Very interesting!

Although I am mostly ignorant of Finnish history, I have an old M-39 rifle that was apparently used in the Winter War, assuming I have identified the stock joint type correctly. I have hunted some deer with it, but it is mostly to shoot for fun, and as a collection piece. When I first got it, I took it all apart to clean and refurbish everything, and to fix a broken firing pin, and found some dirty pine needles trapped between the stock and the barrel. Assuming that they got in there during the Winter War, I set them aside, and then put them back inside the rifle how I found them, when I put it back together. I guess kind of an an honor to the forgotten Finnish person who endured hardship while carrying it. It is a really good old gun, especially for a Mosin-Nagant, but very heavy. Hehe.

Your thoughts on feuds between villages is interesting as well. Here, there used to be kind of an us-vs-them mentality between the northern and southern parts of the county (which was then a part of Virginia, now a border-county of West Virginia). Apparently it dates back to the American civil war, where the northern part of Pendleton county overwhelmingly voted to remain in the union, whereas the southern part overwhelmingly voted to secede. I live in the southern part, but these tensions seem to have entirely disappeared in my generation. However, as a youngster, many of us kids would get together and have BB-gun wars with the kids from the North Fork. But just for fun, rather than out of a sense of malice. To this day, I still wonder how nobody lost an eye in all that, but I remember only a small amount of blood (and a lot of little purple bruises), haha. But as adults, we all laugh about it and get along fine. :)

Is patriotism and nationalism in Finland closely linked to non-egalitarian philosophies? Sometimes I get confused discussing such things with European friends, because we seem to mean vastly different things when we use those words. It seems like, here in the States (well, at least in the part where I am from), the grassroots sorts of patriotism and nationalism are very closely linked to egalitarian principles, with non-egalitarian philosophies often being shouted down as "un-American". It gets me to thinking that maybe "patriotism" and "nationalism" may not be very useful labels, as they seem to mean entirely different things to different people and to different sub-cultures within my country. Or perhaps they have been used as emotional labels on subjective issues for so long that they have lost any fundamental meaning in the contemporary discourse.

But I dunno..... I am too dumb to figure such things out, LOL.