Finland Country Quotes

It is estimated that Josef Stalin killed more than twenty million people during his reign of terror. The Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia lost more than a third of their population during the Soviet genocide. The deportations reached as far as Finland. To this day, many Russians deny they ever deported a single person. But most Baltic people harbor no grudge, resentment, or ill will. They are grateful to the Soviets who showed compassion. Their freedom is precious, and they are learning to live within it. For some, the liberties we have as American citizens came at the expense of people who lie in unmarked graves in Siberia. Like Joana for Lina, our freedom cost them theirs. Some wars are about bombing. For the people of the Baltics, this war was about believing. In 1991, after 50 years of brutal occupation, the three Baltic countries regained their independence, peacefully and with dignity. They chose hope over hate and showed the world that even through the darkest night, there is light. Please research it. Tell someone. These three tiny nations have taught us that love is the most powerful army. Whether love of friend, love of country, love of God, or even love of enemy - love reveals to us the truly miraculous nature of the human spirit.

Gun control zealots compare the United States and England to show that murder rates are lower where restrictions on ownership of firearms are more severe. But you could just as easily compare Switzerland and Germany, the Swiss having lower murder rates than the Germans, even though gun ownership is three times higher in Switzerland. Other countries with high rates of gun ownership and low murder rates include Israel, New Zealand, and Finland.

You cannot trust people who have such bad cuisine. It is the country with the worst food after Finland.

Researchers at the University of Missouri had found a “gender equality paradox” when they studied 475,000 teenagers across the globe. They noted that hyperegalitarian countries such as Finland, Norway, and Sweden had a smaller percentage of female STEM graduates than countries such as Albania and Algeria, which are considered less advanced

A 2011 OECD report showed that, over the past three decades, in Sweden, Finland, Germany, Israel, and New Zealand--all countries that have chosen a version of capitalism less red in tooth and claw than the American model--inequality has grown as fast as or faster than in the United States. France, proud, as usual, of its exceptionalism, seemed to be the one major Western outlier, but recent studies have shown that over the past decade it, too, has fallen into line.

It’s ironic that the Tea Party populists, most of whom believe that they are furthering the American ideal of “rugged individualism,” are supporting mega-corporate-friendly policies like Reaganomics and Clintonomics and are making it very difficult for individuals to be anything other than drones in a giant corporate-run economic machine. And, on the flipside, those countries that call themselves “democratic socialist” in their organization—Finland, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden—actually provide a deep and fertile soil into which entrepreneurs may plant new businesses.

I couldn’t wait to get out of the car. The first thing I did was smell the air. I closed my eyes and took a breath, the biggest breath of my life, knowing I was taking the biggest breath of my life. I was taking a breath to smell Shepelevo. Breathing in Shepelevo was like hitting the right note on the piano. There was only one right note. When I was young, Shepelevo was the smell of nettles, of salted smoked fish, of fresh water from the Gulf of Finland, and of burning firewood, all wrapped up in one Shepelevo. As it had been, so it was. Across two continents, a dozen countries, twenty cities, three colleges, two marriages, three children, three books, and twenty-five years of another life, I breathed it and smelled the air. Nowhere else in the world had it. “Papa,” I said, my voice breaking. “Do you think we could photograph the smell?” He gave me a look and then laughed.

Few countries have such an obsession with cars as Finland. The interest goes right down the scale, from watching Formula One to changing the oil in the old Datsun parked outside.

Finland, that country so like himself, for so long half free and quite comfortable, somehow exempt from the fuss of near-apocalypse.

Real Madrid would still only be the 120th largest company in Finland (a country with a population of just 5.4 million people, or about the same as Minnesota).

Now is probably a good time to make my confession about Finland, our next destination in this Nordic odyssey: I think the Finns are fantastic. I can't get enough of them. I would be perfectly happy for the Finns to rule the world. They get my vote, they've won my heart. If you ask me, they should just change the word 'fantastic' to 'Finntastic.' Helsinki? Heavensinki, more like.

Karelia is the best place to explore Finnish Orthodox customs. Onion-domed churches and traditional festivals give the place a different feel from the predominantly Lutheran rest of the country.

The Finns famously drink more coffee than any other nation on earth, and the quality is the highest it's ever been with fabulous roasteries continuing to open around the country, such as the award-winning Lehmus Roastery in Lappeenranta.

the Finnish financial analyst Matias Möttölä calculates that in terms of revenue, Real Madrid would still only be the 120th largest company in Finland (a country with a population of just 5.4 million people, or about the same as Minnesota).

No one with an ounce of empathy could fail to be appalled by the distressing footage – taken on fur farms in Finland, Sweden, the US, and other so-called “high-welfare” countries – of foxes, rabbits, minks, and other animals who were left to suffer in filthy wire cages with untreated wounds, injuries, and even missing limbs, sometimes alongside the rotting corpses of other animals. These frightened, distressed animals often mutilate themselves and their cagemates before their short lives come to an end through painful anal electrocution, neck-breaking, drowning, gassing, or strangulation.

When hard times hit—and this is the beauty of Finland—when the going gets tough, many other countries tighten their grip with more control—what Finns do is they let go. They understand that sisu doesn’t come from holding on harder, sisu comes from allowing people to figure out what they’re going to do next.

The entire country of Finland (to hear Otto tell it) has been plunged into an endless night of existential despair and suicidal depression. The usual antidotes have been exhausted: self-flagellation with steeped birch twigs, mordant humor, week-long drinking bouts. The only thing to save Finland now is coffee.

The secret protocol of the Hitler-Stalin Pact partitioned Poland between the two signatories and gave the Soviets a free hand over Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, Bessarabia, and Northern Bukovina. Most of these new countries were Catholic, which in Stalin’s mind meant subordinated to a foreign power—the Vatican. That was unacceptable for the man who had become the Soviet Union’s only god—at whose order 168,300 Russian Orthodox clergy had been arrested during the purges of 1936–1938 alone, 100,000 of whom had been shot.4 The Russian Orthodox Church, which had had more than fifty-five thousand parishes in 1914, was now reduced to five hundred.5

Islam will aim to establish itself as the majority in France, Germany, Austria, Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. Any country, in which they successfully establish themselves will serve as their primary base for the invasion of neighbouring countries (such as Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Denmark, Hungary and the Mediterranean)

Anchoring the country's southwest is Finland's former capital, Turku. This striking seafaring city stretches along the broad Aurajoki from its Gothic cathedral to its medieval castle and vibrant harbour. Turku challenges Helsinki's cultural pre-eminence with cutting-edge galleries, museums and restaurants, and music festivals that electrify the summer air.

The ones with the most generous social provisions are the northern European countries: Germany, Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Norway. These are export-oriented, surplus economies with sound fiscal balances and strong social safety nets. The claim that Europe’s fiscal mess is the result of overly generous social welfare systems simply cannot be substantiated.

