Mayor Bill De Blasio’s New York City has just criminalized the term “illegal alien”. [NYC threatens up to $250G in fines for using terms like 'illegal alien,' threatening to call ICE, by Sam Dorman, Fox News, September 28, 2019] For where this Cultural Marxist rampage going, just look to Finland, where former Interior Minister (2011-2015) Dr. Päivi Räsänen, is currently under “police investigation” for…quoting a verse from the New Testament.
Finland’s “flip” from a nationalistic democracy like modern-day Estonia to a Politically Correct soft totalitarianism has happened at break-neck speed. Actually no fewer than three members of the Finnish parliament are currently being “investigated” for having broken the Nordic nation’s anti-free-speech laws—laws which can ultimately be traced back to the multiculturalist fanaticism of one judge (Kritarch in VDARE.com speak): Mika Illman.
Finnish police announced in summer that they were investigating Dr. Räsänen, a member-of-parliament for the small, fundamentalist Christian Democrat Party, for a tweet published during homosexual “Pride Week.” In her tweet, she dared to ask: “How does the foundation of the church’s teachings, the Bible, fit with elevating sin and shame as reasons for pride?” She added a verse from the New Testament [Police open investigations into social media posts of al-Taee, Räsänen, by Aleksi Teivainen, Helsinki Times, August 27, 2019]
When the investigation was announced, Räsänen—who caused a huge furor in Finland in 2010 when, as in Interior Minister, she criticized homosexuality in a TV debate—re-tweeted the “illegal” Bible reference:
“I am not concerned on my part, as I trust this will not move on to the prosecutor. However, I am concerned if quoting the Bible is considered even ‘slightly’ illegal. I hope this won't lead to self-censorship among Christians. Rom. 1:24-27”
[Finnish Christian MP under hate crime investigation for quoting scripture, by Heather Preston, Premier, September 3, 2019]
En ole huolestunut omalta osaltani, sillä luotan, ettei tämä siirry syyttäjälle. Mutta olen huolestunut, jos Raamatun siteeraamista edes harkitaan "vähäisesti" lainvastaiseksi. Toivon, ettei tämä johda kristittyjen itsesensuuriin. Room 1:24-27 https://t.co/aGP2mWG6aP
— Päivi Räsänen (@PaiviRasanen) August 13, 2019
According to a Finnish police spokesman, it is a crime in Finland to “insult” a “minority” and homosexuals might feel “insulted” by being told that their behavior is “sinful.” [Police open investigations into social media posts of al-Taee, Räsänen, by Aleksi Teivainen, Helsinki Times, August 27, 2019]
It follows that it is a crime in Finland to quote Romans 1: 24-27:
24 Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonor their own bodies between themselves:
25 Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.
26 For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature:
27 And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet.
Even in a country with Finland’s history (by Western standards) of speech conformity, a new low has been reached. During the autocratic rule of Finnish president Urho Kekkonen (1956-1982), the nation of 5.5 million practiced massive self-censorship to keep the Soviet Union happy, even though meant abasing themselves before Moscow and making life very difficult for dissenters. Books were censored or banned and people were driven out of their jobs if they upset, or might upset, Kekkonen and his enforcers.
And Finland is not used to vociferous argument anyway. It is a country where you conform; where you don’t “rock the boat”…where everyone gets along and tries not to stand out. But, until recently, Finns could at least quote verses from the Bible at their leisure. However, Finland—small and with a history ruled by others, whether Sweden, Russia, or (sort of) the Soviets—always feels the need to conform to what bigger other countries do. Also, levels of trust are so high in Finland that it is relatively easy for opponents of freedom to gain power, because nobody is bold enough to challenge them.
Finland’s transition into a Cultural Marxist Police State was well under way by 2004, when academic Tatu Vanhanen—the then-Prime Minister’s son—was “investigated” when his scholarly research on race differences in IQ was point-and-spluttered about by a Leftist Finnish newspaper [ Comments in interview could bring charges of inciting racism against PM Vanhanen's father Helsingin Sanomat, August 12, 2004]. In 2008, blogger Mikko Ellilä was prosecuted for “insulting a minority” by arguing that Africans are more violent than whites on average, and using VDARE.com (this Steve Sailer review) as a source.[ The trial of Mikko Ellilä 14.3.2008 - English translation, turkkila.blogspot.com, March 25, 2008]. (He was found guilty and fined 360 euros—low because he was on unemployment benefit and fines in Finland are linked to earnings).
