Freedom of Speech and Case Mikko Ellilä

by Aapo Puhakka

Back to political opinions

Another article, which is under prosecution: Muutama täky Illmanin Mikalle by Jussi Halla-aho

Happened so far

In December 2006 Mikko Ellilä published an article Society Consists of People, where is some controversial claims.

In February 2007, Ombudsman for Minorities of Finland, Mikko Puumalainen, made an request for preliminary investigation of ethnic agitation to the Finnish National Bureau of Investigation.

Some time before that (perhaps in 2004 or 2005), Mikko Puumalainen had made somewhat similar investigation request against Tatu Vanhanan and his book IQ and the Wealth of Nations. The results were negative. This case seems to be somewhat similar.

In April 2007, Mikko Puumalainen made several public comments, that the Internet should be censored of material critical for multi-culturalism.

In the beginning of May 2007, Mikko Ellilä heard about the investigation and caused a huge national and international uproar of the matter in the blogosphere.

Personally, I do not agree with everything Mikko Ellillä writes. My comments and thoughts about the most controversial aspect of the article follow later in this page. However I respect the freedom of speech and I dislike censoring of the Internet. I think Ellilä has the right to write whatever he writes. There are no clear lies, altough controversial claims (which are likely to be incorrect in my opinion) sure are. And there is no agitation for violence.

Because the matter has rised a huge international uproar and the original article is in Finnish, it would be unfair, if the non-Finnish-speaking people couldn't read it. So I publish here my English translation of the article. In case, that the original Finnish article disappears, here is a backup-copy of it.

My comments and thoughts of the most controversial aspect of the subject matter

It is a sad thing and a fact, that most countries and communities, where majority of people are of African or Muslim origin, are in a miserable state economically. Whether this is a cause of biological/genetic factor or the real culprit is traditional African tribal and Islamic culture, is a controversial question, to which there is no definitive answer yet.

Personally, I'm inclined to believe, that the traditional African and Islamic culture is the major factor. Genetic things might have some minimal part. Colonialism might have something to do with it, but it really is very minimal, because those countries and communities haven't raised from their sad state (unlike several East-Asian countries), altough colonialism ended a long time ago.

Some research could be done, to explore the matter more thoroughly. Some research could be done easily with a little bit of Wikipedia-search and data-analysis, more thorough exploration would require interviews.

Easy Research

Idea for an easy research: Let's put in a database some data of each country of the Earth, which is easily available from Wikipedia. The fields of a database table COUNTRY could be:

And some more possibilities there sure are as well. I think information should be put in for each field for each country, even if it would be only an educated guess. If it's an educated guess, some classification of the validness of the information and some textual description of the guess might be good.

With this data, it would be easy for everybody interested to do different analysis, of which factor is relevant, almost only with some SQL-queries and simple calculation.

Thorough Research

More thorough research-idea would be to make interviews of backgrounds, abilities and beliefs of people. Beliefs to look for and data to be gathered could be for example:

As a conclusion I might state, that because the article inspired so much creative ideas for example research possibilities, censoring it would have been a very stupid move.

Aapo Puhakka