A quote from James Fulford at VDARE.com, 13 May 2008

There's a free speech trial going on in Finland, […] 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", 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.

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?

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: 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. […]
 
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."

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. […]
 
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.

 

 

 

See also:

 
The Human Rights Officer (a.k.a. Hate Crime Officer) Is Investigating You, 15 January 2008