Awakening Finland

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The very successful Fourth Awakening conference took place on May 24 on the outskirts of Helsinki, Finland. It was organized by the dedicated and capable leader of the Finnish-nationalist Blue-and-Black Movement, activist Tuukka Kuru, who has sponsored previous Awakening events. Like the recent Remigration Summit, it attracted participants and speakers from all over Europe as well as the United States — a high-quality event. Mr. Kuru found the perfect venue, and even though the conference was publicly advertised, there was not a single demonstrator, and there was no need for security. I had not been previously aware of many of the European speakers, and I was impressed by the variety of their perspectives and how carefully they have thought about the future of our people.

The first speaker was Dan Eriksson, a Swedish activist who is chairman of Det fria Sverige and Europa Terra Nostra. He began with perhaps the most provocative question of all: What if we do not win? What if European people neither stem the flow of foreigners nor raise their birthrates enough to remain the majority? Border control and remigration are clearly possible with the right political will, but raising birthrates is a different matter. Mr. Eriksson noted that “many countries have tried baby bonuses, but financial incentives will not solve our problem,” because it is spiritual rather than material. “We can’t bribe people into having children in a world in which they do not believe.” Our goal is to rekindle our pride and reclaim our lands in the face of a population explosion brought on by foolishly exporting Western medicine to the Third World.

One common mistake nationalists make is to believe that our fellow whites think as we do, but many do not and will not. We must therefore imagine a future in which we never take power, and we must be prepared to build a future for our people entirely on our own. However, “what if a shrinking population isn’t the end of the world?” Mr. Eriksson asked. “What if it is a chance to rethink everything?” He noted that we did not choose what is happening, but we are not afraid of it. “How do we remain us, even as we become fewer?” His reply: “The world around us may collapse but we will not.” Whatever the political future may hold, we will begin by starting real communities of like-minded people.

Mr. Eriksson is actively engaged in this and spoke of the promising results. We must build institutions of all kinds that reflect our values and guarantee our future. Mr. Eriksson believes artificial intelligence will be an important part of that future, one that will make it possible for economies to function with fewer people. “Nationalists complain about AI,” he said, “but we must not be late for this revolution.” We must also recognize that because of population pressures on resources, “the age of growth is over, but the age of heroes has only begun.”

The second speaker, Werner Toivonen, is a Finnish environmentalist activist who emphasizes the importance of nationalist parallel societies. He warned that even though Europeans are not having babies, others are. He explained that it is the widespread use of chemical fertilizers that has made the population explosion possible. When fertilizers first came into use in the early 20th century, there were only 2.5 billion people; now, there are eight billion. Only 2 percent of food is grown without chemical fertilizers, and without them, crop yields would be so low there would be mass starvation. Even with fertilizer, there is more starvation now than at any time in history, with billions more undernourished, while desertification reduces the amount of farmland. Mr. Toivonen predicted that in the next 30 years, there will be one billion refugees for environmental reasons alone. Many will have moved within failing countries, but many will cross borders.

Mr. Toivonen believes that with increasing population and diminishing resources, a food crisis is inevitable. Europe will have to feed itself, but only France is now self-sufficient in food. This, however, will be an opportunity for Europe, because “hungry people are angry people.” Mr. Toivonen predicts that as hunger bites, not only will Europe cut immigration to zero, it will enforce remigration. After that, Europe will have to manage “controlled population decline,” because “growth must come to an end.” Ultimately, the Nordic countries of Norway, Sweden, and Finland have the right combination of people and raw materials to ensure survival for hundreds of years. In Finland, the population would drop from 5.6 million to four million — the level at which life can be sustained with a reasonable degree of comfort. We must start thinking in terms of quality over quantity in all things, including human beings.