All of the Nordic countries have high levels of trust, but the Danes are the most trusting people on the planet. In a 2011 survey by the OECD, 88.3 percent of Danes expressed a high level of trust in others, more than any other nationality (the next places on the list were filled by Norway, Finland, and Sweden, respectively, and the United States was way down in twenty-first place out of thirty countries surveyed).

The poor performance of the huge Soviet army against the tiny Finnish army had been a big embarrassment to the Soviet Union: about eight Soviet soldiers killed for every Finn killed. The longer a war with Finland went on, the higher was the risk of British and French intervention, which would drag the Soviet Union into war with those countries and invite a British/French attack on Soviet oil fields in the Caucasus.

Sugar producers in the European Union are subsidized even more than their peers in the United States, and the price of sugar in these countries is among the highest in the world. In 2009, The New York Times reported that sugar subsidies in the European Union were "so lavish that even Finland, a cold-climate country, began to produce more sugar," despite the fact that sugar extracted from cane grown in the tropics can be produced at a much lower cost than sugar extracted from beets grown in Europe.

Each February/March the entire country takes a "ski week". The schools shut down, parents take off work, dogs go to the in-laws, and Finland's middle and upper classes go on holiday. But not all at once. They can't have the entire country gandala-ing up to Lapland at one time (AVALANCHES!). So the country takes turns. The best region goes first: Southern Finland. Then the second best: Central Finland. Then the reindeer herders and forest people take a week off from unemployment and go last: Northern Finland.

The largest wooden old town in the Nordic countries, Vanha Rauma deserves its Unesco World Heritage status. Its 600 houses might be museum pieces, but they also form a living centre: residents tend their flower boxes and chat to neighbours, while visitors meander in and out of the low-key cafes, shops, museums and artisans’ workshops. Rauman giäl, an old sailors’ lingo that mixes up a host of languages, is still spoken here, and the town’s medieval lace-making heritage is celebrated during Pitsiviikko (Rauma Lace Week).

Finland isn't just vast expanses of pristine wilderness. Vibrant cities stock the country's southern areas, headlined by the capital, Helsinki, an electrifying urban space with world-renowned design and music scenes. Embraced by the Baltic, it’s a spectacular ensemble of modern and stately architecture, island restaurants and stylish and quirky bars. And the ‘new Suomi’ epicurean scene is flourishing, with locally foraged flavours to the fore. Beyond Helsinki, Tampere and Turku in particular are lively, engaging cities with spirited university-student populations.

Most men I met in Finland appeared to be these silent, unemotional types. Their symptoms were not as pronounced as those of the man on the plane, perhaps, but they were the type of men of whom I met very few in England: Taciturn, introvert, joyless, reserved, and perfectly happy to be solitary, engaged in pursuits that were absolute anathema to me such as hunting, trekking and cross-country skiing. Presumably their incapacity to experience joy rendered sport quite attractive, because it would elevate their endorphin levels. It also appeared to render alcohol extremely inviting.

Finns have a deep and abiding love of their country’s forests and lakes. In July Finland is one of the world’s most relaxing, joyful places to be – a reason Finns traditionally have not been big travellers. After the long winter, why miss the best their country has to offer? Finns head en masse for the mökki (summer cottage) from midsummer until the end of the July holidays. Most Finns of any age could forage in a forest for an hour at the right time of year and emerge with a feast of fresh berries, wild mushrooms and probably a fish or two. City-dwelling Finns are far more in touch with nature than most of their European equivalents.

The national curriculum for the Swedish preschool is twenty pages long and goes on at length about things like fostering respect for one another, human rights, and democratic values, as well as a lifelong desire to learn. The document's word choices are a pretty good clue to what Swedish society wants and expects from toddlers and preschoolers. The curriculum features the word "play" thirteen times, "language" twelve times, "nature" six times, and "math" five times. But there is not a single mention of "literacy" or "writing." Instead, two of the most frequently used words are "learning" (with forty-eight appearances) and "development" (forty-seven). The other Scandinavian countries have similar early childhood education traditions. In Finland, formal teaching of reading doesn't start until the child begins first grade, at age seven, and in the Finnish equivalent of kindergarten, which children enroll in the year they turn six, teachers will only teach reading if a child is showing an interest in it. Despite this lack of emphasis on early literacy, Finland is considered the most literate country in the world, with Norway coming in second, and Iceland, Denmark, and Sweden rounding out the top five, according to a 2016 study by Central Connecticut State University. John Miller, who conducted the study, noted that the five Nordic countries scored so well because "their monolithic culture values reading.

Finland is not Scandinavia, nor is it Russia. Nevertheless, Finnish tradition owes something to both cultures. But the modern Finn is staunchly independent. The long struggle for emancipation and the battle to survive in a harsh environment have engendered an ordered society that solves its own problems in its own way. They have also given birth to the Finnish trait of sisu, often translated as ‘guts’, or the resilience to survive prolonged hardship. Even if all looks lost, a Finn with sisu will fight – or swim, or run, or work – valiantly until the final defeat. This trait is valued highly, with the country’s heroic resistance against the Red Army in the Winter War usually thought of as the ultimate example.

The country that is often judged by international league tables to have the most successful schools in the world, Finland, is closer to these progressive models than anything we would recognize. Their children don’t go to school at all until they are seven years old—before then, they just play. Between the ages of seven and sixteen, kids arrive at school at 9 a.m. and leave at 2 p.m. They are given almost no homework, and they take almost no tests until they graduate from high school. Free play is at the beating heart of Finnish kids’ lives: by law, teachers have to give kids fifteen minutes of free play for every forty-five minutes of instruction. What’s the outcome? Only 0.1 percent of their kids are diagnosed with attention problems, and Finns are among the most literate, numerate, and happy people in the world.

Finnish agriculture is so dully over-mechanised that it defies all statistics and diagrams. Every village in Finland, far from being an embodiment of farming and the rural way of life, reminds one of a technological exposition, whereas serenity and the values of tradition are still visible in the countryside of all other European countries. Finland — at least a few years ago — was the world leader of electronic financial transfers. Ideas about electronic systems and computers enter our silly heads like knives cut through butter. Personally, those who feel so important and busy that they couldn’t survive without mobile phones in their cars, I would send to the mountains for a year, or rather five years, for them to reflect on the values of life. But perhaps that wouldn’t help either: if a mind is dull, it’ll stay dull.