In 2009, Dr Jussi Halla-Aho—now an MP and leader of the nationalist Finns Party, which almost won this year’s parliamentary election—was prosecuted for insulting a racial minority. His crime: asking rhetorically, in response to local newspaper Kaleva posing the question of whether Finns were alcoholic due to genetic characteristics, whether Somalis were chronically unemployed for the same reasons. He was also fined for “disturbing religious worship”—by calling Mohammed a “pedophile.” (Muslim scriptures report that Mohammed married a nine-year old—but Noticing this is considered hateful).
Halla-Aho had openly dared his local public prosecutor—Mika Illman, on whom more later—to prosecute and so prove the double standards on “Hate Speech” he was highlighting. Irony-deficient Illman did just that. (I discussed all these cases in 2017: Finland At 100—Frozen By Fear, Dragged To A Multicultural Grave) .
More recently, in 2018, Finland actually had a Finnish Alt Right journalist Ilja Janitskin–who ran a non-PC newspaper called MV-Lehti–extradited from Andorra (a tiny principality, between France and Spain) for “aggravated incitement against an ethnic group”. [Anti-immigrant agitator Janitskin extradited to Finland, in police custody in Helsinki, YLE.fi, April 14, 2018]. Janitskin was sentenced to 22 months in jail. [Anti-immigrant agitator Ilja Janitskin gets 22-month jail sentence, YLE.fi, October 18, 2018]
The other members of parliament are being “investigated” for having possibly “insulted” a “group” are the Finns Party’s Juha Mäenpää and the governing Social Democrats’ Hussein al-Taee, an Iraqi who came to Finland when he was ten.
Al-Taee is being “investigated” for posts on Facebook around a decade old in which he allegedly used insulting language about homosexuals and Jews, compared Somalis to “terrorists” and referred to Saudi-Arabians as “child f---ers”. (Marriages to girls as young as 10 were legal in Saudi Arabia until fairly recently, and the Grand Mufti objected strongly to proposals to raise the age of consent to 15.)
This tenuous Finnish attitude to free speech been made much worse by one judge and former public prosecutor who has devoted much of his career to curtailing the right of Finns to express their opinions: Mika Illman [Email him]
Illman, 50, is part of Finland’s 5% Swedish-speaking minority, which is hugely over-represented in the county’s elite. (In 2011, almost 25% of board members of the fifty biggest companies in Finland were Swedish-speakers—Finland-Swedes over-represented on company boards, by F. Jansson, Social Europe Journal, September 2011). The Swedish minority have their own political party, the Swedish People’s Party, which is rabidly pro-multiculturalism—perhaps unsurprisingly as many Finnish nationalists want to stop Finns having to learn Swedish at school and to abolish Swedish as the country’s second official language. (Only if a commune’s Swedish minority drops below 3% does it become “monolingual.” Until that happens, all public services must be offered in Swedish as well as Finnish). A former Finns Party MP, James Hirvisaari, has openly accused Illman of trying to manipulate the Finnish legal system to shut down Finnish nationalists and thus protect the Finnish-Swede privilege from criticism
Illman’s Swedish-language doctoral thesis set out draconian criteria by which speech about ethnic groups could be judged as criminal. It has become the key source to which the police and prosecutors turn in deciding whether or not to persecute a Finn for his opinions.
Subsequently, Illman--the son of a (gentile) professor of Jewish Studies and the brother of Ruth Illman, a professor of the same subject, author of Music and Religious Change among Progressive Jews in London [2018]--was appointed the chief public prosecutor for a region of southern Finland. In this position, he became the country’s Hate Speech-Finder General.
Cross-examining the blogger Mikko Ellilä, who had dared cite VDARE.com, Illman sneeringly enquired:
“One of your exhibits is a review of the book IQ and the Wealth of Nations published on the website of an organization called VDare. What kind of an organization is this? . . . Is it an objective and respectful organization?”
[ The Finnquisition And VDARE.COM, May 13, 2008]
You’d think that a public prosecutor would be politically neutral, but not in Finland. Illman has been a member of an organization called “DEMLA” (“Social Democratic Lawyers”), whose members had links to East Germany in the 1980s.
