke to me in English and my friend in Finnish--somehow she knew. Their immigrants also need to learn Swedish since that is a 2nd language.

Finns are very thorough and systematic and no immigrant comes in uninvited (although a some Russians do just walk or bike over the border--and because of their history with Russia that's like a small invasion) and it takes about 10 months to be processed. We met (in stores) Vietnamese and Chileans, who were refugees from an earlier time, and we saw Somali youth congregating on the streets of Helsinki. But during the 2015 immigration crisis in Europe, many more were accepted. Even the president shown in this photo took refugees into his own home as an example for the citizens. What if every politician in our country did that? We had 70,000 at the southern border in February--Pelosi and Schumer could take a few. About 1/5 of Finnish refugees who came during the rush, have been sent home, and many who claimed to be children/teens turned out to be adults. Sounds more tidy than the way we do it, where the Democrats in Congress say hundreds of thousands need to be processed in 20 days or they have to be set loose in the general population with a "promise" to return for a hearing on their eligibility. Meanwhile large "family" groups, some with rented children to drop off to be used again and again, cross our borders, and drug cartels use them for cover. But unlike Finland, we don't have a system.

https://www.foxnews.com/world/finlands-entire-government-resigns-after-breakdown-of-agreement-on-welfare-state-reform

We want white socialism say the Progressives—a blond, blue-eyed fairy tale

“Progressives have a longstanding love affair with the nations of northern Europe, which are, or in some cases were until the day before yesterday, ethnically homogeneous, overwhelmingly white, hostile to immigration, nationalistic, and frankly racist in much of their domestic policy.The Left occasionally indulges in bouts of romantic exoticism — its pin-ups have included Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, Patrice Lumumba, Mao Zedong; we might even count Benito Mussolini, “that admirable Italian gentleman” who would not have been counted sufficiently white to join Franklin Roosevelt’s country club — but the welfare states that progressives dream about are the whitest ones: Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, etc. The significance of this never quite seems to occur to progressives. When it is suggested that the central-planning, welfare-statist policies that they favor are bound to produce results familiar to the unhappy residents of, e.g., Cuba, Venezuela, or Bolivia — privation, chaos, repression, political violence — American progressives reliably reply: “No, no, we don’t want that kind of socialism. We want socialism like they have it in Finland.”

Translation: “We want white socialism, not brown socialism!”

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/420877/socialism-left-white

https://www.ssb.no/en/befolkning/artikler-og-publikasjoner/immigrants-in-norway-sweden-and-denmark

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/5195/sweden-rape

It is estimated that there are today more people of Swedish ancestry living in the United States and Canada than in Sweden.

Three years ago in Finland

It seems like ages, but it was July 2006 and we were visiting our friends in Helsinki. I was desperate for something to read, so I bought a Time magazine. According to my blog

"I paid 4 euros (about $5.00) for 52 pages of Time, 19 of which were photos of the World Cup. Photos I can figure out in Finnish. Five pages were devoted to bashing the "Bush Doctrine." No mention or credit for liberating the Iraqi people from a cruel dictator; no credit for identifying North Korea within months of taking office as part of the Axis of Evil; no mention that his neo-con advisors are former Democrats; or the 500 WMD that have been found; that the Iraqi people have voted in free elections. Although Bush has always acknowledged we were in for a long battle against Islamic terrorists, when he reiterates this, the MSM seems to think it is a victory for their side.

So what does Time recommend? Some Truman era reruns. They don't mention how extremely unpopular Truman was his second term--I think he was lower in the polls than Bush. Another article by Jos. S. Nye, Jr. pined nostalgically for the days of FDR and containment. Tell that one to the Estonians and the millions of other east Europeans who died in the Gulags waiting for the Americans to come and free them. Sixty years ago we sold out 40 million East Europeans to the USSR; let's not repeat that mistake by selling out the Iraqis."

