Ed Dutton with an Evolutionary Perspective on the Rape of Finland

The Silent Rape Epidemic: How the Finns Were Groomed to Love Their Abusers
Edward Dutton
Oulu, Finland: Thomas Edward Press, 2019

Finns enjoy an unusually high-trust society. Longtime British resident Ed Dutton describes unmanned roadside vegetable stands that operate on the honor system, with customers reliably leaving the correct price for what they take. Travelers need not purchase a ticket before boarding a train; everyone happily pays the conductor as he comes through. At least until recently, girls in outlying villages could safely hitchhike into larger towns on Saturday nights.

Oulu (pronounced Oh-loo) is the largest city in northern Finland. It tends to be a dull place, and residents like it that way:

Very little crime, very little conflict; very little to report: Everyone eating the same kind of food, wearing the same kind of clothes, following the same cultural traditions: trusting, safe, predictable. The perfect place to raise a child.

By 2005, however, the city had begun accepting small numbers of Muslim ‘refugees.’ That summer,

a 30-year-old worker for the Finnish Lutheran Church had been naïve enough to get talking to a group of Muslim men in a bar and, worse still, go back to their flat. She was rewarded for her friendliness towards these guests by having her clitoris cut off with a pair of scissors which were then inserted into her vagina.

During the next couple of years, several local women were raped by Muslim men in city parks. By 2008, the trend was being reported in a national tabloid—which, however, failed to mention that all of the assaults had been carried out by Middle Eastern men. Oulu’s local daily, Kaleva, stopped reporting perpetrators’ names. As in other Western countries, Finnish journalists tend to be aggressively cosmopolitan leftists who despise the folks back home, ordinary Finns with “their simple desire for a picturesque wooden house close to a lake; their contentment living in a society where people mostly think in the same way.” If such narrow-minded yokels were to learn what was really going on, the multicultural project might be threatened!

Soon, the names of Muslim criminals were being redacted from police and court press releases as well. Official reports spoke only of men “of foreign background,” as if Finnish women were being attacked by German tourists or Japanese guest lecturers from the local university. But the authorities knew the truth: a 2018 a study by the Finnish Police Academy found that 93% of rapes of foreigners in Finland in 2016 had been committed by men from Islamic countries.

In the spring of 2015, Juha Sipilä was elected Prime Minster of Finland on a platform of admitting fewer refugees. But in September of the same year, once Angela Merkel had opened the floodgates, he did an about face and offered refuge to 32,478 persons, mainly young Muslim men. Sipilä even persuaded some Finns to take such men into their own houses, promising to do so himself (he never did).

Within a month of their arrival in northern Finland, 60 of these supposedly desperate asylum seekers were staging a protest in front of Oulu’s police station: they didn’t care for the traditional Finnish food offered at the local refugee center. Authorities obediently changed the menu.  The incidence of rape and sexual assault in Northern Finland quickly increased. The first gang rape occurred as early as November 2015 in the town of Kempele, a few miles from Oulu, where several ‘refugees’ had been settled; the victim was a fifteen-year-old girl.

As official sources continued to suppress information about the perpetrators, a local couple established a reputation as an accurate source of information. Junes Lokka (b. 1979), a half-Moroccan computer programmer, and his fiancée Tiina Wiik (b. 1985), who blogs under the name ‘Swan of Tuonela,’ began livestreaming phone-ins and interviews on YouTube. They also maintained contacts with ‘Alt Right’ figures worldwide: both Jared Taylor and Kevin MacDonald, for instance, have appeared on their internet shows. In 2017, Lokka won election to the Oulu city council as an independent, with Wiik serving as vice-councilor.

In November, 2018, two local fathers set a trap for a Muslim molester operating in a city park.

They’d called the police so that he’d effectively be caught in, or almost in, the act. But, amazingly, the police didn’t seem particularly interested. Although they arrested the diversifier, they didn’t even bother to check the man’s phone nor search his flat. If anything, they appeared irritated by what the fathers had done.

