Politics & Power Quote by Harri Holkeri

Holkeri’s line carries the calm authority of someone who lived close enough to history to treat it as weathered fact, not ideology. He frames Finland’s 1918 Civil War as a trauma that was once legible in daily life, “visible” in the way communities segregate themselves, in who gets jobs, in whose grief is publicly honored. That word does quiet work: it suggests that national wounds aren’t abstract; they show up in faces, silences, and local power.

Then he pivots to the Second World War as a kind of brutal solvent. The subtext is less “war is good” than “external threat rearranges internal politics.” For Finland, the Winter War and Continuation War created a shared narrative sturdy enough to cover older fractures: defending the state becomes a story that both former Reds and Whites can inhabit without relitigating the past. Holkeri is describing a shift from class-based memory to nation-based memory, from contested legitimacy to collective survival.

But there’s also a politician’s sleight of hand in “I do not see any more wounds.” It’s a claim about perception as much as reality, and it does what leaders often need it to do: certify reconciliation as completed, making further demands for reckoning sound excessive or divisive. His “my generation” is doing ideological heavy lifting, casting unity as earned through sacrifice and implying that younger Finns should inherit gratitude, not grievance.

In context, this reads like late-20th-century Finnish consensus culture speaking: social peace, pragmatic politics, and a preference for forward motion over prolonged moral accounting.