Part One: A Tale of Two Snipers: Simo Häyhä, Lyudmila Pavlichenko & the Eastern Front

Margaret talks with firearms historian Karl Kasarda about two WWII snipers on the Eastern Front defending their homeland, a Finnish man and a Ukrainian woman who couldn't have been more different.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff,
a podcast that usually isn't about shooting people. I'm your host,
Margaret Kiljoy, and that is the sketchiest introduction that I
will probably ever do for this show. My guest today
is also not sketchy, and his name's Carl. Hi, Carl.

Speaker 2 (00:25):
Hey, it's so good to be here, and it's good
to see you again. It's been a little while and
it's a real treat to be on the show today. Yeah,
I would say, yeah, shooting people is a sketchy thing. Sadly,
within history sometimes it's been less sketchy to shoot them
than to not. But that's a different topic.

Speaker 1 (00:39):
That's the main topic we're going to talk about today.
Cool and Carl is the host of in Range TV,
which is a not just YouTube show where you can
learn about firearms. Is that a decent way to send
that up.

Speaker 2 (00:56):
Yeah? I think so. It's a firearms channel at sensibly,
but I think it's much more a cultural historical channel
that deals with the topic of firearms through a different lens,
is kind of the way I put it. So we
try to deal with these topics in a way that
frequently other people who deal with firearms, don't approach them
from and I think that's part of the reason maybe
I'm here today.

Speaker 1 (01:17):
Yeah, it is. I think the audience knows. I don't
tell my guests what they're going to be on to
talk about, but Sophie knows. Sophie is our producer, Hig.

Speaker 3 (01:25):
Sophie, Hi, I do know. And then I liked that
description of your channel, Carl. I feel like that, really
like that. That really sums it up.

Speaker 2 (01:34):
Thank you.

Speaker 3 (01:34):
That's great.

Speaker 1 (01:37):
Yeah, folks have it.

Speaker 3 (01:38):
I was gonna say, I am here though, and we
are here, and.

Speaker 1 (01:43):
And who else is?

Speaker 3 (01:45):
But it's it's our editor, Ian, That's where.

Speaker 1 (01:48):
You're going for right It is. Ian isn't here with
us on the zoom, but here's what Ian is with
us spiritually always yes present. So everyone has to say
Hi Ian Hi Ian, Hi Ian Hi Ian. Well, and
our theme music was written for us by unwoman. So

(02:11):
this week and next week, because we're going to do
a four part we're going to talk about two extraordinary
people who had a lot in common and an awful
lot not in common, who are more or less on
opposite sides of a war. Carl, have you ever heard
of the Great War? The World War It's sometimes called.

Speaker 2 (02:29):
Oh the first you need Part one of World War Two. Yeah,
I've heard of that.

Speaker 1 (02:32):
Well, that's what I was going to get to is
actually it has a lesser known sequel called World War
two Electric Boogaloo, which is like a straight to DVD
thing that not too many people have heard of.

Speaker 2 (02:44):
Oh yeah, that's kind of one of those niche hipster wars.
Yeah we should probably. Yeah, you hear about the Great
War all the time, but that that hipster stuff. You know,
you got to go to special niche war markets for
that kind of content exactly.

Speaker 1 (02:55):
And that's what we are this week because today, Yeah,
I'm just kind of curious when you figure out what
we're talking about. One of the people that we're going
to talk about was a five foot three Finnish farmer
with a Mosin Nagant, which is an old bolt action
rifle in the Peri skis, who didn't want anyone to
invade and conquer his country. The other person we're going

(03:17):
to talk about was two inches shorter, still, a five
foot one Ukrainian gun manufacturer lady who also had a
Moson Neagaunt, who also didn't want anyone to invade and
conquer her country. Both of them, by strange accidents of history,
were working counter to Hitler's plans. Although the Ukrainian woman

(03:37):
was absolutely the more anti fascist of the two. The
finn Simohuha is sometimes credited as the most successful sniper
in history. The Ukrainian Ludmila Pavlchenko is universally considered the
most successful woman sniper in history. It's actually completely possible.
The numbers and all this stuff is really blurry. It's

(04:00):
only possible she has more confirmed sniper kills with a
rifle than Simo because his count also includes his prolific
submachine gunning. You ever heard of these folks.

Speaker 2 (04:10):
I've heard of both of them. I'm more familiar with Simo.
Although I'm familiar with both of them, I'm excited to
learn more about them. It is true about Simo, though,
I do know this, Like when you said about his
submachine gun kills, the Finns during the Winter War and
the Continuation War were greatly armed with submachine guns, and
it was part of what educated the Soviet army, let's say,

(04:31):
on the value of those those types of weapons. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (04:34):
No, it's interesting because it seems like the rifle they
used was a Russian design, and then the submachine gun
that everyone used was a finished design.

Speaker 2 (04:42):
Or at least a derivative thereof. Yeah, so the finish
was the Saomi, and then you later see the PPSh
forty one and the forty three, and they the forty
one is definitely similar the drum magazine. In fact, in
the Soviet weapon is nearly identical to the finish one.

Speaker 1 (04:59):
Yeah, makes a lot of sense. So first we are
going to talk about Simo, which means we're going to
get to talk about my second favorite country to nerd
out about. The first one, as any listeners probably caught
on as Ireland. But the first country that I nerded
out about when I was a kid, it is Finland.

(05:20):
I don't know why. I mean, I do know why,
but it's it's a weird story.

Speaker 3 (05:24):
Okay, what is it?

Speaker 2 (05:26):
Okay?

Speaker 1 (05:28):
When I was fourteen years old, I was at a
very large concert in Washington, DC, and I was crowdsurfing
to Blondie and I fell on top of a very
cute fourteen year old girl who was from Finland, and
we dated for many years, and I went and visitor
in Finland. See some of the more interesting parts of
that story I have to cut out because it would

(05:51):
show who her family is.

Speaker 3 (05:53):
I'm just saying that is a meat cute.

Speaker 2 (05:58):
That seems like such a sweet story actually, and that
and that gets you to Finland, which is a place
that I feel like so many people don't even know exists,
which is a weird statement, you know how that works? Like, no,
it is one of those countries that's kind of like
off the radar for lack of a better term, although
a little more so recently with everything going on with Russia.

Speaker 1 (06:16):
But yeah, yeah, yeah, that's true. I guess the whole
NATO thing. Have you ever been to Finland?

Speaker 2 (06:22):
Either of you? A number of times? Three, three or
four times?

Speaker 1 (06:26):
Actually, yeah, Sophy never Well, it's nice. The sun either
doesn't go down or it doesn't come up, depending on
your timing, which I think for most people means the
sun never goes down, because I don't know a lot
of people who travel to Finland in the winter unless
they live in Finland. You ever gone in the winter.

