Rational and reasonable, she’ll be hounded and smeared for being way too over the top in her opinions. That’s where we are today, whether in the US or in Finland.
Cambridge Professor of Social Anthropology Harri Englund pens an op-ed for the Helsingin Sanomat (my guess is that he was asked to do it) in which he insists that being against the culture of a certain society is akin to racism. He’s wrong of course. I have often stated there there is indeed a hierarchy in culture. At times a country’s culture can be good, at times it can slip into something entirely evil. Culture, both good and bad, are not constants, but fluid in nature. A good and decent/humane culture (prevalent in free societies) is something that has to be vigorously maintained and handed down from generation to generation.
No reasonable person would argue that German/Italian culture during the 20’s, 30’s and 40’s were humane, benevolent in nature, quite the contrary. Neither were the cultures of Imperial Japan, Czarist Russia/Communist Soviet Union, Communist China, Tito’s Yugoslavia and etc. etc.. You get the point. It’s the academics seeking ways to shore up their Leftist ideology in light of inconvenient facts (underpinned by their stoic allegiance to identity politics and post-modernism), who are now insisting that rejecting (a certain) culture is now…racism.
Truth be told, Harri Englund and his fellow travelers are using this kind of argumentation (Culture is Race) as a means to secure Islam a special status that’s free from any kind of criticism. It’s but a move of a chessboard piece to counter sound argumentation that criticism of Islam, is not about race, but about resisting a tyrannical ideology. It’s not our fault that many cultures are steeped in Islam, any more than it was Finland’s fault that many Eastern European countries were steeped in utopian Marxism. So to with Islam and the countries that have been taken over by it, with their ancient cultures being destroyed in the process.
We should only be offering them (the Islamic world) the branch of enlightenment, not our submission. People hailing from that part of the world who recognize and fully accept the values of classical Western civilization, are welcomed as brothers. This is what half-wit academics fail to understand, or do not want to admit.
It’s getting worse
I read the Helsingin Sanomat, and I suppose that I should have gone without reading it, because I was left with a text in which racism was once again redefined. https://www.hs.fi/mielipide/art-2000005570116.html
Racism as an idea is cruel. No one should be discriminated against on the basis of biological, mental or physical characteristics. In the United States blacks were kept as slaves. Carol Swain, a professor of political science, tells me (in a prior blog post of mine you can find a video link) how the Democratic party defended slavery, founded the Klu Klux Klan and ordered a race segregation. The Republicans wanted to put an end to slavery and drove all civil rights.
Culture is not completely unchangeable, and no country’s culture is perfect. If that were the case, people would also be perfect. Kant was very pessimistic about human goodness. In our dreams, we can find a world where all people are straightforward, hard-working and benevolent. When we wake up we must regulate laws, monitor the borders of our state, and maintain law and order. Any awakened dreamers in the world are unlikely to want anarchy, or do they?
I do not know how the allowing of the burka in Finland promotes integration into Finnish culture. It would rather integrate Finns into Islamic culture. “Perhaps the concept of culture sometimes disappears in the same way as the concept of a race, perhaps we can then talk about things with their real names,” writes Harri Englund. Are different cultures that are being resisted to, due to racism? If all cultures were equally good, then why are some countries much more corrupt, more criminal and poor? Can it really be said that cultural factors have nothing to do with the fact that every third man in South Africa commits rape during his life ( https://yle.fi/uutiset/3-5676829). Why is the position of women in some countries significantly weaker than in others? The moral concepts of different cultures vary, this is the reason for religions, living conditions and different traditions. Culture is also influenced by the history of that country, and culture moves from generation to generation. For the child it’s the parents who tell what things are right or wrong. We are all representatives and creators of our culture.
Do we have to pretend that all cultures are equally good and refrain from explaining things on cultural phenomena?
It is already clear that Islam and Mohammed can not be blamed, unlike Christianity and Jesus. What is being sought here is that there should not even be any criticism of the Islamic culture.
I hope that Finnish decision-makers cease to be sheep and begin to defend Finnish culture and to counteract that which goes against our values. I hope that we can have a comprehensive press, which would see something more fixable in our immigrant policy than that it’s not lax enough. Why does the mainstream media never see immigration with the eye of an average Finn, who pays for everything and whose children who have to live in a very different country than the previous generations?