Illman was seemingly happy that Hallo-Aho had been successfully prosecuted, likely because Hallo-Aho’s offending blog post was actually entitled “A Bait to Mika Illman”—so notorious had Illman become for prosecuting “hate speech.” Chillingly, when interviewed after Halla-Aho had been found guilty for challenging him, Illman told a Swedish-language newspaper
“It is good that the judges now have gotten a precedent. The Supreme Court has set a limit to how much the one criticizing the power brokers can provoke and exaggerate”
[Yle: Halla-aho överklagar domen, HBL, June 8, 2012]
The court had found that Halla-Aho’s post was entitled “A bait to Mika Illman” deliberately to cause offence, apparently meaning that Halla-Aho by extension was also being deliberately offensive to Somalis and Muslims [Religious Insult and Blasphemy in Finland, by Tuomas Äystö, Blasphemy and Freedom of Expression, 2017, p.332]. So Halla-Aho was found guilty, in other words, partly because he’d had the temerity to bait Illman.
Proof that Illman’s prosecution of Halla-Aho was personal: the fact that Illman declared that the notorious “Mohammed Cartoons” published by French magazine Charlie Hebdo were legal in Finland because Finland’s hate speech laws were “the same as France’s” [Illman: Pilakuvien levittäminen ei olisi viharikos, Karjalainen, January 11, 2015]. But Hallo-Aho would not have been prosecuted in France.
Illman is now a judge in overwhelmingly Swedish-speaking and white Ekenäs, where his wife, Eva Fagerholm, is the town’s registrar, his daughter, Jenny, is an award-winning “young entrepreneur” [Deras müsli går till final, by Eva Hagman, Västra Nyland, March 10, 2016 ] and his son, John, is an activist in the Swedish People’s Party, having been a local election candidate in 2017 [Antalet kommunalvalskandidater har rasat för Kristdemokraterna i Raseborg, by Tove Virta, YLE, March 2, 2017]. But Illman is vehemently opposed to those living in more “enriched” areas of Finland—where family life is more challenging—being able to discuss the problems caused by this enrichment. (Immigration is in Swedish-speaking areas—ironically, the government doesn’t send refugees there because they wouldn't learn Finnish).
Illman has called for compulsory moderators on all internet discussions forums in Finnish [We Have Ways of Making You Moderate, Gates of Vienna, May 13, 2007]. In his 2005 doctoral thesis, Illman argued for much stronger anti-free-speech legislation.
Illman is quite clear that studying race differences in, for example, intelligence, should be criminal:
I believe that the wording of the said provision of the Criminal Code should be interpreted in such a way as to exclude, as a general rule, expressions in which the speaker merely expresses his view that a particular ethnic group is superior to certain others. Such an interpretation is, in my view, in the best interests of a pluralistic and democratic society.
In fact, he’s upfront about the fact that such prosecutions have, and should have, a nakedly Leftist aim:
The purpose of criminalization is ultimately to protect a pluralistic society through the threat of punishment.
(From his Ph.D. thesis Hets mot Folkgrupp, my translation.)
In other words, the legal system should be centered around protecting Multiculturalism.
For this reason, Finns Party MP James Hirvisaari said frankly in 2013 that Illman was “politically corrupt.” Rather than debate this, Illman’s deputy Jorma Kalskee simply criticized this opinion’s being expressed at all: “I can’t remember during my 40-year career of ever hearing an MP that is a member of the legal committee using this type of language against the judicial authorities.” Illman just scoffed: “I couldn’t care less what Hirvisaari says”. [Kansanedustaja halveksii oikeuslaitosta: “Sairasta, sairasta”, by Linda Pelkonen, Uusi Suomi, February 2, 2013]
With Illman’s influence over Finland’s legal system, it is no wonder that Muslim “refugee” gangs in the northern Finnish city of Oulu were able to get away with grooming and gang-raping Finnish teenage girls, one of whom killed herself, for so long—the outrage was only revealed when a nationalist councilman exposed it online. It is no wonder the police and mainstream newspapers tried cover-up what was happening. It is no wonder that the victims’ fathers approached the nationalist councilman about what was taking place rather than the press or the police.
For them to talk about what was occurring risked prosecution in the Neo-Soviet Finland that Illman has helped to create. People simply fear to speak the truth.
And it is no wonder that the rapists received laughably lenient sentences of no more than 4 and half years.
To Illman and his ilk, people repeating the facts about Somali average IQ or quoting Bible verses are far serious crimes than what Muslim refugees are doing to working-class white teenage girls.
All of these rapes, as well as the teenager’s suicide, should be on Illman’s conscience.
Mika Illman is a dangerous man. He is a danger to freedom of thought, to democracy, and to civilization.
Hopefully, however, the clown world Illman has pushed for has gone too far in investigating a Christian for quoting a Bible verse. When something becomes ridiculous, it begins to lose its sacredness.
Harri Honkanen [Email him] is a student of Scandinavia.