(06:46):
I've only gone in the summer.

Speaker 2 (06:49):
But the one time I went in the winter, it
was one of those incredibly mild winters, so I did
not experience like true Finnish winter. Yeah, so I got,
I got the real, the real, simple taste of it.

Speaker 1 (06:59):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (07:00):
So Finland.

Speaker 1 (07:02):
I think you're absolutely right. Finland is a sort of
overlooked country. And I think what a lot of people
assume that they know about Finland is not true. Finland
is not the country that people might assume it is.
Finland has only been a country for less than half
the time that the US has been a country. And
it's not Scandinavian. That is the one big thing that

(07:24):
I think people misunderstand about Finland, or at least Americans
misunderstand about Finland. It's a far northern country. It is
not on the Scandinavian peninsula. It is I mean neither
Iceland or Denmark. But those are Scandinavian countries because they're
culturally Scandinavian. All of these like whenever I talk about

(07:45):
like what counts as what and like lines on a map,
it's all bullshit. And this whole story is about how
all that stuff's bullshit, but also how it matters. So
the rest of Scandinavia, they're all Germanic pagans like fore
and Odin and Lokian shit. Well, I mean not now,
but historically some of them still are. Finland is considered Nordic,
but it is not considered Scandinavian. It has always had

(08:08):
its own thing going on, like really had its own
thing going on. There are only a few other places
like Estonia and Hungary that are linguistically related to Finland
to any appreciable degree. And it's an odd man out
from Europe, just part of why it's so fucking cool, frankly,
although it is also part of why it has suffered
at the hands of other countries so many times. Finnish

(08:31):
paganism is a combination of polytheistic, like it has lots
of gods, but it's also animistic in that there are
spirits and everything in the world. Animals are considered sacred,
and each type of animal has its own like animal mother,
a sort of guardian spirit for all of that animal
that is distinct from the gods themselves. As best I

(08:51):
can tell, and I'm not actually an expert on Finnished paganism,
as best as I can tell, it's actually because there's
like multiple religions that are all kind of like trying
to share the same and like some of them are
more animistic, and some of them are more polytheistic. That's
my like, that's my best inference based on what I've read.
But I haven't had as many conversations with Finns about

(09:11):
their paganism.

Speaker 2 (09:13):
It does.

Speaker 1 (09:14):
Have you ever heard of the finish afterlife? The pagan afterlife?

Speaker 2 (09:17):
Actually, that's not something I'm familiar with. I'm familiar with
some of the similarities of Greater European paganism in Finnish paganism,
for example, like thor and Percle, which is one of
their curse words, which is the lightning god. That's interesting,
but not about the afterlife.

Speaker 1 (09:31):
So no bed was the first finished word I learned
after kitos, which means thank you. The word for like
basically goddamn. It is the word for the old. Uh yeah,
one of their old gods. The afterlife is called Twanala,
which is and the reason it's my favorite is because
it's when you die, you're dead, like more or less.

(09:54):
Like it's not technically that when you die you go
to a dark underground and you sleep without dreaming forever.
So like when you die, you're dead, and there's like
some gods that look over it, and like, you know,
there's all the stories about people like going there and
getting stuck there and retrieving wisdom and all that shit.
But like, good bad, it doesn't matter. When you die,

(10:15):
you are fucking dead. I love it.

Speaker 2 (10:17):
It's the strongest spiritual form of ambient.

Speaker 1 (10:20):
Yeah, exactly. Finnish is a Uralic language, which the only
real relations to it being Estonian and Hungarian. And the
way that a finn once told me, because I was like,
I went there and people were like, oh, Finish is
like nothing like any other language. And then I was like, wait,
I read a book it says it's like Hungarian, and
this old Finnish man was like, yeah, it was. Actually

(10:44):
my partner's dad was like, if you're on one mountaintop
and a Hungarian is on the other mountaintop like yelling,
I guess you could maybe think it was finish. That
was the way to describe the difference. Uralic language is
come from a language called proto Uralic, which was spoken
in the Ural Mountains, which is a mountain range that

(11:04):
runs through chunk of Russia. Basically because actually everyone moves
around all the time and nationalism is garbage, Finnish wasn't
a written language for a long ass time. In the
sixteenth century, folks were like, well, what if we want
to write the Bible? And they were like, oh shit,
I guess we need a written language, right, So it
started being written, but only in religious context. They didn't

(11:25):
really the modern written Finish was not developed until the
nineteenth century. Everyone was writing Swedish. It wasn't that people
weren't I mean, I'm sure a lot of people weren't literate,
but it was all ruled by Sweden at this point.
So the modern written Finish was developed in the nineteenth
century as part of this urge to create a Finnish
nationalism to escape centuries of Swedish and Russian colonization. I know,

(11:47):
I just talked shit on nationalism, but it means different
things in different contexts. It's a different thing when you're
talking about colonized people versus anyway whatever. People probably heard
me rant about that before. If not, yep, okay, great, And.

Speaker 2 (12:02):
Still to this day in Finland the two national languages
are Finnish and Swedish. Yeah, those are the ones you're
supposed to learn in school. Although everyone knows.

Speaker 1 (12:09):
English, yeah, and only six percent of people have finishes
I mean as Swedish as their like first language. It's
pretty much a leftover. There's like class shit in there too.

Speaker 2 (12:20):
Yeah, it's all on the street signs though, So when
you're like, when you're wandering around, you'll see Finnish and
Swedish right next to each other, and Swedish is easier
as an English speaker to try and figure out, so
I can sort of decipher things through Swedish.

Speaker 1 (12:32):
Yeah, no, that's actually that's a really good point I learned.
One of the things I learned, I've been a Finland
bunch of times, and one of the times, people will
come up to me and they would like, oh, I'm
going to get this all wrong. It's been a while
since I've been there, and they if people come up
to me and talk to me, And so for longest time,
I was saying enpoo sumalainen, which I thought meant I
don't speak Finnish. Eventually, and everyone as soon as I

(12:56):
said that, people would turn around and walk away. And
then eventually I learned I was saying, and I don't
speak Finnish people. But then I learned that if I
just said I don't speak Finnish in English, they would
talk to me, whereas if I didn't want to talk
to them, I would say I don't speak Finnish and
Finnish and then they would turn around and leave, especially
if I said I don't talk Finnish people anyway. Right,
So is a fucking cool language. I am not good

(13:18):
at speaking it, as we have discovered. I know how
to say beer and thank you and cuss. There are
no gendered pronouns in Finnish. The same word is used
for men and women. Lots of languages do this, actually,
probably the majority of languages in the world do this,
but almost no Western languages. The only exceptions that I've

(13:39):
ever been able to find of Western languages that have
no gendered pronouns are Finnish and Hungarian and Bosque and
except Have you ever heard about the secret gendered pronoun
in Finnish?