One of these fathers shared his story with Junes Lokka, who contacted the local court. Courts in Finland, unlike the police or reporters, are legally obliged to reveal the identities of all persons accused. Lokka found a list of seven men, besides the one caught by the two fathers, scheduled to appear on November 28th to face charges of rape or sexual assault: ‘Rahmani Gheibali, Yosefi Shiraqa, Mirzad Javad, Barhum Abdullhadi, Humad Osman Ahmed Mohamed, Mohamed Ali Osman… —all of them post-2015 arrivals from the Middle East. Their victims had been as young as ten. The local newspaper, Kaleva, certainly knew about it, since they receive the court records every day by email, but had colluded to hide what was happening from their readers.

Lokka realized he had stumbled upon an organized ‘grooming gang’ of the type familiar from Rotherham in England. Most of the men operated at a local shopping mall, chatting up under-age Finnish girls in English or broken Finnish and luring them away with alcohol. He published the list of names and charges online, and word spread quickly. On December 4th, an alternative newspaper reported the full details. It became a national scandal, with authorities rushing to deplore the crimes they had previously attempted to keep secret. “The offenses in Oulu are appalling,” said the turncoat Prime Minister responsible for letting the criminals into the country. The Interior Minister chimed in with promises of tougher laws to deport foreign criminals, but the public knew that only a few months before he had been saying Finland could happily take 10,000 Muslim ‘refugees’ annually, rather than the usual 1,000. Dutton recounts:

Oulu was in shock, not so much that there were Muslim rapes — they’d had to deal with that since at least 2005 — but that these could be systematically organised, directed against underage girls, and covered-up by the authorities. On the night of 6th December, the 101st anniversary of Finnish independence, there was a torch-lit parade of nationalists through Oulu. There had been no such thing in previous years. They made their way to the city’s cemetery where, watched over by police, I witnessed them give tense, angry speeches to the applause of a largely working-class audience.

On the afternoon of 10th December, roughly 100 furious Finns braved the cold, sleet and an intimidatingly heavy police presence to protest against the cover up and the rapes, in front of Oulu city hall. In thirteen years of living in Finland, I had never witnessed anything like it. Finns are stereotypically trusting, cooperative, taciturn and desperate not to offend. Yet, as councilors walked into the town hall that dark evening, they were greeted with screams of ‘traitor!’ At one point, a brave Muslim construction worker arose and began to defend Islam from the criticisms which some speakers were vociferously levelling against it. Hissed and jeered by the furious Finns, he was dragged from the steps and beaten up, with the police marching him away, not daring to inflame the mob by arresting those who’d slapped him around until he squealed.

Two weeks later, on 26th December, the windows of Oulu’s small mosque were smashed. The presiding Imam, Dr. Abdul Mannan, is a Social Democratic vice-councilor in town. He is also a Wahhabi who advocates the adoption of sharia law in Finland. In 2017 his son-in-law was killed fighting for ISIS in Iraq.

In early January 2019, more local grooming cases were revealed, bringing the number of accused to sixteen. It also came to light that a 14-year-old girl had hanged herself in October, 2018 after being raped by Muslim men. Oulu’s police took to the newspapers to deny the story, but a week later they were forced to admit that the ‘refugees’ had, indirectly, claimed their first life.

The next day, roughly 50 members of the vigilante group Soldiers of Odin rallied at [the local shopping mall] — now heavily police-patrolled and clear of Muslim men — and marched through the snow blanketed city. In the evening, to quell the public mood, both the Prime Minister and the Interior Minister gave press conferences about the situation at Oulu city hall where MSM journalists asked them easy questions.

