Sixteen Volts

I haven't translated anything from Jussi Halla-Aho for a long time. He has a new essay out, which I'd like to translate because it illustrates so nicely certain cultural differences and similarities that Finland (and the rest of Europe) have with North America. We are all brothers, after all. I will intersperse my own commentary between the paragraphs of the translated text.

The intolerant underclass and some other current events

According to today's Helsingin Sanomat, the "extreme right-wing" and "anti-immigrant" British National Party doubled its seats in Council elections in Britain. BNP gained seats in East London, where it became the largest party in one Council. Britain's minister of work had already in April warned that the white working class is going for BNP. This success of BNP has raised "worried voices" in Britain.

One of the central axioms of the "tolerant" liturgy is that intolerant attitudes belong to alienated and poor people. The implication of this axiom is that intolerance results from (a) ignorance and (b) envy that is felt towards the talented and successful Africans. I can't deny the correlation between poverty and intolerance. It is indeed easier to find primitive (= unorganized and blind) intolerance of foreigners in a lower working class pub than in a ritzy wine bar. I just don't believe the causalities that this correlation is supposed to prove.

Speaking of which, could some leftist finally explain to me why leftists everywhere so eagerly idolize the underclass, considering that the typical underclass thug is about the most reactionary person you can find, with his typical hostile attitudes towards multiculturalism, women's rights, gay rights and protecting the environment? Oh, and please don't use the words "false consciousness".

You can find intolerance mainly in places where there is most alienation and least education, such as East Helsinki and East London. People with the least education are also typically the poorest, since better education gives you better-paid employment. The poorest people tend to live where housing is least expensive, that is, away from downtown.

As everybody should know by know, because European downtowns have not been ravaged by decades of leftist support of various antisocial people and cheap automobility has not enabled the middle class to move to suburbs, European cities tend to be structured in a very different way than in America. In Finnish, even the very word "suburb" connotes ugly and cheap apartment buildings full of ugly people.

Such socioeconomic segregation sustains itself, because the faster poor people congregate somewhere, the faster those people who are able to move out will move out. Lack of education (and the poverty that follows from this) is often a result from inherent attitude problems. (Here "lack of education" must be understood correctly, so that a plumber is not less educated than a particle physicist.) People with attitude problems tend to do problematic things, which makes the areas that they live in to be undesirable for those who have enough money to choose where they want to live.

The Danimal once put it this way: "Wealthy people are just generally cooler to hang around with than poor people. Wealthy people can afford to live anywhere, so where do they live? Around other wealthy people." Once again, the leftist idea of the moral superiority of poor people fails a simple free market test.

The majority of immigrants also have (using the yardstick of Western philosophy of society) attitude problems and hence tend to be poor, which is why they tend to live in the same areas as our native underclass, that is, East Helsinki and East London. It follows that the least educated among us are the segment of society that gets to have the most contact with everyday multiculturalism. Because they can see with their own eyes that multiculturalism brings no real benefits but merely makes their life even worse, they adopt attitudes that are "intolerant" according to the official doctrine. This creates a situation where intolerance and anti-immigrant attitudes are typical to the underclass.

In the Toronto area, multiculturalism is fortunately working quite nicely, but the European-style structure of the city itself plus the fact that the Canadian system carefully chooses the immigrants that it takes in probably have nothing to do with it.

The "tolerant" elite that is well-educated (otherwise it wouldn't be the elite) and has money (because it is the elite) tends to live far away from the places into which it dumps their Third World proteges. Educated people tend to be tolerant, since they have no experience of multiculturalism. No matter how many immigrants live in Helsinki, Eira and Ullanlinna [two wealthy areas] are not multicultural. Here you can meet the few marginal immigrants who are well-integrated and due to economic fruits of this integration (education, employment, attitude) have bought themselves free of multiculturalism, that is, moved to monocultural Finnish areas. A Finn living in Eira or Ullanlinna constructs his stereotypes about immigrants and multiculturalism based on these marginal cases (and of course the propaganda that the media constantly spouts at him). It is easy to be tolerant in Eira or Ullanlinna. This has created a situation in which tolerance and acceptance of immigrants are virtues of the educated class. The causation that shows as the correlation between tolerance and education just isn't that education (= being smart) has given these people a better chance to understand the inherent loveliness of multiculturalism, but in that the possibility of living in a non-multicultural zone that their wealth has provided them has given them a chance of never encountering multiculturalism.

As Steve Sailer has often put it, in America being for open borders and unlimited immigration is an important signaling mechanism for the top-tier white people, since this way they get to show that they are so high up the ladder that they have nothing to worry. It's not like those masses of immigrants threaten their jobs or put their kids in the private schools and best universities that their kids go to, and it's so hard to find a good cleaning lady or lawnscaper these days, since few Americans are willing to do these jobs for $5 an hour.

