About ten years ago, NATO forces were posted to Bosnia; the combined forces included Czech and U.S. soldiers. One of the U.S. soldiers was reported as having been raped. I remember hearing the news at the time, and talking to my friends about it. It was interesting to me because Czech law and U.S. law are different, so the conflict was not just did he do what she says he did, but even if he did, was it illegal? And was it wrong?
In both countries, sex is considered rape if it's not consensual. The difference (and I am not a lawyer, so you must understand that what I am telling you is my impression after reading about this and talking to some lawyers, but it may not be correct) is that under Czech law, it's rape if somebody says no. Under U.S. law, It's rape if one of the people doesn't say yes.
Thus, under Czech law, a woman could be mind-bendingly drunk or drugged (but conscious), and the situation wouldn't be considered rape, because she didn't say no to being drunk or drugged or to the sex that followed. Under U.S. law, a woman could wake up the next morning, be all "whoops" and call it rape because she never said yes.
I don't find either of those particularly good alternatives. And I don't know what happened on that base ten years ago. There's an article in a Czech magazine this week implying that the man was innocent, and maybe he was, but I wasn't there. Was she drunk, was she forced, was she coming on strong, was she raped? I can't know.
But I think what is interesting is that the story itself, and the laws (again, as I understand them) reflect a cultural and sexual difference that is remarkably large. In one version, you are responsible for what you do even if you don't quite know what you are doing. There is in this a certain amount of personal responsibility that I find attractive. There's also an element of "she asked for it" that I find repugnant. In another version, you're not responsible if you didn't know what you were doing and choose to do it. There's a certain charm to that level of innocence, but there's also a backlash to it: you're too stupid to be expected to know what you're doing.
I think about statistics like four reported rapes in the US to (less than) one in the Czech Republic, but I don't trust these statistics. I think about things like sexually provocative dressing, which seems more standard here (there was a woman in a crochet dress on the bus yesterday, for example), but I also think about walking home, being surrounded by a gang of drunks, and laughing and walking away.
I think about what it would be like for an American soldier to feel like she'd been in a situation that had gotten out of her control, and what would be necessary from there. And I think about a Czech soldier being taken from his post, feeling like he'd done something wrong but never being told what he did (he wasn't charged). I think about how with all their training in weaponry and tactics and defense, they hadn't been warned about each other, men and women. I think about how sad it is that we're so sophisticated and we can't work out these basics.
The possession of some secret material seems to be the biggest news today so far here in Finland as the Finnish Security Police seems to contradict itself about the possession of intelligence on spies.
If I have not got it all completely wrong following the Finnish media; According to the news, both the Foreign Minister and the Interior Minister were informed by the Security police is not in possession of the so-called Rosenholz material which is said to contain data gathered by western intelligence concerning agents of the former DDR Stasi secret police, with some Finnish names among them.
The Interior minister, when interviewed on Morning TV this week, confirmed that SUPO does not have the original files in question but other documents with similar content. She also said that the information would have to remain classified according the international agreements when receiving the files.
The Finnish security police have apparently been misleading the president concerning these secret spy documents according the media.
The state attorney has however noted that the Security Police claimed to have had access to the material at when being heard during court proceedings against former Presidential Advisor (who was freed from all charges in the end) some while ago.
The president announced her open line 7 years ago and acclaiming the documents to be made publicly available when the information about the Finnish spies would to arrive in Finland, but as the documents in question were already in the possession of the security police at the time, they stayed in safekeeping, the security police has apparently not been acting according to the set open.
The German head researcher of the Stasi-archives earlier called the Finnish investigation of the Finnish president’s aide amateurish and a major cock-up as it has resulted into the former presidential aide having been accused of spying on false grounds. The Finnish Foreign business- and development minister now emphasises that the government is to pay compensation in order to avoid huge costs in court proceedings at the same time admitting the misuse of the Rosenholz files. The court proceedings about the question of compensation to be paid begins in Helsinki in August and the former presidential aide, today the itinerant ambassador of Finland in the western Balkan countries hopes to win the case and be paid compensation for the personal harm of being falsely accused as a spy.
The Finnish prime minister has so far not made any statements in the matter as has few other ministers of cabinet but it being July and in the middle of the holiday season in Finland should be as good excuse as any other.
A strange coincidence though seems the announcement of the senior police commander in office of the security police about his resignation out of health reasons at this time after having been on sick-leave already for some time, claiming it having nothing to do with the spy business scandal currently at hand.
Finland has received asylum seekers from Somalia that had been tried by tribal wars for decades and the Somali population is more prone to commit crimes than the average Finns themselves.