I'm pining for the Bush era; I should have been more grateful. Maybe the press bashed him, but unemployment was 4.5%, the economy was booming, the magazines were fat with advertising, there were 20 houses for sale in Lakeside instead of 60, and the capital wasn't full of socialists.

3593

Dinner Party Plans

Today we're having two couples over for dinner and photos of my husband's trip to Haiti, Sharon and Eric and Joan and Jerry. Joan has also participated in medical mission trips to Honduras, so she's bringing her photos too. If they are on a disc, we've got a wee problem (my F drive is being fussy and our VCR isn't sophisticated enough or have the right gee-gaws to give us a slide show), but we'll find something. Either my laptop or theirs.

I'm of the "clean once, party twice" school of hostessing. Next Sunday we're having friends who know Martti and Riita (Finland) for dinner and photos of our trip to Finland last summer--Nancy and Bob, and Pam and Dave. Now, because of cat hair, I will have to push the vacuum around again before next Sunday, but I'm hoping I can keep the clutter under control, and not put away the good china.

Today's menu: Sweet sour meatballs, potato salad, fresh asparagus, tender crisp carrots with honey glaze, hot rolls, relish dish, sugar-free, fat-free lemon fluff pudding with fully-leaded St. Pat's shamrock iced cookies from Cheryl's Cookies. I'm thinking of adding a small dish of black beans and rice, just for the theme.

Next week's tentative menu: Boneless pork roast with orange-cranberry glaze, cole slaw, chunky applesauce (home made), probably carrots again, rolls, and maybe chocolate peanut butter pie (sugar free).

2707 Trip Tale: Reading in the woods

One course of action when you are up early in a log cottage in the pine and birch forest by a pristine lake in South Karelia is to read by the morning sunlight (no electricity) with a freshly brewed cup of coffee (bottled gas). Days without TV, radio, the Internet, or newspaper has a way of returning one to the joys of reading known by earlier generations. The hand woven birch bark baskets and pine shelves of the cottage were full of books--flora and fauna, old novels from the 40s, biographies, guides/tourism for the local events, and some old how-to-manuals. I found only one in English, "Eastern Approaches" by Fitzroy Maclean who was a member of the British Diplomatic corps in the 1930s-40s and wrote of his experiences traveling in the USSR and Balkans during 1937-45.

There was one eerie passage that seemed true even 60 years later. [Communists in 1942] all had one thing in common, their terror of responsibility, their reluctance to think for themselves, their blind, unquestioning obedience to the Party line dictated by a higher authority. . . the terrible atmosphere of fear and suspicion that pervaded their lives." This would be a book to read for anyone wishing to do business in Russia today, needing to understand the roots of the culture.

Either Maclean was an outstanding writer or after a week of being deprived of reading, I was like a starving woman at a banquet. In either case, it was a good read, given the years I had spent studying the history and politics of the USSR in the 50s and 60s. The chapter on the purge of the Party in the late 1930s was riveting because of all the old familiar names, particularly Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin (who was posthumously rehabilitated in 1988).

Maclean sat through the entire trial and with friends tries to sort it all out. He decides that everyone needs a cause to die for--judges, prosecutor, prisoners and NKVD. And for the prisoners, it was the Party. Even in facing death, they were characters in a theatrical production about good and evil. The trial served as a reminder to the people to be suspicious of everyone--to see spies and traitors everywhere, to shun foreigners, to explain the shortages of food and goods not on a failing economic and political system, but on those terrible traitors who were on trial. Certainly the benign and benevolent Stalin couldn't be at fault, but these traitors now being purged from the Party.

When I got home I looked up Maclean and found he was a very popular writer who had written a number of books (some think his life was the inspiration for James Bond) and that Bukharin, one of the more unforgettable characters in this book, had written an autobiographical novel while imprisoned before his death.

