This year’s Christmas in Finland has been sullied by WAYCISTS. At least, that’s the opinion of the state-run broadcaster and a major progressive broadsheet (think: New York Times), because the traditional Christmas play featuring a the Wise Men of the East uses — gasp! — a character in blackface to portray the dark-skinned king.
The horror!
KGS of Tundra Tabloids has the story:
Finnish news media tries stirring up angst against Christmas play because of traditional black character
This is an innocent and endearing traditional Finnish Christmas play, which is why they (Leftists/media) are now attacking it…
I tweeted about it earlier, stating that:
It was only a matter of time that would come under assault, every year I’ve watched the performances in Jysk, wondering when will the nutjobs come after it. Well, now the fake newsrag HS wants to make it an issue, I hope normal Finn’s tell them to stuff it.
It’s simply a play based upon the gospel of Matthew telling of the Wise Men’s journey to honor the newborn child Jesus, and of King Herod, who orders his soldiers to murder all of the young Jewish boys in hopes of getting this newborn.
The state broadcaster YLE’s article on the Christmas play (in Finnish, Tiernapojat). It tries to connect this play, in which a character playing the King of the East (thought to be of dark complexion) darkens his face, with other cultural Christian traditions using ‘black face’.
Most followers of this website already know about Black Pete of the Netherlands, a pixie, or sprite of a character that helps Santa deliver presents to the children for Christmas. That has been regularly attacked by the same forces in the Netherlands (as now here in Finland), annually making its way into the international press. The HS and YLE are now trying to do that with the Tiernapojat.
In Holland, the pains of the local Black Pekka or Zwarte Piet tradition in the local Christmas tradition. In Finland there is still no debate about The Tiernapojat yet.
In that one line, YLE sets up its entire premise behind the story, to cause a commotion over a simple, cute, endearing Christmas play telling a gospel story. No one ever looked at it as ‘racist’, nor should they. YLE then interviews an obscure music teacher, Minja Koskela, and Muslim activist, Marya Abdulkarim to deliver what they think is the ‘coup de grâce’ to the play as a whole:
According to the music teacher, researcher Minja Koskela, Tiernapojat are no longer in school.
— Blackface is a racist practice, it has racist roots, and even if it is not understood as racist, it still is. Period.
According to Marya Abdulkarim, a national activist, blackface mocks the situation and characteristics of the subordinate. It caricatures minority representatives. The tradition is based on abuses of power and oppression, says Abdulkarim.
So who are these people that YLE sought out to diss this traditional play, making them the go-to people on anything? Minja Koskela is a self-proclaimed feminist, teacher, blogger and researcher who wants to end gender roles in school. So she’s a bona fide Leftist kook. Marya Abdulkkarim is a sharia supremacist who is supposedly a female ‘Muslim rights’ activist and insists that Finland is inherently racist. Yet another kook.
I don’t need to dig deeper into the article, which basically has little to say about the Finnish Tiernapojat Christmas tradition (because there’s really nothing negative about it). The brunt of the article focuses on the Dutch tradition of Black Pete. This is simply “guilt by association” when there’s absolutely no case for it. There’s no connection between an ethnic white kid playing the role of a black king, and Black Peter. They’re making something up out of whole cloth for a political agenda, and at the expense of the kids who love rehearsing the lines and acting for audiences during Christmas. Making these kids and the parents who support them into racists is beyond the pale, and racist in itself. This is a gross attack of Finnish culture and its people, plain and simple.
The “cultural appropriation” exercised by white indigenes in Europe when they put on Mexican sombreros or blackface etc. is surely offset by non-Europeans appropriating Europe-invented technology such as TVs, aircraft, ships, automobiles, sewing machines and pretty well anything else (ex Chinese inventions, cf. Joseph Needham) .
Recently an aide to the ALP, Aust. Labor Party leader Shorten resigned/had to resign because someone discovered a years-old photo of him blackfacing at a party, I believe. NB: Shorten’s party holds many Federal seats in the Lower House that contain more than 10,000 Muslims each as per the 2016 Census. Most such seats in Aust., are in fact held by the ALP currently, the great majority being located in Sydneyabad.
I ask myself how the advance guard of the da’wah and/or hijra adepts would view African Christians who, far from needing to blackface and fresh into Europe from the odd Advent explosion and machete affair in their West African village church, just want to portray one of the 3 Kings of the Orient at Epiphany?
Have any readers encountered SJW ukases on this subject? Do tell.
The very notion of cultural appropriation is silly beyond belief.
Throughout human history, peoples and civilisations tried to spread their cultures, even impose them by force on other peoples and civilisations.