The very next day, the first reports emerged of Muslim grooming activity in the capital, Helsinki. In Oulu as well, new cases kept coming to light. On 20th February, police commissioner Markus Kiiskanen announced that the police were investigating 29 ‘foreign’ men for child rape and sexual assault in Oulu. Even at this stage, no one in any official position was bothering to clarify that the ‘foreigners’ involved were not Norwegians. The scandal became international news, with British dissidents Katie Hopkins and Tommy Robinson separately travelling to Finland to meet Lokka and Wiik.

Such, in brief, are the events that inspired the book under review, all related in its first chapter. In the rest of the work, Dutton uses evolutionary psychology to shed light on why the rape epidemic occurred and why the Finnish authorities have responded to it so weakly. The central reason is disarmingly simple, though its causes reach deep into the Finns’ evolutionary history: Finns are too nice.

Visitors to Finland strongly agree in their characterization of the locals as quiet, unemotional, hard-working, honest and rule-following, stoical, and anxious to please. They also have the highest average intelligence in Europe: this is associated with kindness, conscientiousness and altruism, but also with low self-esteem, including shyness and a strong desire to conform. Finnish men are also rather low in testosterone, because the climate in which they evolved rewarded men who could cooperate with one another more than those inclined to aggression and impulsiveness.

These traits characterize Northeast Asians as well, and Finns have around 10% Northeast Asian admixture. Until as recently as the 1960s, Finns were sometimes actually classed as ‘Mongoloids.’ This was an exaggeration, but the Finno-Ugric peoples do represent a genetic cline in that direction.

High social anxiety and a desire to please are associated with low self-esteem. Dutton recounts that foreigners like himself often get asked what they think about the Finns: “this concern about the opinion of others is a marker of high Agreeableness and low self-esteem, as it is people with these traits who are most concerned about the feelings of others.” A Finnish sociologist named Tarja Laine has studied the national inferiority complex in detail:

She claims Finns are often ‘discontented with the nation’ and ‘ashamed of themselves.’ Laine argues that there is a history of self-stigmatization in Finland, because Finnishness was defined as ‘inferior to the rest of Europe’ [and] also notes how deeply concerned Finns were about what foreigners would think of them when they hosted the summer Olympics in 1952.

Women with low self-esteem are more anxious to please the men with whom they interact, and thus susceptible to the attentions of seducers.

Finland has historically been a poor nation. Famine carried off 20% of the population as recently as 1866–68, and the country remained predominantly agricultural until the 1950s. This means that Darwinian natural selection remained strong until quite recently. The harsher the environment, the more strongly men must be adapted to it in order to survive. For this reason, Finns have an exceptionally small gene pool.

This means fewer individual outliers, whether for intelligence or personality. The rarity of outlier high intelligence, along with high social anxiety and conformism, explains why Finland has produced fewer men of outstanding achievement than the country’s high average IQ would lead one to expect, and most of these have emerged from the country’s genetically atypical Swedish-speaking minority. An allele associated with inquisitiveness has been shown to be less common in Finland than any other European country (and absent from East Asian populations).

Dutton’s previous work on the personality traits typical of genius indicate such men must have

the ability to think unconventionally, to withstand criticism and even ridicule, and to have the self-confidence and doggedness to pursue very hard work for many years with little or no support and sometimes in the face of outright antagonism. That kind of person tends to be bold, critical, idiosyncratic and unconventional, which is often perceived by people as annoying, arrogant, controversial, and provocative.

The reader can readily see this is very nearly the opposite of the personality type which we have described as predominating in Finland. High social anxiety and conformism, along with a relative lack of personality outliers, means very few Finns are bold enough to ‘rock the boat’ and question things. It may sound ironic, but it is quite possibly not an accident that the Finn most responsible for blowing the lid on Muslim grooming gangs is half-Moroccan.

