The moral of the story is pretty clear: you ought to crush the communists and leftists by all possible means, including mass murdering them in order to prevent a collapse of the society. Finland remained a) independent; b) unified; c) democratic; d) free for the rest of their history so far. For comparison, in Bulgaria, 1% of the population was killed after Soviet forces occupied the territory and installed the communist party in power. For the next 45 years the very fabric of society was torn apart and we are barely functioning as democracy (let alone free society) to this day. So, the math is very simple: in both cases 1% of the population was murdered. But when you murder the 1% communists you only do what is necessary to prevent them to murder the other 1% - all the innovators, engineers, writers, artist, etc.
For me, the reconciliation process is the most impressive part of the story. Mannerheim becoming such a unifying national figure despite his role in the civil war is remarkable
Social democracy was the original way of solving the left vs right conflict. The promise was that growth will give working class people better outcomes that wealth redistribution. This worked OK till 1970s+. Neoliberalism & globalism promised open economies would produce more gain by trickling down - but failed to actually make sure that occurred. This is the central issue that needs resolving in the current polarisation.
Say, can you recommend a good English-language book on the civil war? It sounds fascinating. (I like Finnish literature but know very little about Finnish history (if that helps your reccommendings).
I am afraid I do not know any English-language books about the Finnish Civil War. Finland is still a bilingual country and Finland and Sweden have deep cultural bonds meaning that a lot of Finnish books get translated into Swedish, but not so many into English.
However, Wikipedia has a bunch of articles on the Finnish Civil War that are both long and well-written.
If you want something to immerse yourself in I can recommend Väinö Linna's trilogy Under the North Star (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_the_North_Star_trilogy). These are novels but very well known and should not be that hard to find in English. It is an epic story about a poor, rural Finnish family. Especially the second volume deals almost exclusively about the class conflicts of the early 20th century and the civil war, mostly seen from a red perspective. Even though they are made up I have the feeling that the capture the mood of early Finland very well. They are also good literature, which helps.
This is, of course, true. But there is still quite a lot of political overlap. Even in Democratic strongholds like San Francisco or New York City Trump got 10% of the vote in 2020. Just as Biden got 10-20% even in the most rural areas. And then there is the middle ground, suburbs and smaller towns, where both sides are well represented.
It is nothing like the elections in 1860 when Union states and Confederate states could just as well have been holding two different elections, since the candidates and the votes cast were completely different in the south compared to in the north.
In California, where I grew up, there is a large contingent of wealthy, city-dwelling or city-adjacent right-wingers. Their numbers are not enough to swing elections by direct votes, but they have a lot of money and civic clout.
Thanks for the article, this was educational and informative. Especially while looking at it from a third world perspective, where riots are not unheard of, when friends and neighbors usually commit unspeakable atrocities on each other - there's one simmering in the distant north east of my nation for over a year now. Civilization breaks down really quickly.
There is no reason for civil war in US right now. There is a lot of prosperity, enough freedom and independence among states that very few would want to fight over moving to a different state or working on local initiatives.
So regardless of what happens this election there won't be a civil war. A lot more things would need to happen before that. And US has a lot of potential to resolve and reform without violent conflicts
I am just an ignorant European and I have to admit that I do not even know what you are remarking on here. Is Dixie not a customary label on civil war era southerners? Or is it offensive? I think I am rather offensive than lexically incorrect, but I am not sure about that either.
No one is perfect, of course. But I believe the American bureaucracy handled the 2020 election turmoil in an impressively even-handed and non-corrupt way.
I feel strongly that in America, the false accusation of corruption (with the intent to erode trust in the civil service) is far more of a problem than actual corruption.
I know little about the Finnish Civil War, but I know about contemporary America and the American Civil War.
1. While the Confederate states were all situated in one compact geographic area, there was often considerable internal dissent within those states (and in the North) as to whether to support the Confederacy vs. the Union. In particular, in the South, it was hillbillies vs. planters and planter wannabes.
The hillbillies rarely owned slaves (they couldn't afford them, and the Appalachian terrain didn't lend itself to large-scale plantation agriculture) and considered the government on far-off Washington to be less likely to intrude on them than the government in the state capital.
In the case of contemporary America, take, for example, Illinois. Illinois is considered a Team D state for purposes of national and statewide elections, but that is because so many people live in Chicago and environs. Once you leave Chicago, most of the rest of the state is pretty red. A similar pattern can be seen in other states. Basically, the big cities and areas with large black or native populations (Latinos, less and less) are Democrat strongholds. Everything else is Republicans.
