Helsingin Sanomat reported on Saturday 28th of September about the Huvila occupation that started the day before. You can read the article in Finnish here. In addition to the hateful and misleading title, it contains numerous factual errors.
Already in the title, the concerns of the city’s technical director about the “irreversible” effects of the occupation on the property’s condition are raised without question, even though keeping it empty is clearly the worst threat to the preservation of the building heritage. The city itself knows very well that its negligence has probably caused so much irreversible damage to the beautiful villa that a miracle should happen for somebody to come and fix it up. This kind of attitude in reporting is of course basic oats when talking about us anarchists, but the amount of complete confusion that came later surprised even us.
First of all, the Meilahti manor, which served as the stage for Makamik’s 10 year anniversary spring festival last year, was taken over by Mäyräkopla in the spring of this year, after which social center activities began in the premises under the name of Kaaoskartano. Students against cuts took over the same manor’s dance pavilion half a week later for one weekend, but for some reason, the manors and pavilions, as well as Kaaoskartano and the student group got mixed up in Hesari and the whole takeover was allegedly done by “students”.
Secondly, we said goodbye to the Kulosaaari manor that was taken over for Makamik’s 11 year anniversary spring festival already on the Sunday of the festival weekend, and as far as we know, there hasn’t been any kind of squatting activity there since then. Somehow, however, Hesari has mixed it up with Squat Palmia (also in Kivinokka), which was taken over a few weeks later by Mäyräkopla, and where the functions of Kaaoskartano, which was evicted from Meilahti, were moved, and claims that MAKAMIK is still operating in Kivinokka. Kaaoskartano still has its lodge there at the moment, but we have nothing to do with it other than informal bonds of comradeship and solidarity.
Hesari claims to do quality journalism, but mixes up even simple issues in it’s reporting and ignores Mäyräkopla’s and Kaaoskartano’s significant squatting and social center activities completely. We understand that a layman browsing through the announcements published by numerous groups on different platforms may sometimes get confused, but on such a large platform it would perhaps not be necessary to say out loud things about which one knows absolutely nothing.
This was again a good reminder that fact-based information about occupations and other radical activities can best be obtained from the groups themselves. One can also wonder in which other matters Hesari pulls curves into straight lines or cubes into balls under the publishing pressure of click-bait headlines.