The personality profile of Finland can be explained in terms of one of the currently recognized ‘big five’ dimensions of personality, viz., empathy. Like all dimensions of personality, it represents a spectrum, with most people bunched toward the middle and ever fewer toward the maladaptive extremes. The disorder known as autism refers to pathologically low empathy. Autists cannot understand or perceive the feelings of others. Those suffering from the mild form of autism known as Asperger’s syndrome are bad at reading the feelings of others from facial expressions or verbal cues: e.g., they may be slow to take a hint. They are also good at withstanding disapproval, one of Dutton’s ‘genius’ traits.

At the other extreme of the empathy scale lies schizophrenia. Schizophrenics obsess over what others are thinking and feeling. They are prone to reading too much into the behavior of others: “Thus, a subtle cue indicating that someone is slightly annoyed or upset may be understood by a schizophrenic to mean that the person is dangerously angry and wants to kill them.” Milder symptoms may include social anxiety, anhedonia (the inability to feel joy), apathy, and derealization, in which one does not perceive the external world as quite ‘real.’ Such persons may even be capable of remaining inert in the face of immediate peril (e.g., to the tribe’s women). They also tend to be bad at theorizing, prone to jumping to conclusions, and biased against disconfirmatory evidence (e.g., that a beloved policy is producing disastrous results). Mild schizophrenia is known as schizoid personality disorder.

The symptoms of schizoid personality disorder closely match the Finnish personality profile. Schizophrenia spectrum disorders are, in fact, diagnosed more frequently in Finland than elsewhere in Europe: at three times the rate of the UK, for instance. They are, however, diagnosed at only one third the rate in Northeast Asia; here again, Finns represent a clinal type.

Intriguingly, Dutton mentions that the highly empathetic or schizoid personality type tends also to be associated with a certain kind of religiosity, viz., the disposition to see nonhuman nature and historical events as meaningful products of intention, i.e., as providential. He reports that on his first visit to the country in 2003, everyone he got introduced to “was, by English standards at least, religious: baptized, confirmed, paid up members of the Finnish Lutheran Church, as were about 85% of Finns at the time.” The poverty of premodern Finland and the harshness of the climate also help to explain the traditionally religious character of the people: psychologically, religion is a stress-coping mechanism. Secularization is now occurring, but with a noticeable lag behind Northwestern Europe.

Religiosity, even when it involves a universalistic religion such as Christianity, is associated with high ethnocentrism. This includes both positive ethnocentrism, or attachment to one’s people and its ways, and negative ethnocentrism, or distrust/dislike of outsiders. The strongly religious are prone to conceiving of their nation as enjoying the special protection of God, and of their enemies as being in league with the devil. In this connection, we should note that the normally mild-mannered Finns have a longstanding reputation as formidable soldiers; the ferocity with which the nation stood up to the Red Army in the Winter War of 1939–40 is legendary. Computer modelling reveals that more ethnocentric people win out over less ethnocentric over time, all else being equal.

The Soviet annexation of Eastern Karelia after World War II gave occasion for an extraordinary national display of positive ethnocentrism:

The government mandated, and the population accepted, that people must divide up their properties in order to take families of Karelian refugees into their homes. A room rationing system was imposed, on the basis of one family per room. My father-in-law recalled this happening. Even though their house wasn’t particularly big, it was divided down the middle, with Karelians living in one half and his family squashed together in the other. Farmers also found parts of their land subject to compulsory purchase so that Karelians could farm [it].

As an example of negative ethnocentrism, Finnish treatment of Russian prisoners of war could be harsh in the extreme:

Russians were put into concentration camps where they were given insufficient rations. These camps had a very high mortality rate: 17% of those who went in died there due to malnutrition and disease. Captured Soviet soldiers had to work bare foot. By the summer of 1942, many were reduced to eating grass. Approximately 1200 of these POWs were shot without trial.

