[aqsalose]

It is difficult to give a comprehensive answer in a fly-by HN comment.

Very brief answer: It was complicated. It is complicated.

Slightly less brief answer: Define reconciliation. I doubt any kind of perfect, ideal reconciliation was ever reached. It is not like there were two sides who agreed to something: there were many political actors, with different opinions. It was a mess, and it still is a mess. Many people who had first-hand experience of the war or the terror or its consequences remained bitter. The distinction between the Red and the White social sphere continued for a long time (Anecdote: there were Red and White country-wide sports unions SVUL and TUL until 1993.)

Some people remain bitter. The kind of people who like to have arguments about history and historical figures continue to debate the matter and legacy of Mannerheim and which was worse, the White terror or the hypothetical Red terror if the Reds had won.

Another anecdote. A couple of years ago a student chapter at one university put a portrait of Mannerheim on the wall of their club room. One professor made a very angry public complaint. I don't know what happened afterwards, but there were lots opinions in newspapers and social media, for a moment.

If we define "reconciliation" as "why there was no further violence, at least not much", one reason was that some of the political leaders on White pushed through torpparilaki (a land reform). SDP could participate in the elections, and due to efforts of some centrist politicians on White side, could once enter a government. Economy was good, the Great Depression wasn't as bad as in many other places. When Winter War happened, many regular people on the Red side felt their lives were improving and were distrustful of Stalin's clumsy propaganda moves (it helped that many Reds who "escaped" to the USSR during 1920s-1930s were shot or imprisoned with other ethnic Karelians and Finns in Stalin's purges; the word eventually got back that the USSR was not a paradise). The Reds were divided: non-communist socialists like SDP leader Väinö Tanner enjoyed electoral support among the working class, but were also quite hated by the pro-Soviet left. Maybe the White-aligned political police simply was very efficient at suppressing the would-be revolutionary left (some true believers on the Red side attempted to continue underground pro-Soviet / revolutionary efforts, not very successfully.)

Other part of the answer is that there was a lot of ...not-exactly-reconciliation for several decades.

Remember, some on the Red side continued with not necessarily reconciliatory political efforts? Some on the White side were actively not pleased about this at all, and some objected to any leftists being allowed to participate in politics at all. Feeling the legacy of their Independence War Victory was being squandered. In the 1920s/30s, for several years, some white extremists burned leftists printing presses, kidnapped and roughhoused lots of perceived communists, killed some, and the state apparatus turned a blind eye. Eventually they proceeded to kidnap bourgeois politicians not deemed anti-communist enough, including the ex-president Ståhlberg. At some point the danger of a genuine coup / intra-white civil war was real. (Google for Mäntsälän kapina.) In the end, after the parties and politics to the left of SDP were effectively banned, the extreme right lost its steam.

After the WW2, many outright communists and other on the Red side of left who had spent 1920s-1930s out of politics or in prison were able to enter the politics (thanks Finland mostly losing the WW2 to the Soviets) in force. In some respects, they got some amounts of revenge, when the most bourgeois party, Kokoomus, could not enter the government for decades because of Soviet objections. Google for Kekkonen and Finlandization.

[doikor]

> one reason was that some of the political leaders on White pushed through torpparilaki (a land reform)

This is a often overlooked but very important part of making the post civil war much more peaceful. A large portion of the reds were tenant farmers (torppari) and giving them their own land basically made them "whites" (basically all the landed farmers were on the whites side) and thus fixing one of the biggest issues a very large portion of the reds actually had with the situation before the civil war.

[jabl]

> Some people remain bitter. The kind of people who like to have arguments about history and historical figures continue to debate the matter

It's a really strange human quirk to get so worked up about historical events. Finland has these, yes, as excellently explained by the parent and parent's sibling comments. In the US you find people who get really really angry if somebody suggests that a civil war 150 years ago wasn't about slavery.

Heck, you'll even find people who somehow identify with ancient Sparta, apparently based on watching that really terrible movie (or even more terrible successor movies), and thinking that Spartans were uniquely badass and honorable and whatnot.

[kaitai]

It's not really a "strange human quirk". Last time I was at a gathering where some older friends had one beer too many and started getting heated about the war, it's because they were talking about family members who were tied to a fence and left to die. Pretty brutal stuff. To you it's a historical event. To my 80-year-old friend it's his uncle, and the trauma his mother carried with her having to take her brother's body off the fence.

I am not that old. When I introduced my now-spouse to my father, my father commented that now-spouse's family was from a town that was "a little Red, eh?" I'm quite aware that my family and my spouse's family were on different sides of the civil war. It's embedded in where our grandparents lived and the roles they had in life. It's embedded in their economic lives and the opportunities they had. Ironically, since my family was rural landowners, the children had to scatter and find different livelihoods, while spouse's family (pushed into factory work earlier) actually ended up more advantageously positioned as life moved to the cities...

You call it history; I call it great-grandparents, three of whom I was lucky enough to get to know.

[zokier]

> It's a really strange human quirk to get so worked up about historical events

You have to keep in mind that Finnish Civil War is not some far history; it is something that touched peoples grand-parents. Somewhat naturally something hitting that close can still be pretty touchy subject

[rat87]

> > Some people remain bitter. The kind of people who like to have arguments about history and historical figures continue to debate the matter

> It's a really strange human quirk to get so worked up about historical events. Finland has these, yes, as excellently explained by the parent and parent's sibling comments. In the US you find people who get really really angry if somebody suggests that a civil war 150 years ago wasn't about slavery.

