Ladies and gentlemen,
First of all I must thank the International Civil Liberties Alliance for this most gracious award as I must express my gratitude to my friend Mark Steyn for coming all the way here to motivate it.
I gladly accept it – not least because I take it that this is not only for me but also in recognition of what my friends and collaborators in The Free Press Society have been working so tirelessly to accomplish since we started our work for free speech more than eight years ago.
I am happy to recognise in the audience a number of co-workers who have been in this with me for many years.
A couple of months ago I had a strange experience. I was visiting a small almost rural municipality about 20 km north of Copenhagen. It was a wonderful spring day. The trees were green, the birds were singing. Among the low rolling hills lay wonderful, not to say opulent, mansions with ample space for the luxury cars. From one of the hills you could see the silvery sound that runs between Denmark and Sweden. A mother was out teaching her young daughter to ride her pony.
I had come to the place where the Danish elite lives. This is where the rulers of our country spend their time when they don't drive their Mercedes or BMWs into Copenhagen to man the commanding heights of our society.
Here live the decent people who vote for decent political parties, read their decent newspapers and associate with other decent people who never tire of criticising the common folk for their inexplicable and inexcusable unease over the mass immigration and Islamisation that are tearing our cities and in fact our entire social fabric apart.
Here live the core proponents of multiculturalism, cultural relativism – the true believers that all cultures are equal and that it is downright evil – not to say fascistic and racist – to claim otherwise.
For example that our own Danish and Western culture is far superior to cultures that allow slavery, honour killings, genital mutilation, wife beating, polygamy, murder of so-called blasphemers and all the rest.
And why should they care? On this day in early May about 20 kilometres away from the vast and spreading ghettos of Copenhagen there wasn't a Muslim to be seen for miles around.
Their children attend lily-white schools and don't have to worry about being beaten up, robbed or raped on their way home. They don't experience gang warfare. Nobody is being shot right in front of their houses.
These are things you occasionally read about if the decent papers should choose to print a small item on such unfortunate incidents. But they take place far away in a foreign land where the ruling elites rarely if ever set foot.
And if you are well off and live in the city, you stay clear of the ghettos. You prefer neighbourhoods where you only meet people of your own kind and if your child attends a public school with a certain number of so-called "ethnic" – or as we say in Denmark – "new-Danish" pupils, you take your child out of that school and put it in a private school.
This is quite easy to do in Denmark for we have many private schools and a growing number of them. It will cost you a bit of money but if you have that money, it is a small price to pay in order to insure that your kid learns anything at all.
In many cases the alternative is that your child will be forced to spend 10 years in a school system so bad that in Copenhagen, 40 percent of Arab-speaking students leave school without being able to read and write. And of course, they will never get a job but will remain an economic drag on the welfare state for as long as they live.
So I can well understand why good people want to live in the right neighbourhoods and send their children to the right schools. I can even understand that the leaders of our Socialist parties – including our Social-Democratic Prime Minister and other colleagues in her cabinet – have opted for private schools for their children though they never miss an opportunity to declare that we need to do more to strengthen the public school system.
In a way it all makes sense. The politicians that are responsible for the mass immigration of primarily Muslims are saying to the common folk: The public schools have become so bad that our children will not go there. But don't despair: We are doing everything we can to improve conditions in our public schools where your kids are forced to go because you cannot afford private ones.
That is true socialism in the 21st century.
I can understand all that. What I cannot understand is why these same politicians continue to do what is in their power to keep the immigration of non-integratable analphabets and people who can contribute absolutely nothing to our society flowing.
Well, to be absolutely frank, I can understand why, but it would far exceed the limits of this short presentation to go further into that.
The very first thing our new centre-left government did after it came to power less than a year ago was to undo the few and meagre restrictions the former right government had reluctantly put in place.
We are now back to basically unrestricted immigration and we can be quite certain that Denmark's slide into chaos, crime, parallel societies, the de facto abolition of the welfare state and eventually of democracy, the rule of law and freedom of speech will accelerate.
And as we go from bad to worse, we should not imagine that our politicians and other members of the ruling elites will turn around and admit that they have been wrong to advocate mass immigration, multiculture and cultural relativism.
We should not expect our rulers to issue an official apology for having destroyed our countries like the Chinese Communist Party did some years after the Cultural Revolution.
If we want to know what our future will be like, all we need to do is take a look at what is happening as a result of the Arab spring, which for some reason our ruling elites continue to be enthusiastic about.