Now more than a dozen offenders are facing having their asylum applications rejected and being sent back to Somalia. The Somali population now is wondering what went wrong in the way they were received here in Finland, how they were and still are treated by the natives. Well I see no harm in sending criminals back to where they came from if they do not behave like they should. If you move to a new country you should learn the way it is lead in that country, the new country has no need to adjust to you. You take the spoon in your hand and begin to eat what you are served.
Of course there are Somalis that behave well as there are Finns and people with other ethnicities that commit crimes, it should not be the ethnicity that decides how you are treated, and everybody has a right to be treated equally according to the law!
When white Caucasians move to Somalia they face the same prejudices and problems as we immigrants do face here in Finland. I am just lucky that it does not show I am a foreigner but I still get rejections when applying for a job.
What is racism but protecting your own ways against the unknown out of fear?!?
The news are sometimes most disturbing I think and have no sense at all.
Now Finnish junkies and drug addicts are by the Finnish National Health Institute warned against visiting Stockholm in Sweden without bringing their own clean syringes to shoot their drugs with. And this is because there has been an increase in the occurrence of HIV infections recently in Stockholm and the junkies are now warned against sharing needles. Where lays the point in this?
I have had some friends that already when young turned junkies and died; well they did not care about anything but to get their fixes. And still today I have a friend that survived and quit, that has been clean for decades now so I have not exactly experienced it myself but know from reliable sources that one thing is for sure, you do not think about clean needles when needing a fix, you are just dying to do it, no matter what! So where lays the use of this news or warning from the Finnish Health Institute about syringes?!?
Today is the most popular date to get married this summer in Finland.
In Tampere alone all churches are fully booked and about 50 more couples today are getting married than any other day this year with the Midsummer being traditionally the most popular day for weddings. The numbers 7-7-7 seems to be the reason. I just wonder why, the only thing I come to think of is that it might be an easy date for the future anniversaries for the spouses to remember.
Also the Live Earth concert is today, 7-7-7 the movement for a climate in crisis to improve people’s awareness about environmental issues all over the world. To make people more aware of what can be done to slow down the global warming and maybe the concert will help in making a change. The Live Earth concerts are held in 9 different cities in different parts of the world beginning in Australia early this morning Finnish time and the only free concert is in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. The concerts will be make an awful lot of carbon oxide and other waste so I just hope it will be worth it in the end.
The former vice-president of the United States Mr Al Gore is patron of the concerts and he seems to have become a huge cult figure after the release of his film, An Inconvenient Truth. I found the film quite shocking to watch as it made sense. Well, guess someone’s has to tell the truth even if it an inconvenient one or one you do not wish to hear.
Aerosmith is performing a concert in Helsinki today; it is 10 years now since their previous visit here in Finland. Having a concert 7-7-7 the show should have begun at 7 too, well guess you can’t have it all.
Those guys have been going strong for so many years now, how old does it make you feel if a band that has been around since the stone ages and that happens to be for almost as many years as you are old yourself?!?
I subscribe to a certain Lucy Van Pelt type of psychology, a belief that "carpe diem" is really more than enough to go on, in fact, it's almost all you need to know about getting by in the world. It's served me well enough, but at times, it falls just short. The day has been seized, tightly and by the throat, and perhaps throttled a little for good measure, but the heart is somehow left out of the process.
When the day you are attempting to seize insists on skittering away across time zones, how can you ever grab hold of it? And even if you have it, if your feet are in, oh, Seattle, and the globe starts to spin away from you towards, let's say Vienna, there is no way your arms are long enough to keep your feet where you want them to be. You will have to let go by the time you reach the Eastern seaboard or you will get very, very, sore. Your feet will be dragged across the peaks of the Rockies, your shins all marked up by the pointy Continental Divide, your belly scraped on the corrugated metal grain elevators of the plains. It really hurts when you hit your chin on the Eiffel Tower. Don't even get me started on the Atlantic crossing. And anyway, who can reach that far?
Carpe deim doesn't make it possible for you to be in two places at once, either. It can't magically make you able to browse the shelves the local public library while you are also off to some farm festival to find out what makes for a handsome sheep. You cannot eat Ethiopian food, seated on the outdoor patio surrounded by African accents, sopping up the curry with that odd spongy bread while also having kaffee und kuchen in a tiny jewel box bakery where the ladies are wearing fur hats. One of you can not have the cake while the other eats it. Carpe deim is all fine and well, but then you get to the point where there's no cake.
Maybe I'm looking for a sort of "seize the cake" ideology. I'm flustered because not only don't I know the word for cake in Latin, but seizing cake makes a big mess all over the place, though I guess you could lick the whole sweet disaster off your fingers. It has a certain sexiness to it, seize the cake, but also the cake is ruined.
