Ten Tribes Tribal Report no.39: Canada, Finland, and Ireland

TR-39: Canada, Finland, and Ireland
Ten Tribes Tribal Report
6 September 2010 26 Elul 5770
Contents:
1. Canada and Israel are equally happy.
2. Population: Reports from Finland.
(a) Finland: Population
(b) Finland's Prosperity Brings New Migrants
(c) Finland Extracts from Wikipedia
3. " An American who knows History" Defends the Irish

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1. Canada and Israel are equally happy.
Canada and Israel are tied for eighth place. Surprised? Don't be.
by Brian Henry
http://www.aish.com/jw/id/101741303.html
Extracts:
Canada and Israel have much in common. We're both big believers in democracy and in fairness, we're both highly diverse multicultural societies and both of us have dynamic economies.

But I was tickled to learn this summer that Canada and Israel have yet one more thing in common: We're tied for eighth place among the happiest people on Earth.

Some people might be surprised to find Israelis at the top of the happiness charts. After all, Gallup conducted this poll from 2005 to 2009, and during that time, Israel fought two wars.

On top of that, Israel is often portrayed as a monstrous, apartheid state. Surely Israeli Arabs must live in utter misery -- and since they make up 20% of the population, their despair ought to pop the happiness bubble, right? Apparently not. It seems Israeli Arabs are pretty happy, too.

But what about all those wars in Israel? Shouldn't they make Israelis miserable? Not really.

The 2006 war against Hezbollah in Lebanon lasted just 34 days. The operation in Gaza against Hamas, in 2008-2009, lasted just 22 days. In total, that's only eight weeks of war.

For the other 252 weeks in the last five years, Israelis spent their time pretty much like Canadians: working, raising their families and enjoying themselves. That's normal life in Israel, but what's normal isn't news, so we don't hear about it.

Besides, being at war doesn't necessarily make people unhappy. During the first hours of the Lebanese War, Israel destroyed all of Hezbollah's long-range missiles, making Israel's major cities safe for the duration.

Hezbollah did fire thousands of missiles into northern Israel, trying to kill as many Jews as possible. But Hezbollah's missiles caused few injuries, as a million Israelis simply evacuated to the south, and those who stayed waited out the bombardment in bomb shelters.

Meanwhile, the country was absolutely behind the war. Overseas, people may have been confused over what the war was about, but Israelis all knew they'd been attacked without provocation, with missiles striking Israeli towns and an ambush on an Israeli patrol that left three soldiers dead and two more kidnapped.

Standing together in the face of aggression doesn't make people miserable; quite the contrary. It puts fire in the belly and the warmth of fellow feeling in the heart.

Similarly, while people overseas may have been confused by the media coverage, Israelis know that their operation against Hamas in Gaza was one of the most justified wars in history -- that it was an answer to naked terrorism after all other solutions had been tried and failed.

For years, Hamas had tormented the townsfolk of Sderot with daily rocket and mortar attacks that struck schools, homes and health clinics. The purpose of the war was to allow Sderot and other Israeli towns coming under terrorist attack to enjoy the same peace and happiness as the rest of Israel. And whole country supported the cause.

During the Camp David talks, it was proposed that, as part of a peace agreement, some Israeli Arab towns should be placed on the Palestinian side of the border.

So the Israeli Arab weekly Kul Al-Arab polled the Arabs of Um al Fahm to ask what they thought of their city joining a Palestinian State. Only 11% were in favour; 83% said they preferred to remain Israeli.

This article originally appeared in The National Post.

2. Population: Reports from Finland
(a) Finland: Population
http://countrystudies.us/finland/31.htm
Extracts:

Finland had 250,000 inhabitants in the sixteenth century. As a result of wars, the population did not reach the 1 million mark until 1810. Mortality remained high even in the nineteenth century. The famine of 1867 to 1868, for example, killed 5 percent to 10 percent of the population, and it was not until 1880 that there were 2 million Finns. In the last part of the century, improved living conditions began to lower the death rate, but a simultaneous fall in the birth rate and increased emigration retarded growth.