The whole village has been drunk for the last three days. And as for feast days, it is simply horrible to think of! It has been proved conclusively that alcohol does no good in any case, but invariably does harm, and it has been demonstrated to be an absolute poison. Then, ninety-nine percent of the crimes in the world are committed through its influence. We all know how the standard of morality and the general welfare improved at once in all the countries where drinking has been suppressed—like Sweden and Finland, and we know that it can be suppressed by exercising a moral influence over the masses. But in our country the class which could exert that influence—the Government, the Tsar and his officials—simply encourage drink. Their main revenues are drawn from the continual drunkenness of the people. They drink themselves—they are always drinking the health of somebody: ‘Gentlemen, the Regiment!’ The priests drink, the bishops drink—

Do countries require a crisis to motivate them to act, or do nations ever act in anticipation of problems? The crises discussed in this book illustrate both types of responses to this frequently asked question. Meiji Japan avoided dealing with the growing danger from the West, until forced into responding to Perry’s visit. From the Meiji Restoration of 1868 onwards, however, Japan did not require any further external shocks to motivate it to embark on its crash program of change: Japan instead changed in anticipation of the risk of further pressure from the West. Similarly, Finland ignored Soviet concerns until it was forced to pay attention by the Soviet attack of 1939. But from 1944 onwards, the Finns did not require any further Soviet attacks to galvanize them: instead, their foreign policy aimed at constantly anticipating and forestalling Soviet pressure. In Chile, Allende’s policies were in response to Chile’s chronic polarization, and not in response to a sudden crisis, so Allende was anticipating future problems as well as addressing current ones. In contrast, the Chilean military launched their coup in response to what

The Swedish royal family’s legitimacy is even more tenuous. The current king of Sweden, Carl XVI Gustaf, is descended neither from noble Viking blood nor even from one of their sixteenth-century warrior kings, but from some random French bloke. When Sweden lost Finland to Russia in 1809, the then king, Gustav IV Adolf—by all accounts as mad as a hamburger—left for exile. To fill his throne and, it is thought, as a sop to Napoleon whose help Sweden hoped to secure against Russia in reclaiming Finland, the finger of fate ended up pointing at a French marshal by the name of Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte (who also happened to be the husband of Napoleon’s beloved Desirée). Upon his arrival in Stockholm, the fact that Bernadotte had actually once fought against the Swedes in Germany was quickly forgotten, as was his name, which was changed to Charles XIV John. This, though, is where the assimilation ended: the notoriously short-tempered Charles XIV John attempted to speak Swedish to his new subjects just the once, meeting with such deafening laughter that he never bothered again (there is an echo of this in the apparently endless delight afforded the Danes by the thickly accented attempts at their language by their current queen’s consort, the portly French aristocrat Henri de Monpezat). On the subject of his new country, the forefather of Sweden’s current royal family was withering: “The wine is terrible, the people without temperament, and even the sun radiates no warmth,” the arriviste king is alleged to have said. The current king is generally considered to be a bit bumbling, but he can at least speak Swedish, usually stands where he is told, and waves enthusiastically. At least, that was the perception until 2010, when the long-whispered rumors of his rampant philandering were finally exposed in a book, Den motvillige monarken (The Reluctant Monarch). Sweden’s tabloids salivated over gory details of the king’s relationships with numerous exotic women, his visits to strip clubs, and his fraternizing with members of the underworld. Hardly appropriate behavior for the chairman of the World Scout Foundation. (The exposé followed allegations that the father of the king’s German-Brazilian wife, Queen Silvia, was a member of the Nazi party. Awkward.) These days, whenever I see Carl Gustaf performing his official duties I can’t shake the feeling that he would much prefer to be trussed up in a dominatrix’s cellar. The

One of the few entry points to the Baltic Sea, the Kattegat passage is a busy and treacherous waterway. The entire region is a maze of fractured islands, shallow waters and tricky cur-rents which test the skills of all mariners. A vital sea route, the strait is used by large container ships, oil tankers and cruise ships alike and provides a crucial link between the Baltic coun-tries and Europe and the rest of the world. Navigating is difficult even in calm weather and clear visibility is a rare occurrence in these higher latitudes. During severe winters, it’s not uncommon for sections of the Baltic Sea to freeze, with ice occasionally drifting out of the straits, carried by the surface currents. The ship I was commandeering was on a back-and-forth ‘pendulum’ run, stopping at the ports of St Petersburg (Russia), Kotka (Finland), Gdańsk (Poland), Aarhus (Denmark) and Klaipėda (Lithuania) in the Baltic Sea, and Bremerhaven (Ger-many) and Rotterdam (Netherlands) in the North Sea. On this particular trip, the weather gods were in a benevolent mood and we were transiting under a faultless blue sky in one of the most picturesque regions of the world. The strait got narrower as we sailed closer to Zealand (Sjælland), the largest of the off-lying Danish islands. Up ahead, as we zigzagged through the laby-rinth of islands, the tall and majestic Great Belt Bridge sprang into view. The pylons lift the suspension bridge some sixty-five metres above sea level allowing it to accommodate the largest of the ocean cruise liners that frequently pass under its domi-nating expanse.

Myself and my colleague Guy Madison (Dutton & Madison, 2017) inadvertently provided evidence for the Finnish inferiority complex in a study we did of every marriage between a Finn and a foreigner that took place in Finland in the year 2013. On average, males and females operate different sexual selection strategies. Males have nothing to lose from the sexual encounter, so it makes sense for them, if they can get away with it, to have as much sex as possible with as many different women as possible in order to maximise the probability that their genes will be passed on. Accordingly, they select for youth and beauty, as these are markers of fertility and health. The essence of beauty is a symmetrical face and a such face implies a low level of mutant genes and thus sound genetic health. Females operate differently. As we discussed briefly earlier, they have a great deal to lose from the sexual encounter, because they can become pregnant, which carries with it a range of social and physical costs. This makes them more selective. Specifically, they are sexually attracted to high status men as these men will have the resources to provide for them and their child, meaning that both of them are more likely to survive (Buss, 1989). So, socioeconomically, women ‘marry up’ (hypergamously) and men ‘marry down’ (hypogamously). We would expect that nationality would be an aspect of status. We tested this by ranking different nationalities based on various criteria and especially how wealthy a country was. We predicted that, among marriages between a Finn and a foreigner, Finnish women would to a greater extent marry men that were from countries ranked as higher status than Finland while Finnish men would disproportionately marry women from lower status countries. This is, overall, what we found. However, we specifically found that, whatever the objective national status differences, Finnish women married Western European and Anglophone (USA, Canada and so on) men while Finnish men married Eastern European and East Asian (including Japanese) women. This would imply, whatever the economic reality, that Finns regard themselves as inferior to pretty much all Western Europeans. It also indicates that the Japanese – who are far wealthier than the Finns – regard themselves as inferior to the Finns, presumably because there is some idolization of whiteness or, possibly, as has been argued by a Japanese anthropologist, the Japanese specifically adore Finnish culture (Mitsui, 2012).

