Paavo of Saarijärvi is the celebrated subject of a poem by J.L. Runeberg, whose bicentenary is celebrated this year. Although the circumstances of its writing are outmoded and its image idealised, the upright God-fearing peasant who courageously struggled against poverty and the forces of nature remains part of the Finnish national canon.
     Elina Sana's historical study of Finland's extraditions to Nazi Germany during the Second World War (see page 63) is not a holocaust story of any scale, and although the information it contains is not entirely new, we would perhaps have preferred to turn our eyes away from the details and the moral reality of which Sana's work so vividly reminds us. Idealised images crumble, the facts remain, and it is the author's intention to study them further.
     Faster than scholarly research, poetry and the arts, the electronic media today convey images of ourselves and others. When the mirror image is more beautiful than the face, the result is confusion. A couple of recent examples:
     Finnish television showed a Canadian documentary about judgements of criminal cases and prison conditions in different parts of the world. Axe executions and stonings from Asia and Africa, a hard-line punishment prison in Arizona in which discipline was in the hands of an almost sick-minded sheriff. One of his methods was humiliation. Male prisoners were forced to wear women's underwear.
     The scene shifted to Finland, where the sun shone throughout the item and nature was at its greenest. A women's prison in an old wooden house in the country was shown. Everyone had comfortable rooms; there was a communal kitchen, and the prisoners' children played in the yard. Male prisoners were filmed working on the restoration of the 18th-century fortifications of Suomenlinna in Helsinki harbour. There were no guards, and the prisoners were paid for their work.
     The documentary's image of Finland was so touching that I could imagine criminals rushing to Finland just to get into our jails. A week later a newspaper item reported that our prisons are suffering from overcrowding. There are too few staff, and violence and drugs problems are on the increase.
     Another documentary interviewed a Japanese working woman who said that in Japan neither employers nor husbands approved of working mothers. The woman described Finland as a 'paradise of equality'. We women here know that equality has not been achieved either in jobs or pay, and that even housework is not evenly divided within families.
     In a way it is a pleasure to see images of ourselves when we see ourselves in a good light, even when we know the image is distorted. National smugness was also at issue when a radio newsreader from the Finnish Broadcasting Company let slip, after bellicose and violent items from abroad: 'And now to peace at home.'
     What has been done cannot be undone, but looking into the mirror of recent history is a necessity. Even in fitting rooms in shops there are two mirrors, one of them swivelling, so that we can also see ourselves from in front and behind.

     Kristina Carlson
     Editor-in-Chief
 
 
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