The typically Finnish psychological profile can be explained by means of life history theory. Schizoid-leaning personality traits are aspects of the slow life history strategy characteristic of harsh yet stable environments. In such environments, the carrying capacity of the ecology for a particular species is quickly reached, so its members start to compete more keenly with one other in a sort of “arms race of adapting to the environment,” gradually shrinking the gene pool. Individuals invest less energy in procreation and more in nurturance of offspring, having fewer children but carefully teaching them how to thrive in their difficult environment. The result is that life slows down: childhood lasts a long time, with puberty and the onset of sexual activity delayed. Sexual behavior tends strongly to monogamy and the generous investment of resources in mates. This selects for higher altruism, as there is competition for mates, and higher impulse control, allowing planning for the future. In a predictable environment, such efforts tend to pay off in the long run, and there is more likely to be a payback for cooperation as people live longer and invest in reciprocity.

In a harsh environment where cooperation promotes survival, people create strong social and affective bonds. Extraversion decreases because the results of risks become easier to predict. More energy is invested in developing a complex mind; less is invested in the body. Also, the mental and behavioral qualities of a potential spouse become more important factors of sexual attraction. A man wants to be confident of paternity, and confident that his wife will be a good mother, so he selects for Conscientiousness and Agreeableness; over evolutionary time, women adapt accordingly.

Slow life strategy societies impose strict norms and are highly conformist. Cooperative personalities produce societies that are so strongly attuned to their environment, members must be more environmentally plastic: more has to be learned and less is simply instinctive. ‘Culture’ — rather than instinct — is more central to the group’s way of life.

Finns consider their country strongly democratic, but Dutton believes this view must be qualified. High social trust does predict democracy to some extent, since parties must, e.g., trust their opponents to yield power in response to electoral losses. But, as the American founders well knew, a certain distrust—particularly of ambitious, power-seeking politicians—is also necessary to keep institutions from becoming corrupt. Our founders were right: there is good evidence that highly intelligent psychopaths, with their ability to manipulate the less intelligent, more emotional and more trusting, are especially likely to rise to positions of power. Postwar Finland offers an edifying instance of this.

Urho Kekkonen (1900–1986) was in no way a Communist sympathizer. He served in the White Guard during the country’s fierce and bloody civil war of 1918, and belonged to the interwar Academic Karelia Society which advocated for a Greater Finland incorporating Soviet East Karelia. But once elected president of the country in 1956,

he was able to persuade people that there was an imminent threat of Soviet invasion and that only he had the skill to successfully negotiate with the Soviet leadership and save the country. With his large following, people in positions of power were prepared to do his bidding. If you questioned him — and particularly his foreign policy — he would declare you to be ‘out of favour at court.’ This could have serious consequences for [one’s] employment. By the 1970s, Kekkonen’s power was so great, his control of the media and the parliament so tight, and censorship so endemic (in fact strong criticism of the Soviets was effectively illegal) that the reality of Finland’s ‘democracy’ came into question in the West. National policy was, in many cases, okayed by Moscow before being put into action.

Kekkonen ‘played the Moscow card’ not merely to protect Finnish independence, but to maintain his personal power:

In 1961, it was looking like he might lose the presidential election to conservative Olavi Honka. The USSR sent a ‘note’ referring to the threat of ‘war,’ possibly because they wanted Kekkonen re-elected. This created the ‘Note Crisis,’ Kekkonen went to the USSR to sort it out and eventually he was re-elected overwhelmingly after Honka withdrew.

In short, the Finns behaved like the schizophrenic who imagined a moderately irritated man was out to kill him. It is widely suspected, although unproven, that the whole ‘Note Crisis’ was masterminded by the Machiavellian Kekkonen himself.

So conformist are the Finnish people that they were uneasy over the country’s 1994 referendum on whether to join the EU, fearing the public expression of a plurality of opinions would prove a ‘national crisis’ and tear the country apart. According to one Finnish observer, voters asked themselves not whether joining the EU would be beneficial to the country, but ‘How can we make ourselves fit for the EU?’ The whole referendum was marked by intense concern about the perceptions of others, national insecurity and kow-towing to those perceived as important: in this case, Western Europeans.