It's Independence Day. There is a surplus of independence, but very little cake.
This starts with some stuff I've been reading about recently (racism), derails briefly with a book analogy, morphs into some stuff I've been thinking about a lot (culture), and then gets sort of preachy. Like most stuff I write, I guess.
First, I think racism is sort of boring. If you have made it to adulthood and still think a person can be meaningfully judged on the basis of skin color, then you are a bore. That people do so is beyond question, as is the fact that those people are boring. That people who are judged on the basis of their skin color tend to be upset about it is reasonable; sometimes I will complain about how stupid romance novels are, and sometimes I find it entertaining to sit with people and ridicule romance novels to bits, and sometimes I find talking about them in disparaging terms (or despairing terms, which sounds similar but is different), to be almost as boring as the books and the people who read them. True fact, though: Romance novels outsell any other genre. So: read them openly, or read them in secret, or deny having ever read one ever, but denying that they exist and have true financial power is not merely ignorant. Racism is the same: whether or not you personally contribute to the 55% of paperback sales, and whether you feel qualified to discuss lunch counters and workplace nooses, and whether your book was passed over because it didn't have a heaving bosom on the cover, and wait: boy am I tangled. Anyway I'm saying: Racism is boring. I don't find discussing it to be quite as boring, although it can be exhausting. I don't doubt that it exists. I don't have a single clue what to do about it.
Culturalism is the thing I've been thinking about more, though. I left Japan largely because I felt I was becoming a real culturalist, and a bit of a racist as well. It is very hard to have your hair pawed at, your breasts discussed, your body grabbed every time you're on public transit. It's hard to regularly field questions about whether all Americans are fat like you, ugly like your president, stupid like your television shows. It's hard, particularly when presented with a culture that seems so uniform, to not start turning around and judging that culture, as a whole, as you feel like you're being judged. It's hard to not remember that there are 248 people on that rush hour train that may not be trying to touch you, that in one day you probably had at least one intelligent question for each insulting one. It's easier to start saying, "These people..." and then you get words like "always" in there and pretty soon you sound as horrible as the kids who point or throw stones at you in terror; as the man who turned you down for an English teaching job because you have blue eyes. Like a devil, he said, or a ghost. Stupid nip.
But I didn't want to be that person. And that's one of the main reasons I left.
I do understand that it's instinctive to want to make sense of things by grouping them somehow. Look, I'm the kid who "played" with Legos by sorting them into little piles by size and then by color. You mean you can build stuff? Huh. So I get why even people with the best intentions say, "In this culture, everybody does things this way"-- among other things, you want to do your best to not offend people, go marching across the tatami mat with your shoes on, whatever, and making a note of the differences is one way to avoid making a mess. And I understand that it's interesting to evaluate things as if there were some universal scale of "good" and "bad". I understand these feelings, I've experienced these feelings, I've acted on these feelings. I've explained knowingly that it's a Czech tradition to do X or Y, that X is better than the US way or Y is worse, whatever. I'm not saying I'm perfect.* But there's a point at which you're not talking about the behavior, you're talking about the people, and that's right when you step into a bad ism.
*I've also slept on the occasional sidewalk, and while I'm not denying that I did so, I'm saying it's in my plans to avoid doing so again, and I'd advise you to do the same.
And now we get where we were going. I think that most racism in the US is actually culturalism, and I think that the "different culture" justification is used by means of saying "but I'm not a RACist" and I'm increasingly thinking: so what? In a way, culturalism is worse than racism, because it's more easily justified. But they are different, says the culturalist, and it's true: if your culture prefers certain behaviors, even if you personally do not, then you have a different perspective than someone from a culture that doesn't accept that behavior. But the minute you start judging a group of people on the basis of that one thing, you're doing the same thing the racist does. Your "pioneering vanguard" does have the whiff of a burning cross to it, to be honest.
I've lived here 1/3 of my life, and the longer I live here, the more I realize that for a small, nearly monolingual, nearly monoracial country, the diversity is pretty impressive. When I got here, I wanted to make sense of the culture and I had to take on a lot of things as being representative of a whole in order to see where I fit into the picture. It should also be noted that I was much younger then. Czechs like beer. Hey, you're black, do you like soul music? Czech students are unabashed cheaters. Hey, you're Asian, you must be really good at math. The thing is, at some point you should be able to come to terms with the fact that just because most things are true doesn't mean all things are true, and therefore you might be better off assuming that no things are true. It might be easier to set down the romance novel and try a different book, something with a plot you can't predict. You might try a mystery novel. You might try thinking outside of genre altogether.