Sixteen Volts

Last night, when I watched the CBC news about the bombings in Mumbai, I half-expected to hear something about diverse youths who represent wide strata of Indian society. I didn't, but the female news reporter sounded very concerned about if these bombings mean that alienated groups of Indian society now feel left out of the modernization and progress. Hey, perhaps it was the Indian precarity who is responsible for these bombings. Now it is certainly the time for us rich Westerners to start flogging ourselves since clearly these bombings are somehow our fault, and try to come up with ways for us to correct the injustices that forced these desperate victims of Western oppression to believe that they have no other solutions or ways of participating in the discussion than to lash out violently. Never forget that the blood of all these innocent victims is in our hands!

Jussi Halla-Aho has taken off for summer holiday and won't write more until August, but he has a new essay out, "The debate both here and next door", which analyzes the way that Finland is slowly following Sweden to dhimmitude. I can actually remember, when I was a kid in school, once seeing an educational video in which some Finnish woman lamented the fact that Finland takes only a few hundred refugees each year, and how she feels so bad and ashamed about this whenever she is with Swedes who take in tens of thousands. (Finland has about 5 million people, whereas Sweden has about 8 million.) Well, I certainly wonder who is laughing now.

Somebody asked a good question about my essays: if the mainstream media censors the stark reality of multiculturalism, how is it that I am able to report about it? Doesn't the fact that the blog "Monikulttuuri" can constantly list these "unfortunate but non-related separate incidents" by itself prove that my thesis of creeping totalitarianism and self-censorship of media is false?

Certainly not. In Finland the "progressive" ideas have not yet completely spread over all media, and the "sensitive" way of reporting the news is not yet properly coordinated. In other words, the filter of political correctness leaks in quite a few places. If you read the news about some event in five different papers, you can usually find out if that event contains any of those elements that you should never generalize from.

There are various degrees of censorship. First, you can publish the news but cut out the unpleasant details, just like Helsingin Sanomat recently did in its news article about the knife murder in Suutarila [in which a Somali man killed his wife, but if you read the news articles, you'd think that a Finnish hate murderer killed a Somali]. They left out the words "immigrant" and "from Somalia" that can be found in the article in Iltalehti that is otherwise identical. In the dead tree edition of Helsingin Sanomat they had, just to be sure, edited out the last paragraph that mentions that the attacker had flown in from the Great Britain day before the murder.

Occasionally the mainstream media, in all its burden of responsibility, relegates to margins or does not write at all about events that, in a city the size of Helsinki, you would think would be newsworthy. As an example of this, see the June 9 incident where a group of immigrant youths armed with beer bottles hospitalized a Finnish bystander for no discernible reason in downtown Helsinki. Our major newspaper did not make even a peep about this, but Iltalehti mentioned about it in one small article a week later.

It is also a form of censorship that the chronic conflicts created by multiculturalism are reported in a selective fashion. I already mentioned earlier that the knife murder of one Belgian youth became newsworthy in the international media only after it turned out that the attackers, despite the suspicions, were not Arabs. But it was most certainly immediately newsworthy when a Belgian schizophrenic shot an immigrant woman and the little girl who was in her care. But how many of you can remember reading in any newspaper about when six Moroccan youths rampaged in a bus in Antwerpen and kicked to death a 54-year-old man who tried to calm them down? Or that the Moroccan youths have in general taken as their task to terrorize the public transit in Belgium?

I do not challenge the right of commercial media to censor themselves. But it is obvious that they do.

As I said, in Finland such filtering is still rudimentary, and the reader can bypass it with a little legwork. In Sweden things are different, and the whitewashing is absolutely airtight. I have been reading the Malmö newspaper Sydsvenskan and compared its reporting to Dagens Nyheter and Expressen. We Finns know quite well, for example from the writings of Esa Suominen, the parliamentary aide of our foreign minister Erkki Tuomioja, that "immigration is inherently a positive force. Sweden is an excellent example of a country in which the borders have been way more open. Studies demonstrate that without the immigrant labor force, Sweden would be significantly poorer than it is today and would have massive difficulties in maintaining its wealth." Especially the town of Malmö has certainly benefit from this inherently positive force, and its enriched everyday life has gained attention even overseas.

