Fw: A few morning things and thoughts -- from Jyri and something from me

Thanks much to Jyri for a timely and quite interesting post -- more rich grist for our current discussion. Finns know a great deal indeed about their next door neighbor.

As I've previously written, I encountered a good number of Finnish-American students when I did my first year of college teaching at Superior State, northern Wisconsin and just across the river from Duluth, Minnesota.  I tend to get along very well with students, whatever their political views.  I certainly got along very well with the Finns at Superior.  The student political views varied -- but they got on well with each other.  A fair number had parents whose perspective was socialist and some IWW  -- and others came from Communist Party backgrounds (often via the local Tyomies Society.)  (That was the year I used Mills' Causes of World War III and his Listen Yankee! as texts in some of my classes,  It was also the year I met and married Eldri and we wound up in Mississippi at the end of the summer of '61.

Wisconsin State itself was "ruled" by General Jim Dan Hill, an arch conservative of Texas origin.  I had been hired hastily close to the beginning of academic year 1960-61.  Hill had a newspaper column, reactionary to say the least.  Soon after I arrived, he wrote a glowing endorsement of the House Un-American Activities Committee and its twisted film, Operation Abolition -- which badly garbled the good student (SLATE) protests against the Committee in the Bay Area the preceding spring.

I wrote a long response attacking the Committee and its film.  The local paper gave it very good coverage.  That's when I learned a couple of things:  Virtually no one at the College ever  challenged Hill -- and much of the community disliked him very much indeed.  The local Lion's Club quickly invited me as a speaker on HUAC and I was very cordially received.  Many of its members were of Finnish background.  It was a good meeting and, when it was over, its president and I visited for a long time.

He told me of the intense ideological factionalism that had gripped the Finnish cooperative movement in the North Country -- Minnesota, Wisconsin, Upper Peninsula of Michigan.  The time frame was mid '30s into the late '40s.  "People did terrible things to each other in those days," he said.  And then he added, "We finally realized that we are all Finns -- together."

It wasn't very long before we had a vigorous student/community movement against General HIll. Many in our movement were Finnish. Some were Native,  For more on that, see these two related posted: "Fear, Sex, and Babies Galore" and "Horror Story in the Groves of Academe"  http://www.hunterbear.org/organizer_17.htm

Now here's Jyri -- with good and provocative grist:


Morning Hunter,
Good point about the Russkies and Putin. He’s not a latter-day Stalin but he’s certainly a tough customer (former KGB officer and operative) and no one’s fool. Not some happy drunk like Yeltsin, once described by some Russian as “our daily source of joy”.
Not being apologetic, but the number one thing (to my mind) that one has to understand about Russia is that it’s an empire. It’s been clipped around the edges, but it’s essentially the same “Rossiiskaya Imperiya” that’s been around since the days of Peter the Great some three centuries ago. Still intact, which is more than can be said for the other empires that existed back in the day. The Soviet Union was just another name for it, with its own brand of tsars – some better some worse. I was taught in school that the place covers almost one-sixth of the land area of our planet – that fact of geography defines a lot of things. Empire means an imperial mind-set with resulting behaviour. 
More soon about this, but in the meantime here’s an interesting piece of news regarding the snipers in Maidan Square in Kiev during the uprising. It’ll probably hit the media over there today, if it already hasn’t. Either Russian disinformation (they’re very good at that) or then with elements of the truth. We shall wait and see.

 http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/05/ukraine-bugged-call-catherine-ashton-urmas-paet

But now to do my bit for the taxman, the bank, the people financing the car, the power company and a few others.

Best
Jyri



From: Hunter Gray 
Sent: Wednesday, March 05, 2014 4:57 PM
To: Bear Without Borders 
Cc: [email protected] ; [email protected] ; [email protected] ; [email protected] 
Subject: A few morning things and thoughts

The on-going interaction between East and West is obviously very interesting, including from the perspective of international  sociology.  The West, long accustomed to getting its way, is up against a Force that -- as any good strategist of any genre always tries to do -- is at work on its own familiar turf.  The supercilious ethnocentrism of, say, DC and London, comes through transparently in the repeated public efforts to denigrate Putin and, to some extent, Russia in general.  This current situation is not a Stalin/Molotov/Vyshinsky deal -- but it certainly isn't a dog-and-pony show,  Putin is a strong and shrewd guy, never a retreat-personality, and at this point he hold cards, aces, and spades.

I had a long phone and truly excellent visit last night with grandson/son, Thomas Gray Salter (MD).  He and his good spouse, Mimie (of Zambia and UK and a PA), with Baby Willow, are joining the staff at Mayos (Rochester, MN) later this summer.  Thomas never knew his late Mississippi Choctaw father (I did).  But I, and our family, have been a fine substitute and all of us are very proud indeed of Thomas and Mimie and their own little family -- as we are of all of our kids and their connections.  I am sending Willow a copy of my book which is, in its own way, a good basic history of our doings over the many decades.

In the Old Days, in North Dakota and then for several years here in Idaho, Thomas and sometimes Josie (our youngest daughter), were on hand to distribute information leaflets whenever I spoke -- on a variety of topics.  As an organizer, I have always known that people, at a speaking event and often other related things , always want something tangible to carry away with them literature-wise -- and I've always provided that. Most of our family here, including Thomas and Josie, were on hand when I spoke on the civil rights movement and current human rights issues to a very interesting and large gathering:  the combined staffs of the Caribou National Forest and the Bureau of Land Management.  These were the kind of people with whom I grew up in Northern Arizona and with whom I worked for years.  So it was a very friendly meeting -- a number of Natives were among the combined staffs -- and, although it was scheduled to go for ninety minutes or so, it went for almost three hours.

In the early days of my Lupus War, Thomas faithfully accompanied me to every medical meeting -- e.g., bone marrow stuff.  During my three ICU incarcerations, he was always there -- as were other family members at various times.

In the Old Days, we often had eight family members living at our far-up home right here.  There were also several dogs and cats. That's the Indian Way. This worked out just fine.  But in time, Josie and Cameron moved into Pocatello proper and Thomas and Mimie went off to Minnesota and Iowa. Samantha (Maria's youngest) and her friend, Nyck, are in Denver.  It can get a little lonely but still, with the exception of myself, everyone in our family anywhere, has a trusty cell phone.  

This family always takes care of all of its babies and this family always stands together.

Best, Hunter Bear


HUNTER GRAY [HUNTER BEAR/JOHN R SALTER JR] Mi'kmaq / 
St. Francis Abenaki / St. Regis Mohawk 
Member, National Writers Union AFL-CIO

Check out our massive social justice website
www.hunterbear.org  The site is dedicated to our
one-half Bobcat, Cloudy Gray, and to Sky Gray:
http://hunterbear.org/cloudy_gray.htm

SHOOTING LUPUS --  Driving this oft-lethal deadly 
disease of mine back into its genetic cave and into
impotency in an eight year war:
http://hunterbear.org/shooting_lupus.htm

See our very full COMMUNITY ORGANIZING
page -- with a great deal of practical material:
http://hunterbear.org/my_combined_community_organizing.htm

See my  new expanded/updated "Organizer's Book," 
JACKSON MISSISSIPPI -- with a new 10,000 word
introduction by me. This page lists many reviews.
And this book is also an activist's how-to manual: 
 http://hunterbear.org/jackson.htm   

The Stormy Adoption of an Indian Child [My Father]:
http://hunterbear.org/James%20and%20Salter%20and%20Dad.htm:
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