*Peter Brimelow to speak in Bodrum, Turkey at the third annual conference of the
Property and Freedom Society, May 22-26, 2008. Click for details.*
05/12/08 - Are
Human Beings Alike Or Different? The Evidence Is In,
But It’s Hard To Talk About, by Steve Sailer
The Finnquisition And VDARE.COM
There's a free speech trial going on
in Finland, which is under the kind of "hate speech"
tyranny that
Paul Belien reported on for us in 2005:
“The Darkest Corners Of Our World”?—Bush Can Start With
Europe’s Hate Crime Crackdown. But this case
hasn't gotten as much attention as the Canadian
“Human Rights” commissars’
attack on Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant, because all
the free speech has been in Finnish, which nobody speaks
except, well, Finns.
Finns have a high rate of literacy
and education and many of them speak English, so we have
some volunteer translations of the court proceedings.
Here's what's happened: Mikko Ellilä
is a
blogger, who posted a rant on his blog about
Africans and African immigration in Finland and
elsewhere. (Excuse me for using the word rant—if you're
a conservative you always hear that everything you've
written is either a rant or a screed, but in this case
it's more or less appropriate.)
The awful majesty of the Finnish
legal machine is coming after him for a blog post.
State Prosecutor Mika Illman: The text under
discussion, "Society
Consists of People",
[VDARE.COM note: Aside from the free speech
issue, be advised that the link contains nude
pictures—not pornography, but a picture of
Michelangelo's David, and several pictures of African
tribesmen and women, also nude, for comparison]
has been published
on the Internet. In the text, Africans are slandered and
insulted. It includes material that is prohibited in
section 11 of the penal code and that should therefore
not be disseminated. I demand that the text be removed
from the Internet. It is indisputable that the text has
been disseminated as described in the penal code. What
is in dispute is whether the statements included in the
text are illegal. This case is not about freedom of
opinion. Mr Ellilä is free to hold any opinions that he
wishes. However, the
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights
prohibits abusing these rights. Freedom of speech may
not be misused.
[Turkkilaista
tuumintaa: The trial of Mikko Ellilä 14.3.2008--English
translation]
Note that the business about the
"International Covenant"(a UN document which the
United States has
signed but not ratified) is usually a censor's way
of saying that even if his country had free speech,
international law would force him to crush dissidents
with whatever local legal machinery is available. A
cease-and-desist order, for example, could prevent a
journalist from writing at all. (Mark Steyn actually
expects this: "My career in Canada will be
formally ended next month.")
The questioning at Mikko Ellilä’s
trial contains exchanges like this:
Illman: You write, "For the Africans,
looting,
rape,
nepotism, corruption, clan warfare, superstition and
impulsive homicide are business as usual". What is this
claim based on?
Ellilä: On well-known facts. There are a lot of
dictators and wars in Africa. There was a genocide in
Rwanda in the 1990s due to intertribal conflicts between
the
Hutus and the Tutsis. Apart from the
Darfur crisis in Sudan, there was also a
civil war in Sudan between the Arab Muslim
government in the north and the black Christians and
other non-Muslims in the south. In Congo, the dictators
Mobutu Sese Seko and
Laurent Kabila killed millions of people. In
Zimbabwe, the dictator
Robert Mugabe has killed hundreds of thousands of
people.
Idi Amin, the dictator of
Uganda, killed hundreds of thousands of people. I
could go on and on about this. Don't you ever read
the
newspapers or watch the
news on TV?
[VDARE.COM note:
emphasis added]
Good question. Worth asking in any
discussion of immigration—are the newcomers fleeing the
problems of their home country, or are they
bringing them
with them?
Illman: But you write, "for the Africans". How do you
know that, for example, some African family living
in Finland feels this way?
[VDARE.COM
note: Emphasis
added, again. The reason why its now illegal for Finns
to say bad things about Africa is because Finnish
government policy has
imported Africans who will be offended.]
Ellilä: I don't think anyone who can read and write
would interpret that passage as referring to every
single African in the world. Likewise, the phrase "men
are taller than women" does not mean that
all men would be taller than all women. I am talking
about the statistical averages of large populations.
Which is also a good point. But
here's the point in the testimony that really excites us
at
VDARE.COM:
Illman: One of your exhibits is a review of the book IQ and the Wealth of Nations
published on the website of an organisation called VDare.
What kind of an organisation is this?
Ellilä: I don't know. I found the review by using
Google.
Illman: Is it an objective and respectful
organization?
Ellilä: I have no idea. I merely used Google to find
information about the book by Richard Lynn and Tatu
Vanhanen.