As a result, shortly before World War I the country's inhabitants still numbered only 3 million. A short-lived "baby boom" in the first five years after the upheavals of World War II allowed the population to reach 4 million by 1950.
Since then the country's population growth has been among the lowest in the world. Low birth rates coupled with heavy emigration resulted in a population of only 4,937,000 in 1987. The annual birth rate since the early 1970s has averaged fewer than 14 births per 1,000 persons, a rate that has caused demographers to estimate that Finland's population would peak at just under 5 million by about the turn of the century, after which it would decline.

At the beginning of the 1980s, Finland's average population density fourteen persons per square kilometer, was the second lowest in Western Europe, just behind Norway's, thirteen and ahead of Sweden's seventeen. Actual population density varied widely, however. The province of Lapland, covering 29.3 percent of the nation's area but containing only about 4 percent of its population, had a population density of about 2 persons per square kilometer, making it one of the earth's emptiest regions. Uusimaa, Finland's second smallest province, which contains the capital city, Helsinki, accounted for only 3.1 percent of the national territory; however, it was home for more than 20 percent of the country's inhabitants, who lived together at a density of 119 per square kilometer, a figure identical to that of Denmark. The provinces of Kymi, Hame, and Turku ja Pori in south-central Finland, which had a mix of rural and urban areas with economies based on both agriculture and industry, were perhaps more truly representative of Finnish conditions. During the 1980s, their population densities ranged from thirty to forty persons per square kilometer.

(b) Finland's Prosperity Brings New Migrants
http://www.migrationinformation.
org/USfocus/display.cfm?ID=267
By Arno Tanner
Finnish Directorate of Immigration
November 2004
Extracts:

In the last 50 years, Finland has transformed itself from an agriculturally oriented culture into a competitive, technologically advanced information society. This small, Nordic country of five million people has the least corruption and the best competitiveness rate of any country in the world, according to international indices. Over 85 percent of Finnish households have access to a broadband Internet connection and over 90 percent of the active population has a mobile phone.

Such favorable economic, technical, and social developments help explain why Finland again has become an attractive destination for both economic and forced migrants. The first wave of immigrants - Swedes, Russians, Central Europeans, Tatars, and Jews - came to the capital Helsinki and other major towns from the end of the 19th century through the 1930s for economic opportunities.

Finland was under Swedish control for over 600 years until 1809, when it became a Russian Grand Duchy. In 1917, Finland achieved its independence. Despite several wars and conflicts, Finland has experienced mainly voluntary and economic emigration.

The first historical wave of voluntary emigration occurred in the 17th century, when hundreds of Finns, along with Swedes, established colonies in what later became the US state of Delaware. Later, the majority of Finnish emigrants settled in the US, Canada, Australia, and in Finland's neighbors: Russia, Sweden, and Norway.

Of the total of one million Finns who emigrated before World War II, about 500,000 went to North America. Finnish immigration to the US - particularly to the Great Lakes area, California, and the Northeast - peaked between 1899 and 1913. Between 1920 and World War II, most Finnish emigrants headed for Canada, mainly because the US tightened its immigration rules.

While many Finns were leaving, people from across Europe settled in Helsinki and other major southern towns from the late 19th century onwards. During Russian rule, between 1809 and 1917, there were at least 20,000 immigrants to Finland, according to most estimates. Between 1917 and 1944, there were also several thousand immigrants.

These first waves of modern immigration included Swiss cheese makers, Bavarian brewers, Norwegian sawmill proprietors, British textile industrialists, Italian ice cream makers, Jewish merchants and Tatar fur and carpet traders. They made a comprehensive and considerable contribution to the Finnish economy.

In addition, well-educated young Finnish women, such as nurses, migrated to Western Central Europe, particularly to Germany and Switzerland, for marriage or work after World War II. There may have been as many as 50,000 such cases altogether, including many who eventually returned with foreign husbands.

Today's emigrants from Finland are mainly highly educated people, particularly in IT, medicine, chemistry, physics, biotechnology, and the arts. Most spend a year or two working in countries like the UK, where they gain experience and professional networks that can be useful back in Finland.