Speaker 2 (13:52):
No?

Speaker 1 (13:53):
Okay, One time a drunk Finn told me that there's
a secret, and I'm going to tell you the secret,
but can't tell anyone. There's one gendered pronoun in Finish.
It is rarely used, and it is used for the
gender my useless piece of shit husband. And whenever I

(14:16):
and I've checked this by talking to Finns about it,
and they always start off by saying no, there's no
gender pronouns and finish, and I'm like, well, what about
my useless piece of shit husband pronoun? And then, especially
if they're drunk, they'll admit it that there is this
secret gender pronoun. I can't remember what it is. And
I tried googling this and I did not come up

(14:36):
with success. And I wrote my finish friend, and I
think my finished friend is sick of me asking this
kind of question and didn't get back to me before
the time of recording.

Speaker 2 (14:46):
So just be a couple little things like this. For example,
there's another word that's just one word that means sitting
at home drunk in your underwear. Yeah, it's just one word.
So you say that one word and everyone knows what
you're doing that night, for example. So there's like little
secret like that.

Speaker 1 (15:00):
Yeah, totally, spoon theory is written into the finish. This
is going to turn into a weird Margaret or whatever
spoon theory has written into it, though like, I don't
have the spoons to do it. I'm too tired. You
can say anyoxa, which again I might be completely butchering.
I learned this when I was sixteen years old and
have not checked since but this, you know, this idea
of like I don't have the energy, and you can

(15:22):
say it in a way that like, if you say
it in English, I don't have the energy, people are like, ah,
you lazy bum get up. At least in the nineties,
I think that culture is caught on to the fact
that sometimes people literally don't have the energy to do
things anyway. Fins historically were wild and scary to the Scandinavians.
Fins were seen as wizards by the Norse. If a

(15:44):
fin shows up in a story, you know that something
spooky is about to happen. But this is also a
conflation of the Fins with the Sami people, which is
an indigenous group in the northern in like Lopland. Right
that the Scandinavians weren't really good at making these distinctions,
and neither is anyone else, because the samiyear and oppressed
people who get complated with the Finns. Finnish also only

(16:07):
became one culture really recently, and it's still in many
ways not necessarily one culture. The indigenous Sami of the
north exist, and then even in southern Finland there are
multiple regions with their own ethnicities and languages. Even if
most of them are Finnic, right, like you have the Karelians,
the Ingredians, and the Ingreans were almost completely genocided by

(16:28):
Stalin and we're going to talk about that, and that
is going to be a really major factor in understanding
what we're going to talk about, which is clearly Finland
and World War Two. We've clearly painted at that. But
you know what isn't Finland in World War two? Any ideas?

Speaker 2 (16:48):
But it's the sponsors that support this podcast.

Speaker 1 (16:50):
That's right, all of them. Actually, I don't know what
Nokia is doing in Finland back then. I don't know.
Kia might not have started till later. There actually could
be sponsors that were on World War Two. I just
did that annoying thing where it's like I knew I
pronounced it like fins and that's not true. I just
fucked it up. I should just say no Kia. Uh,

(17:10):
but that's not who we're sponsored by, unless it is.

Speaker 2 (17:12):
I don't fucking know.

Speaker 1 (17:13):
Here's some ads that let me feed my dog.

Speaker 2 (17:20):
And we're back.

Speaker 1 (17:22):
They were a tire manufact o Kia was, Yeah. I
think they did other shit too, But I remember one
time I was at this like squat and I was
like standing on this tire and I said no Ken.
I was like, that's funny. That's a phone, and they're like,
it's not a phone, it's a tire, and I was
like that makes sense.

Speaker 2 (17:35):
Like Mitsubishi's used to be used to make zeros, used
to make wet talk about that anymore. The zero aircraft
from the Japanese. Oh shit, yeah, they made they made
the zeros. If you if you email them about they
just don't reply.

Speaker 1 (17:49):
Yeah, there's a lot of World War two stuff that
people don't like to admit that they were making, including
if you ask Finland what it was doing during World
War Two, they don't like talking about it for some
weird reason.

Speaker 2 (17:59):
But it's an interesting situation and they were. They were
in a tenuous place that put them in a really
interesting predicament.

Speaker 1 (18:05):
That is the main subject of today. Yeah, so the
actual areas of what includes Finnish culture doesn't really line
up with a modern map. You've got folks speaking Miankili
in northeastern Swedish in Sweden, which is a Finnish dialect
sort of another Finnic language, and then in Karealia, which
is now mostly part of Russia, and then Ingria is

(18:28):
entirely in Russia, so lines on maps don't define culture
very successfully, right, But in the nineteenth century, Finland is
trying to become Finland, and so a poet whose name
I forgot to write down goes around and collects the Kalabala,
which is the Finnish great epic of all their myths
and shit, and it kind of turns it into a

(18:50):
single narrative. So in some weird ways, it's like, oh
the like all the traditional mythology is actually only from
the nineteenth century, but it draws on oral tradition before that.
These days, Finland is probably known for being happy, except
that it has a really high suicide rate, although lower
than the US is. And it's known for being a great,
great social democracy, except that the social democracy is falling

(19:11):
apart and fascists are gaining more and more power. It's
also known for producing very great black metal, no notes
this is true, and for being the place that gives
the world, gives the world the sauna, and for having
one hundred and eighty thousand lakes a lot of fun.

Speaker 2 (19:27):
The times that I spent there, I came to actually
appreciate the suna. The sound is a really nice thing.
So there's a real something there. The going from the
cold water to the hot sana and back and forth
again really is invigorating. Whether it is just a chemical
inducing moment or really healthy for you, I don't know,
but it's nice and there's just a public element to it.
There's a fact there's a public sauna in Helsinki that

(19:50):
you can go to and like, for example, they don't
have hang ups like about like public nudity like we
would in the US, where people just all body types
and everyone's together in one space. Yeah, and nobody really
looks at each other and it's not but if it
was here it would be weird. So that's an example
of our culture does form things.

Speaker 1 (20:05):
No totally, that is a yeah, yeah, I don't know.
I agree. So Finland started off through most of the
medieval era and stuff. It was like fairly tribal. The
southern folks started becoming more sedentary and agricultural, but were
still like theoretically divided into what gets called tribal as

(20:25):
a really blurry word that gets used a lot of
different ways. Whereas the northern Sami we're like we're good,
We're just gonna keep hunting, fishing, like I don't know
about agriculture shit. And then in the thirteenth century, the
Christians were like, well, we don't want cool, pluralistic religious systems,
so we're going to kill you all until you join
our blood drinking cult. So they had the Northern Crusades,

(20:47):
the lesser known Crusades, and they conquered Finland for Sweden,
and basically Finland became European at this point, and it
also became Catholic. Then the Protestant Reformation hit the North hard,
and Finland went Lutheran because the Swedish king went Lutheran
during the nineteen forties when most of our story takes place,

(21:07):
Like ninety six percent of Finns are Lutheran, which I
do not know a ton about. But it's not anti
science or anti abortion, so okay.

