AMY GOODMAN: Norwegians gathered in front of a cathedral in the center of Oslo Tuesday to mourn the 76 victims of the killer who stunned the nation with a deadly bomb and gun attack. Thousands of flowers and candles have been laid in front of the cathedral as people pay their respects to the victims. Crown Prince Haakon Magnus was among the prominent visitors also invited to an Oslo mosque in a sign of national unity.
CROWN PRINCE HAAKON MAGNUS: [translated] We have taken this initiative because of the incident on Friday. The people of the nation are in mourning. It is a difficult time, and we wish to distribute a message of hope, warmth, generosity and peace.
AMY GOODMAN: The suspect in the Norwegian attacks, Anders Behring Breivik, allegedly set off a bomb outside government buildings in Oslo Friday and then opened fire on a Labour Party summer camp for youth activists on a nearby island. During a court hearing Monday, he accepted responsibility for the killings but denied charges of terrorism. He says he belonged to an anti-Islam network that has two cells in Norway and more abroad. But Norwegian police and researchers have cast doubt on whether such an organization exists.
Breivik faces terror-related charges that carry a maximum 21-year sentence. His defense lawyer, Geir Lippestad, told reporters yesterday his client appears to be insane and that he would quit if Breivik did not agree to psychological tests.
GEIR LIPPESTAD: This whole case has indicated he's insane. He said it was necessary to start a war here in Europe and throughout the Western world. So, he's sorry that it was necessary, but it was necessary, he says.
AMY GOODMAN: But the suggestion that Anders Breivik is insane has been rejected by scholars following the rise of right-wing extremism. Instead, they see him as the extension of a virulently xenophobic narrative with deep roots in the United States.
Breivik left a long trail of online comments, a YouTube video, and a manifesto meticulously outlining his political beliefs. His 1,500-page manifesto, titled "A European Declaration of Independence," seeks common cause with xenophobic, right-wing groups around the world, particularly here in the U.S. It draws heavily on the writings of prominent anti-Islam American bloggers, as well as Unabomber Ted Kaczynski. His writing reveals him as a right-wing nationalist fueled by a combined hatred of Muslims, Marxists and multiculturalists. In his video and manifesto, he identifies himself with the figures of the Crusades, in particular the early figures that actually fought a Muslim invasion of Europe. Breivik calls for a "conservative revolution" and "pre-emptive declaration of war."
Even after the massacre in Norway, right-wing pundits in the U.S. have come out in defense of Breivik's analysis, if not actions. On Monday, Pat Buchanan wrote at The American Conservative, quote, "As for a climactic conflict between a once-Christian West and an Islamic world that is growing in numbers and advancing inexorably into Europe for the third time in 14 centuries, on this one, Breivik may be right," unquote.
For more, we're joined by someone who's made his way through much of the 1,500-page manifesto. Jeff Sharlet is author of the bestselling book The Family, contributing editor for Harper's Magazine and Rolling Stone, author of C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy and, most recently, Sweet Heaven When I Die: Faith, Faithlessness, and the Country In Between. Professor Sharlet joins us from Dartmouth College, where he teaches English.
Welcome to Democracy Now!, Jeff. Well, how far have you gotten into Breivik's manifesto?
JEFF SHARLET: I've been reading it slowly over the week, and one of the things that got me started was that, you know, almost immediately, a lot of conservative pundits and even sort of mainstream journalists were declaringsummarizing this 1,500-page document. And, you know, sort of startled: how did they read this in a few hours like that? So I've made my way through most of it, but it's a massive document, and it requires a lot of work, because sometimeshe says he's lifting from a lot of sources, many of them American. Sometimes he identifies them, as with Robert Spencer, a popular anti-Islamic blogger. Sometimes he doesn't, as with William Lind, a prominent conservative critic whose attack on what he sees as political correctness as a sign of Western decadence he lifts kind of whole cloth without attribution. So, you really have to kind of read the text and then really double-check and see where it's coming from. I mean, even some of the most extreme things, you're then stunned to seefor instance, his Bible battle verses that he uses as he's preparing for combat. You know, you think this is really fringe, and in fact it comes from Joseph Farah and WorldNetDaily, a very popular conservative website in the United States.
AMY GOODMAN: What were you most shocked by, Jeff Sharlet, as you tweet your way through this manifesto, sharing what you are learning? For example, talk about Spencer. He mentions him, what, more than 150 times throughout the pages.
