Tag: Finland

Keeping the Peace, Finn Style

On By robstroudIn C.S. Lewis, History, Just War, Military History, Military Musings, The Future, Words2 Comments

The war in Ukraine trudges on, but the world has become safer with the imminent expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

Recognizing the expansionist aspirations of Dictator Putin’s Russia, Sweden and Finland have decided to request formal admission to the peacekeeping alliance. Their reception has tentatively been approved, although just today another dictator, Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey is threatening to “freeze” them out if they don’t support his efforts to suppress Kurdish independence.

I have my own experiences with NATO. Foremost among them was the small part I played in helping bring about the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. (I even served as one of the “escort officers” for a Soviet verification team when it visited RAF Greenham Common.)

I mentioned the treaty on Mere Inkling and lauded its success.

The great thing about NATO’s cruise missiles is that they were deployed to bring the Soviet Union to the negotiating table, where the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty led to the elimination of all such munitions from Europe!

Alas, this monumental treaty has expired.

It is a casualty of Russian Federation dreams to restore the Soviet Union’s former borders in Europe. Combined with the “defection” of the former Warsaw Pact nations, it is easy to understand why a suspicious Russia postures so aggressively.

Which, of course, encourages the democratic nations to draw closer in mutual defense.

How are the Finns Celebrating

Finns are different.

Not quite what you would expect. Many people – certainly most Americans, the ones who are not totally geographically ignorant – mistakenly think Finland is a Scandinavian country. Not quite. True, they are a Nordic nation, but Nordic Perspective offers an insightful discussion, replete with great maps, on the subject.

Being a Nordic people, it comes as no surprise many Finns are welcoming their entry into NATO with a beer. In fact, a brewing company named “Olaf” has opted to use the French acronym for NATO – OTAN – as a play on words. “The beer’s name is a play on the Finnish expression ‘Otan olutta,’ which means ‘I’ll have a beer…’”

Good for them. (So long as they remember to drink in moderation.)

Now, this OTAN-business raises a question in my mind. Is it merely a coincidence, or might the French have a passive aggression purpose in mind with this heteropalindrome?

After all, the headquarters of NATO had to be moved from Paris to Belgium when Charles de Gaulle withdrew from the military alliance.

Wondering about French subliminal messages got me thinking about C.S. Lewis’ thoughts on the subject. Lewis loved all people, but was no one’s fool. He understood many of the influences exerted upon culture are destructive. Decadent societies (e.g. pre-war Berlin) sow seeds that ultimately bear tragic fruit.

As the Second World War was just beginning, and Lewis’ brother Warnie had safely returned home after the Dunkirk evacuation, Lewis mentioned France in one of his 1940 letters to his veteran brother. It is quite entertaining, as long one is not an über-Francophile.

I am also working on a book sent me to review, Le Mystere de la Poesie*by a professor at Dijon, of which my feeling is “If this is typical of modern France, nothing that has happened in the last three months surprises me” – such a mess of Dadaists, Surrealists, nonsense, blasphemy and decadence, as I could hardly have conceived possible.

But one ought to have known for, now that I come to think of it, all the beastliest traits of our intelligentsia have come to them from France.

Well, that’s enough of that. It’s time to pop the tab on an OTAN and toast the NATO, and its expanding protection of world democracies.

* Volume two of The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis has a footnote reading “This work cannot be traced.” I believe the likely object of Lewis’ disdain may have been written by André Vovard and published in 1951 in Paris and Montreal by Fides.

C.S. Lewis on Russian Aggression

On By robstroudIn C.S. Lewis, History, Just War, Military History, Military Musings, Modern Life, The Future9 Comments

Sadly, we see history repeating itself. The Russians (resurgent Soviets) are trying to expand their borders by violence.

Czarist Russia was unabashedly imperialistic. However, their successors, the Russian Communists combined their hunger for new conquests with unbelievable brutality.

C.S. Lewis viewed them with the distrust they merited. At the beginning of the Second World War, the Russians played the Allies for fools when they signed a nonaggression pact with the Nazis, so the two countries could carve up poor Poland between them.

The following month, in September of 1939, Lewis referred to the ominous event in a letter to his brother Warnie, who was a career soldier. First, however, he describes the situation with evacuee children who were living at the Kilns.

The nicest of our evacuated girls (the Rose Macaulay one) has been taken away by a peripatetic lip-sticked mother who has changed her mind, and been replaced by an Austrian Jewess (aged about 16) whom the school warned us against as difficult: but so far neither Minto nor Maureen nor I can find any fault in her.

The house has shaken down into its ‘war-economy’ quite well, and indeed the children are incomparably less of a nuisance than [other guests] with whom we have often been afflicted in peacetime.

To-day is a bad day because we have just heard the news about Russia and poor Minto, for the moment, regards this as sealing the fate of the allies–and even talked of buying a revolver!

That December, he mentioned Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Finland in another missive to his brother Warnie. In the letter he refers to some old story told by their father, that was of special, humorous recollection to the brothers.

Well, Brother, (as the troops say) it’s a sad business not to have you with me to-morrow morning-and not to have the January walk ahead. The most cheerful thing at present (oddly enough) is the News. Russia’s attempt to do to Finland what Germany did to Poland reminds me of your father’s story of the “great bosthoon”* whom his athletic friend took out for the run and who tried to imitate him in jumping the flax-pond-one of those of his wheezes whose point lay wholly in his telling.