That said, the US military heavily recruits from minorities (who are looking for a bus ticket out of whatever hell they come from) and rednecks (who actually buy into the Eagle Flag Freedom bullshit). During the American Civil War, the standing army was quite small, but the officer class in particular was disproportionately Southern.
And keep in mind, in many red states, pretty much every male over the age of about ten owns firearms and there are LOTS of combat veterans.
1. I am vaguely aware of the social differences within Confederate states. But despite this, the Appalachian hillbillies seem to have rallied around the Stars and Bars in almost the same numbers as the planters and planter wannabees. While there might have been internal differences this does not seem to have affected cohesion, especially not in relation to the Yankees. This is also very visible in data from the 1860 presidential election, where Lincoln almost universally got less than 1% of the vote in the southern state.
Contemporary America is of course geographically sorted too. But not to the extent of the 1860s. The conditions are also completely different today. In the 1860s politics was at its core local while today they are very much national. In this, contemporary America is much more similar to Finland in the 1910s than America in the 1860s. America in the 19th century was too large to have any meaningful national politics. While Finland in 1918 was small enough that all 3 million Finns could obsess over the same political issues. Just as modern Americans, thanks to modern communications, can obsess over the same political issues.
2. I must admit I know very little about the US military. I thought that US officers saw it as a mark of honor to be apolitical and subordinate to the civilian leadership. If that is not so then some equations might have to change.
The US Military sees it as a great honor for the general public to honestly believe that the US military would never take sides in internal american disputes over who gets to be the civilian leadership, and that the US Military will always obey the civilian leadership.... but if the civilian leadership ever asks the US Military to take sides in a big internal dispute about who gets to be the proper civilian leadership, that's going to get REALLY ugly. The Senior US Generals will likely do everything they can possibly think of to avoid following that order....
In 2016 and 2017, they DID do everything they could think of to avoid intervening. There was actually a very plausible small-scale scandal, which was hushed up a great deal, where it appeared that senior US Military generals in the Pentagon had more-or-less-deliberately delayed sending military reinforcements to rescue the US Legislature from rioters on Jan 6th, in hopes that US Police would rescue the Legislature FIRST, so the military wouldn't have to do it themselves... and then those generals may have lied about the nature of the delay afterwards during the resulting inquiries.
If a real war breaks out.... there's no guarantee that the enlisted, or the junior officers, would actually do what the generals told them to do. Especially not if it involved taking sides in an internal dispute, or even worse, taking the 'wrong' side in an internal dispute. The US Military tradition of "'don't take sides" and "don't take the wrong side" could easily outweigh "Obey orders from civilian leadership." Nobody really knows. There hasn't been a really big test of the question in a very long time. Everyone, Military and Civilian both, is pretty desperate to avoid finding out what the answer is.
The best bet is that if an American Civil War broke out, the US Military would probably behave a lot like the Russian Garrison Troops did in the First Finnish Civil war... Stay in their bases, officially avoid taking sides, and then secretly smuggle weapons to whomever they sympathized with.
Also, keep in mind that American private arms sales are an enormous industry... I'd have to go look it up, but I think that in terms of small arms, America private citizens may actually spend MORE money on (small, individual) weapons and ammo every year than the US Military and the various US Police Forces COMBINED. If you're only comparing small arms, and not the price tags of the bigger stuff, like tanks.
I think that added up, US Private Sales of small arms, ammunition, and civilian pickup trucks to private american individuals actually makes the US Private Citizenry about the 12 biggest army in the world by budget, roughly tied with the budget for the entire armed forces of South Korea. Again, I'd have to look it up, but it's a LOT of money.
The US Armed Forces are DESPERATE to never again pick a fight with the US Private Citizenry as a whole. The Civil War and the unofficial Coal Wars were bad enough. And the number of retired former members of the US Armed Forces generally outnumber the number of currently active members of the US Armed forces, so... smuggling assistance to them while pretending to be neutral is probably the way it would go.
Look up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain, where 10,000 workers fought 3,000 police officers in the year 1921, and then realize that rural america has spent the last hundred years getting richer and richer, and spending a reasonable portion of that money on weapons which can last forever with decent maintenance. I think America technically has more private firearms than it has private cars, but the way the law works, the US government isn't allowed to directly measure the actual number of private firearms currently in existence, so we can only guess.
Using ballots as a proxy for support is mistaken, as Lincoln wasn't on the ballot in most of the South.
EDIT: also, using election results as a proxy for mass opinion in the antebellum South is problematic, because poll taxes and voter registration laws made it (intentionally) difficult for poor whites in the South to vote.