I'd like to point out one detail about the rhetorical trick of Esa Suominen's argument. The industrial wealth of Sweden was built a few decades ago, and immigrants were certainly important in building that wealth. But it was just that these immigrants were very different back then compared to today. For example, they comprised a few hundred thousand Finnish guest workers. Which are, like, totally the same as what Sweden takes in today. I have read that Swedes didn't particularly like these Finnish guest workers ("En finne igen", a Finn again, they used to say when some drunken Finn got himself in trouble), but I would bet that even the very worst problems that the Swedes ever had with the Finnish guest workers three decades ago must seem positively quaint to Swedes today.

Sydsvenskan regularly reports of "youth groups" who, using knives as tools, have liberated other youths of their money or cellular phones, or simply beat the shit out of them. (Today's paper contains one such article.) The paper not only refrains of making any kind of explicit descriptions ("invandrare" [immigrant]), but the paper never mentions any kind of identifying features of the assailants, unlike we routinely do in Finland. The reason for this should be obvious to at least us "prejudiced nazis". Dagens Nyheter and Expressen, just like all other Swedish papers that I have seen, follow the same policy of silence.

While the Somalis were rampaging in downtown Helsinki last year, the city editor of Helsingin Sanomat went publicly through painful self criticism for the fact that he had in his earlier reporting of the street robberies been silent about the common factor behind all these robberies, that is, the nationality of the perpetrators. The editor was loudly chastised for this in the reader mail section, asking him, for example, how exactly mentioning the ethnic background of the perpetrators would have increased tolerance. This is a strange question. The purpose of crime reporting is not to increase tolerance, but to inform people about the criminal situation, and secondarily, if all goes well, hopefully help the police to solve crimes.

But we should also ask whether censorship really increases tolerance or anything else that is good. Except for the social workers, cops and the criminals themselves, it took a whole autumn for the Finns to realize that these street robberies are not just random and unconnected events, but in downtown Helsinki there really is a gang of Somali youth that robs and mugs other people in an organized fashion. When this was finally realized, the public discussion could begin, and even some projects to stop this gang emerged. It is of course a whole other thing whether this discussion was sensible or the measures effective, but at least it was clear what the problem is. In Sweden, on the other hand, censorship is absolute. Everybody knows who the "youths" wielding knives really are. Attempts to discuss the problem immediately fail because whoever wants to say that this problem even exists has nothing to quote or refer to, because nothing is ever admitted in public. This silence allows those who think that admitting the problem would give ammunition to the evil ones to play dumb. "The immigrants don't stab, the immigrants don't stab, the immigrants don't stab, la de da, show me even one news article that says that immigrants did stab." And when you can't even discuss the problem, there is no hope of actually doing something to the problem.

Another side effect of censorship, less dangerous but still no less annoying, is that the crimes committed by immigrants are placed on the shoulders of the native population, and the public discussion dances around the question of what is wrong with the natives. I am sure that some people think this is hilarious and serves well those stupid Finns, but it doesn't exactly help in solving the problem. Consider the Suutarila case mentioned above. Under the edited news article we could find the comment by "Minsku":

"What is wrong with the Finnish men? For example, Amnesty International has noticed that Finnish men are violent towards women, and here we can see a sad example where such behaviour can lead to."

Right, I had already forgotten that one. The Finnish feminists appealed to Amnesty International about the problem of the Finnish male being so violent and dangerous. Since only the crimes of white men are really important for leftists and Amnesty International, of course this gang condemned Finland for treating its women so badly. I would certainly be curious to see even one Third World nation in which men treat women better than in Finland. Once again, leftists: can you name even one Third World country in which husband slapping his uppity wife is a crime or even considered a shameful act. Or one in which marital rape is a crime? How many times has Amnesty International expressed its haughty disapproval for these countries for the way they treat women? Goose egg, I bet.

We should also remember that Finland might seem like a bad place compared to other countries when it comes to domestic violence for the simple reason that over there it is actually considered a crime and it is reported and tabulated. In most of the world, women know perfectly well that they can't get uppity, because of what will certainly happen if they do. Of course, such manliness makes the Western feminists adore these countries even more --- crude and stereotypical manliness is a problem only when it is expressed by white males, and from the other groups of men, it is just authentic and exciting so that it's a miracle that the feminist won't slide off her chair.