JEFF SHARLET: Yeah, and already"apologists" seems like too strong a word, but these conservatives are going and saying, "Oh, that's not fair to draw a connection"will say, "Oh, he doesn't mention Spencer. People he's quoting mention Spencer," particular, another popular anti-Islamic blogger named Fjordman, who he quotes extensively. But that's the nature of this text, and that'sand Breivik is not a stupid man, and he talks about that, how he's collaging this text, so he's constantly coming back to Spencer as his sort of dominant authority on what Islam is. And, you know, if you depend onif you believe Spencer's understanding of Islam, other people might be taking up arms, too. It's a little bit like reading Leviticus and then saying, "Oh, well, I know what Christians are all about, and all Christians are off hunting for witches, literally, and killing people." I mean, it'sthe irony of Robert Spencer is he takes an absolute literalist and kind of ahistorical examination of Islam and then builds up this great monster, and that's what Breivik goes to for his authority. And not just Spencer, but Pamela Geller, Rich Lowry from the National Review.
He's reallywhat struck me most about this document is just how American it is in every way. I mean, a huge amount of it is from American sources. The ideology, he himself will sometimes describe as American. He's a great admirer of America, because he says United States, unlike Europe, has retained its Christian identity, and that's why he's going to these sources. He says America has the kind of Christian identity he would like for Norway to have.
AMY GOODMAN: The manifesto also provides detailed instructions for preparing physically and mentally for what Breivik describes as a coming "civil war" between patriotic nationalists and "multiculturalists" who are, wittingly or not, destroying European civilization. He writes, "Once you decide to strike, it is better to kill too many than not enough, or you risk reducing the desired ideological impact of the strike. Explain what you have done (in an announcement distributed prior to operation) and make certain that everyone understands that we, the free peoples of Europe, are going to strike again and again."
He also says, "This is the big day you have been looking forward to for so long. Countless hours and perhaps years of preparation have rewarded you with this opportunity. Equip yourself and arm up, for today you will become immortal."
One more quote: "For the last three years I have been working full time on a cultural conservative work which will help to develop and market these political ideas."
And finally, "The time for dialogue is over. We gave peace a chance. The time for armed resistance has come."
Jeff Sharlet, comment on these.
JEFF SHARLET: You know, you mentioned that marketing line, and there's another line, and he says, "I'm not only a one-man army, I'm a one-man marketing agency." That's how he describes himself. And what's interesting is he analyzes what he thinks the media reaction is going to be. And so, he predicts correctly that, you know, a lot of mainstream media is just going to dismiss him as a madman, as insane. "You can use that to your advantage," he says, "because they're not going to take you very seriously." And he says, but the other thing is, he says, a lot of cultural conservatives, like Pat Buchanan, he said, they will be forced to condemn what I've done. They may, in fact, genuinely condemn what he's done, he says, but they're going to read my manifesto, and they're going to find in it this great document, this wake-up call, as Pat Buchanan has described it, "wholly accurate," as American Christian right leader Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association has described it.
So when you look atyou know, one of the things that comes out of that, all that sort of rhetoric about preparing for battle is terrifying, but even more terrifying is his really sort of correct assessment of how conservatives would use it. And so far, they've been playing pretty close to the script and condemning the violence but saying, "Hey everybody, this isyou know, we really do need to fight the Muslim menace," and so on, which sort of starts to lead you in this kind of circular logic where you get back to, ultimately, atrocities like the one Breivik has committed.
AMY GOODMAN: Throughout his manifesto, Breivik blames the feminist revolution for Europe's downfall. He says he even tried to measure the relative decadence of each European country by determining how willing women were in each country to have one-night stands. In one part of Breivik's manifesto, he writes, "Fact: 60-70% of all cultural Marxists/multiculturalists are women. This partly explains why the gradual feminist revolution is directly linked to the implementation of multiculturalist doctrines. These feminist cultural Marxists do not only want more benefits and rights for themselves. They want it all, and have more or less been awarded with everything they could ever dream of achieving. They now have complete matriarchal supremacy domestically and exercise substantial influence in politics."
He also writes, "Females have a significantly higher proportion of erotic capital than males due to biological differences (men have significantly more prevalent sexual urges than females and are thus easily manipulated)."
Jeff Sharlet, how does this fit into his overall ideology?
