@Vaeltaja
Which would be the criminal acts you refer to? As it happens confining people to camps in a such a situation is not a criminal act.
I'm not going back into that old discussion again.
So in your opinion moral superiority is measured by the amount of money handed out?
It is obviously a good way to display it in the current case. An opportunity sadly lost, I would say.
Before Russians more or less erased whole Finnic cultures living the area (which could actually amount to a crime against humanity) there were Finnic people living in the area. Technically you are correct, land belonged to Karelians. Not to (Western) Finns or to Russians.
There is no technicality here. East Karelia never belonged to Finland, period. And all the "Finnic" stuff is romantic nationalistic babble.
Also last i checked Finland was not exactly willing participant in WWII, however it was dragged into it by the Soviet Union itself.
I think that is a very strange way of putting it, but even if it were true it would be beside the issue.
You should really read what you yourself first posted and what i replied to it, again. And then think before you post. You missed everything what i wrote and apparently even most of what you yourself wrote.
I suggest you cut out the personal remarks and make it clear instead what your factual point is.
Philip: It is totally irrelevant on a larger scale whether or not the Finnish SS Volunteers by chance were ordered (or on their on initiative) committed war crimes, and the fact that some Finnish people seem find it important just shows how little they have understood - or want to understand. I have never seen such a discussion in any other country. The actions of the SS are not the responsibility of the individual countries these volunteers came from, it is the responsibility of the SS. The national responsibility has to do with the setting up of these units, and there the Finns were under no direct pressure, unlike the occupied countries. It was a very bad, miscalculated and unnecessary choice which shows that there were influential pro Nazi circles in Finland - as the program points out, but again the message is prevented from sinking in by the usual brick wall.
Vaeltaja: So you essentially judge a person due to his associations instead of actual evidence against him. That seems more like judicial process for Inquisition than anything belonging to modern Western society or standards.
I don't judge anyone, because I don't care. Whether the Finnish Battalion in the SS committed war crimes or not would depend on coincidental historical circumstances and has no influence on anything on a larger moral or national scale, as indeed I stated in my last post. It would be a different matter if the Finnish state had demanded that the Battalion mustn't be ordered to do things of such a nature, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
Also the show makes quite common error of mistaking Waffen-SS for the whole of the SS.
I haven't even touched upon that issue and I suggest we keep it out of this discussion.
You clearly have missed couple of points regarding the 'road to the Continuation War' on how Finnish leadership perceived the SS Volunteers question (also do note that Finns aimed to get their volunteers into Wehrmacht, not to SS, it was German decision).
The important thing isn't how you claim to "perceive" something, but what you actually do. Apart from that, the Finnish leaders wished it to be a Wehrmacht unit but were told that it couldn't be, since after the setting up of the
national groups in the SS there were no Wehrmacht recruitment outside of Germany. That is made clear in one of the other programs in this same series.
As for that matter program only manages to show that there were certain fringe elements in Finnish society that embraced Nazi ideology. Nothing else.
The program shows there were fringe element who were suddenly give a lot of influence, as Finland opened up more and more to Nazi Germany.
Of the whole book only Holmila's section is actually facing criticism due to being written like political pamphlet.
Wrong. The entire book completely punctures the notion of the "separate war" thesis and frequently refers to the German-Finnish cooperation as an "alliance".
Also his section is limited to its stated topic. Representing it as anything else is not exactly useful for any purposes.
Wrong again. The essay has a very wide scope, including present day politics. Holmila even calls it hypocritical if Finnish leaders now condemn the Finnish contribution to the Holocause because in fact modern Finland is acting in exactly the same manner towards political refuges in this day and age.
Insult part referred to the section where you pretty much state that Finns are immoral people mishandling their education simply because they do not conform with your line of thought.
That's another gross misinterpretation. Clearly, the Finnish people are not immoral, and that is what is causing the trauma. Apart from that, statistics show they are very highly educated, particularly the women.
If you had read the intro section of the book in question you might have noticed that it actually discusses this, however it comes to almost opposite result from what you do. Finns have looked truth in the eye.
I have read the introduction and it's very good, but I don't agree with all of it. I believe what has happened is that the Finns have gone through a number of motions in order to kid themselves that they are approaching this properly, but in fact they haven't. They just keep diverting the real issues in various ways by turning the attention to things that aren't really relevant, while at the same time closing their eyes to the really important issues. But you can't repress serious emotional problems that way forever. They will keep popping up in various forms and we see them in the examples I have already mentioned, such as the compensation issue, the overemphasis on the Jewish question, the claimed angelic status of the Finnish Battalion, and so on and on. Probably, the best way to deal with such things aren't through historical research, but through artistic endeavour, which I believe is one of the reasons that Finland has such a rich literary and cinematographic culture in this regard. It's the old question of listening to your own artists and realising how important they are; indeed something my own native people could learn a lot from. Where I live now, however, they have a pretty good grasp of it, too.
Regards, Vely