The intolerance that follows from the everyday encounters in bad neighbourhoods is usually, like was said, primitive and blind. The experience of multiculturalism that the lower working class schlub living in East Helsinki is much closer to the average objective reality than the experience of Eva Biaudet [a female Finnish politician known for her advocation of multiculturalism] who lives in Southern Helsinki, since the schlub gets to see a much larger sample of immigrants, but he is not any better than Eva Biaudet to understand that his experience is not the whole truth. Because the immigrants that he encounters are what they are, he begins to think that all immigrants are trash and then shouts obscenities to the somali who works at the checkout at Alepa [in this context, Wal-Mart might be the closest equivalent, even though Alepa is more of a supermarket]. The ideology of multiculturalism itself creates such racism, because the multicultural propaganda cannot accept that even though multiculturalism as a marginal phenomenom in Eira is fun, it is no fun at all as a mass phenomenon in East Helsinki. Diversity training will not make the working-class schlub to believe that multiculturalism enriches society (since it doesn't do that in where he lives), but it makes him believe that all immigrants can be grouped under one umbrella term. For both Biaudet and the schlub it is true that every immigrant = X. It's just that the schlub and Biaudet solve this equation using very different values of X.

I can see that the previous paragraph became somewhat obscure. I have a point there. Please try to understand it.

Racism (separate from being generally critical towards multiculturalism) is not the only unpleasant phenomenon that multiculturalism and the religion of multiculturalism have increased in Western society. The elite that is choking under its political correctness and trapped in the prison of its utopian dreams cannot defend itself against the aggressive and hostile communities of immigrants who have isolated themselves in their ghettoes. These people have learned (especially in France and Britain) that if they burn houses and cars and kill people, their host society will not send an army to the streets to discipline them, but gives them even more unearned money, apologizes for its past, present, real and imaginary bad deeds and starts wallowing in self-criticism. Parts of the native underclass, the gang that in my youth hung around the hallways of cheap apartment buildings drinking beer and breaking and vandalizing public property because of sheer malice (and who can't comprehend or forgive the fact that those who have more intelligence and are willing to work also get to have more money and other goodies), is watching and learning.

Multiculturalism has created an operating procedure in which the violence and vandalism of the masses cannot be intercepted, because according to the doctrine, violence always results from social injustice and the beatings given by the fascist police. Our native asocial loser stratus cannot paint its skin black, but it can simply make up a nice and humane sounding ideology that justifies its actions, so that this ideology makes these losers as untouchable as skin colour makes an African or Islam makes a Muslim. These losers proclaim that they are "activists" who fight ghosts such as "fascism" and fight for tolerance, being humane, the working class and whatever else. If the riot police then uses its batons to club the rock-throwing human scum, by doing this they oppress the workers, oppose tolerance and support fascism.

Since the media and the political elite have now for a long time whitewashed the actions of immigrants and the failure of multiculturalism, they have become unable to recognize evil as evil. When cars and houses burn and knives stab, the menu of a "tolerant" person no longer contains the simple explanation: evil people are doing evil things, and they must be stopped. Western society has become a society of excuses. "Simplification" is the greatest of all sins. Even a ridiculous explanation is better than a simple solution. When the human trash is rioting, the progressive media, trendy politicians and the lily-white female university professor who has a hyphenated last name and wears an African scarf for solidarity start analysing the hidden social structures that have caused this angry and justified reaction of the oppressed masses.

The European discourse is worried about extreme right wing movements and their violence. This "threat of extreme right wing" is a nonexistent strawman. There is no such thing. During the last ten years, European towns have been burned and vandalized by immigrants and left-wing activists, not the right-wingers. And this will continue to be so, since these groups will not encounter any opposition for their rioting, and since the possibility to burn and destroy stuff without anybody stopping you (plus you might get to show your face in a talkshow) tempts both black and white barbarians to rampage. The current rioting in Helsinki (or in Berlin or Göteborg) is not caused by youth being worse off than it used to be, or society being more unfair than it used to be, but it is simply because for the first time in history, those nasty little side effects of sexual procreation, the numerically marginal defectives are considered "activists" and listening to them is considered a virtue.

Indeed, during this May Day, a bunch of young leftist anarchists mass rioted in Helsinki and burned down a bunch of historical buildings that greens and leftists had previously tried to protect against demolition. As predicted, leftists are now out in force in media proclaiming that this riot somehow proves that the Finnish system is bad and we should be more tolerant and give more to the underclass. I have to wonder what would have happened if a similar riot would have erupted in their beloved Soviet Union.

Most people don't like it when public buildings and streetcars, buses and trains are vandalized with graffiti. Most people are happy when the recent control campaign of public transit made the travel of normal people safer. Most people believe that an able-bodied person should work for a living. Most people consider the Finnish police to be reliable and fair. Most Finns believe that there are already too many or just enough immigrants in Finland. How come it is that the organizations whose platforms include opposition of all kinds of police action, support for unlimited immigration, smoking of cannabis and generous welfare transfers to people who simply don't feel like working, have become these "citizen activists" whose views we must give weight in making political decisions? How come the people whose contribution to the functioning society is an absolute zero get to organize events called "reclaim the streets"? Isn't it time for the decent people, both the worker and the CEO, to start demanding that vandals give them back the streets, marketplaces, parks and local trains that the decent people have already paid for with their tax money?

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Monday, May 08, 2006 at 9:51 AM