To give the example of Lousisana, I don't remember if there was still a property requirement, but you had to pay a hefty poll tax and register a year in advance at the County courthouse. Voting also only took place at the couty seat. The upshot was that you not only had to pay to be able to vote, you had to plan ahead and be able to take two days off of work (one to register, one to vote), unless you lived near the courthouse.
This was not much of an option for the average frustrated hillbilly.
More to the point, this was before the australian ballot. If you wanted to vote, north or south, you showed up at the polling place, and just wandered around outside until someone handed you a pre-printed party ballot you could take into the polling place and hand to the poll workers.
And everyone could see which kind of ballot you had picked, and if you picked a really unpopular one, there might very well be... threats... made about that. or challenges to your voter registration, or both at the same time. Poll-Watchers were generally armed.
In a lot of the south, the Republican party didn't even bother to pay local printers to print up Republican ballots, or to pay local men to offer those non-existent ballots to people outside the poling booths. The Republicans knew exactly how hopeless, dangerous, and expensive doing that in some parts of the South would be.
The South may very well have had similar issues printing their preferred ballots in certain parts of the North. This was an era where the way to win was to go to a border state, find the biggest cluster of your most reliable voters, and then do whatever it took to get them to walk to the local polling place and vote. Right up to paying the saloon outside the polling place to offer free drinks all day to anyone who picked up the 'correct' party ballot at the bar, and promised to go cast it just as soon as their drink was over.
Nobody spent much effort in trying to penetrate the other guy's districts in a border state. way too dangerous. Just drive up the turnout in your own district, that's the way to do things.
In a lot of ways, American Democracy is returning to that system now: Base Turnout once again matters way more than Swing Voters.
The moral of the story is pretty clear: you ought to crush the communists and leftists by all possible means, including mass murdering them in order to prevent a collapse of the society. Finland remained a) independent; b) unified; c) democratic; d) free for the rest of their history so far. For comparison, in Bulgaria, 1% of the population was killed after Soviet forces occupied the territory and installed the communist party in power. For the next 45 years the very fabric of society was torn apart and we are barely functioning as democracy (let alone free society) to this day. So, the math is very simple: in both cases 1% of the population was murdered. But when you murder the 1% communists you only do what is necessary to prevent them to murder the other 1% - all the innovators, engineers, writers, artist, etc.
For me, the reconciliation process is the most impressive part of the story. Mannerheim becoming such a unifying national figure despite his role in the civil war is remarkable
Social democracy was the original way of solving the left vs right conflict. The promise was that growth will give working class people better outcomes that wealth redistribution. This worked OK till 1970s+. Neoliberalism & globalism promised open economies would produce more gain by trickling down - but failed to actually make sure that occurred. This is the central issue that needs resolving in the current polarisation.
Say, can you recommend a good English-language book on the civil war? It sounds fascinating. (I like Finnish literature but know very little about Finnish history (if that helps your reccommendings).
I am afraid I do not know any English-language books about the Finnish Civil War. Finland is still a bilingual country and Finland and Sweden have deep cultural bonds meaning that a lot of Finnish books get translated into Swedish, but not so many into English.
However, Wikipedia has a bunch of articles on the Finnish Civil War that are both long and well-written.
If you want something to immerse yourself in I can recommend Väinö Linna's trilogy Under the North Star (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_the_North_Star_trilogy). These are novels but very well known and should not be that hard to find in English. It is an epic story about a poor, rural Finnish family. Especially the second volume deals almost exclusively about the class conflicts of the early 20th century and the civil war, mostly seen from a red perspective. Even though they are made up I have the feeling that the capture the mood of early Finland very well. They are also good literature, which helps.
Thank you!
FYI that is the wrong map of Finland in 1917. At that time Finland had land access to the Barents Sea.
Actually, no. Petsamo was not part of Finland until 1921 with the ratification of the Treaty of Tartu: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Tartu_(Finland%E2%80%93Russia)
In January 1918, which the map depicts, Petsamo was still Russian and Finland did not have land access to the Barents Sea.
Thank you for the update
The geographical sorting in the US is almost entirely rural vs urban.
This is, of course, true. But there is still quite a lot of political overlap. Even in Democratic strongholds like San Francisco or New York City Trump got 10% of the vote in 2020. Just as Biden got 10-20% even in the most rural areas. And then there is the middle ground, suburbs and smaller towns, where both sides are well represented.
It is nothing like the elections in 1860 when Union states and Confederate states could just as well have been holding two different elections, since the candidates and the votes cast were completely different in the south compared to in the north.
In California, where I grew up, there is a large contingent of wealthy, city-dwelling or city-adjacent right-wingers. Their numbers are not enough to swing elections by direct votes, but they have a lot of money and civic clout.