2682 Trip Tale: Our hosts

Twenty five years ago we promised Martti and Riitta that we would visit them in 1985 for our 25th wedding anniversary. We were a bit late by visiting in July 2006, but that only sweetened it. We had become acquainted in the late 1970s when Riitta was getting her PhD in equine orthopedics (horse bones) at Ohio State, and her husband Martti, who didn't have a work visa but was studying architecture, volunteered at my husband's firm. They also became active in our Lutheran church and made many friends there. She is now a successful surgeon and department chair, and his home, residential, and commercial designs in Finland are some of the best I've ever seen in the 40+ years I've been following my husband around.

How delightful to visit them now with three grown children, the oldest also planning to be an architect, and see our hosts well-established and successful in their careers. If we had come earlier, we would have missed a lot--such as the family home which Martti has redesigned and completed in the last two years after the death of his parents (his father designed and built the original house in the early 1960s). Knowing friends' children is great, but meeting them as adults is even better in some ways, because they will be adults much longer than they were children (and they can help you with tour planning, rubles exchanges, and language). So, I think it is best that we visited in 2006 (when they were having a terrific, but warm, summer) rather than in the 1980s or 1990s.

Here they are walking through the small forest with us near their house, down to a public beach. They live on the island outside Helskinki proper where they grew up. One of the streets in their area has four homes designed by Martti.

The main house in which they live was originally a two level on a steep hill and Martti redesigned it, incorporating the large boulder on which it sat into the new living room wall. The house now has four levels. Finland has long summer days (didn't really get dark while we were there), but very short days in winter, so the house has a lot of glass to take advantage of the sun when it is available.

This photo is from the master bedroom level, looking over the living room into the kitchen where Riitta and I are at the table. You can see that much of the living room is glass, as is the kitchen ceiling. The period furniture of Martti's parents was reupholstered for use in the new living room. The white walls and wood cabinetry and floors set off a riot of color in flowers and plants.

Brief comments during the time we were in Helsinki when I could use a computer, here, here, and here.

Other entries I wrote about the Helsinki, Finland area
The flag exchange
Finland and Russia compared
Helsinki, pt. 1
Helsinki, pt. 2
Illiterate in Finland
The new veterinary hospital
Suomenlinna, a fortress
Saarinens' summer home

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Monday Memories

2679 We're here in Finland

We arrived about noon Sunday. I didn't sleep on the plane so I'm about to crash. We are enjoying our Finnish friends wonderful hospitality and plan to do some interesting sight seeing this week. We've met all 3 kids, and her mother, and toured the house Martti recently renovated. The guys are both architects, so that's seems to be keeping them busy and we've walked through a lovely forest over to a street where Martti has some homes. I've never seen so many lakes in my life!

Probably won't be doing much blogging--the keyboard is different. No MM or TT this week. Just hoping I can find some coffee in the morning.

2644 Also reading at the Lake, Suomalaisia Kuvia

a book we received from Martti and Riitta (he's an architect and she's a veterinarian/academic) in 1980, dedicating it to the trip we promised we'd take in 1985 for our 25th wedding anniversary.

Well, we’re coming up on our 46th, and this year we are actually flying across the pond. On the 25th, or for the 25th, in 1985, we went to Hawaii--a fabulous trip I'll never regret. And on the 30th, in 1990 I was in the middle of re-establishing my career--writing, publishing, attending conferences, networking, etc. It was a busy time with limited vacation, plus we bought our second home and needed to sink all discretionary funds on it.

Then in 1995, my husband was establishing his sole practice. He could barely break away from his clients, and his mother was increasingly frail. In 2000 the year my mother died, we returned to Illinois so we could celebrate our 40th anniversary in the church where we were married and with my family. On the 41st, 9/11 happened and it didn’t seem a good time to go anywhere--for some time. Then in the next few years, my husband’s family and father needed us in California, so our trips combined responsibilities and travel. Last year for our 45th, we took a cruise on the Danube--our first to Europe.

So now, finally, we are ready to see Finland, and also take a trip into Russia to visit St. Petersburg. I’m reading the book that the Tulamos gave us in 1980, and am studying (or at least looking at) Russian grammar and conversation from a book published in the 50s when everyone was still "comrade."

Here are some photos of Martti's work.