[VDARE.COM note: Vanhanen is Finnish himself,
the father of the Prime Minister of Finland, and a
respected scholar at Tampere University. He's also been
threatened with
prosecution.]
That review
happened to include a diagram of over a hundred IQ
studies conducted during the 20th century, which is what
I was referring to in the exhibit. I wasn't referring to
the review itself, which I didn't find too interesting.
First of all, VDARE.com is as
"objective and respectful" as we can manage, but
what we try really hard to be is accurate and
truthful. You see all those links in the text? Click
on them, and you'll find the originals of everything
we're quoting, so you can see that they're true, and you
can, if you want, get the full context.
And while we're sorry that Mr.
Ellilä didn't find Steve Sailer’s review too
interesting, VDARE.com is frequently the only place some
of this material is available. For example, National
Review
used to publish
J. Philippe Rushton, but they don't any more.
Rushton hasn't changed, nor have his articles.
National Review has
changed.
The Finnish Inquisition transcript
contains a number of places where quotes from the
original blog post seem to be redacted, possibly they
aren't even allowed to publish it in a transcript, or
possibly the person who published the transcript was
worried about the Finnquistion himself, since it's on a
Finnish website. But it looks really odd.
Quotation III: "Were black-majority areas to be
independent city states, they.. [ *illegal content
omitted* ] ..manifest themselves in their behaviour."
Quotation IV: "Importing Negroes into Europe lowers..
[ *illegal content omitted* ] ..if Negroes weren't
welfare bums living off taxpayer money."
[VDARE.COM note:
Remember, the original
post, or a copy,
is still online,
with pictures as noted above.]
The last point, on which Ellilä was
questioned, has to do with the idea that
immigration imports poverty. Unskilled
immigrant workers make money for employers, and make
a pitifully small amount of money for themselves, but
they cost the more productive taxpayers money in health
care and schooling.
Last year, Steve Sailer
wrote
“In 2005, the
Washington Post sent two reporters to Finland
for several weeks to find out why Finland has ‘the
world’s best educational system, produces such talented
musicians and architects, and has more
cell phones per capita than
Japan and
America.’
“Sitting here in my pajamas in California, I could have
saved the Washington Post all the expense. The
most important reason why Finland is so Finlandy is
because it is full of Finns.”
And more recently, Steve
noted that the Wall Street Journal had the
same idea, publishing a story called :
What Makes Finnish Kids So Smart? Finland's teens
score extraordinarily high on an international test.
American educators are trying to figure out why.[By
Ellen Gamerman, February 29, 2008]
"American educators" were "trying to
figure out why" so they could make the
No Child Left Behind act work.
Sorry!
Is African immigration a problem in
Finland? A fairly small one ("A
cloud as small as a man's hand ") by the
standards of, say,
Paris. But it’s growing. And remember, Finland
didn't have this problem at all until they
invited it in.
The
CIA World Factbook article on Finland mentions the
following ethnic groups: Finn 93.4%, Swede 5.6%, Russian
0.5%, Estonian 0.3%, Roma (Gypsy) 0.1%, Sami 0.1% (2006)
A
2005 story from Helsingin Sanomat, (in
English) says
“At the beginning of 2004, a total of 2,346 Somalis
lived in the capital city, amounting to some eight
percent of the total number of foreigners.
“In addition, 715 people who have Somali backgrounds but
who have received Finnish citizenship live in Helsinki.
“Large numbers of Somalis arrived in Finland in the
early 1990s when the civil war raged in Somalia. In
fact, the Somalis form the largest group of refugees
both in Helsinki and in Finland as a whole.
“The age structure of Somalis and other African
immigrants differs from that of other immigrant groups.
There are plenty of children and young adults, and very
few people over the age of 65. One quarter of the
Somalis were born in Finland.”
A recent story in the same paper
talks about the use of the African drug khat,
and a September 19, 2004 article is titled
Health care personnel to be given guidelines on female
circumcision. The Finnish Government has a
website which says "Mutilation
of genitals is a crime in Finland."
Unfortunately, it also seems to be a crime to condemn
the
cultures that do that sort of thing.
It is still not a crime in the
United States, so far. Which means that VDARE.com
can continue to publish the facts on various questions
to “The
Darkest Corners Of Our World”.
Unfortunately, that no longer means places like
Somalia, but
Belgium,
Holland,
Canada, the
United Kingdom,
Sweden…and Finland.
Email Mikko Ellilä.
If you want to email or
print out, format by clicking on this permanent URL:
http://www.vdare.com/fulford/080513_fulford_file.htm
************
accepted.
The Fulford File, By
