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Kauhajoki: Roger Boyes of the TIMES Strikes Back
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by Christina 123 | September 24, 2008 at 03:12 pm
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ROGER Boyes is a journalist on the TIMES who caused a great controversy when he wrote a piece about the Finnish nature after the Jokela tragedy. His article drew on folklore and sterotypcial myths. The TIMESONLINE webpage was inundated with an astonishing weight of outraged Finnish opinion, mainly on the lines of "you patronising British person," among the more polite ones.
But now he is back with "I told you so", as the tragedy happens AGAIN within a year.
Swedish paper DAGBLADET and the Norwegian NYHETER are obsessing about whether it could happen in their Scandinavian utopias next, where a heavy metal culture and "goth" is also popular among their gentle youth. What the Nordic nations share is a culture of relentless uniformity and conformity and where nobody crosses the road unless the lights are green.
So is Roger Boyes right? With Finland having one of the highest homicide rates in Europe, even without the high school massacres, maybe he might have a teeny weeny point...?
Or maybe not...
The youth of Finland seems to be living on a short fuse. Only ten months after the Jokela school shooting — eight dead that time — there is again blood in the corridors and classrooms of a college in this apparently placid and consensus-loving country.
Early indications are that the latest assault was a bid for similar global notoriety. The Jokela slaughter last November stunned Finland and placed the killer, Pekka-Erik Auvinen, on the growing roster of desperate male teenagers ready to release their frustrations with a gun. Like Jokela, the latest shooter carefully planned the attack: from the timing, soon after the start of the academic year, to the YouTube manifesto, it was an act of theatre.
Auvinen’s YouTube message was a rambling Nietzschean tirade together with some clumsy attempts to demonstrate his shooting skills. No matter — before it was taken down it was viewed by thousands. Something similar happened in the case of the Kauhajoki killer. Sad to say, he had been motivated by no more than a desire for internet celebrity.
School massacres feed off each other, and plainly the youth who blasted his schoolmates learned from Auvinen; Auvinen in turn had been in touch with a would-be American shooter.
Related LinksYet at the risk of howls of displeasure from Finnish readers — who raged at my commentary on Jokela — it has to be said that there is something disturbing going on in their proud, self-regulating Nordic culture. After not one, but two massacres in a year, it is time that the Finns looked hard and close at their children.
After Jokela — an average school in Tuusala, an average dormitory suburb of the Finnish capital — my argument was that the Finns were letting down their young generation, allowing them to slip into a kind of psychological isolation. In small-town Finland — with nothing much to do except hang around in cliques forged in school, with the days shortening, with parents absent and the geographical distance between the homes of classmates unusually long — traditional friendship was slipping away and being replaced by social networking sites. Although all Finnish schools have psychiatrists, they are overworked. Teachers geared to ensuring exam results are failing to spot depression. And in a society with a hunting tradition, guns are readilly available.
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at 04:14 on September 27th, 2008
I was really disappointed of his article - I was expecting him to blame the sunshine and a beautiful warm autumn day this time over.
The fact remains there is nothing wrong solely about Finland. There is something wrong about the western society in general. You can see similar copycat youth things all over. Someplaces they burn churches - someplaces they topple over tombstones - someplaces they make an internet suicide club - and now it is the time of school shootings. If anything is to blame then the American gun-worshipping culture that has made it something "cool" to be in possession of a firearm. And no, it is not the cause of the internet either. If you blame the internet you can blame German Literature and Goethe. After all there was a suicide spree of young men with a bad fashion sense, yellow trousers and a purple tailcoat, shooting themselves after lost love. And that was a few hundred years ago, and what has changed? Everyhting and nothing.
The "problem" is marginalization of youth and where they get their rolemodels from. The current western consumerist culture creates small egoists with affluenza.