06/08/2021
The U.S. is obviously living through a Mao-style Woke Cultural Revolution, but at least it has the First Amendment as the school board who suspended a teacher with normal ideas about “pronouns” found out [Judge orders Loudoun schools to reinstate teacher, calls suspension unconstitutional, ‘vindictive,’ by Neal Augenstein, WTOP, June 8, 2021]. In Finland, a former government minister is currently being prosecuted simply for quoting from the Bible [Ivy League law profs blast prosecution of Christian politician, The Christian Institute, June 4, 2021]. This is part of a process whereby all European resistance to Cultural Marxist Political Correctness, above all to the Great Replacement, is being suppressed by the Ruling Class [Flemish activists receive prison sentences for ‘Stop Islamization’ banner, Free West Media, June 5, 2021]. And it’s coming to an America near you.
Dr. Päivi Räsänen, a medical doctor, is the former leader of the small, fundamentalist Christian Democrats. It currently holds 5 seats in Finland’s 200-member parliament. From 2011–2015, she was Finland’s Interior Minister as part of a multi-party coalition government. But now she has been charged with “Hate Speech,” specifically “incitement against a minority group,” due to a pamphlet she wrote on homosexuality in the Finnish Lutheran Church, her comments in a TV interview that “Pride events celebrate acts and relations that the Bible calls sinful and shameful,” and her comments on Twitter and Facebook, including posting an image that included Bible quotes [Ex-interior minister Räsänen charged with hate speech, Yle Uutiset, April 29, 2021].
I’ve reported before on Scandinavia’s, and specifically Finland’s, seriously dodgy history when it comes to free speech — especially with regard to Third World immigration.
Thus in 2004, there were calls for prosecution of the then-Prime Minister’s father (!), academic Tatu Vanhanen, whose peer-reviewed research (with Richard Lynn) proving that Africans have lower IQ than white people had been reported in the leading Finnish newspaper and enforcer of the new morality, Helsingin Sanomat.
In 2009, Dr Jussi Halla-Aho, an academic and True Finns politician, was convicted of “incitement to ethnic or racial hatred,” for wondering, in response to local newspaper Kaleva asking whether Finns were alcoholic due to genetic characteristics, whether Somalis were chronically unemployed for the same reasons [Jussi Halla-aho, Finland’s populist hardliner, Digital Journal, June 10, 2017]. His drawing attention to the double standards of what is “racist” led to a fine for “racism.”
And for calling Mohammed a “pedophile” Halla-Aho was fined for “disturbing religious worship” [Finnish Politician Fined for Blaspheming, Friendly Atheist, Patheos, September 9, 2009].
In 2018, the Finnish Establishment Media did its best to cover up an epidemic of Muslim rape gangs that targeted teenage Finnish girls and the suicide of one of their victims.
My hypothesis: Finland and, to a lesser extent, all the Nordic countries, are highly conformist cultures in which you’re not supposed to “rock the boat.” This may be due to a small gene pool and adaptation to extreme cold where only highly cooperative groups survive.
But the intense conformity — the desire not to “stand out” — means that Multiculturalism has spread through Finland at incredible speed: it has taken only about a decade. And now it is the orthodoxy, it must not be questioned. By criticizing the public promotion of homosexuality, the former Christian Democrat leader ventured into Woke-shark infested waters.
What is going on here? The technical literature shows that Left-wing people are selfish and intensely motivated by gaining power for themselves at the expense of other people. Unlike Right-wing people, they score very high in Machiavellianism; the desire for power [Signaling Virtuous Victimhood as Indicators of Dark Triad Personalities, By E. Ok et. al., Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2020]. They score higher in measures of selfishness and lack of empathy than conservatives [Corrigendum to “The nature of the relationship between personality traits and political attitudes” [Personal. Individ. Differ. 49 (2010): 306–316], By Brad Verhulst et al., Personality and Individual Differences, 2016]. And their high levels of mental instability make them fearful and so make them want to control everybody.
This is one of the reasons Leftists favor mass-immigration; it helps to ensure to that they are in control. They hate people calling it “The Great Replacement,” or implying that it’s planned, because this might cause them to lose control. They can pursue this “Great Replacement” as long as people don’t dare speak out against it — as long as people fear expressing their opinions.
