|
illodiini
|
 |
« on: December 25, 2022, 06:52:49 AM » |
|
This writing by the writer F. E. Sillanpää was published in the Suomen Sosialidemokraatti magazine on Christmas Eve in 1938. The publication caused a great uproar, which, among other things, led to the removal of Sillanpää's works from German bookstores. A year later, Sillanpää was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
(This is more or less a raw translations by Google. I fixed some errors, but if something sounds odd, it's probably my fault)
A Christmas letter to dictators
Gentlemen, I speak to you instinctively, even though I immediately notice that it is not in the right style. I guess with good reason that you yourself don't really like that Mr. title - let's say it's the only title used by perhaps the greatest man on earth. The mightiest of you wants – excuse me: commands – to be addressed as a comrade, and when he's also the bloodiest of you, there's a good dose of humor in that comrade designation. One of you wants to be a leader – or more correctly a director in Finnish – and the third is downright il duce.
Well, Napoleon Bonaparte wanted to be emperor, and the position and attitudes of your dictators closely resemble that man, one of the most remarkable paradoxes in human history. He was - now I'm only talking about Napoleon, not you - one of the biggest evildoers in Europe, whose "life's work" has nothing left but the memory of his crimes in the pages of history. Otherwise he was a very insignificant man, ravaged by a severe nervous disease, who easily lost his temper and his concepts and thereby made himself ridiculous. Both he and you are individuations produced by a special kind of time.
When your great and talented peoples' dark sleepwalker period is over, so are you. Those who have not allowed themselves to be fooled, but have kept pure the spark of high humanity, will emerge. It has required a fight and many have fallen and perished at the hands of your "power". Or rather, only their earthly dust has perished. For your power will not reach higher than the dust of the earth. A lot of blood and tears have flowed under the lashes.
BUT if some have fallen, someone will always make it there, to the moment when the clouds part and the sun of humanity Rises blessing those who wake up from the nightmare. Then the rejoicing will be great, the Jews and the Greeks can embrace each other according to the doctrine that has passed through the dark ages of millennia, during which greatnesses of various names have imagined that they have suppressed it in the dust that they have raised from the earth on their march. Then the joy is so great that we momentarily forget what we just endured.
Only sometime later will we with vague feelings look at your worldly accomplishments, some roads and canals, some draining of swamps - which last mentioned in the eyes of us Finns are quite modest. We look at them like we look at a cemetery. We suspect - and we know - that they have not been born from the people's happy anergy, but a lot of blood and tears have been shed under the blows of the whip.
It is more than likely that the practical meaning of those devices of yours will then be the same as the pyramids of Egypt. But even at that time, the life works of your great – really great – citizens are still fresh, because they have been stored higher than where your most ferocious sowers of death could have soared with their machines. The life works of Dante, Goethe and Tolstoy, Bach and Beethoven have not faded in the slightest - rather, their spirit at the moment of liberation seems even brighter.
And above all, the great Jewish basic doctrine shines even brighter then, the birth of which we here in North and somewhere else can fearlessly celebrate, at least this time as free people. It is the doctrine of great, unselfish love, which you call weakness and laugh at in derision. But it has, as said, lasted longer than the teachings and applications of anyone like you, when humanity reached this age.
WE sometimes find it difficult to restrain our moral rage in the face of your actions, although we should have a quiet moment for you too, dear poor human children; countless such moments of prayer have surely been held for you. When, during the Christmas celebration, we especially focus on remembering the man who truly loved even those who in the most horrific way raped and tortured his earthly being to death, then we forget you, at least for a moment, and the best of us have a benevolent thought for you.
I see in my eyes your mocking expressions; you think our Christmas hymn is the sound of a mosquito next to your roar. But we, for our part, know that our standards are higher than yours, and we strengthen in the conviction that victory will be ours once. Ours, whose motto a great German once summed up in the words: Be a noble person, helpful and good.
F. E. Sillanpää
|