Speaker 2 (21:16):
It tends to be more chill.

Speaker 1 (21:17):
I think, Yeah, that seems to be the Yeah, it's
like seems like in the like Catholic light kind of category.

Speaker 2 (21:22):
Yeah, totally. It's a high church with a lot of
pomp and circumstance, but a lot what seems like a
lot less awfulness in it. I mean not that there isn't,
but it's less right, and so yeah, I think we
forget because it was long ago. But like in Europe,
just like in so many other places in the world,
Christianity was spread by sword and gun, and Finland and
Norway and Sweden, all those places were crushed under that

(21:44):
similar type of the theocratical war.

Speaker 1 (21:48):
Yeah, no, totally, and I mean and then even the
places that were each doing the conquering are then going out,
like like Sweden conquering them, but Sweden had just been
conquered by Christianity. And then I don't actually know who
conquered Sweden with Christianity. I assume it was the English,
but I haven't. I don't know, but it's like it
happened to them too. It's this gift that keeps on giving.

Speaker 2 (22:09):
What's super interesting about that. I don't know if when
you were there, if you went to Helsinki and saw
the history museum, But when you go through, at the
bottom floor is like the oldest elements, and then it
goes up and as you go up, different floor, as
it goes to more modern and closer to a current time. Okay,
when you get to the floor, When you get to
the floor, it's like it says the Christian era, and
then when you go to the floor above it, it's interesting,
it's a word phrase that would never be used here.

(22:32):
They refer to it in the museum as the post
Christian era. I thought that was something.

Speaker 1 (22:38):
Yeah, No, I I guess when I was younger, I
probably I went to some like museums and shit. When
I went there as an adult, I was a fucking
crusty piece of shit, and I was like, I have
more memories of being passed out drunk and a gutter
outside a gay bar in Helsinki has some good conversations
with folks. Well passed out drunk and a gutter. I

(23:00):
know that passed out and talking don't whatever. Anyway, So
Finland kept having it rough. It was a poor outpost
of an empire, and that tends to go rough. About
a third of the population died two years in two
years during a famine from sixteen ninety five to sixteen
ninety seven. It was a really cold summer followed by

(23:21):
a really hot winter that just fucked everything up, plus
snowing and floods and the combo move of the little
ice age happening, and then a whole bunch of volcanoes
had gone off all around the world, and it was
bad and people were like eating each other and shit,
not the majority of people, but that was the thing
that happened and it was really bad.

Speaker 2 (23:41):
But don't worry.

Speaker 1 (23:43):
It stayed really bad for Finland because Russia kept invading
and conquering in the eighteenth century in two events known
as the Greater Wrath and the Lesser Wrath.

Speaker 2 (23:54):
I had never heard of that. That's yeah, that's fun,
as though Lesser Wrath is any somehow not any worse.

Speaker 1 (23:59):
Right, Yeah, I mean, it's kind of like how the
Great War it doesn't actually seem that bad when you
hold it up to World War Two, but it was
absolutely an completely horrendous thing, you know.

Speaker 2 (24:07):
Oh, I think you could argue in some ways, I
mean obviously.

Speaker 1 (24:10):
Okay, fair enough.

Speaker 2 (24:11):
I don't know if those worse are good or better
in terms of war, but the Great War in some
ways was even more horrific in certain instances.

Speaker 1 (24:17):
Yeah, no, fair enough. So the Greater and Lesser Wraths
involved Russians going around with axes murdering hundreds of peasants
that ago like they would just like walk up to
a village and kill everyone with axes with a plague
happening at the same time. Then in eighteen oh nine
Russia got Finland and held it the wraths. They didn't
really successfully hold it, and Russia held Finland for more

(24:39):
than one hundred years. During this time, you start getting
finished nationalism though, like let's be free idea, and a
big part of the like leftist and labor thing for
decades was fighting against Russification. So the very idea of
making a Finland was a worker's idea and a socialist idea,
especially social democracy that was like always the most common

(25:05):
wave of like I'll talk sometimes about how overall socialism
in the nineteenth century had like three sides. There was anarchism,
there was authoritarian communism, there's social democracy, and the dominant
strain in Finland I think the entire time has been
social democracy. So in their own internal elections before Finland

(25:26):
becomes free, they become the first European power to give
women the right to vote. Literally, women have had the
right to vote in Finland since before there was a Finland.
And nineteen seventeen is a year that comes up a
lot for some weird reason, was a good year for
leaving Russia. Finland was torn between the Social Democrats and

(25:49):
right wing parties as Communists took control of Russia. The
right wing of Finland recently. Previously, the right wing of
Finland was the like we love Russia part right, but
then when the Communie to control of the Soviet Union,
they were like, we're not so sure about Russia anymore. Actually,
we want to be free too, So they like show
up in the Social Democrats like, wait, you want to

(26:09):
be free too, We actually, like finally fucking agree that
we want to be Finland, and they were like, yeah,
we totally want to be Finland totally. This is an
employ to join the German Empire. I swear we're not
just looking for a different boot to lick. And they
were like, sweet, I don't know why you brought that
up about the German Empire. It seems completely unrelated, but sure,
let's be free. So Finland declared it's independence. And this

(26:30):
was before the Bolsheviks were like we want all power forever,
fuck everyone, right, or kind of before they had conquered
all power. So Lenin was like, chill, you can go
your own way. It's cool. It helped I think this
is my inference a really large chunk of the Soviet
forces in the northwestern Russia where the sailors who skewed
heavily anarchist, and anarchists tend to be a little bit less,

(26:54):
making everyone be Bolsheviks kind of one of their things.
So you have a newly through free Finland and they're like, okay,
are we a socialist workers republic in a social democratic
form or are we a puppet state of the German monarchy?
And they had a war about it. The Reds were

(27:16):
mostly social Democrats and only a minority of them wanted
to join the Bolshevik thing going on next door. They
wanted no dictatorship of the proletariat. They only wanted democracy.
They kind of they specifically were like, basically, we want
like a France or USA without private property, like with
where where workers own the means of production instead of

(27:36):
like one dude owns everything.

Speaker 2 (27:38):
You know, Yeah, you could. You can still see bullet
holes in buildings in Helsinki from the Reds in the
White Civil War.

Speaker 1 (27:45):
Yeah, I believe it.

