Avoiding the filthy snares of Communism - or right-wing violence and exploitation

Old-time election posters concentrated on dishing the dirt on opponents

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By Terhi Upola
     
      The "Redville" (Punikkila) campaign, launched by the youth wing of the moderate conservative National Coalition Party in the upcoming municipal elections, targets the Social Democrats.
      It sets up two opposing communities, a failed and shabby Redville (under SDP rule, naturally) and a thriving private enterprise-driven utopia known as Porvarlahti, or Nonsoc Bay. It ruffled a few feathers, but it is mostly good clean fun.
      What is more, it is all touchy-feely teasing by comparison with the way the Social Democrats themselves wrote about their bourgeois rivals in the first Parliamentary elections in 1907, before Finland secured her independence:
      “Are you going to cast your ballot for the betrayers of the people?! If you vote Conservative, then remember that your vote is going to those who would buy their way into power! To arsonists! Whipcrackers!”
     
The mood of the society was naturally quite different back then. In those days it was the done thing to sling mud - campaigning was negative with a capital N. And it did not stop with 1917 and Independence, either.
      The National Coalition Party bashed the left with a big stick in their election campaigns in the 1930s and 1940s.
      In the general election of 1930, the National Coalition had entered into an election alliance with the Agrarian Union (the forefathers of today’s Centre Party). The pairing dragged around a life-sized plywood tank to their campaign meetings, signifying an all-out frontal assault on Communism, reports researcher Pauli Heikkilä from the Archives of the Organizations of the National Coalition Party.
      In their election posters, the National Coalition railed against the Reds and demanded that "the Communist filth" be driven out of Finland.
     
The SDP gave almost as good as they got. They announced that they were fighting against right-wing violence. "[the SDP leader] Väinö Tanner was at times obliged to physically wrestle hecklers at election gatherings, when members of the Lapua Movement* attacked him", says Esa Lahtinen, Director of the Finnish Labour Archives.
      In 1929 the National Coalition Party and the now defunct Vapaan työväen liitto (the League of Free Labour) had advised agricultural labourers to vote for the right. In their campaign posters, they told the Finnish working man that "Socialism will strip You of your freedom, but You will never lower yourselves to become serfs".
     
Quite one of the nastiest Parliamentary election campaigns was fought out in 1948, just after the war. The SDP Party Secretary Väinö Leskinen declared the election was "all-out war, everyone against everyone".
      "The National Coalition way is the path of violence!" thundered the Communists. "Will you subject yourselves to become the guinea-pigs of Socialism?" asked the National Coalition, underlining their point with a nasty image where "the bunny gets it" in the form of a syringe full of sinister red fluid.
      The SDP's "Enough Already!" poster campaign was directed particularly at their class rivals the Communists. "Enough Already!" stickers were pasted up all over the place.
      "As far as I understand, stickers were also attached to the railway Pullman carriage used by the then Minister of the Interior, the Communist Yrjö Leino. The story went that they were put there by none other than Väinö Leskinen himself", says Esa Lahtinen.
      Those were the days.
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 8.10.2004
     
Note: The Lapua Movement (Lapuan liike) was a right-wing organisation that had come into being in 1929, initially led by zealous anti-Communists, and highlighting the legacy of the White Guards and the 1918 Civil War. It was particularly strong in Ostrobothnia, in north-western Finland, where the town of Lapua is also situated. The movement gradually turned fascist and actually gained some considerable measure of power, but it was banned after a failed coup attempt in 1932. Vehemently anti all things left-wing, the members took to kidnapping known labour organisers, Social Democrats, and Communists, beating them up, and driving them to the eastern border, where they were tossed out and exhorted to cross. The Wikipedia entry below gives a few more details on this less than pleasant chapter in 20th century Finnish political history.


Links:
  Lapua Movement (Wikipedia)

Helsingin Sanomat