Because

1. It was totally because of slavery

2. Claiming it wasn't because of slavery tends to downplay historical racism and tends to be associated with modern day racism

[jabl]

Er, right, yes, I agree with you. It seems I got tangled up in my own explanations, sorry about that. That's what you get for writing a comment in a hurry. What I meant to say there seems to be a fraction of the population in the US who really think the US civil war was about "states rights" or whatever, and not slavery, and they get really angry if anybody suggests otherwise.

[johnyzee]

Weird. It was verifiably not about slavery - at least not from the beginning. It was not an issue until well into the war.

Also, I completely disagree with your interpretation. Recognizing that people at that time, on both sides, did not actually care all that much about the plight of the slaves, does not 'downplay historical racism', quite the contrary. It goes a long way to explain why blacks, even after emancipation, never really got a fair chance in America, to this day.

I am not an American and have no dog in the fight, for what it's worth.

[pchristensen]

I was a little startled by your statement, so I charitably tried to figure out where it was coming from. Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_Confederat...) said that the South seceded to protect slavery, but the North attacked the South to put down the rebellion, not necessarily to free slaves.

So I would say that you were technically right that the Civil War was not declared to end slavery, but the overall conflict (and 30+ years leading up to it) was unquestionably about slavery.

[t-3]

Try variable substitution.

If the modern right believed that the left wanted to take all their guns and destroy their way of life, and attempted to secede based on that, it doesn't matter that most on the left don't care at all about limiting gun rights, the war that results will still be about guns, because that is the simple answer. Republicanism (relating to republics, not asses and elephants), libertarian ideals, subordination of government to the people all CANNOT be discussed as motives, because the simple, loud and ideologically clear position of individual vs collective capacity for violence is too big and drowns out the nuance.

Similarly, the actual US Civil War cannot be reasonably discussed, because consideration of any other socioeconomic and historical factors in addition to that of slavery is seen as ignoring or attempting to whitewash the institution of chattel slavery. The rural/urban industrial/agricultural divide is still a big issue in the modern context, and we still avoid actually discussing it, instead focusing on the implications of such a divide: illegal immigration, migrant worker exploitation, human trafficking, etc.

The shifting of the Overton Window feeds back into our perceptions, and reinforces a black/white, everything has an answer worldview.

[krapp]

> Weird. It was verifiably not about slavery - at least not from the beginning. It was not an issue until well into the war.

The civil war was verifiably about slavery from the beginning[0]. South Carolina explicitly mentioned slavery as part of its rationale for secession[1], as did numerous other states[2]. Alexander Stephens, Vice President of the Confederate States of America, declared slavery to be its very cornerstone[3]:

    "our new government['s] foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth."

Even the "states rights'" arguments around the Civil War boil down to specifically the Southern states defending their right to continue slavery without interference from the North. That's what they were seceding over.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origins_of_the_American_Civil_...

[1]https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_scarsec.asp

[2]https://www.historynet.com/which-states-referred-to-slavery-...

[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornerstone_Speech

[johnyzee]

The fact that slavery was part of their state charters does not show that the war was started over slavery.

The fact is that Lincoln upheld the rights of the Southern states with regards to slavery, both before and after the start of the civil war. This is a quote from Lincoln on the campaign trail immediately before his election and the start of the war [1]:

I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, [applause]-that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. (He goes on like this at length)

From Lincoln's inaugural address, after secession and war had started [2]:

I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.

Lincoln also prohibited a policy of promising freedom for slaves that would support the Union in the early stages of the war (several states that were part of the Union were also slave states).

It was only well into the war that the tune was changed, at a politically opportune time, and, as we know, not always with great concern or a great outcome for the former slaves.

I am surprised that people would be taken aback by this. These are well established historical facts, and well known, I guess outside the U.S. educational system.

[1] https://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/debate4.htm

[2] https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/lincoln1.asp

[mistrial9]

I have looked into this topic off and on -- The laws of slavery from the slave-holding States, were absolutely a source of conflict and included in the first shots fired. There were trade issues and disagreement on monetary policy (no single currency yet?).

At that time in US history, multiple large land acquisitions (new states) were in progress after the massive land sale by the French and the repeated defeat of the Spanish in the Far West. Modern Texas had been finalized and the US Presidential Election had regional candidates competing vigorously.

The civil war famously was not very bloody for the first year, with a lot of arguing more than shooting, but neither side stepped back, and the restriction of navigation on land and water led to more battles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War

[pchristensen]

You are focused only on the Union’s publicly stated reasoning for starting the war. Take a look into why the South seceded in the first place. Also, look at the decades of conflict over free vs slave states in the western expansion. Slavery was THE issue in the USA in the mid-1800s.

[pasabagi]

You're misinformed. Read any current, mainstream work of scholarship on the issue.

EDIT: this is a bit short, but honestly, without any rancor, mainstream scholarship is pretty unanimous on this topic. Popular discourse is more divided.

[ZeroGravitas]

> In the US you find people who get really really angry if somebody suggests that a civil war 150 years ago wasn't about slavery.

Yes, and denying the holocaust happened gets people upset for some reason too. Something about telling bare-faced lies, about easily confirmed historical facts, as a way to flaunt a political affiliation to a group that openly considers some people sub-human is strangely political for reasons no one can figure out.

[jabl]

Well, I agree with that angle. I was more wondering about the opposing viewpoint, why do people get attached to a monstrous ideology and claim people under said banner did none of the things they historically did.