What are the implications of ethnic identity for multi-racial and multi-ethnic societies? Tatu Vanhanen of the University of Tampere, Finland, has probably researched the effects of ethnic diversity more systematically than anyone else. In a massive, book-length study, he measured ethnic diversity and levels of conflict in 148 countries, and found correlations in the 0.5 to 0.9 range for the two variables, depending on how the variables were defined and measured. Homogeneous countries like Japan and Iceland show very low levels of conflict, while highly diverse countries like Lebanon and Sudan are wracked with strife. Prof. Vanhanen found tension in all multi-ethnic societies: “Interest conflicts between ethnic groups are inevitable because ethnic groups are genetic kinship groups and because the struggle for existence concerns the survival of our own genes through our own and our relatives’ descendants.” Prof. Vanhanen also found that economic and political institutions make no difference; wealthy, democratic countries suffer from sectarian strife as much as poor, authoritarian ones: “Ethnic nepotism belongs to human nature and . . . it is independent from the level of socioeconomic development (modernization) and also from the degree of democratization.” Others have argued that democracy is particularly vulnerable to ethnic tensions while authoritarian regimes like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or Tito’s Yugoslavia can give the impression of holding it in check. One expert writing in Foreign Affairs explained that for democracy to work “the party or group that loses has to trust the new majority and believe that its basic interests will still be protected and that there is nothing to fear from a change in power.” He wrote that this was much less likely when opposing parties represent different races or ethnicities. The United Nations found that from 1989 to 1992 there were 82 conflicts that had resulted in at least 1,000 deaths each. Of these, no fewer than 79, or 96 percent, were ethnic or religious conflicts that took place within the borders of recognized states. Only three were cross-border conflicts. Wars between nations are usually ethnic conflicts as well. Internal ethnic conflict has very serious consequences. As J. Philippe Rushton has argued, “The politics of ethnic identity are increasingly replacing the politics of class as the major threat to the stability of nations.” One must question the wisdom of then-president Bill Clinton’s explanation for the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia: “[T]he principle we and our allies have been fighting for in the Balkans is the principle of multi-ethnic, tolerant, inclusive democracy. We have been fighting against the idea that statehood must be based entirely on ethnicity.” That same year, the American supreme commander of NATO, Wesley Clark, was even more direct: “There is no place in modern Europe for ethnically pure states. That’s a 19th century idea and we are trying to transition into the 21st century, and we are going to do it with multi-ethnic states.

The year 1944 was the year of the greatest burdens in this mighty struggle. It was a year that again proved conclusively that the bourgeois social order is no longer capable of braving the storms of the present or of the coming age. State after state that does not find its way to a truly social reorganization will go down the path to chaos. The liberal age is a thing of the past. The belief that you can counter this invasion of the people by parliamentary-democratic half-measures is childish and just as naive as Metternich’s methods when the national drives for unification were making their way through the nineteenth century. The lack of a truly social, new form of life results in the lack of the mental will to resist not only in the nations but also in the lack of the moral power of resistance of their leaders. In all countries we see that the attempted renaissance of a democracy has proved fruitless. The confused tangle of political dilettantes and military politicians of a bygone bourgeois world who order each other around is, with deadly certainty, preparing for a plunge into chaos and, insofar as Europe is concerned, into an economic and ethnic catastrophe. And, after all, one thing has already been proved: this most densely populated continent in the world will either have to live with an order that gives the greatest consideration to individual abilities, guarantees the greatest accomplishments, and, by taming all egotistical drives, prevents their excesses, or states such as we have in central and western Europe will prove unfit for life, which means that their nations are thereby doomed to perish! In this manner-following the example of royal Italy-Finland, Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary collapsed during this year. This collapse is primarily the result of the cowardice and lack of resolve of their leaders. They and their actions can be understood only in light of the corrupt and socially amoral atmosphere of the bourgeois world. The hatred which many statesmen, especially in these countries, express for the present German Reich is nothing other than the voice of a guilty conscience, an expression of an inferiority complex in view of our organization of a human community that is suspicious to them because we successfully pursue goals that again do not correspond to their own narrow economic egotism and their resulting political shortsightedness. For us, my German Volksgenossen, this, however, represents a new obligation to recognize ever more clearly that the existence or nonexistence of a German future depends on the uncompromising organization of our Volksstaat, that all the sacrifices which our Volk must make are conceivable only under the condition of a social order which clears away all privileges and thereby makes the entire Volk not only bear the same duties but also possess the same vital rights. Above all, it must mercilessly destroy the social phantoms of a bygone era. In their stead, it must place the most valuable reality there is, namely the Volk, the masses which, tied together by the same blood, essence, and experiences of a long history, owe their origin as an individual existence not to an earthly arbitrariness but to the inscrutable will of the Almighty. The insight into the moral value of our conviction and the resulting objectives of our struggle for life give us and, above all, give me the strength to continue to wage this fight in the most difficult hours with the strongest faith and with an unshakable confidence. In such hours, this conviction also ties the Volk to its leadership. It assured the unanimous approval of the appeal that I was forced to direct to the German Volk in a particularly urgent way this year. New Year’s Proclamation to the National Socialists and Party Comrades Fuhrer Headquarters, January 1, 1945

In Finland, all education schools were selective. Getting into a teacher-training program there was as prestigious as getting into medical school in the United States. The rigor started in the beginning, where it belonged, not years into a teacher’s career with complex evaluation schemes designed to weed out the worst performers, and destined to demoralize everyone else. A teacher union advertisement from the late 1980s began with this breathtaking boast: “A Finnish teacher has received the highest level of education in the world.” Such a claim could never have been made in the United States, or in most countries in the world.

There were few more unlikely candidates in 1611 for Great Power status than Sweden. Even with its satrapy of Finland, the total population numbered no more than 1.3 million. They lived on the northern edge of Europe in an impoverished, barren, half-frozen country with almost no industry to speak of. So poor was Sweden that by winter’s end peasants were often reduced to eating tree bark to survive. It was a society, writes historian Michael Roberts, “which was half-isolated, culturally retarded, and still in all essentials mediaeval.

In one of our conversations, she told me about Finland’s development of sisu, a rough cognate for grit. Etymologically, sisu denotes a person’s viscera, their “intestines (sisucunda).” It is defined as “having guts,” intentional, stoic, constant bravery in the face of adversity. 21 For Finns, sisu is a part of national culture, forged through their history of war with Russia and required by the harsh climate. 22 In this Nordic country, pride is equated with endurance. When Finnish mountain climber Veikka Gustafsson ascended a peak in Antarctica, it was named Mount Sisu. The fortitude to withstand war and foreign occupations is lyrically heralded in the Finnish epic poem, The Kalevala. 23 Even the saunas—two million, one for every three Finns in a country of approximately five and a half million—involve fortitude: A sauna roast is often followed by a nude plunge into the ice-cold Baltic Sea. If Iceland is happier than it has any right to be considering the hours the country spends plunged in darkness each year, Finland’s past circumstances, climate, and developed culture have turned it into one of the grittiest. Finland’s educational system is also currently ranked first, ahead of South Korea, now at number two. 24 The United States is midway down the list. 25 In Finland, there is no after-school tutoring or training, no “miracle pedagogy” in the classrooms, where students are on a first-name basis with their teachers, all of whom have master’s degrees. There is also more “creative play.” 26 Perhaps the tradition of sisu and play, I suspect, are part of the larger, unstated reason for its success. 27 “Wouldn’t it be great if you heard people talking about how they were going to do something to build their grit?” Duckworth asked.