Finland’s response to the Danish Cartoon Crisis is similarly instructive. While the drawings of Muhammad were widely reproduced in Western Europe, and the governments of Denmark and Norway affirmed newspapers’ right to publish them, all mainstream Finnish papers declined to do so. When the website of a small Finnish nationalist group posted the cartoons, both the Prime Minster and President of Finland publicly apologized. Unsuccessful attempts were made to prosecute the nationalists.

Multiculturalism and Muslim immigration came later to Finland than to other European nations, but once they arrived, Finnish conformism made them difficult to combat:

To a certain extent, Kekkonen’s quarter-century rule kept Finland sealed off from the antinationalism and Multiculturalism that was affecting many Western countries by the 1970s. Kekkonen, however, couldn’t do much about the rejuvenation of Marxism in Finland — especially considering the delicate relationship with the Soviets — and these ideological successors to the defeated Reds were, by the 1990s, espousing Multiculturalism. By the time I came to Finland, the attitude of the kind of people who work for Oulu City Council was that Oulu should ‘internationalise.’ [Multiculturalism] was regarded as a way of turning Finland into a proper, ‘modern’ Western European country, just like the Multicultural ‘big boys’ such as Sweden and the UK.

Finland’s Lutheran church is now in free-fall. As recently as 1980, 90% of Finns were still members; today the figure is 69%, and the decline seems to be accelerating. Dutton reports that in his early days in Oulu, homosexuality was seldom discussed, or it was dismissed with the remark that ‘gays go to Helsinki.’ But by 2018, the town had its own annual gay pride parade graced by the presence of the local Lutheran clergymen. He also shares an anecdote about a young female student of his who submitted an essay arguing that the voluntary religious instruction still offered at Finnish schools be abolished in favor of compulsory multicultural education, the gist of which would be that the races are equal and there is no God.

As noted above, religion favors ethnocentrism, so the collapse of Lutheranism is certainly relevant to the rapid entrenchment of multiculturalism. Dutton believes the spread of such maladaptive ideas and behavior is a result of increased mutational load in the Finnish population. This has been caused by the relaxing of Darwinian selection consequent upon the country’s recent prosperity. He notes that maladaptive ideas tend to originate among social elites less subject to selective pressures than working people.

In 2015, however, enough ordinary Finns retained a common-sense skepticism about the wisdom of mass immigration to elect a restrictionist governing coalition consisting of the Center Party and the explicitly nationalist True Finns. That September, when Prime Minister Juha Sipilä performed his volte-face, announcing the admission of tens of thousands of new ‘refugees’, Dutton expected the governing coalition to fall apart: ‘The True Finns will not tolerate this; their leader will bring down the government.’ Instead, in best Finnish style, he meekly acquiesced in the Prime Minister’s decision. As a consequence, two years later the party’s livid followers replaced him with a hardliner. The other members of the government were not prepared to allow such a troublemaker into the cabinet, however, and once more the ruling coalition was in danger. But rather than forcing the issue, all the True Finns’ government members and about half their MPs split to form a new party called ‘Blue Reform.’ It has virtually no public support but, at least for the time being, has succeeded in keeping genuine patriotic opposition to multiculturalism out of the government. Dutton wryly concludes:

We know what happened as a consequence of these two betrayals. Preventable rapes, Oulu’s grooming gangs and the almost successful attempt by the Finnish Establishment to cover up the suicide of a raped teenage girl. . . . But, on the plus side, at least Oulu wasn’t as boring as it had been in 2003.

So much for the weak Finnish response to the Muslim rape campaign against their women. What might evolutionary psychology have to say about the behavior of the Muslims themselves?

