On this day in 1918, the Finnish People's Delegation declared a socialist workers' republic (known "Red Finland"), at the start of the Finnish Civil War. The burgeoning working class movement was crushed by imperialist German forces.
Prior to 1917, Finland had been ruled as a Grand Duchy, an autonomous part of the Russian Empire. With the collapse of the Tsarist state in the wake of February Revolution and a long-term increase in nationalist sentiment, Finland declared independence on December 4th, 1917, formally recognized by the Russian Bolsheviks on December 31st.
Due to industrialized Finland having a strong revolutionary labor movement, conservative and proletarian forces were immediately thrown into conflict.
Red Guard paramilitary units representing the labor movement found themselves in a cycle of escalation with loyalist "White" Guards, culminating in a mass uprising of Reds in Helsinki on January 27th, 1918, marking the start of revolution. The following day, the Finnish People's Delegation was formed by members of the Social Democratic Party. Bourgeois forces fled to Vaasa, where they set up their own "White Senate".
The war saw the Whites, under the leadership of General Mannerheim, receive support from the German Empire, which was more well-established than the Reds' primary ally, the newly-created Russian Soviet Socialist Republic.
Following an imperialist intervention by Germany on the side of the Whites in March 1918, the war ended in defeat for the Reds in May. Over 12,000 people perished from starvation and hunger while imprisoned in White-operated POW camps, and reparations were not paid to former victims of the White Terror until 1973.
Lessons of the Finnish Revolution of 1917–1918
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Theory:
European medieval movies: Everyone is wearing brown and covered in shit, everything is awful and miserable and ignorant, everything sucks
Chinese, Japanese, Korean medieval movies: people spend tons of time hanging out in clean, well appointed inns. Anyone who isn't poor is wearing nice clothes. There's rule of law and cops and stuff. There are civil police, doctors (who can fly because reasons), cities and towns are clean and organized, people routinely travel long distances if relative comfort.
probably situate this discrepancy in the enlightenment ideology of the liberal revolutions
That tracks. The past has to suck bc if it didn't we'd have to admit that the enlightenment is bullshit, something like that?
Dan Carlin has a large amount of brainworms, but he isn’t wrong when he said Japan was probably the best bet to get stranded in the past and still have some semblance of modernity.
From https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/04/east-india-company-original-corporate-raiders