As long as we live in peace, we must live by the rules of a peaceful society. There is too much fuss going on.
I do a person himself changes if he has to live next door to a large, disturbed brute.
It makes one alert, even startled, and becomes squeamish. Starts looking for a hand longer and leans on the hard-working friends of the home blocks.
The same goes for nations. This has also happened to us. We are no longer the same Finland as ten years ago, which is a shame – it was a great Finland – but we shouldn't be the same either.
We invest in defense. The generals are listened to. The union was joined. The border was closed.
All of this is correct. It is still good to think about how much we should change. When following public debates, it sometimes feels as if Finland should be built into the Sparta of the North.
Original Sparta was an ancient Greek military state that flourished long before the beginning of our era.
In disciplined Sparta, weak newborns were thrown into a ravine. Healthy boys, on the other hand, were admitted to state hospitals at the age of seven.
“These boys learned to read and write only to help”, Greek philosopher Plutarch wrote in his work Lykurgos. “Otherwise, the goal of the entire upbringing was willing obedience to superiors, endurance in efforts and achieving victory in battle.”
“As they got older, their hair was cut very short, they were used to walking without shoes and usually playing naked. … They were unfed because they did not wash or use ointments. … They slept together on bundles of reeds, which they had gathered themselves by cutting the tops of the reeds growing in Eurota without a sickle, just by hand.”
The Finnish translation is Kalle Suuronen handwriting from 1942. It is no coincidence that the book was published in Finnish at that time. Spartan men spent the best years of their youth in war or in a military camp.
Current Finland is not Sparta. That's why some speeches are a bit surprising.
When does the reservist need to be in tip-top condition in the winter of 2025, if, for example, Trump is elected in the USA. When will another, equally prophetically accurate threat picture be presented.
When do we need to find pieces of legislation to prevent reservists from transitioning to civilian service.
When will the deputy chancellor of justice be lynched, who is doing his job when the borders are closed, legality control.
The mope of rhetoric starts showing off unnecessarily sensitively even when things are factual.
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Preparation is a skill.
It has remained unclear to only a few that we are living in dangerous years. (It's okay to wonder about those few, but that's the topic of a different fair.) However, security is not a reason to spartanize Finland.
As long as we live in peace, we must live by the rules of a peaceful society. They include, for example, the right to choose civil service.
Swedish there is a catchy expression in the language that fits the spirit of the times: m.p or scumbag. It comes from the words militärt överinteresterad persona militarily overexcited person.
The definition of the word is subject to interpretation. I interpret it as an insult. It's on the move.
In the same breath, I would like to state, as if to protect the background, that I am really interested in national defense.
I'm a lieutenant in the reserve, and I already understood as a non-Spartan klopp in the winter of 1991, why I had to leave the cabin in the dark woods and learn how to handle weapons with frosty fingers in the dark. It still warms me that my conscript winter turned out to be the last in the Soviet Union.
National defense and mudslinging are two different things. Preparation is a skill that demands a lot from a democracy that believes in freedom. No reliving or ranting, just decisive action.
Material equipment is expensive. Even more expensive is spiritual equipping, because you can't get it with money.
The author is HS's foreign editor.
#Column #Sparta #North #built
