So I thought I should at least try to recreate a part of what I wrote into thin air yesterday.

The World Champs made me think of the character and force of patriotism. In a sports event, I have never heard noise as loud as that produced by the crowd on Saturday when Tommi Evilä (Tampere rules!) took the only Finnish medal of the games (see clip of Heike Drechsler interviewing him). I believe the concrete structures of the stadium were shaking. There are two main reasons for the overwhelming response: the huge disappointment over Tero Pitkämäki's failure to win the javelin the previous Wednesday, and the immense historical importance of athletics for the (self-)image of this country. Chris Turner has written a nice English summary of that background.

Patriotism, though, differs from nationalism. To me, 30,000 people yelling for Evilä on Saturday, as the skies darkened above us, exemplified healthy patriotism. Because of this collective zeal, all the other competitors also received a lot of support, and they seemed to appreciate it. If the crowd had started booing at Evilä's rivals - which, to be fair to the tradition of fair play in Finnish sport spectatorship, was quite inconceivable - they would have expressed nationalism in a sick way.

Nationalism, of course, is no stranger to track and field athletics. Sometimes it has lead to outright cheating, even if we ignore doping and, especially, the legendary East German he-women and such specimens as Jarmila and Flo-Jo. Experts still joke and talk about events occurring at the 1980 Moscow olympics. Deliberate mismeasurements in the discus, unfair red flags in the long jump, the stadium gates oddly opening whenever a Soviet athlete was about to throw the javelin... these are an endless source of anecdotes. As is the infamous Evangelisti case from the 1987 worlds in Rome, apparently engineered by the late Berlusconi-style IAAF mafioso Primo Nebiolo. Other famous cheaters, such as my favourites Stella Walsh and Fred Lorz, may not have had any nationalist motivations.

Such foul play is comically sad, but still nationalism is easier to accept in sport than in gun-toting politics, where people regularly die because of it. For the same reason, I can't help feeling it is easier to accept in a small country than in a superpower. Finland and Estonia, albeit undoubtedly patriotic peoples, are unlikely to get too imperialistic and start invading countries. There seems to be a theoretical consensus that offensive wars, or unprovoked invasions, cannot be legitimate expressions of patriotism. They are fuelled by imperialist nationalism, and the public understands this. Therefore, the lack of provocation needs to be hidden and the invasion presented as a defensive measure and an act of philanthropy. This is a simple rhetorical trick. Stalin set out to "liberate" Finland in the Winter War (1939-40); Saddam set out to "liberate" Kuwait in 1990; Bush set out to "liberate" Iraq in 2003. Till the end, Soviet historiography insisted that Finland started the Winter War; till the end, American right-wing mythmakers will insist that Iraq had both WMD and something to do with 9/11; till the end, the same conservative yes-men will present Hiroshima and Nagasaki as acts of charity.

Past conflicts present the hardest challenges for anyone trying to avoid overtly nationalist attitudes. Objectivity seems to downplay the sacrifices of one's dead compatriots. Most Americans whose grandfathers died on Iwo Jima would be hard-pressed to accept the brutal terrorist nature of the atomic bombs. The pressure towards nationalism is probably even stronger when considering a purely defensive battle fought to preserve a country's independence. I know it was impossible not to feel slightly patriotic while listening to my grandfathers wild stories about the frozen hell that was the Winter War. For a balanced view of that conflict, however, it's not enough to remember the 26,662 Finnish soldiers who died. Specifically, one should acknowledge that the greatest human tragedy in that war was Stalin's decision to send masses of ill-prepared Soviet boys north to die in the Finnish forests. Nobody knows how many of them got killed: one Russian source says "only" 126 875, Finnish estimates usually double that figure, and Nikita Khrushchev spoke of as many as a million. In any case, as one of their generals reportedly commented afterwards, the Russians did win just enough territory (10 % of Finland) to bury their dead. If that taught anyone anything, hopefully it was the fact that invading sovereign and patriotic countries is usually a bad idea. They tend to have little desire to be liberated.

I'm not sure there's a point to all this. After all, circumstances make it impossible for lots of people nowadays to feel patriotic toward any country. What this does reveal is that I am confirming at least two stereotypes: one on bloggers and another on Finns. Average bloggers' lack of argumentative coherence, we all know, can only be matched by their desperate need to find something to say. As for Finns, a rather bland but truthful joke will explain the "intro-retrospective" stereotype. This is a joke on national obsessions that I remember hearing from my history teacher some 15 years ago.

An American, a Frenchman, and a Finn were assigned to write a book on elephants, using whatever approach they found interesting.
The American immediately came up with a work called Making Profit out of Elephants.
The Frenchman wrote a poetic essay on the elephant's lovelife.
The Finn had trouble deciding but eventually produced a detailed study bearing the title The Elephant and the Finnish Winter War. 17:35