Speaker 2 (27:46):
And it's another thing that I thought was super interesting
was in Helsinki is that while it's no longer necessarily
that same level of direct conflict the areas that were
quote white in the areas that were quite red in
terms of like in terms of possession of the city
still have a different vibe when you're in them even now.
That makes architecturally, yeah, yeah, like restaurants, even down to basics,

(28:09):
like just the general let's put it this way. Some
places are just way more bohemian feeling and they still
feel that way. Yeah, and it's leftovers that resonate from
like that long ago. It's really interesting.

Speaker 1 (28:19):
Yeah, no, that that makes all of sense to me.
This was a nasty civil war and the way it
used to get explained to me was like, well, some
Finns were capitalists and some were Soviets, and they had
a war, and the capitalist one. This is not a
very good way of understanding the civil war. It was Bolsheviks. Sorry,
it was not Bolsheviks as social democrats. And then the

(28:40):
capitalists who won militarily were heavily supported by Germany. Basically,
Germany conquered Finland at the behest of the upper classes
of Finland. Then the whites were like, hey, Germany, do
you want to help us get rid of this red problem?
And they're like, yeah, as long as our prince gets
to be whatever anyway. So the Reds were volunteered, the

(29:00):
Whites were conscripts. The Reds included thousands of women fighting
in the army the Soviets. The Soviets off to the side,
were split. I actually had just assumed that they basically
were the main Red Army in supporting the Red Army.
They mostly kind of stayed out of it. Some supported
the Reds, some worked against the Reds and effectively sided
with the Whites. The Soviet soldier station in Finland who

(29:23):
sided with the Reds were buying large these anarchists two
hundred and fifty anarchists sailors in the Battle of RUSSOVESI was,
I don't know, the main largest force of Soviet forces
I found fighting in the Civil War. I'm sure there's others.
And this is while the anarchists were still sometimes part
of the Red Army. That changes, and we'll talk about

(29:45):
it in the next week's episodes. I don't know if
anyone on the show has picked up that I'm not
really excited about Bolshevism, that they tend to kill everyone
that they disagree with. But if you're ever in the
middle of a revolution and you're like man, I wish it.
I hope someone betrayed, Like I hope someone uses this
as an opportunity to just like kill everyone who disagrees
with them. Well, then you should befriend the Bolsheviks, the

(30:10):
group that won the Civil War. You would think it
would be the Finns because they were both sides of
the fight. But it was not the Finns who won
the Civil War. It was the Germans. The conquering Whites
rounded up the Reds and their families and just fucking
murdered them or just left them to starve. More than
ten thousand Red prisoners were left to starve to death

(30:30):
in prison camps, and the White Field commanders got shot
the shoot on the spot declaration, which was fairly literal,
and it told them to execute anyone they wanted. Yeah.
I had this moment where I didn't really know about
this right when I was when I you know, went
to Finland and until like some of the more recent times,

(30:51):
I went to this anarchist festival called Most of Pispola,
and Pistola is a working class suburb of Tampaday, and
at one night I was like walking home from the
party at two in the morning and like the sun's
still on the horizon because it's fucking Finland and it's
cool as shit. And there's this big hill that runs
to the middle of town and I walk up to
the top of it by myself, and there's just this
big monument and it's just a monument to the murdered Reds,

(31:14):
and I just had this, like, I don't know, introspective
moment thinking about that war and thinking about how, as
likely as not, I would have been fucking one of
those dead people.

Speaker 2 (31:26):
You know. Yeah, it makes the things like that make
this palpable, don't it doesn't It It's like when you
see it and you, like I said, you can see
the bullet hole and the glass of the building, or
the vibe of just different neighborhoods in the city that
is still still resonate from one hundred years ago, really,
but it still has that effect indelible fingerprint on the

(31:46):
on the society in it. Yeah, and I don't I
don't know, like you mentioned earlier, like how things are
sometimes devolving there in terms of authoritarianism, and it's it
doesn't really go away. It just it just gets quiet
for a little while and then it comes.

Speaker 1 (32:01):
Back totally and The only positive thing is so, does
you know all the social Democrats have just been murdered
and all their families have got murdered, right, And it
actually doesn't even take a generation before social democracy is
a major force in Finland again, you know. Yeah, the
Whites win, and since they were boot liquor fox didn't
actually believe in a free Finland, they elected the parliament

(32:21):
elected a German prince as the King of Finland. Fortunately,
Germany then immediately lost World War One and the German
Empire collapsed. Finland became a republic and kind of in
the weird way, like the moderates won the war, like
the side that wasn't one of the sides won the
war because the Whites and the Reds kind of both

(32:43):
lost bootlocking the Germans and the atrocities that the Whites
had committed lost the Whites a lot of popular support,
and the Reds had lost all their popular support because
they were dead or in exile. And so you get
the moderates, the center and the center left, who more
less have traded Finland off between each other ever since.
So Finland messy place, beautiful place, lots of lakes between

(33:09):
the wars, World War one and World War Two. In
case anyone forgot what the two wars were, they're numerically named.
It's easier to remember which one came first, which one
came second. Wouldn't it be awful if they were a
countdown instead, like we'd started off with like World War
nine or something.

Speaker 2 (33:23):
You know, well, then you know how many are left.
That's true, which is kind of nice until you get
to zero, and then you just don't know what's going
to happen.

Speaker 1 (33:31):
I believe Fenris Fenrier is going to eat the sun.

Speaker 2 (33:34):
And then oh yes.

Speaker 1 (33:39):
So between the two wars, two things of importance to
our story happened. First, Finland actually managed a kind of reconciliation.
I first, when I first started reading about Simo, I
was like, I thought this reconciliation thing was a lie,
and so I kept reading more and more about it,
and I actually don't think it's a lie. I think
it's true. By nineteen thirty seven, the centrist and often

(34:00):
center right Agrarians and then the center left Social Democrats
were running the government in coalition. The far right is
on the decline, as is authoritarianism on both sides of
the spectrum. The far right parties aren't officially banned, even
though they just try to stage a coup in like
nineteen thirty two or something like that. But the Communist Party,
the Bolshevik Control Party, is officially banned, and so the

(34:23):
Center is holding stuff. But the other thing that happened
that I think is really important to understand for this story,
so Finnish culture and language extends beyond the borders of
what managed to carve itself out of Finland. You've got
some Finns in northeast Sweden, and more importantly, you've got
all these Fins over in Russia, and not just like

(34:44):
Finns who showed up there, but like Finns who've been
there for ever or at least hundreds of years, right,
the Angrian Finns who are mostly Lutheran, and I couldn't
tell you their average politics. And also in Russia you
do have all of these Reds who were fleeing the
White terr and most of these Reds that start off
actually fairly moderate. There are social Democrats who want to

(35:05):
use democratic state focused means to a chief workers control,
but they'd just been fucking massacred by the landowners, and
so for a lot of them Bolshevik had a sudden
and new appeal.