And people have always been glad when elements of their culture were imitated by others. Poles were happy that everywhere in Europe people danced polkas and mazurkas, Italians are happy that all over the world people cook pizzas and spaghetti, and I believe that Japanese are proud that their martial arts are carefully studied on all continents.
All this resentment of ‘cultural appropriation’ is absolutely phony, it is just a new, wholly artificial pretext to complain invented by people for whom resentment is the only thing that gives a semblance of meaning to their drab and useless lives.
The “Comrades” have spoken! Off to the Re-education Gulag with them! My grand-daughter has a golly that she adores. “Didimo” the golly attracted the ire of her nursery minders. They tried to ban her and my son from the Nativity play a year or two back because of ‘Didimo’. My wife is mullato from Panama and she really has no time for PC sensitivities. They visibly cowered onec my beloved wifed opened up on them. “All my family children in Panama have a “golly”- they are very popular. I send them across on my visits back home!”.According to my Gran-daughter Didimo flies as well by living on a diet of baked beans. He is currently trying to show his pals how to do the same. He considers himself an English gentleman today- fully assimilated too! He still lives happily with his keeper.
Honestly the Left are sick in the head. We purchase him from Australia. Even there they are now “Banned”. These activist will happily prescribe hormone treatments to 3 years old ‘gender confused’ nursery infants but play hell over a doll, known since Egyptian times, made by the local slave workers to protect them against evil spirits in the tombs there. They acted as a talisman. Unfortunately ‘Didimo’, has not been very effective in protecting us from Leftwing evil spirits.
The “W.O.G.S.” in golly (***) stands for ‘Workers on Government Service.’ This was confirmed by my aged father who was in Egypt in the War.’
The Workers on Government Service made these dolls as talismen known as “Ghuls” hence gollies. ‘Ghul’ is Arabic for spirit related to the dead.The Left simply make these fake links with the ‘Black Petes’ simply to create trouble and mayhem.
http://jinn.wikia.com/wiki/Ghul
I am glad your granddaughter has such sensible grandparents. And such a lovely golly. She will have at least some warm memories of her childhood, unlike children raised in politically correct families.
Oh. If anything like this ever happens here in Czechia, it will ruin the entire Three Kings carolling tradition. Our Three Kings song is ALL ABOUT the black guy. He’s literally the star of the show.
The most common version goes like this:
The three kings go from house to house, singing:
“We Three Kings are coming to you from afar, to wish you luck, health and long life. From distant lands we are coming, for Bethlehem we are headed.”
A homesteader responds to their song, looking specifically at the black guy:
“What about you, the black one, standing in the back with your chin sticking out?”
The black guy responds:
“I fully admit being black, for I hail from the land of the Moors. Harsh sun is to blame for my color.”
“You shouldn’t have stayed in the sun if you didn’t want to get tanned.” sings the homesteader.
To which, the Kings respond: “Sun is a precious gem to celebrate the Christ’s birth.”
The black guy then steps forward and sings:
“I, the black one, I step forward and wish you Happy New Year.”
And the two remaining kings add: “We also step forward to wish you Happy New Year.”
After that, the drinks are handed out (if the Kings are adult). The Kings mark the homestead’s door with a blessed chalk (C+M+B) and receive a gift (usually foodstuff, like fruits, pies or smoked meat products, or some spare change).
If we take away the black guy, the whole thing would consist of the Kings and the homesteader awkwardly staring at each other! 😉
Of course, these days it wouldn’t be hard to find a real black guy… but, what would we do with him for the remaining 364 days when he is not needed? 😛
We had an incident where a boy dressed up for a party at school as his favourite footballer–who just happened to be a few shades darker–and used boot polish, or dark makeup. Now, this is Australia, where we don’t have a history of African slaves, and putting on makeup to make you look more like a darker person you wish to emulate, or to play a dark-skinned person in a play, isn’t ‘blackface’. Blackface always involved big smiley white lips and white gloves, as I recall, and was a caricature. Australia doesn’t have a history of ‘blackface’ either. Olivier as Othello? The opera movie of Vickers as Otello? Have they been banned yet? The ‘offence’ industry is out of control–but you all know that.
@Salome:
I temporarily play devil’s advocate to point out that any hyperventilating SJW would refer you to 1. black Aborigines 2. the Kanaka South Sea islanders who worked in Queensland sugar cane before 1900, the practice
of bringing them there being known as “blackbirding”.
So the answer to such SJWs, not that they will listen once outside their safe space, is that if they had any political acumen as self-styled progressives, they would drop their identity politics divisiveness. Instead they would work to build cross-race coalitions for what really matters, that is, the precarious gig economy for young people, no tenancy protection law worth a damn, the housing bubble, etc.
Can someone translate waycist?
WAYCIST is the same as “racist”. It’s the way Elmer Fudd might say the word.