David Skrbina is a retired senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Michigan and until recently a visiting research fellow at the University of Helsinki. He is suspicious of technology, opposed to Christianity, and critical of Jewish power in the United States. He has written frequently in support of the boycott, divestment, sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, but only recently came to the attention of the Southern Poverty Law Center in the United States. To his astonishment, the University of Helsinki immediately dismissed him after it got a call from the center. By his calculation, there are only about 1,000 Jews in Finland, and none of the administrators at the university was Jewish, so he was amazed by the power of a single telephone call from an obscure organization 5,000 miles away. He never got an explanation for why his unpaid fellowship of just a few weeks a year was terminated. Dr. Skrbina argued that in the United States, the success of any project will be greatly influenced by whether the Jewish lobby approves of it, but he would not have imagined that Finns would obey orders to fire an American BDS proponent.

Dr. Skrbina warned that Europe is well beyond its carrying capacity, so importing people is folly. The continent should allow slow population decline and become self-sufficient. Only nations that do not depend on others can organize themselves entirely as they see fit, and Finland is well positioned for this. “Population decline is not a crisis,” he said. “It is a blessing.” Dr. Skrbina worries about how technology hurts us. He noted that before the industrial revolution, infant mortality was about 33 percent, and that this was eugenic. Now, in the West, almost every baby lives. “We might count that a success,” he said, “but from the point of view of the species, it’s a disaster.” “In the United States,” he added, “there has been such a terrible decline in the genetic quality of the population that it is a wonder the place even functions.” He predicted that future generations will have to reconnect with the land — and in ways that are not dependent on technology.

Mark Collett is founder of the British organization, Patriotic Alternative. He began his talk by warning us that he would depress us with awful statistics, and was as good as his word. In Britain’s two largest cities, white British people are already a minority: just 36 percent in London and 42 percent in Birmingham. Even the media now admit that in the country as a whole, white Britons are just 70 percent, and that by 2050, they will be a minority. Children five to 11, at just 50.9 percent, are barely a majority, and recent years have seen the largest influx of foreigners in history.

It is now impossible to conceal the extent of the replacement, and the one fortunate consequence has been what Mr. Collett called “a huge, seismic racial awakening.” The question is, “Will we wake up in time?” There is no guarantee that white Britons will be able to avoid being reduced to a minority, but “either way, our fight does not change.” In a stirring conclusion, Mr. Collett reminded the audience, “We are the greatest people to walk the earth. We are white people. Even as minorities, we will not stop fighting. We will never give in.”

F. Roger Devlin, who writes frequently for AmRen, spoke about the problem of white sub-replacement fertility. He noted that the mass influx of strangers puts pressure on resources and makes it harder for natives to rear large families. However, even if immigration stopped tomorrow, there must be repatriation, though even that would not rebuild white fertility. Why don’t whites have babies?

Dr. Devlin took the long view, noting that we have evolved for 40,000 years in a harsh climate utterly unlike that of Africa, where even today, women often do the farming and are not dependent on men. The result among blacks is opportunistic mating, unstable families, and matrilineal societies. In Europe, farming was much more demanding and required the strength of a man. Women therefore needed men for support, and those who could secure the loyalty of a man passed on that propensity to their daughters. European women are attracted by good providers, just as men are attracted by youth and beauty.

The industrial revolution meant a change from a society of farmers to one of wage earners. Capitalists cared only about a large pool of workers and low wages, so women and even children worked in factories. Women are helpless and unavailable for work while they are pregnant and nursing, so work outside the home lowered national fertility. Absent mothers were also bad for family relations. In response, social reforms brought sex discrimination in employment and the family wage. Jobs reserved for men paid enough to support a wife and as many as three children, while wives stayed home. This system persisted through the 19th century into the first half of the 20th.

Feminism changed everything. Feminism makes European women more like African woman-farmers. They can support themselves and no longer need to be loyal to a man who sees his role as that of a provider. At the same time, adding women to the workforce increased the labor force and lowered wages. The only people who benefit from this are employers who can cut personnel costs, and childless lesbians who can easily support themselves. Only a minority of men make enough money to support children and wives who stay home. Women, despite feminist propaganda, want to be provided for. If they have high incomes, they want men who have higher incomes still. Thus, many of the smartest, most capable women never marry or marry late and have few children.