None of what has been happening to Western societies over the past three or four decades should have come as a surprise. Many people tried to warn but they were brutally repressed, treated as former human beings, had their careers cut short, got fired from their jobs, lost friends and family. And of course many despaired.
I'm afraid that we have to expect an even more massive attempt to crush free speech. If you cannot and will not admit to your crimes and stupidity, you can at least try to prevent people from talking about them. And if you are armed with a formidable arsenal of ideological hogwash, such as anti-racism, the need to combat Islamophobia and hate speech, then perhaps you'll succeed.
At least we have seen that our judicial systems are quite prepared to tow the line, as some of us in this hall have personally experienced. They are even prepared to bend the law to get at the unfortunates who insist on speaking the truth about what has been happening and where it will lead us.
Some of you may have followed my own two-year long brush with the Danish prosecutor and courts after I had been accused of hate speech and racism.
It is difficult to present my eventual acquittal by a unanimous Supreme Court a couple of months ago as a victory for free speech. It may, however, be seen as a victory for the rule of law – and of course that is quite important in view of the tricks the public prosecutor tried to pull.
For one thing my able attorney managed to demonstrate that the wording in the indictment was not based on what I had actually said – albeit not for public dissemination – but on what my enemies in the politically correct press had chosen to quote me for.
That would be considered a scandal in any civilised society.
In a civilised society it would also be considered non-kosher to proceed with a trial when every witness statement in the prosecutor's possession confirmed that my remarks had been disseminated without me having had a chance to vet and authorise them.
And this is what is required for a conviction under our infamous Article 266b of the penal code: One must have made a conscious decision to disseminate one's remarks to a wider audience.
Yet they went ahead.
Finally, when it became clear to the prosecutor that she was in trouble because the very wording of my conviction in Superior Court proved that I had not intended my remarks to be published, she proposed a really clever way out for the Supreme Court. They could simply change the Superior Court's wording to make it look as if I had in fact known that my remarks were to be published.
It reminds me of a book I once read. It was by George Orwell.
Fortunately, the Supreme Court wouldn't swallow this intriguing line of reasoning, but the fact that the prosecutor would even attempt this stunt is frightening and cannot help but send a message to anyone in the country who is thinking of opening his mouth – even in your own home:
You had better secure the services of the best lawyer in the country and be prepared to spend two years fighting in court. And if not, we suggest that you shut up.
I have no doubt that the main culprit is the media. If they had spoken out decades ago, none of this would have happened. But with few exceptions they haven't spoken out.
What we have come to call the “the mainstream media” have deteriorated to a point where they clearly constitute a threat to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
The fourth estate was supposed to act as an independent eye on the legislative, judicial and executive powers but has in fact become a part of the ruling elite. Effectively blinded, it no longer considers it its duty, or even sees its way to criticise or expose the lies and crimes of that ruling elite, given that so doing would also expose its own.
One survey after another shows that the vast majority of Western journalists suffer from groupthink, a set of attitudes and beliefs that dictates their approach to their work.
They do not seek to inform the public about what is happening in the real world but instead want to educate and mould the citizens to conform to this same set of preconceived notions of what ought to be.
Vast swathes of reality are brushed under the carpet because the mainstream media consider them outside their collective beliefs and thus antithetical to the multiculturalist, cultural relativist, "green" and anti-Judean-Christian ideologies they strive to impose on the public.
Occasionally you will read or watch a disturbing story about murder, mayhem and rape, the deterioration of the state and all our public systems. But it is never put into context. The mainstream media never ask: Why has it come to this? What has it got to do with mass immigration from cultures that are openly antithetical to our own? What has it got to do with Islam?
And as the mainstream media stubbornly refuse to pose these obvious questions, reality turns into science fiction. Even if you observe a shoot-out in your street, even if your daughter is gang-raped on her way from school, even if your taxes keep increasing while all public services are crumbling, you will not accept this as belonging to the real world but as emanations of something outside the reality you have been conditioned to accept as the only true one.
I used to complain a lot about deceiving rulers and a lying press.
But that is quite futile. Like howling at the Moon. The ruling class and the press that serves it will never change. They will stay with the Titanic they have built and if the rest of us don't want to sink to the bottom with them, we had better build other ships with captains and crews that know how to avoid the icebergs.
My esteemed colleague Ingrid Carlqvist will later enlighten you as to what we have in mind.
Thank you.