And this useful “fear” doesn’t just have to be with regard to speaking out about immigration. Speaking out about any Leftist policy should be frightening — all the better to discourage the, from a Leftist perspective, wicked and frightening “Great Unwashed” from voicing their opinions on anything at all.
This policy has recently come to the fore in Finland; until now only famous for Santa Claus, Nokia, and having an attractive, young Prime Minister.
A fellow easy-on-the-eye former government minister will now go to court for quoting the Bible.
Specifically, in 2019, during “Helsinki Pride,” Dr Räsänen criticized the decision of the Finnish Lutheran Church’s decision to sign as a “partner organization” in the Gay Pride and tweeted that she found it “regrettable” that “sin and shame” had been made into a source of “pride.”
Dr Räsänen also posted an image of including a number of Bible verses that, in her view, make the Christian perspective on homosexuality quite clear including “Do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman. That is detestable” (Leviticus 18: 22) and Romans 1:24-27, which describes homosexuality as “shameful.”
These, and other verses on the subject, were also used in her pamphlet, Male and Female, He Created Them, which was published in 2004.
Räsänen maintains an English-language version of her website on which she has kept a diary of her treatment at the hands of Finnish police and prosecutors over the last two years and where her “offensive” pamphlet can be found, translated into English [Male And Female He Created Them, by Päivi Räsänen, PDF].
I am of course aware that VDARE.com is a single-issue coalition site focused on immigration and takes no position on other issues. But clearly, Räsänen’s prosecution — even if it fails — will have a “chilling effect” on free speech in Finland with regard to any protected “minority.”
This includes with regard to the ethnic minorities — Arab “refugees” — that were responsible for a wave of grooming and rape of teenage Finnish girls in the northern Finnish city of Oulu that came to light in 2018 and resulted in one teenage victim taking her own life.
It will have a chilling effect on being able to discuss the fact that the only terrorist attack in Finland in the last hundred years has been recent and was at the hands of a non-white immigrant.
It will have a chilling effect on being able to discuss the fact that one of the few prominent non-white politicians in Finland — an ethnic Somali called Abdirahim “Husu” Hussein — was exposed as a liar and hoaxer who falsely stated that he had once thrown a man out of his taxi because the man made racist remarks to him.
“Husu” later admitted that “I made this remark because I angry.” He may also have made it because Blacks are higher in psychopathic personality than whites, a fact that, in multi-racial societies, we should not fear discussing because it has consequences for us all.
Back in 2004 Tatu Vanhanen avoided being prosecuted. But who knows whether or not he would get prosecuted for saying the same things now — since 2004 the Finnish legal system has been reformed to take “Hate Speech” far more seriously.
This happened because of the influence of an anti-free-speech prosecutor, Mika Illman, whom one Finnish Member of Parliament explicitly accused of manipulating the Finnish legal system in order to shut down nationalists. Unsurprisingly, Illman was once a member of DEMLA, an organization of far-Left lawyers with links to East Germany.
For Illman and his alienated kind — he’s a member of Finland’s Swedish-speaking minority — it’s not the Bible, or the Finnish nation, or Truth, that is the problem; it is opposition to Multiculturalism. Indeed, he wrote in his 2005 PhD thesis, which has heavily influenced Finnish Hate Speech Laws, “The purpose of criminalization is ultimately to protect a pluralistic society through the threat of punishment.”
Of course, Finland is an obscure country with a small population and a strange language on the periphery of Europe. What is happening to Dr. Räsänen may seem irrelevant, especially as it relates to quoting the Bible.
But it is part of a broader plan to create a chilling effect on all free speech, so that the power-crazed Leftists can take complete control. They have taken control in Finland, to the extent that it may be illegal to quote the Bible. There are people that want America to be like this, and many of them are now in power.
To finish on a positive (sort of) note: historically, there’s no contradiction between being relatively conformist and having a civil war, especially in extreme circumstances. China, Korea, and Japan are all far more conformist than Finland and they've all had civil wars.
Edward Dutton, in his The Silent Rape Epidemic: How the Finns Were Groomed to Love Their Abusers argued that multiculturalism will elevate stress among Finns, which will cause them to become more in touch with their cognitive bias towards ethnocentrism, likely leading to ethnocentrism rising in popularity until it reaches a tipping point and becomes dominant.
But where does this leave the U.S.?
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.