Speaker 2 (35:14):
You know.

Speaker 1 (35:15):
They were like, oh, maybe this thing that won and
has a bunch of power sounds good to us, Right,
So a lot of the Reds went over and became Bolsheviks.
But there's a problem with Bolshevism, a problem made worse
by repeat villain of the pod, the Man of Steel himself,
Joseph fucking Stalin. So if he was the first behind

(35:35):
the bastards about Stalin, No, but it was like the
one of the first five. Okay, it's the maybe the
furthest back I ever listened to was the like Stalin's
drinking party thing.

Speaker 3 (35:48):
Hey, for Solomon's like a like a like a like
what you would equival it to, like the worst frack
guy you ever met.

Speaker 1 (35:55):
Yeah, So he was like, what if what if I
just kill all the fins and then destroy their culture?
And so he did.

Speaker 3 (36:05):
Yeah, yeah, that's the FRACKI equivalent to, Eh, like, oh,
what if we're just like go throw toilet paper at
their house?

Speaker 1 (36:14):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (36:16):
Yeah. His sociopathy seemed to be his hobby, did it not?
In a recurring theme?

Speaker 1 (36:23):
Yeah, pretty much, And he's good at coming up with
excuses for it. That he comes up with I think later,
so he decides to kill all the Fins and destroy
their culture, including the Finnish communist in exile, the like
loyal Bolsheviks. I suspect that no ideology has killed more
Communists than authoritary communism. Specifically, I was just there's gonna

(36:43):
be so many times in this note whatever I think
people have caught on my position on all of this.
Stalin was like, we've got to destroy Finnish culture, language traditions.
And while we're at at people the Ingri and Finns
who lived in the area that's now Saint Petersburg, since
they've lived there since before there was a Saint Petersburg,
they're like, I want to say, seventeenth century migrants to

(37:04):
that area, and then Saint Petersburg came like the next
century or some shit. In nineteen twenty six, there's one
hundred and fifteen thousand of these Angryan Fins living in
this area where they have lived for hundreds of years.
They have their own Finnic language, in their own culture.
Nine years later, there's only seven thousand of them left.
So this is a pretty successful genocide. This genocide was

(37:30):
centrally managed and considered with the specific goal of assassinating
the male population and destroying them utterly. Those who weren't
killed were usually deported since Stalin was like, well, we
need this buffer zone. Russia's obsessed with these buffer zones,
and they were like, we need this buffer zone between
US and Finland where there's no Fins because they might

(37:50):
be loyal to Finland, right, and so he sent folks
to Siberia Kazakistan. If he didn't just fucking kill them,
Settlers from elsewhere in Russia took their homes and farms
and shit. All the Lutheran churches and the Finnish language schools, radio,
and newspapers were all shut down. Today, the population of
Angrian Finns is about twenty five thousand. There are only

(38:13):
seventy living speakers of the Angrian language. Left and the
communist exiles. I think that they had started off helping
all of this happen, right, to like prove that they're
good and loyal. They got purged after they helped purge
the other Fins.

Speaker 2 (38:31):
Weirdly, it doesn't seem like there's an authoritarian movement or
government in this world that doesn't result in genocide. It
doesn't matter if it's colonial Spain invading what is now
New Mexico, or Russia with Finland, it always is the
same thing over and over again. Yeah, whether it's killing
people or cutting their hands off or their feet off,
or taking away their language or putting them in camps,

(38:53):
it's the same thing. It doesn't matter if it's called
Stalinism or communism or Nazism or whatever. Always results in
the same shit.

Speaker 1 (39:02):
Absolutely, I don't.

Speaker 3 (39:04):
I don't think I really absorbed. I like when when
you're I have the script, when you were saying seventy
seven zero living speakers left of that of language, Yeah,
you said, yeah, that is that is that is so sad.

Speaker 1 (39:20):
I know, and most of them are older. And that
mean you know that happens to so many languages. But
it's just like it's it happens to those languages because
of combinations of colonization and genocide, and like, yeah, but
you know we have two lingo Is that one of
our sponsors?

Speaker 3 (39:41):
No, Robert and I got an ad who was it
for it? Well, we did do it. We just did
do an ad on by the bastards for some language thing.

Speaker 1 (39:49):
It might have been Rosetta Stone.

Speaker 3 (39:51):
Yeah, I think it was Rosetta Stone.

Speaker 2 (39:52):
So yeah, Rosetta s don't can put out a series
of saving the languages of genocide.

Speaker 1 (39:58):
Yeah cool?

Speaker 2 (40:00):
Hello.

Speaker 3 (40:01):
Yeah, also Rosetta Stone paycral for that idea.

Speaker 2 (40:06):
Yeah, that's actually that could actually sell. Yeah they should. Yeah,
I trademarking that you should.

Speaker 3 (40:14):
I think you should be free car last to go
to the trademark.

Speaker 1 (40:18):
We'll be back after that. Yeah, all right.

Speaker 2 (40:21):
A word from our sponsor.

Speaker 1 (40:23):
Yeah, our only sponsor, mosen Nagaunt. If you want a
bolt action rifle that you can think is more useful
in the modern world than actually is that is we
probably shouldn't be sponsored by firearms. Never mind, We'll just
use whatever ads come up randomly. Here you go, and

(40:44):
we're back. So you know, it's nineteen thirty nine. War
is brewing. Hitler is in power. He's looking for allies.
Who does he find. No, not the Fins. That's going
to come later. Spoiler alert. Joseph fucking Stalin. We have

(41:04):
talked about the Molotov ribbon Trump packed before on this podcast.
You can cross it off your BINGO cards now because
we're talking about it now. It is the Stalin and
Hitler are allies for a while packed. It was signed
on August twenty third, nineteen thirty nine, between Ribin Trump,
who was a Nazi, and Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister.
To the public eye, this was a non aggression pact,

(41:26):
but secretly it was more than that. It was an
agreement of how the two powers were going to carve
up Eastern Europe, like who gets what when they start
conquering shit. This secret element wasn't revealed until after the war.
Hitler's big weakness. As far as I understand, I'm not
a huge World War two understander in the way that
there are many people who that is their life's blood.

