Politics of fire: the commemorative torch rally 612 of the Finnish radical right

ABSTRACT

In the last decade, the radical right has organized numerous torch rallies around Europe. This essay analyses symbolic meanings attached to torches in these events. My case study is the 612-event that has taken place in Helsinki every Finnish Independence Day since 2014. The organizers of the torch procession claim that their event is politically non-committed, patriotic and commemorative. However, the organizers and speakers in the event come from various radical right organizations. Torches are said to symbolize life, continuity, and the ‘eternal Finnishness,’ but in the context of the radical right, the torches may also recall the torch rallies of the Ku Klux Klan, Nazi Germany, the Finnish Academic Karelia Society (AKS) in the 1930s, various similar radical right torch rallies in contemporary Europe, and the petrol bomb attacks against asylum centres around Finland in the autumn 2015. While the speeches held in the event move mostly on quite general patriotic level, one can also find references to more radical right-wing ideology, for example to the theory of the ‘Great Replacement.’ The event is thus illustrative of the ‘doublespeak’ of the radical right: it sends different messages to the general public and the initiated activists.

KEYWORDS:

• Radical right
• torch rallies
• 612-event
• Finnish Independence Day
• doublespeak
• use of cultural memory

Notes

1 The exact number of the participants is difficult to give. The 612.fi declared that they had 3000 participants, while the counter-demonstrators estimation was 1200.

2 In 2015, the name of the antifascist counter-demonstration was Freedom at stake (Vapaus pelissä).

3 This article is connected to my larger project on material tropes of cultural memory and temporality, of remembrance and forgetting, where I suggest that our cultural notions of memory are tied to certain material ontologies, based on different states of matter.

4 For general overviews on the radical right, see, for example, to Art (2011), Davies and Lynch (2002), Fielitz and Laloire (2016), Klandermans and Mayer (2006), Mudde (2002, 2007, 2017), and Wodak, KhosraviNik, and Mral (2013), and on the Finnish radical right Sallama (2018). While there are numerous academic studies on the contemporary radical right, the use of torch processions and fire imagery has been addressed only passing.

5 Was Hitler’s fascination with torches influenced by the practices of Ku Klux Klan is a question that I have not found an answer to. Although he was certainly aware of KKK and appreciated the race segregation in Southern States, it seems that he found the hooded seremonies of KKK ridiculous and did not search co-operation with the organization.

6 These demonstrations, known as ‘Kuokkavierasjuhla’ between 1996 and 2006, were originally peaceful, but later led occasionally to confrontations between the police and the demonstrators.

7 The 'Overton window' refers to the range of ideas tolerated in public discourse. The term was recently used by Hännikäinen (2019) who expressed his dislike of an openly racist provocations of some ethnonationalist youth in the Finns party. He did not disagree with the ideological racism of ethnonationalists but insisted that, for strategic reasons, they should be aware of too radical statements: ‘The much-debated window of Overton does not move by shock methods, but by edging with resolution, and this difficult work must be done in hostile atmosphere.’ In other words, he suggested the conscious use of doublespeak in order to hide the ultimate goals of the radical right.

8 On the concept of autochtone, see Geschiere (2009).

9 The original Finnish translation of Jünger’s ‘Die Totale Mobilmachung’ by T. Vadén and A. Salminen, published at Niin & Näin 2/2012.

10 On the authority of the dead over the living in human cultures, see Harrison (2003).

11 On the significance of rallies and rituals for Nazi-propaganda, see O'Shaugnessy (2016),