Terminological Games: The Finnish Security Police Monitoring the Far-Right Movements in Finland During the Cold War

Abstract

This article focuses on the use of terms and concepts related to the nationalist movements by the Finnish security police during the Cold War. The key objective of the security police was to protect the legal order of the state and monitor the groups and phenomena potentially harmful to that cause. The previous experience regarding the rise of the radical nationalism and fascism in Finland in the 1930s and the 1947 Paris peace treaties were the historical and legal contexts within which the interpretations were made. As the article shows, interpretation made by the security police, however, relied occasionally on a limited understanding about the evolving far-right scene, thus producing terminological confusions, and in some cases even evidently biased interpretative patterns may be observed. The article also studies how terms and concepts produce differing evaluations and differing understandings regarding the phenomena at hand. The analysis is supplemented by a short excursion on the other side exploring how the far-right used the terms in order to avoid police scrutiny.

State repression of racist associations: Dilemmas of tolerance in the Nordic countries

“…Such pressure for a state to act can of course come in many forms. As we have seen, Finland was called on by the WWII peace treaties to ban fascist organisations, and more generally the Finnish government was mindful of how its actions were perceived by the Soviet Union (Kotonen, 2020). For the purposes of this study, however, the most significant source of international pressure is the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD).…”

“…In the 1970s, the airing of a documentary about a small but active neo-Nazi organisation caused a public uproar, after which the group was dissolved (Yle, 2015). Its supporters responded with a series of violent acts, culminating with the prosecution and conviction of the group's leader (Kotonen, 2020). More recently, the Nordic Resistance Movement had been on the radar for years, until legal action was triggered by a high-profile event where one of its members assaulted and seriously injured a passer-by during one of the group's rallies (Sallamaa & Kotonen, 2020).…”