The Man Who Left Too Soon: The Life and Works of Stieg Larsson Read Online Free

of hate propaganda, there was little actual scientific research being quoted on such sites.
    ‘I couldn’t find a single scientific paper,’ Larsson lamented, ‘mapping out the relationship between agitation and action. At the same time, it would perhaps seem superfluous to point out that propaganda is the tool of any lobby group or political group from right to left, from good to evil. I rather doubt that any group would spend time, effort and money on propaganda if it didn’t have a proven effect.’
    Larsson’s attitude to the propaganda that bombards us daily was relatively benign – he noted, for instance, its acceptable legal status. After the end of the Second World War, he observed, race biology and obviously anti-Semitic sentiments didn’t make much of an impact on everyday life among Europeans. ‘Although there were an abundance of groups producing hate propaganda, a Nazi magazine or a leaflet was actually very hard to come by for the average member of the public. You really had to make an effort to be able to read any of the rather tatty Mimeographed editions making the rounds in the political sub-vegetation.
    ‘The arrival of the internet has changed all that. And to tell the truth, we who monitor such things have been slow to catch on. For the racist groups, cyberspace is a dream. It is no accident that today the first item on the agenda for any racist or ultra-nationalist group is the creation of a home page. Nazis were among the first to realise the potential of the internet. This is clearly worded in their own internal strategies.’
    Larsson, always au fait with the exigencies of disseminating information, posited that compared with the production of books or magazines, the internet was cost-reductive: it is cheap and easy to maintain.
    ‘An internet homepage of the smallest racist group of three or four people has the same circulation and availability as Der Spiegel or a CNN broadcast. It is in everybody’s computer, just the click of a mouse away. And – perhaps most importantly – it offers a brand new way of organising, merchandising, fundraising and communication.’
    In a conclusion with obvious ramifications for his later fiction, Larsson pointed out that on the internet you can find absolutely anything you are looking for – a proposition even truer today than when Larsson made it.
    ‘Experts in terrorism,’ he continued, ‘will tell you that every group that has ever taken violent action has done so following a period – sometimes years – of active propaganda. In many ways this stage is the process of dehumanizing the target of your propaganda… first you joke about the Holocaust, and then you claim it is a forgery – it never happened.’
    Interestingly, though, Larsson was keen to broaden out the discussion from attacks on minority ethnic groups by pointing out that propaganda often has another underlying theme (one with considerable resonance in the US with its survivalist movements): fostering suspicion against democratic society, democratic politicians and democracy itself.
    ‘My personal opinion’, he said, ‘one which some of my partners and associates will agree with, while others will disagree, is that legislation alone cannot solve the challenge of internet hate propaganda. Indeed, I would even counsel caution against relying too much on legislation. Please don’t misunderstand me. We have laws separating right from wrong according to our social standards. If we have a law against incitement of racial hatred, then let us by all means use it as a tool to prosecute offenders.
    ‘But the reality of the problem is that we are now facing thousands and thousands of racist pages from all over the world. The reality of the situation is that we haven’t even got enough police officers to investigate, let alone enough prosecutors to take action. For that reason, the judicial process in any country will only skim the surface and make examples of a few of the worst