Soldiers of Odin – Extremism in Disguise?

Continuing with another post on patriotism, like yesterday...

^{It's a bit blurry picture, quick snap, but if you don't know who those people are, they're Soldiers of Odin.}

Soldiers of Odin is a city street patrolling organisation, originating here in Finland, born as an answer for some criminal activity by immigrants – they patrol the streets making sure they are empty of crime and violence.

Their values:

• independency and autonomy (on a national level)
• against harmful immigration
• against islamisation and multiculturalism
• against EU and globalisation
  _{Source: from their own website (in Finnish).}

So, they don't want people coming here that have poor chances for integration – I think that's reasonable, because you can't take a limitless amount of people in too quick without some clashes happening between the immigrants and main population, especially if they have a very different cultural background. However, they are fine with foreigners coming on the basis of working or studying.

Being against islamisation and multiculturalism is a bit of a controversial stance. The multiculturalism thing though – that's just straight up ironic, because we Finns ourselves are a mixture of western and eastern culture.
I think they are afraid of muslims 'taking over and raping and killing all the white people', if we are a bit dramatic. Personally, I don't really think it's that much of a religion as being the threat but – looking what has happened in Sweden – the formation of "no go zones" where most of the immigration population gets centered in certain districts, and that is what – to my understanding – creates most of the problems, not really the religion, as long as we don't start deriving any weird religious things into laws, which shouldn't be done with Christianity nor with Islam. And most people won't be extreme fundamentalists, not in Christianity, and I believe, not in Islam either.

So, I'm arguing that the problem is more sociological one rather than religious.

I mean, like stated, we can't take every single immigrant here – help yourself before you can help others – I guess that makes sense to an extent. But where do you draw these lines of being able the help others, how well do we have to be? Do we have to get the national dept to decrease? Not needing to increase taxes on poor? Something along those lines Soldiers of Odin think at least. Economics is another not so strong suit of mine, but it seems like almost every country is caught in a debt cycle, Finland too. On the other hand, capitalism isn't a zero-sum game, because even with world population increasing, the average gross domestic product has been increasing too. So even though there will be more people, it doesn't necessarily mean that the "pie" would get smaller for individual.

Oh, and globalisation – if they seriously think they can get rid of that, good luck, you probably have to find another planet to isolate to for that practice, globalisation isn't going anywhere, and it's not actually even as new of a phenomenon as people think. The world has been global for a long time now – demand for foreign products, silk, pepper, gold has existed for a long time, and therefore, also the transportation of them. Of course the delivering of a product was way slower back then compared to this day when globalisation has really ramped up with easy transportation and instant delivery of information, but still, since the days of people sailing to foreign countries and continents to buy and sell goods, the world has essentially been global.

But, back to the anti-globalists (who borrowed their symbol from the mythology of our neighbor) and their practice.

Their street patrolling itself is fine, even though bit intimidating, because they rarely initiate any harmful behavior. In a way it's admirable even, that people are taking the initiative themselves for taking care of others. But what I'm bit worried about, is they're values which might potentially attract extremism and create political polarization. On paper they don't approve any kind of extremism, but I think it's hard to deny that the practice of Soldiers of Odin wouldn't appeal on people attracted to such.