During the brief “Winter War,” Finland inflicted severe casualties on the Soviet invaders, despite being vastly outnumbered. Despite their heroic defense, Finland was forced to surrender some of their territory to the Soviets.

During World War Two, the Western allies (primarily Britain, the U.S., and France) liberated countries from Nazi oppression.

The Soviets, in contrast, simply changed the nationality of the victims’ oppressors. They regarded the nations devastated by the Germans as new conquests. And, rather than helping them reestablish their independent governments, the Communists absorbed the areas they could, and set up puppet regimes in nations they could not manage to digest.

When the collapse of the Soviet Union finally left Eastern Europeans with a chance at freedom, most fled from behind the Iron Curtain.

In 1950, only a half a decade after the global war’s end, another major war was erupting. The Korean War pitted another Communist aggressor (China) against the democracy in South Korea. Soviet troops covertly joined the North Korean forces, flying early generation MiG-15s. (It is the modern MiG-29 that Poland is hoping to transfer at the present time to Ukraine.)

Despite the Soviet denials, the Korean Conflict pitted the two great world powers in a battle that could well have erupted into a wider conflict.

The concern expressed by C.S. Lewis in the following letter was common among those who were still reeling from WWII’s violence. In June of 1950 Lewis wrote to thank an American friend for food sent to supplement the postwar rationing.

For once, the all absorbing topic of food has been swept into the background by the dreadful news from the Far East. The only gleam of satisfaction is that all of us feel that your prompt action may still save us from a third war; it has at least saved us from a second Munich, and there are hints in our papers today that Russia will very likely back down–but start probing for a ‘soft spot’ elsewhere: Burma, Cochin-China, or even Europe. One can but pray.

In 1950 Lewis prayed, as all Christians should, for a de-escalation and peace.

Seventy years later, events in Ukraine clearly reveal that Russian rulers still long to conquer their neighbors. While we pray for peace, the world dare not close its eyes to the specter of Putin’s resurrected Soviet empire.

  • Bosthoon is an Irish word for an ignorant or uncouth boy or man. The inference is that the initial failure of the Soviet invasion revealed their foolhardiness.

Misinterpreted Symbols

On By robstroudIn C.S. Lewis, Military History10 Comments

finn planeFew symbols evoke the intense reaction caused by the swastika. Regardless of the color in which it is rendered, it is inescapably associated with the Nazi insanity of the Third Reich.

And yet, for millennia it meant something else. And even today, in many lands it is recognized as representing something completely different.

I recently read a fascinating article* about the 1939-40 Winter War between the Soviet Union (Hitler’s “ally” at the time!) and tiny Finland. The Finns fought valiantly, and although in the peace settlement they forfeited territory to the insatiable communists, they inflicted terrible casualties on the aggressors.

Finnish bitterness toward the Soviets, due to their invasion, led them to ally with the Germans once the nonaggression pact between Germany and the Soviet Union ended. Without any sympathy for Nazi beliefs, they naturally hoped to regain the land they had been forced to surrender in 1940.

Prior to the Finnish alliance with Germany, the swastika already served as the official symbol of their small but talented Air Force. Ironically, they had adopted it in homage to the Swedish noble who donated one of the first foreign planes imported to fight the Russians.

The plane pictured above is the modest aircraft donated by Count Eric Von Rosen. The symbols adorning it are based on his personal crest, which was in turn based upon ancient Viking runes. It represented good luck.

After the decisive defeat of the National Socialist Party, the offensive symbol was virtually wiped away. However, as one writer says, “Although de-Nazification was enforced throughout Scandinavia, it was taken rather lightly in Finland, where the symbol had become an integral symbol for their Air Forces.

This is understandable because in Finland, the symbol meant something completely different than the common association linked to Hitler’s mania.

This should serve as an important lesson for those of us who work with words (which in large part are symbolic). A meaning we may consider patently obvious might turn out to be missed entirely by a reader for whom the “symbols” mean something else entirely. In Mere Christianity C.S. Lewis provides an entertaining illustration of this.

There is no need to be worried by facetious people who try to make the Christian hope of “Heaven” ridiculous by saying they do not want “to spend eternity playing harps.” The answer to such people is that if they cannot understand books written for grown-ups, they should not talk about them.

All the scriptural imagery (harps, crowns, gold, etc.) is, of course, a merely symbolical attempt to express the inexpressible. . . . People who take these symbols literally might as well think that when Christ told us to be like doves, He meant that we were to lay eggs.

The fact that we know the swastika has an ancient pedigree, and that it continues to mean something completely different than Nazism in some locales today, is unlikely to calm the minds of the vast majority of people who will never become comfortable with it.

Turning to Lewis once more we find a dynamic image that is perfectly apropos to our discussion of the swastika as a symbol. Symbols, he reminds us, are inherently powerful. Although written in a different context (“Williams and the Arthuriad”), Lewis could easily have had in mind the preeminent symbol of Nazism and the Holocaust when he wrote:

A symbol has a life of its own. An escaped metaphor—escaped from the control of the total poem or philosophy in which it belongs—may be a poisonous thing.

_____

* You can download a copy of “The Winter War” from Air Force magazine at this link.