Any man living as a Middle Eastern ‘refugee’ in Finland or any other Western country is in a position of extremely low social status, and thus quite unattractive to females. On the basis of nationality alone, many Western women would never consider marrying even a socioeconomically successful Middle Eastern man. In such a context, rape becomes an attractive option—especially gang rape, as this affords protection of a gang, lowers the risk of prosecution, and means the victim can be more easily overpowered. Polygamous Islamic societies subject women to purdah precisely to protect them from such gangs of single, low-status men—and to allow high-status men to monopolize them.

Many of the girls raped in Oulu were from impoverished, run-down areas of the city. Rape gangs target girls whose own relatively low socioeconomic status correlates with a faster life history strategy: sexual promiscuity, early sexual maturation, and attraction to physical status — strength and the ability to win fights — rather than socioeconomic status. Such girls will tend to be less intelligent, easier to manipulate and to access sexually; their family bonds are likely to be weaker and their parents less concerned about their whereabouts. Social elites care less about these girls, expressing disdain for such social inferiors with terms such as juntti (hicks or yokals) and pummi (bums).

That the girls were from a different ethnic group than the Muslim men elevated the probability of rape. People act to further the interests of their group: if it is of low status, one way to raise it is through raping girls from a more dominant group. Rape asserts dominance not just over the females themselves, but also over the males on the opposing side:

It destroys their morale and undermines their confidence, because the conquerors assert dominance and control over the central resource for future existence, namely the wombs of [their] women. Rape can be a deliberate war strategy, because it creates deep trauma and insecurity among the victims and their networks, helping to undermine their ability to defend themselves.

Seeing themselves as jihadis waging war against Finnish infidels is a convenient way for Muslim refugees to salve their battered self-esteem, and rape in the context of Holy War is explicitly endorsed by the Koran.

Dutton concludes that if a large number of very low-status males from the same ethnic group are thrust into a homogenous, high-trust community of a different ethnicity, the predictable result will be rape: ‘Oulu’s Muslim Grooming Scandal was inevitable the moment significant numbers of young, single Muslim males were accommodated in the city.’

The near future does not look bright. The late Finnish political scientist Tatu Vanhanen has estimated the correlation of diversity with ethnic conflict at +0.66. In increasingly diverse settings, people identify more strongly with their group. This means that Muslims are not going to integrate, and will come to perceive Finns as their enemies (if they do not already). Finns uncommitted to multiculturalism will start to mirror this behavior, and the country may spiral into a low-level civil war. Meanwhile, elite Finns who cling to multicultural thinking will vye with one another to demonstrate how deeply they care about ‘refugees’ supposedly being victimized by their bigoted co-ethnics. This will lead to a collapse of trust within the ethnic majority. Many ordinary Finns already distrust the news media and government, and this will intensify as well.

Dutton recalls how distrust of the police in the Northern Ireland of the 1970s led to the formation of paramilitary forces which controlled large Catholic areas hostile to the government. He sees the beginnings of something similar in the Soldiers of Odin now patrolling Finnish streets. The welfare state will become unsustainable under such circumstances, depending as it does on a sense of national kinship. The economy can be expected to deteriorate and crime to increase, even among ethnic Finns.

In the longer run, however, social trends that cannot go on forever can be relied upon to stop. As Finland becomes a more stressful and dangerous place to live, some sort of religious revival is likely, which will both raise the native birthrate and steel Finns’ resolve for the struggle. Nationalist parties will grow. As Dutton notes:

Computer models have demonstrated that once 25% of a group adhere to a counter-cultural viewpoint, such as ethnocentrism currently is, and become activists fervently advocating it, they tip the opinion of the entire group towards their own. And all else controlled for, the more ethnocentric group will always triumph. As discussed, Finns are high in conformism, so when the country ‘flips’ from multiculturalism back to nationalism, it will happen very quickly.

Observers appalled at the apparent weakness of the Finns’ initial response to Muslim rape gangs will do well to recall the ferocity this nation has historically demonstrated in defending itself, and bear in mind the poet’s warning: Beware the fury of a patient man.

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