In April 1990, then-president Dr. Mauno Koivisto declared that all Finns living within the former Soviet Union could be considered return migrants to Finland. Many of these people, known as Ingrians, were 17th-century vanguards of Swedish Lutheranism in Ingria, around Neva River, near Saint Petersburg. Because the Ingrians were poorly treated by the Soviet Union, many Finns felt that Estonian or Russian citizens from the Ingria region who were sufficiently Finnish in terms of ethnicity had a morally legitimate right of return.

As of 2003, 25,000 Ingrians who fulfilled the heredity criteria had "returned" to Finland. As of September 2004, some 22,000 Ingrians were still lining up in Russia and Estonia for entry interviews.

Like many countries, Finland's population is growing older, with the bulk of the post-World War II baby-boomers retiring in the coming five to seven years. Over 500,000 people will retire, which is every fifth or sixth person presently in the active workforce. Unless compensating measures are systematically deployed, population decline will inevitably occur after 2025. The speed of the decline may be slowed by more immigration.

(c) Finland Extracts from Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finland

Finland... officially the Republic of Finland[5]
Finnish: Suomi; Swedish: Finland.., is a Nordic country situated in the Fennoscandian region of Northern Europe. It is bordered by Sweden on the west, Norway on the north and Russia on the east, while Estonia lies to its south across the Gulf of Finland.

Around 5.4 million people reside in Finland, with the majority concentrated in the southern region.[2] It is the eighth largest country in Europe in terms of area and the most sparsely populated country in the European Union. Finland is a parliamentary republic with a central government based in Helsinki and local governments in 342 municipalities.[6] A total of about one million residents live in the Greater Helsinki area (which includes Helsinki, Espoo, Kauniainen and Vantaa), and a third of the country's GDP is produced there. Other larger cities include Tampere, Turku, Oulu, Jyv?kyl? Lahti, Kuopio and Kouvola.

Finland was a relative latecomer to industrialization, remaining a largely agrarian country until the 1950s. Thereafter, economic development was rapid, Finland built an extensive welfare state and balanced between the East and the West in global economics and politics.

Finland tops continuously the international comparisons of national performance.[7] Finland ranks the best country in the world in the 2010 Newsweek survey based on health, economic dynamism, education, political environment and quality of life.[8] Finland has also been ranked the second most stable country in the world[9] and the first in the 2009 Legatum Prosperity rating.[10]

Etymology
The name Suomi (Finnish for "Finland") has uncertain origins, but a candidate for a cognate is the Proto-Baltic word *zeme, meaning "land". In addition to the close relatives of Finnish (the Baltic-Finnic languages), this name is also used in the Baltic languages Latvian and Lithuanian. According to an earlier theory the name was derived from suomaa (fen land) or suoniemi (fen cape).[citation needed]

The Swedish-language name Finland has resemblance with the North Germanic place names Finnmark, Finnveden and hundreds of other toponyms starting with Fin(n) in Sweden and Norway. Some of these names are obviously derived from finnr, a Germanic word for a wanderer/finder

See our notes on the word "Hebrew" and its concomitant "wanderer" amongst other Israelite Nations,

http://www.britam.org/Proof/Attributes/roleHebrew.html

and thus supposedly meaning nomadic "hunter-gatherers" or slash and burn agriculturists as opposed to the Germanic sedentary farmers and seafaring traders and pirates.[citation needed] The term "Finn" often refers to Sami people, too. Finn was used to refer to the people of Finland Proper after the 15th century, when the church appointed a bishop, who became one of the most powerful men in the province, over the whole area corresponding roughly to today's Finland.

The population is aging with the birth rate at 10.42 births per 1,000 population, or a fertility rate of 1.8.[27] With a median age of 41.6 years, Finland is one of the oldest countries;[28] half of voters are estimated to be over 50 years old.

The native language of most of the population is Finnish, which is part of the Finno-Ugric language family and is most closely related to Estonian. The language is one of only four official EU languages not of Indo-European origin. The second official language of Finland, Swedish, is the native language of 5.5% of the population.[43] Most of the Finnish people (92%)[44] speak Finnish as their primary language. Finnish is a member of the Baltic-Finnic subgroup of the Uralic languages.