Thanks for the article, this was educational and informative. Especially while looking at it from a third world perspective, where riots are not unheard of, when friends and neighbors usually commit unspeakable atrocities on each other - there's one simmering in the distant north east of my nation for over a year now. Civilization breaks down really quickly.
Yep. For what it is worth (I'm not a US citizen), I agree totally with your conclusion.
There is no reason for civil war in US right now. There is a lot of prosperity, enough freedom and independence among states that very few would want to fight over moving to a different state or working on local initiatives.
So regardless of what happens this election there won't be a civil war. A lot more things would need to happen before that. And US has a lot of potential to resolve and reform without violent conflicts
Dixies?
I am just an ignorant European and I have to admit that I do not even know what you are remarking on here. Is Dixie not a customary label on civil war era southerners? Or is it offensive? I think I am rather offensive than lexically incorrect, but I am not sure about that either.
"Dixie" is used to name a place, but "Dixies" is not used to describe the people who live there.
And "Yankees" is used to describe a people but "Yankee" is not the name of a place. That sort of makes sense. Thanks for sorting it out for me.
I am shocked by the characterization of American bureaucracies as non-corrupt.
No one is perfect, of course. But I believe the American bureaucracy handled the 2020 election turmoil in an impressively even-handed and non-corrupt way.
I feel strongly that in America, the false accusation of corruption (with the intent to erode trust in the civil service) is far more of a problem than actual corruption.
Thank you, Anders! That was just the right level of explanation for us ignorant Anglos, and it has given me things to mull over.
I like "civil acrimony", too. I would have succumbed to the temptation to write "uncivil acrimony".
I know little about the Finnish Civil War, but I know about contemporary America and the American Civil War.
1. While the Confederate states were all situated in one compact geographic area, there was often considerable internal dissent within those states (and in the North) as to whether to support the Confederacy vs. the Union. In particular, in the South, it was hillbillies vs. planters and planter wannabes.
The hillbillies rarely owned slaves (they couldn't afford them, and the Appalachian terrain didn't lend itself to large-scale plantation agriculture) and considered the government on far-off Washington to be less likely to intrude on them than the government in the state capital.
In the case of contemporary America, take, for example, Illinois. Illinois is considered a Team D state for purposes of national and statewide elections, but that is because so many people live in Chicago and environs. Once you leave Chicago, most of the rest of the state is pretty red. A similar pattern can be seen in other states. Basically, the big cities and areas with large black or native populations (Latinos, less and less) are Democrat strongholds. Everything else is Republicans.
https://images.app.goo.gl/nT6GWS1xSSNsnuih9
You can spot the Rez in the west and upper midwest using this map.
2. The US military, at the general officer level is far from apolitical, although serving generals rarely openly engage in politics.
https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2024-09-23/why-former-u-s-military-leaders-endorsed-kamala-harris
That said, the US military heavily recruits from minorities (who are looking for a bus ticket out of whatever hell they come from) and rednecks (who actually buy into the Eagle Flag Freedom bullshit). During the American Civil War, the standing army was quite small, but the officer class in particular was disproportionately Southern.
And keep in mind, in many red states, pretty much every male over the age of about ten owns firearms and there are LOTS of combat veterans.
1. I am vaguely aware of the social differences within Confederate states. But despite this, the Appalachian hillbillies seem to have rallied around the Stars and Bars in almost the same numbers as the planters and planter wannabees. While there might have been internal differences this does not seem to have affected cohesion, especially not in relation to the Yankees. This is also very visible in data from the 1860 presidential election, where Lincoln almost universally got less than 1% of the vote in the southern state.
Contemporary America is of course geographically sorted too. But not to the extent of the 1860s. The conditions are also completely different today. In the 1860s politics was at its core local while today they are very much national. In this, contemporary America is much more similar to Finland in the 1910s than America in the 1860s. America in the 19th century was too large to have any meaningful national politics. While Finland in 1918 was small enough that all 3 million Finns could obsess over the same political issues. Just as modern Americans, thanks to modern communications, can obsess over the same political issues.
2. I must admit I know very little about the US military. I thought that US officers saw it as a mark of honor to be apolitical and subordinate to the civilian leadership. If that is not so then some equations might have to change.
The US Military sees it as a great honor for the general public to honestly believe that the US military would never take sides in internal american disputes over who gets to be the civilian leadership, and that the US Military will always obey the civilian leadership.... but if the civilian leadership ever asks the US Military to take sides in a big internal dispute about who gets to be the proper civilian leadership, that's going to get REALLY ugly. The Senior US Generals will likely do everything they can possibly think of to avoid following that order....