The ten most violent countries in the world in 2014 – Syria, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Pakistan and North Korea – are all among the least capitalist. The ten most peaceful – Iceland, Denmark, Austria, New Zealand, Switzerland, Finland, Canada, Japan, Belgium and Norway – are all firmly capitalist.

Such creativity with statistics is by no means an isolated incident, as revealed by The Climate Change Performance Index[20] published by Germanwatch and Climate Action Network Europe in 2014. Again, the wrong countries were at risk of becoming the top performers, and again, the situation was fixed with creative carbon accounting for nuclear. This particular index went even further than WWF did and declared nuclear electricity to have the same emissions as the dirtiest mainstream electricity, coal power. Given that this was an especially climate oriented index, it is interesting to note that a country could improve its score by replacing nearly emission-free nuclear with practically any mix of fossil fuels. One really cannot make this stuff up. We are sure that similar creative ”indices” are already in preparation somewhere. Using deliberately falsified indices and reports for actual, sensible real world policy is of course impossible, as they simply seek to distort the reality to conform to an ideologically preconceived position. We believe that environmental organizations are in fact never going to tell us which countries have historically cut their carbon emissions the fastest and the most. The leaders in this game are those countries that built a lot of nuclear in the 1980s, like France and Sweden. It is worth noting that these cuts were accomplished with technology from the 1970s, and were achieved completely by accident, as a by-product of energy policy enacted for completely different reasons. There was no active climate policy, but the results were many times better than what Germany has managed with its Energiewende since the early 2000s. It is worth imagining what an active and evidence-based climate policy that pushed aggressively for renewables, energy savings and nuclear could therefore achieve. Image 10 - The best ten years of emissions reductions in four countries. A major part of Germany’s reductions, called “Wallfall”, are due to the country’s unification and the following closure of many of ineffective power plants and industry in eastern Germany. In addition to these countries, also Belgium and Finland have cut their emissions markedly with nuclear power.

Less headway is being made in figuring out how to improve teacher quality, an undertaking more complex than simply recruiting new teachers with better academic credentials or offering higher salaries. In high-achieving countries, such as Finland, Singapore, and South Korea, teachers come from the top of their high school graduating classes, teaching schools have a high bar for acceptance, and teachers’ salaries are competitive with those of lawyers and scientists. It is generally the opposite in the United States.

There is an old joke in Finland, a country proud of its collective introspective character and shyness. “How do you know when a Finnish man likes a woman? He stares at her shoes instead of his.

Good looks, for example, are denoted by symmetrical features—a sign that early life development was not disrupted by infection—and skin that shows no trace of pockmarks, sores, or other blemishes. With that in mind, you’d expect beauty to be more valued by those more susceptible to germs—a theory that evolutionary biologists put to the test in a survey of over seventy-one hundred people on six continents. In keeping with their prediction, those who lived in countries where parasites were leading causes of death and disability—in Nigeria and Brazil, for example—deemed good looks much more important in a mate than did inhabitants of nations like Finland and the Netherlands, which have among the lowest incidences of infection. In a British study, merely prompting people to think of germs—by, for example, showing them photos of a festering skin sore or a white cloth with a dark stain resembling a fecal smear—boosted how much they preferred symmetrical faces in the opposite sex.

World War II, alternately known as the Second World War, began with the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939 and ended on September 2, 1945 with the formal surrender of Japan. World War II involved countries from all over the world, known as the Axis powers, Germany, Japan, Italy, Romania, Hungary, Finland and Bulgaria, and the Allies, made up of Great Britain, France, the United States, Soviet Union, China, Poland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, South Africa, Yugoslavia, Greece, Denmark, Norway, Netherlands, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Brazil, and the Philippines.

Finns are rightly proud of the strong foundations of their society. Famously high tax rates mean the nation is well equipped to look after its citizenry with some of the world’s best health care and education. Despite the high excise on alcohol, Finns appreciate the reliable public transport and world-class universities, libraries and other infrastructure these same taxes afford. Like much of the world, the country is holding its breath as ageing baby boomers retire and it attempts to maintain high pensions.

Singapore has found a way to provide cost-effective quality healthcare for its citizens with superior outcomes as 25% the cost of the US and 40% the cost of Europe. Israel has created a start-up ecosystem to rival Silicon Valley. Finland and Singapore consistently rank among the highest in PISA scores although their spending per pupil is among the lowest of OEDC nations. Zwolle, a town in the Netherlands, makes roads out of recycled plastic which are cheaper, last longer and are environmentally friendly. The Dutch pension system is the envy of the world. Swiss citizens passed a law to limit their congress’s ability to impose obligations on future generations, eliminating the moral hazard of elected officials engaging in “buy now, pay later” policy enactments. Ireland, once among the poorest nations in Europe now ranks among its most prosperous. Through its “Citizens Assemblies”, Petri dishes used to form political consensus at the ground level on sensitive matters such as abortion and gay marriage, it has morphed from one of the conservative societies to among the most liberal. New Zealand has just introduced ‘naked vegetables’, requiring produce in supermarkets to be sold without plastic packaging.

What’s funny is that when looking at racially tolerant countries, America ranks among the best, and many European countries rank as much less tolerant. According to the Washington Post, a country like France is among the most racially intolerant countries in the world, with 22.7 percent of people in France claiming they wouldn’t want to live near someone of a different race. The Nordic countries did score very low for racial intolerance, yet these countries are some of the most racially homogenous countries on the planet, like Finland with a native Finnish population of 87.3 percent or Norway with 86.3 percent of its population being ethnic Norwegians. So, the only countries that people on the left would rather live in are countries that are significantly less diverse and more white than America. Seems rather hypocritical, doesn’t it?

According to the Washington Post, a country like France is among the most racially intolerant countries in the world, with 22.7 percent of people in France claiming they wouldn’t want to live near someone of a different race. The Nordic countries did score very low for racial intolerance, yet these countries are some of the most racially homogenous countries on the planet, like Finland with a native Finnish population of 87.3 percent or Norway with 86.3 percent of its population being ethnic Norwegians. So, the only countries that people on the left would rather live in are countries that are significantly less diverse and more white than America. Seems rather hypocritical, doesn’t it?

like France is among the most racially intolerant countries in the world, with 22.7 percent of people in France claiming they wouldn’t want to live near someone of a different race. The Nordic countries did score very low for racial intolerance, yet these countries are some of the most racially homogenous countries on the planet, like Finland with a native Finnish population of 87.3 percent or Norway with 86.3 percent of its population being ethnic Norwegians. So, the only countries that people on the left would rather live in are countries that are significantly less diverse and more white than America. Seems rather hypocritical, doesn’t it?

So Huawei’s equipment now plays an important—and in many countries, crucial—role in transmitting the world’s data. Today it is one of the world’s three biggest providers of equipment on cell towers, alongside Finland’s Nokia and Sweden’s Ericsson.

