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“Finlandization”
Meiji Era, strikingly illustrates at the national level many of the factors influencing personal crises.
Winston Churchill’s corresponding quip was “Never let a good crisis go to waste!”
As a result, Finland became the sole continental European country fighting in World War Two to avoid enemy occupation.
Finland’s total losses against the Soviets and the Germans in the two wars, the Winter War and the Continuation War, were about 100,000
The Soviet Union’s much heavier combat losses against Finland were estimated at about half-a-million dead and a quarter-of-a-million wounded.
Chinese word “wei-ji,” meaning “crisis,” which consists of the two characters “wei,” meaning “danger,” and “ji,” meaning “opportunity.”)
Finland found it prudent to refuse the U.S.’s offer of badly needed Marshall Plan aid.
Finland even gets the best out of its police: again astonishingly to Americans, Finnish police have to have a university degree, are trusted by 96% of Finns, and almost never use their guns.
Last year, Finnish police on duty fired only six shots, five of them just warning shots: that’s fewer than an average week of police gunshots in my city of Los Angeles.
derogatory term “Finlandization.”
Finlandization is not for export”).
The result was that Japan’s constitution and army came to be based on German models, its fleet on the British model, its initial draft civil law code on the French model, and its 1879 educational reforms on the American model.
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger expressed it, “… however unpleasantly they [the junta] act, this government [i.e., Pinochet’s] is better for us than Allende was.” That American government support of Pinochet, and that blind eye to his abuses, continued through the presidencies of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and initially Ronald Reagan.
plebiscite
Concertación
a dozen U.S. states now spend more on their prison systems than they do on their systems of higher education. A second trend concerns the
so Finnish parents (unlike American parents) can’t buy a better education for their children by sending them to private school.
consider that pet cats that are allowed to wander in and out of their owners’ houses have been measured to kill an average of more than 300 birds per year per cat. (Yes, more than three hundred: that’s not a misprint.)
Finland has the misfortune to share Europe’s longest land border with Russia (formerly the Soviet Union).