(41:48):
Hiller didn't have oil and Russia had oil. Sort did
a remania. I think it was his ally, but he
wanted more fucking oil, right. Russia had sent so much
material assistance to Hitler's war machine, just running trains across
the whole their massive country to make sure Hitler at
everything he needed to start World War two. A week later,

(42:08):
Hitler invaded Poland. Two weeks after that, Russia was like, sick,
me too, and they also invaded Poland and the Polish defenses,
who initially thought the Bolsheviks were gonna come and help them.
We're like, hooray, the Soviets are here. We're like, wait,
why are you shooting at us? We're not the Nazis.
And then the Soviet Union invaded Poland and conquered it

(42:30):
alongside their allies Hitler and held joint military parades and shit.
This does not undermine the bravery of the people in
the Red Army, who later are the people who bled
the most to destroy Nazism. But it is a thing
that's worth fucking understanding about their leader. So Stalin stopped
putting anti fascism into the party jargon. The new enemy

(42:54):
was Western Powers, as like France and England, and in
their secret pact they decided something that's gonna have a
lot of importance to today's story. They said, Russia, you
can have Finland as well as Estonia and Latvia and Lithuania.
But those aren't as involved in the story. And even

(43:18):
before the secret part of it, it was known just that
the Stalin was siding with the fucking Nazis. Pushed a
lot of the Finnish communists over to the social democrat
side of things. Already there's not a ton of Bolsheviks
or like communists like Communist party communists in Finland. But
seeing all this happened, like the Finns are like, oh,

(43:39):
actually maybe this like powermonger is not our friend. So
on October fifth, only a couple weeks after they'd invaded Poland,
the USSR was like, hey, Finland, can we like, can
we have party you just we want to set up
some military bases all your neighbors. Let us do it,
just give us control of huge trunks of Finland. And

(44:01):
even the Finnish communists were like, oh, this is Russia
doing an imperialism. This is the part that I like,
I wasn't certain about this whole, like the communists actually
were against Russia thing, because I like, it's not usually
the way things go. But I read this like thirty
fucking page academic paper about communism in Finland during this era,
because that's whatever. I can't complain. I do it for work.

(44:24):
It is the best job anyone has ever had in
the history of this world. Thank you, Sophie. So the
communists are like, this is Russia doing an imperialism. There
was a few tankies, there's a few holdouts who are like, actually,
the Finnish government, including the Social Democrats are the same
as the fascists, since they won't just turn Finland over
to Stalin, who is allied with the fascists. But don't

(44:44):
pay attention to that part. Finland said no to the
Russians and so and then they started mobilizing for war
because they were like, oh, fuck, this is going to
go really bad. We just told Stalin no, that's like
not a he's like more like a yes man guy,
you know.

Speaker 2 (45:02):
Yeah. Stalin's not known for his his tolerance of no.
He's not really into consent, never was.

Speaker 1 (45:08):
No, he's a free thinker. He's a strong whatever, fucking
piece of shit. So Finns. So the Fins are like,
all right, we're gonna mobilize for war. And the first
thing they do, just whatever, they arrest a couple hundred
Communist leaders, finished communist leaders on suspicion they'd sided with Russia,

(45:28):
but even the police reported quote, the will to defend
the country, or at least loyalty towards the government has
gained a footing even among the communists. And so then
they let them all go except like one guy. I
don't know, there's like probably one guy who was like,
fuck you, I love Stalin. You know, I don't know.
Even a bunch of Communist officers who had received training

(45:49):
in the USSR were like, no, we are fucking defending Finland.
Fuck the USSR. They just purged all my friends. And
I really didn't expect this part. I really thought that
the Reds of Finland were like in a roll and
help the Soviets in the coming war. They didn't. They

(46:12):
were really principal. Russia was like, all right, give us
some Finland. And then it was like what the fuck. No, And.

Speaker 3 (46:24):
I love when you summarized history in like such a
casual way. They're like they're like, nah, nah, we're doing that.

Speaker 2 (46:33):
Noah, bro' I'm not into that. How about you keep
your Russian hands off of my Finland.

Speaker 1 (46:37):
Yeah, exactly. The first time I ever like had someone
get mad at me about this. I used to do this.
I did this tour talking about anarchism and fiction and
I had ended up giving a conversation about Louise Michelle,
who we've covered on this and just part of the
Paris Commune. And I referred to the Paris Commune like
really quickly and haphazardly, where I was like, and the
government was out of town, so people were like, we're

(46:58):
gonna have a party, but then they weren't sure it
was a be a communist party or socialist party, and
then they kind of got into some arguments about it,
and then the Germans invaded, and someone was like, really
mad that that was the way I summed up the
Paaris Commune. Someone listening is really mad about how I
just summed up the start of the Winter War, And
I don't it's cool.

Speaker 3 (47:16):
What's cool as you're no longer on Twitter?

Speaker 1 (47:19):
Yeah, exactly, the Winter's gone.

Speaker 2 (47:22):
Yeah, it's it's x dot com. Now everyone knows that.

Speaker 1 (47:26):
It's just you know, it sounds like something you can't
go to in a library.

Speaker 2 (47:29):
No, you just now, you just now, you just z
your authoritarian dreams. Oh my god, you to become Z.

Speaker 1 (47:34):
Yes, Sophie, I think it's a Yeah.

Speaker 3 (47:36):
Margaret, that was such a good joke and I just
want to compliment you on it. Thank you so.

Speaker 1 (47:40):
Much, thank you. I appreciate it. So have you ever
thought about the comparisons between the Winter War and the
modern Ukrainian War?

Speaker 2 (47:53):
Actually, I have to admit I have. Yes, there's there's
a lot going on.

Speaker 1 (47:58):
Huh, they're so fucking but what I've got. If I'm
missing anything, please let me know if you want to
expound upon any of it. What I've got is that
Russia's main justification for this war was your border is
too close to our cities, and we don't want the
West to come attack us. And then a little bit
of a but come on, we used to that part
used to belong to us anyway, And then also a

(48:20):
bunch of complete nonsense about how you're actually a fascist country,
so we should have to denazify you. And in this case,
in the Winter War, this was based on how seven
years earlier some far right people tried to stage a
coup and they lost, and then they stopped being particularly
politically relevant. God, that's even the same fuck number, almost
the same number of years as the Madden Euromaidan, whatever

(48:45):
the protests in Ukraine. I'm not as good at modern
history current events. Is that what you call modern history
current events? I'm not as good at current events. Also,
the people who are going to take up arms to
defend Finland include people from every part of the political spectrum,
the far right, the far left, the center right, the
center left and the center all about to pick up

(49:07):
guns and fight alongside of each other, which is like
fucking Ukraine also Russia. Things is going to be easy,
and then they meet an intensely fierce defense and their
first attack is going to be utterly defeated.

Speaker 2 (49:20):
Yeah. Like like when you put that into modern you
have essentially you have Zelensky commanding Azov Battalion. How bizarre
is that fighting against the Wagner Group? Yeah, from Russia? Right, Yeah,
what a mix of political ideologies, all sorts of things
mixed together for Ukrainian defense. It's it isn't that different,
You're right, it's spot on.

Speaker 3 (49:41):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (49:41):
And it's like I did an interview with a friend
who was delivering an aid and to the front lines
in Ukraine, and you know, and they're queer, and they
were talking to a queer army commander and they were
like they came out to the to the guy and
we're like, oh good, I usually have to hide who
I am. And they're like, that's great. When you deliver
to the next place, don't tell them this. They're bad,

(50:03):
you know, Like it's fucking weird.