Scandinavia, say, or to a lesser degree any of the “welfare states” where people concern themselves with one another’s … welfare. And it works. The World Happiness Report for 2018 found Finland the most cheerful country on earth, followed by Norway, Denmark, and Iceland. America came in eighteenth, “substantially below most comparably wealthy nations.

Finland – a country that is a dilute solution of land in water

Furthermore, in some countries—Finland and Singapore and South Korea, for instance—future schoolteachers are recruited from the best college-bound students, whereas a teacher in the United States is more likely to come from the bottom half of her class.

Finland had required a matriculation test for 160 years; it was a way to motivate kids and teachers toward a clear, common goal, and it made a high school diploma mean something. Korea rerouted air traffic for their graduation test. Polish kids studied for their tests on nights and weekends, and they arrived for the exam wearing suits, ties, and dresses. In America, however, many people still believed in a different standard, one that explained a great deal about the country’s enduring mediocrity in education: According to this logic, students who passed the required classes and came to school the required number of days should receive their diplomas, regardless of what they had learned or what would happen to them when they tried to get a job at the Bama Companies. Those kids deserved a chance to fail later, not now. It was a perverse sort of compassion designed for a different century.

Which Country Has the Best Readers? One of the most comprehensive international reading studies was conducted by Warwick Elley for the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) in 1990 and 1991. Involving thirty-two countries, it assessed 210,000 nine- and fourteen-year-olds.22 Of all those children, which ones read best? For nine-year-olds, the four top nations were: Finland (569), the United States (547), Sweden (539), and France (531). But the U.S. position dropped to a tie for eighth when fourteen-year-olds were evaluated. This demonstrates that American children begin reading at a level that is among the best in the world, but since reading is an accrued skill and U.S. children appear to do less of it as they grow older, their scores decline when compared with countries where children read more as they mature.

career. This was the minimum price that I was prepared to pay.63 The interviewer followed up with the following intriguing question: 'Does the fact that Lenin gave Finland independence many decades ago give you an allergic reaction? Is Chechnya's secession possible in principle'? To which Putin answered: It is possible, but the issue is not secession. … Chechnya will not stop with its own independence. It will be used as a staging ground for a further attack on Russia … Why? In order to protect Chechen independence? Of course not. The purpose will be to grab more territory. They would overwhelm Dagestan. Then the whole Caucasus – Dagestan, Ingushetia, and then up along the Volga – Bashkortostan, Tatarstan, following this direction into the depths of the country … When I started to compare the scale of the possible tragedy with what we have there now, I had no doubt that we should act as we are acting, maybe even more firmly.64 Putin thus viewed the Chechen issue

on 3 March 1918 the new Soviet republic signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany, ending the war on the Eastern Front. It was a humiliation for Russia. The country lost one-quarter of the former Russian Empire’s population and industry, including 90 per cent of its coalmines. It renounced all territorial claims to Finland, Belarus and Ukraine, and the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Poland became an independent state. The driving force behind the signing of the treaty was Lenin. Despite the enormous losses, he believed that only an immediate peace would allow the young Bolshevik government to consolidate power in Russia, against all its enemies.

A national obsession with a particular sport does not occur in a vacuum. Something lights the match. In the early twentieth century, Finland was a poor, nonindustrialized country where many people worked outdoors and got around on foot and (during the winter) on cross-country skis. These fertile conditions produced Hannes Kolehmainen, who won three gold medals in running events at the 1912 Olympics. Kolehmainen’s triumphs ignited an intense running craze in his home country. Every Finnish boy wanted to be the next Olympic hero. The result was a quarter-century of Finnish dominance of distance running, a dynasty that produced a number of athletes whose performances far surpassed those of the man who’d started it all. Ultimately, the passionate and widespread participation in running that Hannes Kolehmainen inspired had a much stronger impact on the performance of Finland’s top runners than did the conditions of poverty, lack of industrialization, and human-powered transportation that produced the first great Finnish runner. Sociologist

I liked Finland for its absence of overt rage or street crime. This wasn’t the United States, this wasn’t Spain. It was calm here, and moody, a gorgeous, elegant place with slightly off-kilter serotonin levels. A depressed country: this was an easy diagnosis to make, given the suicide statistics, which Scandinavia sometimes tries to deny, just the way Cornell University tries to allay the fears of incoming students’ parents about the famous Ithaca gorge, which, like a harvest ritual each fall, claims the life of a few more hopeless freshmen. Don’t worry, the college brochure should say. Though some students do in fact leap to their deaths, most prefer keg parties and studying. All of Scandinavia was alluring, with its ice fishing and snowcaps, but everyone knew about the legend of ingrained unhappiness among Finns, Norwegians, and Swedes: their drinking, their mournful, baying songs, their muffled darkness smack in the middle of the day.

Offering some of Finland's finest beaches, genteel Hanko, the country's southernmost town, has a history intimately connected with Russia. The St Petersburg gentry for whom it was a favoured summering destination have left a noble legacy of lovely wooden villas, while the area saw heavy fighting in WWII when it was occupied by Russia and locals were forced to evacuate. Today the long sandy peninsula is all about yachts and sand castles, rather than gunboats and trenches, and makes a great place to relax.

The same study reported that countries such as Sweden and Finland have “better academic achievement and child well-being, despite children not starting school until age 7.

Infant mortality in the United States is highest among the richest nations, 5.8 deaths per 1,000 live births, as against a combined average of 3.6 per 1,000 live births for the richest countries, as against about 2 per 1,000 in Japan and Finland. American

The fascist solution of the impasse reached by liberal capitalism can be described as a reform of market economy achieved at the price of the extirpation of all democratic institutions, both in the industrial and the political realm. ... The appearance of such a movement in the industrial countries of the globe, and even in a number of only slightly industrialized ones, should never have been ascribed to local causes, national mentalities, or historical backgrounds as was so consistently done by contemporaries. Fascism had as little to do with the Great War as with the Versailles Treaty, with Junker militarism as with the Italian temperament. The movement appeared in defeated countries like Bulgaria and in victorious ones like Jugoslavia, in countries of Northern temperament like Finland and Norway and of Southern temperament like Italy and Spain, in countries of Aryan race like England, Ireland or Belgium and non-Aryan race like Japan, Hungary, or Palestine, in countries of Catholic traditions like Portugal and in Protestant ones like Holland, in soldierly communities like Prussia and civilian ones like Austria, in old cultures like France and new ones like the United States and the Latin-American countries. In fact, there was no type of background -- of religious, cultural, or national tradition -- that made a country immune to fascism, once the conditions for its emergence were given.