In 2016 and 2017, they DID do everything they could think of to avoid intervening. There was actually a very plausible small-scale scandal, which was hushed up a great deal, where it appeared that senior US Military generals in the Pentagon had more-or-less-deliberately delayed sending military reinforcements to rescue the US Legislature from rioters on Jan 6th, in hopes that US Police would rescue the Legislature FIRST, so the military wouldn't have to do it themselves... and then those generals may have lied about the nature of the delay afterwards during the resulting inquiries.
If a real war breaks out.... there's no guarantee that the enlisted, or the junior officers, would actually do what the generals told them to do. Especially not if it involved taking sides in an internal dispute, or even worse, taking the 'wrong' side in an internal dispute. The US Military tradition of "'don't take sides" and "don't take the wrong side" could easily outweigh "Obey orders from civilian leadership." Nobody really knows. There hasn't been a really big test of the question in a very long time. Everyone, Military and Civilian both, is pretty desperate to avoid finding out what the answer is.
The best bet is that if an American Civil War broke out, the US Military would probably behave a lot like the Russian Garrison Troops did in the First Finnish Civil war... Stay in their bases, officially avoid taking sides, and then secretly smuggle weapons to whomever they sympathized with.
Also, keep in mind that American private arms sales are an enormous industry... I'd have to go look it up, but I think that in terms of small arms, America private citizens may actually spend MORE money on (small, individual) weapons and ammo every year than the US Military and the various US Police Forces COMBINED. If you're only comparing small arms, and not the price tags of the bigger stuff, like tanks.
I think that added up, US Private Sales of small arms, ammunition, and civilian pickup trucks to private american individuals actually makes the US Private Citizenry about the 12 biggest army in the world by budget, roughly tied with the budget for the entire armed forces of South Korea. Again, I'd have to look it up, but it's a LOT of money.
The US Armed Forces are DESPERATE to never again pick a fight with the US Private Citizenry as a whole. The Civil War and the unofficial Coal Wars were bad enough. And the number of retired former members of the US Armed Forces generally outnumber the number of currently active members of the US Armed forces, so... smuggling assistance to them while pretending to be neutral is probably the way it would go.
Look up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain, where 10,000 workers fought 3,000 police officers in the year 1921, and then realize that rural america has spent the last hundred years getting richer and richer, and spending a reasonable portion of that money on weapons which can last forever with decent maintenance. I think America technically has more private firearms than it has private cars, but the way the law works, the US government isn't allowed to directly measure the actual number of private firearms currently in existence, so we can only guess.
Using ballots as a proxy for support is mistaken, as Lincoln wasn't on the ballot in most of the South.
EDIT: also, using election results as a proxy for mass opinion in the antebellum South is problematic, because poll taxes and voter registration laws made it (intentionally) difficult for poor whites in the South to vote.
To give the example of Lousisana, I don't remember if there was still a property requirement, but you had to pay a hefty poll tax and register a year in advance at the County courthouse. Voting also only took place at the couty seat. The upshot was that you not only had to pay to be able to vote, you had to plan ahead and be able to take two days off of work (one to register, one to vote), unless you lived near the courthouse.
This was not much of an option for the average frustrated hillbilly.
More to the point, this was before the australian ballot. If you wanted to vote, north or south, you showed up at the polling place, and just wandered around outside until someone handed you a pre-printed party ballot you could take into the polling place and hand to the poll workers.
And everyone could see which kind of ballot you had picked, and if you picked a really unpopular one, there might very well be... threats... made about that. or challenges to your voter registration, or both at the same time. Poll-Watchers were generally armed.
In a lot of the south, the Republican party didn't even bother to pay local printers to print up Republican ballots, or to pay local men to offer those non-existent ballots to people outside the poling booths. The Republicans knew exactly how hopeless, dangerous, and expensive doing that in some parts of the South would be.
The South may very well have had similar issues printing their preferred ballots in certain parts of the North. This was an era where the way to win was to go to a border state, find the biggest cluster of your most reliable voters, and then do whatever it took to get them to walk to the local polling place and vote. Right up to paying the saloon outside the polling place to offer free drinks all day to anyone who picked up the 'correct' party ballot at the bar, and promised to go cast it just as soon as their drink was over.
Nobody spent much effort in trying to penetrate the other guy's districts in a border state. way too dangerous. Just drive up the turnout in your own district, that's the way to do things.
In a lot of ways, American Democracy is returning to that system now: Base Turnout once again matters way more than Swing Voters.
"Age of Acrimony" is a great book on the topic.