No such thing as a good national identity, no such thing as good ethnocentrism

Ended up down a rabit hole of trying to see if a callout post I saw had any merit and it ended up with me reading a bunch of extremely informative articles about Karelian rights and how "suomalaistaminen" was also enacted against them as a way to pave over the fact that we just decided to Do Some Colonialism in Karelia, same as in Lapland.

Like, I never felt much of a connection to a Finnish identity, y'know? Growing up with most of my positive relationships being in English (with my mom's encouragement) and generally just being really ill-suited to society until I was about twenty honestly did more to hasten my general alienation from society than work ever did, and has so far, and a lot of the bonding with strangers I've done has been with other people alienated from Finnish society, which turns out to be a lot of immigrants and minorities. Honestly, to this day I had a harder time settling in with my work b/c of the anti-Romani and anti-Somali racism.

But that doesn't really change the fact that my disconnect to my culture as a white Finn is just not the same. Finnish nationalism being a comforting blanket that I could wrap myself in, a sense of Finnish cultural heritage in the absence of meaningful community, is honestly just as much of a fabrication as other nationalist identities, and is just as virulent about self-maintaining as other nationalist identities. I still find the "sob-story" (I'm allowed to say that, just like I'm allowed to say I bullied people into accommodating me) about reclaiming Finnish identity in the face of Russification, after pushing for Finnish language and culture to be treated at least as equal to Swedish language that had been imported here over the puddle relatable in the way you do when you've been excluded and your contributions devalued and you just wanna see yourself accepted as you are.

But, yeah, I guess this just means that Finnish nationalism is an edifice I'm just gonna have to let go of if I want to address the mental dissonance. I've been drifting away from it anyway, but mostly out of distaste of how "Finnishness" just gets weaponised over and over against Finns that aren't sufficiently white, and how non-Finns get treated in this country despite the fact that out society purports to hold egalitarian values in high regard. I've never known how to address the losing sense of someone trying to pit me against someone.

I guess I just had to be disillusioned properly, like, I've always thought a lot of anarcho-syndicalists and anti-statists have good and practical ideas, I've just been at a loss on how you could ever coordinate anything without creating an elective identity to create a sense of working together, just for the sake of coordination. And frankly, I don't think I can do things out of a global sense of interconnectivity, because in the global sense everything is predicated on someone's arm getting twisted. I am actively educating myself to go work a job that wouldn't exist if it wasn't for the pillaging of Africa and the continued need for conflict minerals. But a national identity isn't going to give me the sense of "belonging" and "being useful" that I want -- it's only gonna be used to pit me against someone else saying "I don't want that".