Russia’s most powerful weapons now, leaving to one side nuclear missiles, are not the Russian army and air force, but gas and oil. Russia is second only to the USA as the world’s biggest supplier of natural gas, and of course it uses this power to its advantage. The better your relations with Russia, the less you pay for energy; for example, Finland gets a better deal than the Baltic States. This policy has been used so aggressively, and Russia has such a hold over Europe’s energy needs, that moves are afoot to blunt its impact. Many countries in Europe are attempting to wean themselves off their dependency on Russian energy, not via alternative pipelines from less aggressive countries but by building ports.

In in the meantime, doctors should “do no harm.” You’ll learn that countries like Britain, Sweden, Finland, and Norway are doing exactly that: after rigorous reviews of existing studies, they decided to severely restrict, even ban, medical interventions for minors. But in the US and Canada it’s full steam ahead.

Our study of the Israeli model, however, indicates that ideas are only the beginning of innovation, and not the most essential part. If ideas were the essence of innovation, we would expect the countries that led the world in patents per capita—including Korea, Finland, and Israel—to all have roughly the same number of start-ups.

But Leningrad was, above all, the epicentre of communist ideology. This was where the Aurora had fired the first shot and the imperial palace had been stormed; this was where Lenin had arrived, as if by a miracle, at the Finland Station, to save the country. This was where the Party bigwigs had started out. This was where a new calendar had begun!

Yerushalmy and Hilleboe still found a positive correlation between calories from fat and incidence of heart disease, but their takeaways were very different from Keys’s. For example, the death rate from heart disease in Finland was more than twenty times that in Mexico, even though fat consumption rates in the two nations were similar. When the researchers looked at deaths from all causes rather than isolating heart disease, they found that mortality had a negative correlation with fat intake: people in countries with higher fat intakes were actually living longer. When all the data were presented, the only positive correlation with deaths from all causes was consumption of carbohydrates (Yerushalmy and Hilleboe, 1957).

Serious economic concerns alone were what caused Communist party leaders of the Soviet Union to contrive strikes on precise schedules in the forestry industries of Finland, Sweden, Canada, Poland or other competing timber export countries. This was to paralyze work in wooded regions or sawmills there, to make export impossible.

These apparent paradoxes would be vexing, except that an alternative explanation for the relative absence of heart disease on Crete had always been at hand: the near-complete absence of sugar in the Cretan diet. As Allbaugh described, the Cretans “do not serve desserts—except for fresh fruit in season. . . . Cake is seldom served, and pie almost never.” The consumption of “sweets” in the Seven Countries study, as you might remember, correlated more closely with heart disease rates than did any other kind of food: they were abundant in Finland and the Netherlands, where heart disease rates were highest, while study leaders observed that “hardly any pastries were eaten in Yugoslavia, Greece, and Japan,” where heart disease rates were low. And these observations have held true over time. From 1960 to 1990 in Spain, for example, the intake of sugar and other carbohydrates fell dramatically, right along with heart disease rates, as meat consumption rose. Italian sugar consumption, always very low, also dropped during those years.

much of the peat sold in garden centres is now imported from other countries, notably from Ireland, Estonia, Latvia and Finland. Estonia is a wild and unspoiled country where bears and wolves still roam, and it is sad to reflect that great chunks of it are now being dug up so that we can grow begonias.

The primary problems in Finland are skyrocketing costs and demographic changes. Like the United States—and most of the Western world—Finland’s population is aging, pushing the country’s already outrageously high tax burden on a shrinking group of working-age Finns. By 2030, more than one-quarter of the country is expected to be 65 years old or older.46

in June 2020, researchers Supriya Garikipati (University of Liverpool) and Uma Kambhampati (University of Reading) confirmed the finding statistically,12 arguing that female-led countries, such as Germany, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, and indeed New Zealand, did better than most in responding to the pandemic.

countries. The United States has a notoriously high infant mortality rate for a rich country—6.1 deaths per thousand live births in 2010. In Finland, by comparison, it is just 2.3. But it turns out that physicians in America, like those in the UK’s Midlands, seem to be far more likely to record a pregnancy that ends at twenty-two weeks as a live birth, followed by an early death, than as a late miscarriage.

Despite being the most protectionist country in the world throughout the 19th century and right up to the 1920s, the US was also the fastest growing economy. The eminent Swiss economic historian, Paul Bairoch, points out that there is no evidence that the only significant reduciton of protectionism in the US economy (between 1846 and 1861) had any noticeable positive impact on the country's rate of economic growth. SOme free trade economists argue that the US grew quickly during this period despite protectionism, because it had so many other favourable conditions for growth, particularly its abundant natural resources, large domestic market and high literacy rate. The force of the counter-argument is diminished by the fact that, as we shall see, many other countries with few of those conditions also grew rapidly behind protective barriers. Germany, Sweden, France, Finland, Austria, Japan, Taiwan, and Korea come to mind.

Countries like Finland, Norway, Italy and Austria-which were relatively backward at the end of the Second World War and saw the need for rapid industrial development-also used strategies similar to those used by France and Japan to promote their industrie. All of them had relatively high tariffs until the 1960s. They all actively used SOEs to upgrade their industries. This was particularly successful in Finland and Norway. In Finland, Norway and Austria, the government was very much involved in directing the flow of bank credit to strategic industries. Finland heavily controlled foreign investment. In many parts of Italy, local government provided support for marketing and R&D to small and medium-sized firms in the locality.

The four countries with the highest rates of living alone are Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark, where roughly 40 to 45 percent of all households have just one person. By investing in each other’s social welfare and affirming their

I was fortunate to grow up in a place where snowfall was abundant, exclusion from private property was frowned upon, and outside my door were thousands of acres of forested hills to explore. By the time I was ten my feet were as big as my mother's, and I pinched her leather cross-country ski boots and a set of wooden skis and poles from Finland that had stood neglected in the cellar for years. I never had any instruction in Nordic skiing technique, but as soon as I pushed off it was obvious that this was an easier way to move about in the winter woods. To this day I have a hard time thinking of skiing as a sport and have felt self-conscious the few times I've skied in prepared tracks among the athletic and sleek-suited crowd that frequents Nordic centers. For me skiing is just the way you walk when there's snow on the ground. It's walking in cursive, and I love to walk.

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The nations that rank as the least corrupt—such countries as Finland, Norway, New Zealand, Sweden, and Singapore—are also the safest places in the world to drive.

Cleaning out my closets and came across a dusty old book, buried and forgotten in there. I sat down and opened it up. It’s about a little girl in Finland with blonde ringlets who got mad at her grandmother and decided to walk to America. Buck naked except for the bright yellow Nokia rain boots. That’s how the journey started. Forward 53 years and I’m still that girl with a lifetime of adventure and walkabouts in between. I did end up in America, a country I embrace as my own, but the path here came with many detours and dead ends,but I’m here. Finally.

