The objective of my paper is to assess social media discussion on the late 2015 arsons and arson attempts against asylum centers in Finland with particular focus on the rhetorical means used to defend and legitimate such assaults. Finland alongside the rest of Europe experienced a significant influx of refugees from the greater Middle East during late 2015, and a number of installations that housed the newcomers or were designed to fulfil such a function were subjected to arson attempts during the same period of time. While no lives were lost and the overall amount of successful arsons remained low, the string of events was rather exceptional by Finnish standards as the country is commonly seen as suffering from very little political violence.
Finnish social media discussion on the arson attacks featured several rhetorical elements that research literature identifies as a defense or legitimation of reprehensible action. It is the express purpose of my paper to conduct an in-depth assessment of those elements. The work will concentrate upon social media discussion on Hommaforum, the oldest and largest Finnish message board primarily dedicated to opposition towards immigration and Islam. While far from the only social media site that saw the arson attacks being defended and legitimated, Hommaforum provides for an interesting case as its discussants – unlike those on the Nordic Resistance Movement’s website, for example – cannot by default be regarded as supporters of violence. Any defense of the arson attacks will, in other words, have come from the more mainstream representatives of Finland’s anti-immigration milieu. Taken into consideration are discussion threads that concern arson attacks against asylum centers between late September 2015 and the end of that year. While a handful of such attacks have transpired after 2015 as well, it was the end of that year that witnessed the vast majority of assaults take place.
The study employs Albert Bandura’s 1990 theory on disengagement from reprehensible action as its analytical framework. The theory posits that those intent on legitimating or defending reprehensible action may employ, among other strategies of speech, such rhetorical tools as misconstruing the consequences of violence, pinning the blame for the attacks upon the victim, and characterizing violence as a morally upright activity. Alongside assessing Finnish social media discussion on the late 2015 wave of violence, the work will also briefly discuss possible explanations as to why the arson attacks largely ground to a halt during 2016.
The work focuses on a scientifically, socially and politically relevant topic and offers possibilities for further research in other European countries that have suffered from violence against asylum centers. Assessing the rhetorical strategies employed to defend and legitimate violence is furthermore a valuable pursuit as political violence is often preceded by the emergence of a narrative supportive of action. Detecting such speech may, in other words, help to predict the outbreak and escalation of actual violence.