JEFF SHARLET: It's reallyI mean, this has been one of the things that hasn't been commented on enough: how central his critique of feminism is to the whole manifesto. You know, you get into long sections where he's really picking up all these sort of talking points of the American Christian right. And he goes a little further. He goes as far as sort of the far edges of the American Christian right, saying that women should not pursue advanced degrees. And he really gets into this kind ofthis sort of breeding frenzy, described by my friend Kathryn Joyce in her book, Quiverfull, which is a great source on this, this American Christian right movement that sees Christian women as somehowand American and European womenas somehow not doing their job by having enough babies to compete with the Muslims. And, you know, as crazy as that seemsas, you know, I've written in another bookthere's plenty of U.S. congressmen who endorse this idea. He reproduces a long article by an American named Phillip Longman on this idea of restoring the patriarchy, that this is what's necessary to fight Islam.
And, of course, it gets into, as with so many of these kinds of texts, this constant sort of description of women's sexual morality. He says you can measure the weakness of Western countries' ability to fight Islam, as you said, by counting one-night stands, which he claims to have done with his group of buddies by traveling around Europe and seeing, you know, how many people they could sleep with. So there's, I mean, this sort of verythat sounds crazy, but then you start looking at the sources he has. And right from the very beginning, he's constantly returning to this idea that feminism, that women's rights, are at the heart of the kind of sort of fifth column attack on Western strength in response to Islam.
AMY GOODMAN: Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly lambasted the press for referring to Anders Breivik as a "Christian terrorist," on the grounds that Breivik was not actually practicing Christianity. O'Reilly said no true Christian can be a terrorist and insisted Christian fundamentalists are essentially different from Muslim fundamentalists.
BILL O'REILLY: On Sunday, the New York Times headline, "As Horrors Emerged: Norway Charges Christian Extremist." Number of other news organizations, like the L.A. Times and Reuters, also played up the Christian angle. But Breivik is not a Christian. That's impossible. No one believing in Jesus commits mass murder. The man might have called himself a Christian on the net, but he is certainly not of that faith. Also, Breivik is not attached to any church and in fact has criticized the Protestant belief system in general. The Christian angle came from a Norwegian policeman, not from any fact finding. Once again, we can find no evidencenonethat this killer practiced Christianity in any way.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Fox's Bill O'Reilly. Jeff Sharlet, your response?
JEFF SHARLET: You know, Bill O'Reilly, investigative journalist, once again, he can find no evidence. Try reading the manifesto. You know, this has become a popular idea, that he can't be a Christian. Well, he's certainly not a good Christian. I think we can agree with that, all agree on that. It's worth remembering, for Bill O'Reilly, that there's quite a few American evangelicals who would also say he's not a Christian, because he's a Catholic. You can't be ayou know, so that kind of thing, like, "Well, you're not doing my kind of Christianity."
The reality is, there's a story that emerges when you read the entire manifesto. In the beginning, he says, you know, "I wasn't particularly religious. Then I sort of glommed onto Christianity, and I realized I had to have a Christian identity." And by the end, he says he is religious. And, you know, as I said, he's citing a lot of scripture, Bible verses. Bill O'Reilly says he's not even Protestant. He agrees. He sees himself as being called back to Rome, to Catholicism. He described having high hopes for Pope Benedict early on, when Benedict said some very extreme anti-Islamic things, but he's been disappointed. He doesn't think Benedict is the right guy. But again and again, he says, "Look, I'm doing this for Christ." He even, at one point in the manifesto, talks abouthe says, you know, "Some people have a personal relationship with Jesus. I don't." So that's being used to say, "Well, then, clearly he's not a Christian." It's worth noting that, by the end, he gets that personal relationship.
But it's also worth thinking about the tradition he's in. He's not in the kind of American emotional evangelical tradition of Protestantism. He's, in fact, very critical of that. And again, he goes to American sources. He cites a priest, Father Dwight Longenecker, a Bob Jones University alumnus who converted, and writes a very long critique of what he sees as "sentimental Christianity." He prefers what he describes as "Crusader Christianity." And in that, he's not alone on the American Christian right.
AMY GOODMAN: In your book, Jeff Sharlet, your book C Street, you talk about Chuck Colson. Can you talk about Chuck Colson and evangelical Christians here?
JEFF SHARLET: Yeah. He doesn'the doesn't mention Colson. But, you know, ideologically, I think that's really the kind of closest match. Colson, in a lot of ways, might be seen as advocating a Crusader Christianity, as well. He shares a lot of sort of ideas with Breivikfirst of all, very militant anti-Islam. As Chuck Colson, who's the head of something called Prison Fellowship, Christianity in prisons, told me at one point, he says, "You know, at this point, mainly we're doing this to fight a war with Islam in prisons." Breivik actually proposes the exact same thing for Norway. He says we need to fight Islam in prisons by sort of this kind of aggressive conversion campaign.