Russia’s most powerful weapons now, leaving to one side nuclear missiles, are not the Russian army and air force, but gas and oil. Russia is second only to the USA as the world’s biggest supplier of natural gas, and of course it uses this power to its advantage. The better your relations with Russia, the less you pay for energy; for example, Finland gets a better deal than the Baltic States. This policy has been used so aggressively, and Russia has such a hold over Europe’s energy needs, that moves are afoot to blunt its impact. Many countries in Europe are attempting to wean themselves off their dependency on Russian energy, not via alternative pipelines from less aggressive countries but by building ports. On average, more than 25 per cent of Europe’s gas and oil comes from Russia; but often the closer a country is to Moscow, the greater its dependency.

This in turn reduces that country’s foreign policy options. Latvia, Slovakia, Finland and Estonia are 100 per cent reliant on Russian gas, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria and Lithuania are 80 per cent dependent, and Greece, Austria and Hungary 60 per cent. About half of Germany’s gas consumption comes from Russia, which, along with extensive trade deals, is partly why German politicians tend to be slower to criticise the Kremlin for aggressive behaviour than a country such as Britain, which not only has 13 per cent dependency, but also has its own gas-producing industry, including reserves of up to nine months’ supply.

Indeed, trust is central to democracy and these processes have already damaged trust considerably, and will continue to disenfranchise citizens to the point that they may increasingly lose faith in democracy, regarding it as corrupt and a waste of time. They will vote for political parties that are suspicious of democracy, at least when the country is ruled by those whom they perceive to be enemies. Depending on their perspective, these parties will be of the far right or far left by current standards. Movements not unlike the Lapua Movement will gain traction in circumstances like this, as will groups from the extreme left. And the kind of generally wealthy people who become involved in Finnish politics – in Finland individual candidates must fund their own campaigns – will be increasingly distrusted and perceived as, essentially, ‘other;’ as not part of the in-group. This will, unfortunately, have ramifications for their safety, especially as people begin to blame those who advocated and enforced Multiculturalism for its future consequences.    This distrust will start to spread, like a disease, to other organs of the Finnish state. The police will be increasingly perceived – especially if they are seen to enforce unpopular policies with regard to not being allowed to criticise immigration – not as protectors of the Finnish people but as ‘enemies of the people.’ Distrust of the police, will result in the establishment of para-military forces of the kind that have been so prevalent in the recent history of Northern Ireland. This can already be observed with patrols in Finland by the Soldiers of Odin. If this seems too far fetched, it should be remembered that in the 1970s, trust in the police in strongly Catholic parts of Northern Ireland was so low that the British state simply had no control in many of these areas.

In his book Ethnic Conflicts, Tatu Vanhanen (2012) has shown that the more ethnically diverse a society is, the higher is the degree of ethnic conflict. Indeed, the correlation between a country’s ethnic diversity and its level and intensity of ethnic conflict is 0.66. The more ethnically diverse Finland becomes, the more conflict-ridden it will be and the more these conflicts will be based around ethnicity. In such circumstances, in which two groups are in conflict, Vanhanen shows that people tend to identify more strongly with their ethnic group and are more likely to perceive outsiders as an enemy. Thus, his research indicates that as the population of Finland becomes more ethnically-diverse, many Finns will probably develop their sense of Finnishness and become more nationalistic, while the foreigners will be decreasingly likely to integrate and will feel decreasingly Finnish. This is a recipe for a spiral into increasingly intense ethnic conflict; into low-level civil war.

Ancel Keys demonstrated that a diet low in saturated animal fat and processed food was associated with a low incidence of mortality from coronary heart disease and cancer. Beginning in the late 1950s, the study followed almost 13,000 men from seven different countries (Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia, Netherlands, Finland, United States, and Japan). Men living in the Mediterranean region had the lowest incidence of heart disease and the longest life expectancy. And Greek men had a 90% lower likelihood of premature death from heart attack compared to American men!

in some countries—Finland and Singapore and South Korea, for instance—future schoolteachers are recruited from the best college-bound students, whereas a teacher in the United States is more likely to come from the bottom half of her class.

In more advanced countries, such as the Czech Republic and Estonia, state socialism led to a steadily increasing lag behind neighbouring countries such as Austria and Finland.

Although technological and organizational changes have made giving more advantageous, there’s one feature of giving that’s more timeless: when we reflect on our guiding principles in life, many of us are intuitively drawn to giving. Over the past three decades, the esteemed psychologist Shalom Schwartz has studied the values and guiding principles that matter to people in different cultures around the world. One of his studies surveyed reasonably representative samples of thousands of adults in Australia, Chile, Finland, France, Germany, Israel, Malaysia, the Netherlands, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, and the United States. He translated his survey into a dozen languages, and asked respondents to rate the importance of different values. Here are a few examples: List 1 Wealth (money, material possessions) Power (dominance, control over others) Pleasure (enjoying life) Winning (doing better than others) List 2 Helpfulness (working for the well-being of others) Responsibility (being dependable) Social justice (caring for the disadvantaged) Compassion (responding to the needs of others) Takers favor the values in List 1, whereas givers prioritize the values in List 2. Schwartz wanted to know where most people would endorse giver values. Take a look back at the twelve countries above. Where do the majority of people endorse giver values above taker values? All of them. In all twelve countries, most people rate giving as their single most important value.

Bozhe, another nail-curling evening of his sweat dripping on her face and his chest hairs in her mouth. Dominika lay in her bed after Yevgeny had left, listening to her heart beating. His latest gossip from Line KR had nearly made her vomit with the shock. In two weeks TRITON would be delivering a list of assets’ names—her name certainly included—to Zarubina. Benford could not protect her. The wolves were drawing close. Dominika strangely felt no fear, simply a rising determination to survive, for the sole purpose of destroying Their corrupt world. She had two weeks to live. That realization, and Putin’s silky invitation to the seaside mansion on the Gulf of Finland, finally had been the trigger to feverish thought that morphed into a plan—impossible, suicidal—she knew she would carry out: Ruin the piyavki, the leeches that attached themselves thick on the belly of the country. She would do it, if it was her last act.

The national curriculum for the Swedish preschool is twenty pages long and goes on at length about things like fostering respect for one another, human rights, and democratic values, as well as a lifelong desire to learn. The document’s word choices are a pretty good clue to what Swedish society wants and expects from toddlers and preschoolers. The curriculum features the word play thirteen times, language twelve times, nature six times, and math five times. But there is not a single mention of literacy or writing. Instead, two of the most frequently used words are learning (with forty-eight appearances) and development (forty-seven). The other Scandinavian countries have similar early childhood education traditions. In Finland, formal teaching of reading doesn’t start until the child begins first grade, at age seven, and in the Finnish equivalent of kindergarten, which children enroll in the year they turn six, teachers will only teach reading if a child is showing an interest in it. Despite this lack of emphasis on early literacy, Finland is considered the most literate country in the world, with Norway coming in second, and Iceland, Denmark, and Sweden rounding out the top five, according to a 2016 study by Central Connecticut State University. John Miller, who conducted the study, noted that the five Nordic countries scored so well because “their monolithic culture values reading.” They have something else in common: their commitment to play in the early years.