Speaker 2 (50:06):
But at the same time, and I'm not giving them
any difference because that ideology doesn't was deserve any difference. Yeah,
but at the same time, they've been crack troops to
defending eastern Ukraine, which is a weird problem to think about.

Speaker 1 (50:17):
Yeah, no, it Yeah, And so the comparisons to this
because one of the things I really like about today's
story is that it's fucking messy. It is not politically simple,
and the reason I love context anyway, that's like the
fucking fun of this. But like, and also I think
the thing that you can get other than just listening
to another podcast bestimo or something, right, but I think

(50:42):
you have to like get a sense of all this
stuff in order to like figure out who these people
were and why they were fighting, and like what it
meant to different people to be fighting at different times
in different ways. So Russia is gearing up for war
after Finland says no to their demands, and then one
of the problems that they run into as they have
to be like, wait, hold on, stop purging all the Fins.

(51:03):
We need enough Finns who are loyal to us to
shore up some political legitimacy for when we try to
take over Finland. So then they like stop purging the
rest of the Fins, and then there's this whole thing
with a false flag attack that isn't as interesting to me. Basically,
Russia shells itself and it's like the Fins did it,

(51:26):
and then attacks. November thirtieth, nineteen thirty nine, the USSR
attacks Finland and their plan is to set up a
puppet government, and they do right. Whenever they're conquering places,
they're like, aha, this is now though I didn't even
write down the name of it, because this puppet government
is so irrelevant. It didn't last. But the Red Fins
didn't rush to join the puppet puppet government, and the

(51:48):
Soviets scarcely had enough Fins left to manage this puppet government. Instead,
the communists and the socialists, the workers and intellectuals alike,
they rush to the front lines to defend Finland from
the Soviet Union. At least one Spanish Civil War veteran
who was finished came back and told everyone what he
had seen in the war and seen what a piece
of shit Stalin was firsthand, and how he'd betrayed the revolution.

(52:12):
So the puppet government had no fucking support or very
little support. There were a couple of the communists who
went off to it or whatever. The US star doesn't care.
They're not actually trying to set up a red government
in Finland. They're trying to fucking conquer. And so I
can't get into the mind of Stalin on this one.

(52:33):
At the start of one of the harshest winters in years,
he invades Finland. It fucking winter. The Finns, there's not
a lot of things. They're known for, skiing, snow hunting,
and fucking pure and raw emotionless heartiness and maybe saunas.

(52:56):
That's what Finland's known for, which.

Speaker 2 (52:59):
I think you just summed up the word a Finnish
word sea su, which doesn't really translate into English, but
that's kind of like they're oh yeah, sea sue is
this weird untranslatable form of Finish fortitude based on all
those things you just brought up.

Speaker 1 (53:12):
Yeah, it's not gonna go well, Okay, wait, I'm gonna
I'm gonna tell you my favorite Finish joke. There's two
brothers they haven't seen each other in twenty years, and
they decide to go ice fishing. Have you heard this? Okay,
So they show up, they cut a hole in the
ice and they start fishing. They haven't said a word,
you know. Finally, a couple hours go by, and one

(53:32):
I was like, he passed me a beer, passing the beer.
A couple hours go by, Hey pass me beer, passing
the beer. A couple hours go by, and he's like,
how you been, And the other brother looks and says,
christ did we come here to talk or did we
come here to fish?

Speaker 2 (53:48):
That's so finish. Yeah, you can sit at a table
with a fin for an hour and not say a
thing and that's totally normal and fine. It's just how
it works, like that's that's awesome that if you've been
there and around Finnish people, that is spot off.

Speaker 3 (54:01):
And like America needs that.

Speaker 2 (54:04):
I know.

Speaker 1 (54:04):
It's like I'm not trying to talk shit here, like, no.

Speaker 2 (54:07):
This isn't a negative at all. No, I don't think
it's neat.

Speaker 3 (54:10):
No.

Speaker 2 (54:10):
I was there. I was there having lunch one time
with a bunch of my finn friends and and I
just wasn't having the spoons as we were discussing, and
I just picked up my plate and went to another
table and sat by myself. Yeah, and all the finish
there was one other person that was America like what's
wrong with him? And the Fins are like, that's fine,
leave them alone. That's that's not a problem at all.
Over there. That's how it works. Yeah, that's he that's

(54:31):
that's not a problem. And that's how that's how it
vibes there.

Speaker 1 (54:34):
Yeah. And obviously all cultural norms are exaggerations and bell
curves and all that sh and like you know.

Speaker 3 (54:40):
But.

Speaker 1 (54:43):
The most presented as the archetype of this style of behavior,
the shootiest, huntiest moose, huntiest skiest, heartiest of all, the
five foot three farmer and hunter named Simo Howe, who
we're going to talk about on Wednesday. Eh, eh, a

(55:05):
whole episode of context.

Speaker 2 (55:07):
Yeah, I'm excited. I mean, I know the basics of
this guy, but I don't know what the depth you're
going to go into. But what I can do is
as a as a just a preview as for sure,
is how do you describe this person other than badass? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (55:23):
Well, if people want to see badass shooty stuff. I
don't know if you have any skiing content, but I
would bet money there's videos of you shooting in the snow.
How can people look up what you do?

Speaker 2 (55:38):
Ah, that's pretty easy. You can just go to nrange
dot tv, which is a little website and All of
my decentralized distribution points are there, although all of you
will click on YouTube because that's what we do as
consumers there. But I am decentralized and also completely demonetize,
completely crowdfunded and crowd supported, so I really don't have

(55:58):
any overlords besides viewers hopefully that want to support my work.
So in range dot tv is where you can find
my stuff.

Speaker 1 (56:06):
Hell yeah, Sophie. What about you to see pictures of
your dog?

Speaker 3 (56:11):
Oh, they can see it on Instagram. But I want
to plug specifically a series that Garrison Davis just did
on It could happen here, updating folks and what's been
going on since cop City got approved to be built
in Atlanta. Three episodes are out as of last week.
If you're listening to this in modern times, If not,
go back and listen to it. Gear has been covering

(56:33):
cop City for I don't know two years now, and
they've done a really good job of making you feel
like you're there and giving a clear visual understanding of
what's going on. So check it out.

Speaker 1 (56:46):
Hell yeah, And if you want to follow me, you
can google my name and I do too many different
things and so you'll find a lot of them. My
most recent book is called Escape from Inseill Island, and
it is aner story in which protagonists have to escape
an eyelid. It's full of in cells You on Wednesday by.

Speaker 3 (57:12):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media,
visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts.