Over the weekend in Vienna, I had the pleasure of dining with a very interesting gentleman (I’ll call him “Chris”) who is a subscriber and new inductee into the Atlas 400 club that I’ve mentioned before.
Chris travels extensively, like me, and we discussed how many countries are quickly becoming police states. In Europe, I would candidly put Finland towards the top of that unfortunate list. My entry into Europe from Thailand last week was marked with yet another atrocious experience at Helsinki airport.
For the third time in as many trips to Finland, as soon as I set foot off the plane I was ‘greeted’ on the jetbridge by squad of armed government agents decked out in paramilitary gear and urban assault rifles.
Their collective arrogance and overinflated sense of self-importance became quickly apparent as they gleefully combed through a random selection of passengers and their personal items.
The next round of faux-security was the passport/immigration checkpoint. In most countries, this is a routine procedure that takes little more than 30-seconds. The Finnish authorities averaged over 2-minutes per person… I counted.
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Tagged as:
bad governments,
finland
This always happens to me.
Whether in Buenos Aires, Beirut, Rome, Bangkok, Zurich, or now Helsinki, I always seem to get caught up in some sort of protest. To be honest, I love protests… I think it’s great when people finally have enough of the system and demonstrate their unwillingness to continue going along with government policies. This happens frequently in other parts of the world, and the less developed the country, the more chaotic the demonstration.
This is a far cry from the United States where police forces set up “Free Speech Zones” to constrain demonstrators and keep them from disturbing the establishment. Participants in large scale U.S. demonstrations like the recent Tea Party Protests are vilified by the mainstream meadia as lunatics and discredited by the White House press office.
I was fresh off a very long flight from JFK to Helsinki that started out with the plane sitting on the runway for almost 4 hours. Having missed my connection to Lithuania, I took the opportunity to head into town and see how Helsinki has changed since my last visit in 2006.
And there it was. In the middle of an absolutely spectacular day in downtown Helsinki were a few thousand highly charged protesters, most of them women, some of them masked. They were chanting in unison and waving a combination of anarchy flags and pink balloons. My Finnish is a bit rusty, but I fortunately found some young ladies to interpret the noise. (videos to be posted soon)
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Tagged as:
finland,
taxes