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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My chuddier relatives are currently incredibly angry about Jussi Halla-aho being eliminated in what turned out to be the first round of the 2024 Finnish presidential election
I have to admit, with everything going to shit everywhere I was resignedly expecting him to win but I had forgotten that the guy is such an unpleasant charisma vacuum (just look up a picture of him) that he had no chance in a personal popularity contest like this even if chuds love him. (Seriously, his fans call him The Master)
What the same relatives are even more angry about is that one of the two candidates in the second round is a gay guy from the Green Party. I hope he wins just to piss off every reactionary turd
I cannot imagine calling a man who dresses and styles himself like a department store manager as "the Master".
It's all a hilarious injoke that dates back to when he was just some racist upper middle class linguist with a really popular blog where he owned the libs by writing about racial crime statistics while being snarky. Seriously, this guy's political career was all built on e-fame from a fucking blog that translated to a staggering amount of votes when he joined the Finns Party. His wing eventually took the entire party over and turned it into a modern European style fascist party in the vein of Sverigedemokrater or AfD from the protest vote freak show it used to be
He very quickly amassed a huge and rabid fanbase who would go raid the comment sections of any liberal blogger he had complained about in his blog. Very quickly the liberal blogosphere started calling him and his followers a cult, which they thought was epic and started calling him Master
ironically.I see. My ancient enemies, the racist upper middle class linguists.
wanted to see what he looked like and found this
dude looks like an off brand early model Zuccer-bot