There’s a potentially very interesting thread starting on our message board about Finland in WWII.
Now for my question. What exactly was Finland’s role in the Second World War?
Now, often this question is followed by “weren’t you allied with the Nazis?”. This is usually followed by a short, unconfortable silence and “um, yeah, kinda, but we didn’t really like them…” and then the interesting discussion starts with several Finns posting very thorough lessons on Finnish military history – and it’s an interesting history I might add.
So this is where the thread is now. We’ve covered in short the Soviet agression leading to Winter War, the defencive victory and occupation of Russian terratories in the beginning of the continuation war and greed leading to getting our asses kicked and the the Lapland war, with Finland fighting the Nazis and the m burning down Rovaniemi…
This is a good opportunity to get to know what Finland actually did in WWII and what kind of skeletons we might have in our national closet. For you foreigners it’s also a good primer to the Finnish mentality. Yeah, we kind of fought with the bad guys, but it was just because we didn’t have any choice. And that while we’re still very proud of what our grandparents accomplished with fighting those wars, we’re not proud of them having fought a war nor for killing their enemies. We’re proud, because without them we would have lived in a very different country – one that would not have been called Finland. We’re proud because they did what we Finns value over everything else “doing what must be done”.
That’s the key to our stubborness, we’re not very good at making pompous excuses, we just tend to do things because we think they have to be done. Like, say, make a movie in our living room for seven years, because, well, we wanted to make a movie.
And when we Finns want to really bang our drum on something we like to compare it to the Winter War…
And on a completely unrelated note:
The office has been without a decent net connection for a week (and still is) because we’re changing to a better broadband service. Our old connection has been disconnected, but the new one hasn’t been installed yet. So we might have been a bit quieter on the net front and it might be a bit slow to get replies to emails during the work hours.
Update: And as it were, we just got our connection hooked up and the office is back online!
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