From the progressive Swedish media we can easily move to the progressive social sciences in Sweden. Brå, the Swedish council of crime prevention, offers plenty of data that reveal much more about the way crime is discussed in Sweden than about crime itself. Following the lead of Americans, Swedes have enthusiastically started compiling hate crime statistics. Possible motives of hate crimes include hatred of foreigners, homophobia, antisemitism and the white power ideologies. The most common motive for a hate crime is hatred of foreigners, and the most common types of hate crimes are, just like here in Finland, illegal threats, slander and other objectively rather mild injustices.

The funny thing is that in practice, this definition of hate crime logically makes a straight gentile white man the only possible perpetrator of hate crimes. I certainly couldn't see how an ethnic could beat up a Swede in Sweden because the latter is a foreigner. Hatred of Swedes is by definition logically impossible to be the cause a hate crime. But we do have studies that reveal that in Malmö, and no doubt also in Lund, Göteborg, Stockholm and Uppsala, there are gangs of immigrants that rob and mug Swedes for the simple reason that they are Swedes. In their own words, these immigrants are at war against Swedes. Despite this, their acts are not considered hate crimes. They end up in the great anonymous pile of regular crimes, with no mention of the perpetrator and his motives. And these crimes are the important everyday stuff that has a monumental effect on the general tolerance and the relationships between the ethnic groups. Pray tell, which event do you think will more efficiently ruin the general harmony and trust between races: (1) Sven-Peter calls Mohammad a fucking darkie and threatens to punch him in the nose? (2) Mohammad, with his two younger brothers and four cousins, beats up Sven-Peter, takes his cash and rapes his girlfriend?

The problem of the "tolerant" method and its destructiveness are in that when you drum up one side of the problem while you silence the other side to nonexistence, media and government officials start gradually believing in this virtual reality and create solutions to solve the problems in that frame. Now that there are hate crimes and they lead to ethnic discord, and since only white Swedes commit hate crimes, we need more diversity and tolerance education. For the whites. But the real reality is that the Swedes like their Muslim minority less and less every day, because this minority acts in a brutal and violent fashion. The reason for their violence is that a significant portion of the Muslim minority hates the Swedes with a fiery passion for reasons that we can't really begin to comprehend, but which are related to the fact that Muslims are doing badly even though Allah loves them, while the Swedes are doing fine even though Allah hates them, so certainly there must be some massive injustice behind this and Sven-Peter must pay for it with both his blood and his money. These are the real causes of violence and rudeness that need to be addressd. But this can't be done, because statistics say that hate crimes are perpetrated only by white Swedes. If you could talk about the brutality and violence of the Muslim minority, you would give ammunition to racists, and that's no good. If you addressed the root causes of brutality and violence, you would demonize the immigrant culture, and that's no good either. So let's address something that you can address without counterreaction, that is, the attitudes of Swedes.

Halla-Aho then goes to examine the study "Crime among persons born in Sweden and other countries" by Peter Martens and Stina Holmberg, and the silly rhetoric that this study uses to whitewash the ugly reality that certain groups of immigrants commit crimes with a massive overrepresentation compared their proportion of the whole population. Of course, since more than 50% of criminals are still white Swedes (who are still vast majority of the population, at least for the time being), the report gets to say that the main problem with crime is the crime perpetrated by native Swedes who we should really be afraid of. The report also lumps all immigrants together in a single group, to avoid having to compare newcomers from Africa to newcomers from North America or the Western Europe. How very clever.

Jussi's last paragraph is so good and spot-on, however, that I will certainly translate it here.

Finally this report reminds us of the fact that racist prejudice towards immigrants has led to sharp ethnic segregation of neighbourhoods. Immigrants can spend their daily lives without encountering even one Swedish speaker, so they drop out of society and enter the spiral of crime. It certainly couldn't be that a Swedish family with children would escape the crumbling neighbourhood in the shadow of a minaret, its streets ruled by gangs of thugs wielding knives, for any other reason than being racist and prejudiced. During the good old days Enver Hoxha, the ruler of socialist Albania, always sent the government civil servants to spend their summers in building railroads and toiling the fields, so that they wouldn't lose their touch with the common people. Perhaps [the Swedish Prime Minister] Persson could send his social democratic do-gooders to receive similar education of reality. Force these people actually live in the ethnic neighbourhoods of Malmö and Stockholm. This way they could really show all those prejudiced Sven-Peters how it should be done. And then let's roll the video once again.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Wednesday, July 12, 2006 at 9:47 AM