Fogman wrote:
naturalplastic wrote:
BaalChatzaf wrote:
beneficii wrote:
Sweden doesn't even border Russia. Why would it be the first attacked?
Finland is the country that should worry.
Exactly.
Finland borders Russia. Finland was part of Russia during the Czars. And Putin doubtless considers himself the rightful heir of the Czars to still own Finland. In fact Putin probably is trying to undo the sale of Alaska to the US as we speak. Lol!
Perhaps, but at the same time, even though they lost territory, Finland had no issues standing up to Russia during the Winter War.
Also, It was mentioned that Finland is not culturally like the Nordic countries. I disagree somewhat. Linguistically it's certainly very differant, considering the fact that they speak a Uralic language more akin to Hungarian than any of the other languages spoken Scandinavia, (North Germanic group of Indo-European Languages, of which there is a bit of mutual intelligibility) however the cultural values of Finns are much closer to the rest of Scandinavia than they are with Russia.
Basically agree. The Finns ARE culturally very much part of Scandanavia even if they are not strictly speaking actual Scandinavians. And have been for a long time. Finland is part of the Lutheran Germanic Cultural wedge of northern Europe (and not part of the Eastern Orthodox Russian centered eastern part of Europe).
Language wise its true that the Finns are NOT Nordic/Scandanavian. But they are not Slavic either. The language they speak is (as stated above) part of the Uralic language family, and not part of the Indoeuropean language family (that comprises most of the languages of Europe include both the Germanic family that the Scandanavian languages are part of, and the Slavic family that includes Russian). Finn is related to the language of the Lapplanders, and to Estonian, and more distantly to Hungarian, and to the languages of obscure tribes of folks in the Ural mountain region of Russia on the border between Europe and Asia.
For most of history the Finns didn't have their own country. Sometimes Finland was owned by Sweden, and sometimes by Russia. The Swedish kings were more oppressive. The Russian Czars were more prone to just neglect the place.
Finland (along with Poland and the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia) was ruled by the Czar at the dawn of the 20th Century.
But at the end of the First World War the big empires of the Czar and of Austria Hungary and of the Ottoman Turks got broken up, and many ethnic groups got to have their own countries, and Finland finally became an independent country.
But Stalin wanted the Czar's property back. Long story short: he conspired with Hitler to attack Poland, and he went ahead and attacked the Baltic states and Finland as well as attacking Poland- and world war two began. The Baltic states (Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia) fell to the Red Army, but Finland fought back fiercely, and became an ally of Germany against Russia. But then later in the war ended up fighting Germany as well. Saw a TV doc about it. Finland played a really complex role in the war (basically fought on both sides- but only to survive- and was quite heroic).
The Second world war ended, a few years later Stalin died. The post Stalin Soviet leaders were happy to have Finland as a little neutral buffer between Russia and the NATO alliance that included Norway and Denmark (but not Sweden), and got along fine with Finland . The Finns DID cede a Delaware sized piece of land to the USSR - land that strategically surrounded (and would threaten) Russia's "second city" of Leningrad. But after that Russia and Finland got along fine.
But now we have Putin in charge of the post Soviet Russian Republic. He such a megalomaniac that who knows? He might want Finland back as Russian territory (he probably also dreams of getting of getting Alaska back too).
19 Dec 2016, 4:26 pm