No one now calls for jobs to be reserved for men and a return to the family wage, but if we are serious about reversing the decline in birthrates, Dr. Devlin says, “It is time to declare feminism a fatal error and move on.” Europeans are happiest when they live according to evolved nature: men as providers and women as wives and mothers. We have made family formation even more difficult still, through no-fault divorce and by routinely granting child custody to mothers. It is a mistake to assume that in the past, marriage was a prison for women. They could leave any time. However, they could not take the children with them — they belonged to the father — nor could they expect alimony, so they left only if they were very harshly treated.

With no-fault divorce-on-demand, which became popular in the United States beginning in the 1960s, marriage was no different from shacking up. Now, most divorces that involve children are initiated by the woman, who not only can take the children but can also count on financial support.. This makes men understandably unwilling to marry, which angers women. Angry women do not make attractive wives, so marriage rates drop even further. Like it or not, concluded Dr. Devlin, birth rates will not rise in the West without the radical reordering of society required to end feminism and bring back the family wage.

Tomislav Sunić is a Croatian patriot active in nationalist circles for many years. He noted the history of “color revolutions” in Eastern Europe and called the current denaturing of white people yet another kind of color revolution. He lamented the fact that many whites do not even care if their own people become minorities. The real problem, therefore, is whites rather than the non-whites, who cannot be blamed for abandoning miserable homelands. One of the great problems of Europeans has been their long history of war amongst themselves, and even today the tribes of Europe are often hostile to each other. “We can be proud of our national histories,” Dr. Sunić said, “but we must never impose them on fellow Europeans.” At the same time, many in Western Europe have come to see white self-hatred as normal.

Dr. Sunić sees the egalitarian doctrine of Christianity as a big problem. He quoted Galatians 3:28: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” The Greeks and Romans, by contrast, understood peoplehood and married only within the group. Choice, said Dr. Sunić, is always discrimination, and nowhere is discrimination more important than in whom we marry. Diversity leads to chaos.

Dr. Sunić also called attention to the beauty of our race. He noted that beauty is said to be in the eye of the beholder, but he showed us images of some of the masterpieces of ancient sculpture. Who, he asked, could not be moved by their richness of form, their dynamism, even their tragedy? By comparison, the human form in ancient Egyptian art is two-dimensional and lifeless. Dr. Sunić concluded that the only way to combat replacement is to shake off the egalitarianism that he believes Christianity forced upon us.

I began my talk by thanking my European audience for letting me speak in what was for them their second, third, or even fourth language. I explained that although I was by ancestry and rearing thoroughly American, I am just as European as they — my culture, heritage, language, sensibilities, and the faith of my fathers are deeply European. “We are all,” I said, “members of the great brotherhood of Europeans. We have one common struggle, and we will rise or fall as a people.”

I mentioned that Donald Trump is certainly not “one of us,” but that some of his first acts in office are exactly the ones an identarian president would take: border control, revocation of birthright citizenship, systematic deportation, and obliteration of DEI. I marveled at the detailed knowledge someone in his administration must have had of how anti-white doctrine has seeped into every corner of government and how systematically President Trump is rooting it out. I hoped that his example gives heart to European comrades. The United States is not as important a country as Mr. Trump thinks it is, but it can still be an inspiration. I concluded by reminding the audience that every one of us has the blood of heroes in his veins and that we must fight for the future of our children just as valiantly as our noble ancestors fought for millennia to defend their homelands against invaders.

It was a first-rate conference held before a sold-out crowd of impressive, committed activists, and most of the speeches are available here. Mr. Kuru plans to hold annual Awakening conferences, and even if Helsinki seems a little out of the way, any meeting he hosts is sure to be rewarding. An added bonus is a visit to a beautiful Nordic country of delightful white people of which most Americans are completely ignorant. Join the awakening!