The largest minority language and the second official language is Swedish spoken by 5.6% of the population.[44] ... To the north, in Lapland, are also the Sami people, numbering around 7,000[46]

Most Finns are members of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland (79.7%).[50] With approximately 4.3 million members,[50] the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland is one of the largest Lutheran churches in the world, although its membership has recently been on the decline.[51] The second largest group - and a rather quickly growing one - of 17.7%[52] of the population has no religious affiliation.

According to UNICEF, Finland ranks fourth in the world in child well-being.

The overall crime rate of Finland is not high in the EU context. Some crime types are above average, notably the highest homicide rate in Western Europe.[60] Crime is prevalent among lower educational groups and is often committed by intoxicated persons.

Transparency International ranks Finland as one of the least corrupted countries.

Finland has a highly industrialized free-market economy with a per capita output equal to that of other European economies such as France, Germany, Belgium or the UK.

The largest trade flows are with Germany, Russia, Sweden, United Kingdom, United States, Netherlands and China.

3. " An American who knows History" Defends the Irish
From: konrad siegfried
A problem answered - which you posed on you site

On this page concerning the Irish, Brit-Am wrote:
http://www.britam.org/codesarticles/CodesIreland.html

# Ireland is problematic from a Brit-Am point of view. People of Irish descent in the USA and elsewhere on the whole were pro-Jewish and pro-Zionist.
Individuals of Irish descent as well as Jews recognize a kinship with each other.
On the other hand the independent REPUBLIC OF IRELAND (EIRE) was pro-Nazi in WW2 and refused to accept Jewish refugees fleeing from the Germans. #

Answer:

Ireland was neutral. 50,000 of its nationals still served in the British Army. Only a small handful like 3 or 4, who were stuck in Germany when the war started, were in the German Army.

I have no idea how many of its nationals were in the American Army, as they would most likely have naturalized and become Americans.

Its neutrality stemmed from the fact that a merely 20 years earlier it had fought a nasty war of Independence with England where the English burned town and ravaged the landscape. Ireland did not want to be seen as a stooge of the English, which is why it asserted its neutrality; but while it imprisoned Germans who parachuted over Ireland, any American flier was repatriated to American forces (a violation of neutrality, but the Irish still did it.)

As for taking in refugees, what European nation did? Even we Americans shut our doors. Ireland was a small nation, only about 2 plus million at that time. They did not have the wherewithal to absorb immigrants.

The fear that there would be communists among the refugees was real. A good portion of the early Zionists in Israel were socialist - look at the Kibbutz. Leftism was common among large sections of Judaism at that time.
David Ben Gurion was a sociaist. Unfortunately, Leon Trotsky (of Russian Revolutionary fame), Zinoviev, and a large section of the Communist elite were or had been Jewish (many were later shot by Stalin).

So the Irish fear of communist infiltration was not totally fantastic, though it was exaggerated.

The Irish were never pro-Nazi. What they were was anti-English, and given their history, this is understandable.

BTW: Ireland was called a Free State at the time. It did not declare itself a Republic until after the war.

Were they anti-Semitic? Who wasn't then?

But when push comes to rub, the Irish allowed their nationals to join American and British forces.

They returned American fliers to American forces, while German fliers were imprisoned.

When Belfast (in British held Ulster) was bombed, they sent up fire trucks to help them.

There were Russian, French, Croation, Belgian, Baltic, and Scandinavian (even from neutral Sweden) units in the Waffen SS. Neutral Spain sent 50,000 soldiers to Hitler, called the Blue Army.

There were NO Irish units.

The myth of Irish Nazism is because the Irish were officially neutral, spread by the British who were furious. But one source I read said that the Irish - for all their protests - supplied more men to the British Army than the Orange of Ulster. I have no idea if that is adjusted for population differences.

This is a myth, and one honest English historian noted, said the only real help the Germans got from the Irish was the occasional submarine might surface and purchase a sandwich or some fish from an Irishman in a coastal boat.

Their gov't was bigoted, but so was everyone else's at that time.

Thanks

An American who knows History

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