How Finland defeated fascism

In the 1930s, a far right group in Finland captured this man,

their former president, and took him and his wife from Helsinki to Joensuu,

a remote Finnish city almost 300 miles from their home.

The group interrogated them, threatened them, and then released them.

This was the Lapua Movement, a violent, conservative,

political movement that almost pushed Finland into authoritarianism.

But then something happened.

Somehow, they managed to stave off fascism,

and they've remained a stable democracy ever since.

Today, Helsinki is a great city, capital of a nation that has stemmed

the dangerous political currents sweeping the rest of Europe.

So how did Finland protect its democracy?

And is there something the world can learn from this moment in history?

To understand how we got there, let's go back to 1918.

The recent rise in communism had countries

terrified all over Europe, and Finland was no exception.

I do think that the history begins from the Finnish Civil War of 1918.

There were two sides, the Reds, or the communists,

versus the whites, the conservatives. And going forward,

those colors are going to be important for keeping track.

They clashed in the war with very heavy bloodletting.

Finland broke away from Red Russia, mercilessly exterminated its own reds.

And in 1919, became at last an independent nation.

And even though the whites won,

a lot of people remained really nervous about communism in their country,

especially with the new Soviet Union as their direct neighbor.

Those most radical whites sought to create what was called a "White Finland,"

which usually meant some kind of authoritarian state,

but that didn't come about.

And throughout the 1920s, we can see a simmering resentment against the Republic.

And that all came to a head in 1929 in, you guessed it, Lapua.

Lapua is in South Ostrobothnia, one of the most conservative regions in Finland.

So when a communist youth group holds a march there,

they know exactly who they're provoking.

That was the tinder that was that was needed to to light the fire.

The rally was violently subdued, and the communists were thrown out.

So news of what happened in Lapua spread really quickly throughout the country,

and it radicalized an entire nationalist faction of the Whites,

and it was called the Lapua Movement.

Within a year, the Lapua Movement had popular support across the country.

Their supporters included not just the far right, but also more center

right and moderate elites, politicians, and prominent business owners.

A lot of these more moderate elements

thought that they could use the Lapua Movement,

harnessing their passion and their popularity.

And they were also hesitant to push back against them.

And there was one more group that we're going to have to keep an eye on.

They're called the Civic Guard.

They have two roles.

They are an auxiliary defense force, the trains their members in military tactics.

And they are also an organization which is there in case the Reds

would rise again.

So they were naturally really sympathetic

to the Lapua Movement's anti-communist cause,

but a lot of them didn't subscribe to their more authoritarian goals,

which is something we're going to keep an eye on for later.

By the summer of 1930, the Lapua Movement planned a demonstration

called the Peasants' March, and they had a really specific reference in mind.

Benito Mussolini's March on Rome in 1922, when he used the threat

of mass violence to pressure Italy's king into making him prime minister,

bringing the fascists to power.

One just can't dismiss the importance of the March on Rome

to the entire European contemporary far right.

That's when they organized

the so-called Peasants' March on Helsinki, sending tens of thousands of people,

into a demonstration that some of them hoped would actually turn into a coup.

But instead, the government met with them and passed laws that made communists

ineligible for elections and criminalized communist propaganda.

At this point, the Lapua Movement was at the height of its power and support

amongst the conservatives in Finland,

but at their core they were a violent and extremist group.

And it continued to be driven, in part, by radical members

who acted independently and without restraint.

And they showed absolute intolerance for those who opposed them.

Kidnappings really became their hallmark.

The idea was basically symbolic.

You kidnapped someone who you thought a sympathizer of the left

or a member of the political left, and then the persons

were usually taken by car or by some other means towards the east,

towards the Soviet Union.

The message is crystal clear:

if you're a communist, you don't belong in Finland.

And then in October of 1930,

the radicals of the Lapua Movement kidnapped

someone who wasn't just an ordinary rival.

They kidnapped Kaarlo Juho Ståhlberg.

That's the guy you saw at the beginning of the video.

And not only was he a former president, he was the first president of Finland's Republic.

And for a lot of people, that want to step too far.

That clearly was a provocation by the movement

that went against the sense of decency of most of their supporters, even.

And that... that marks the decline of the movement.

And in the 1931 elections,

the Lapua Movement made their last real political gain.

They managed to help tip a close presidential election in favor of P.E. Svinhufvud.

P.E. Svinhufvud is then elected president

of the Republic, and he's the absolute darling of the political right.

I even found this really interesting photo of Svinhufvud at the Peasants' March.

So we know that he really was participating in the Lapua Movement.

But Svinhufvud was also more traditional than the radical whites.

In the end, Svinhufvud would back the Republic, and the law, and rule of law,

rather than any hopes and dreams of the of the most radical whites.

And so in 1932, even though the president they had helped elect was in power,

the Lapua Movement wasn't getting what they wanted. In a final act of desperation,

they tried to stage a coup.

A group gathered in Mäntsälä, near Helsinki, with the goal of gathering

the civic guard to march on the capital and overthrow the Republic.

But when they called on the Civic Guard, something else happened

that they had never considered.

The majority of the civic guards do not respond to the to the call for uprising.

No one goes anywhere and will stay at home and will stand down.

And then the nail in the coffin, the Lapua Movement's former darling President Svinhufvud

gave a radio address, telling the group to stand down.

You could name it just the swan song of of the Lapua Movement.

And just like that, the violent extremist group was done.

They lost the support of the masses, the politicians,

and the military, and the Lapua Movement was banned.

And Finnish democracy has been stable ever since.

Even surviving the Second World War.

Fascism and communism have been rejected by democratic Finns.

Some of the details and events of the Lapua Movement have uncomfortable

echoes with recent experiences in the US.

Democracy at one level was about the rule of the people.

It's about elections.

It's about popular involvement. Absolutely.

But in order to sustain

that project of popular engagement and popular decision making,

you need to have unelected

officials who manage the guardrails.

I think this places a spotlight on the question of who appoints

officials.

Because one of the things we forget or at least take for granted,

is how many nonpartisan systems you have to have in place

to have a healthy democracy.

But one of the largest reasons the Lapua movement failed

was because it crossed the line.

It became too violent and too extreme too quickly.

So it lost mass support and with it, the elites.

And there's one more key lesson

from the Lapua movement that is, thankfully, a lot more hopeful.

We remember the fascists of Italy and the Nazis of Germany, but in reality,

almost every European country had their own far right movements.

An organization which all dreamed of taking state power,

one either through violence or some other means.

And almost all of them failed.