His vacation to Karelia compounded by its history of occupation and destruction by the Russians as well as the influence of legend and landscape had a deep influence on him as an area sacred to Finnish identity and nationalism. Sibelius, like all Finns, was all too familiar with the Russian influence and meddling in Finland. To be clear, Lincoln was not attributing despotism to the Russian people, but the thugs that controlled them: Be it the Tsars of the Winter Palace or the autocrats in the Kremlin, pick your poison. Lincoln’s go to example of Russian despotism in his letter was something every educated human was aware. What Abraham Lincoln’s 1855 letter to his friend Joshua Speed discussed was the political ideology of the inaugural “America First” party, the Native American Party (colloquially the Know Nothing Party), a political party of misfits with no real ideas on governance. As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except blacks.’ When get control, it will read, ‘All men are created equals, except blacks and foreigners.’ When it comes to that I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty-to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.” The cost was always the liberty and security of peoples of non-Russian states who were proximally too far from the safety and security of their own nation’s capital and too close to Russia.Īs a matter of fact, a great American Republican politician (lamenting on the similarity between the current state of US domestic politics driven by conspiracy theory, xenophobia, and anti-immigration rhetoric promoted by overzealous politicians to spark the fear and anxiety of mainly WASP working Americans, and the Russian modus operandi) wrote, “Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. Statecraft, for Russia, has always employed subverting local governments under Russian influence by means of intimidation, invasion, and sometimes war in order to force domestic economic and political stability and regional commerce. Russia has an extremely well documented half millennia long history of inserting itself into the affairs of adjacent non-Russian people since Ivan the Terrible. Although beautiful scenery, the practical function was to serve as a geographical buffer between Finland (a semi-autonomous province of Russia at the time) and Imperial Russia. This stunningly majestic area on the Russian border, with its landscape of forest and lakes, is setting to many events in the Finnish national cycle of myths and legends known as the Kalevala. In 1892, the 35-year-old newlywed Jean Sibelius took his wife, Armas Järnefelt, to the Finnish province of Karelia for their honeymoon.
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