But they also share a kind of a medieval fetish, a kind of idealization of knighthood and manliness, and an explicit and open antagonism toward the Enlightenment. And that's what puts Colson in this sort of more interesting place than a lot of other Christian right leaders. He sayshe comes out quite plainly and says the problem is the Enlightenment, as does Breivik.
And it really even comes down to their vision for what kind of society they see. So, for instance, these folks who are saying that Breivik is not a Christian aren't reading the portions in the manifesto in which he describes the ideal society. They want to believe will be Christian government. He sort of goes back and forth and engages the arguments within the Christian right: should we call it "theocracy," or should we call it something else? But really, they're sort of borrowing from a kind of a Colson idea of merging these things and giving Christianity dominion over all of society. But he says, with great generosity, that you don't have to convert, you just have to allow schools, courts, government to be ruled according to the Bible.
AMY GOODMAN: Interestingly, Colson talks about
JEFF SHARLET: So that kind of vision really comes
AMY GOODMAN: Interestingly, Colson talks about Christian conservatism and the culture war in Norway, is that right? And talk about the connection of, what you write about, the Family to Norway.
JEFF SHARLET: Yeah. Norway is unusual, actually, in having hadseveral years ago, their prime minister was a very active member of the Family. And the Norwegian press did a much better job than the American press, and putting this on the front page for weeks, in a sort of minor scandal, when they discovered all these sort of connections of thisof the previous Conservative Norwegian government to this American Christian right group. And around that same time
AMY GOODMAN: And the Family is...?
JEFF SHARLET: Oh, I'm sorry. The Family is a prominentanother one of theseanother prominent American Christian right organization, headquartered in Washington, really dedicated more to this kind ofcertainly not this Breivik kind of stuff, but more to the idea of a kind of Christian government. Colson converted to Christianity through this organization, was long identified with it, and at one point was looking at Norway and said he was greatly heartened by the rise of a new Christian conservatism in Norway, and talked about the Viking spirit that was rising. The founder of the Family was a Norwegian, who's in fact named his autobiography Modern Viking. And you sort of see that same sensibility in Breivik, who sees himself as a Viking rising again to fightto fight, you know, what he sees as a Muslim horde.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, this in no way is to link any of the people you've just talked about to the violence that has just taken place, this massacre that has
JEFF SHARLET: Absolutely not. And I think that
AMY GOODMAN: just taken place in Norway.
JEFF SHARLET: No, absolutely not. And I think that's incredibly important for us to remember, you know, anyone who cares about free speech, and also anyone who has ever written anything and seen it interpreted in a way that they didn't like. You know, Breivik pulled the trigger. Robert Spencer didn't shoot anybody. Chuck Colson didn't shoot anybody. And they didn't call for shooting anybody.
They do produce a rhetoric that kind of walks right up to the edge of things. I mean, if you are out there, like Robert Spencer or some of these other American conservatives, and saying, "Islam is a religion of violence. There can be no accommodation with it. They are trying to destroy us," you know, and then you sort of say, "And what to do about it? I don't know. You decide." Well, Breivik decided. Breivik took a kind of logical next step from that rhetoric. And that's part of why I think it's troubling when people sort of attempt to dismiss him as a madman and not deal with the politics that are very much a part of our, unfortunately, mainstream political discourse, that walk right up to the edge of violence.
Or, you know, in the case of U.S. war in the Middle Eastyou know, I've reported on this in the past, and we talked about this on the show here beforea number of senior American officers, Lieutenant General Bruce Fister, described the war in Iraq and Afghanistan as "a spiritual war of the greatest magnitude." There was video of the top American Army chaplain in Afghanistan saying that we're there fighting in Afghanistan for Christianity.
So, it's important to recognize that none of these writers are responsible for this, but they are engaging in a rhetoric that sort of walks right up to that step of violence, and Breivik took the step. And it's a little disingenuous for them to say, "Well, we never imagined anyone would do that."
AMY GOODMAN: Of course, his lawyer now is talking about pleading insanity for Breivik.
JEFF SHARLET: Yeah, and, I mean, that's whatyou know, it's a lawyer's job to find the best defense. There's not a whole otheryou know, a lot of angles on which to defend this guy, especially because heyou know, he surrendered and openly admits doing it, all of which he describes in the manifesto. He describes exactly what he was going to do. He says, here are statements that you can read at your trial hearing. It's important to try and get a trial, he says.
And, you know, there's something very reminiscent there of the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, who's another American source who he quotes from. Ted Kaczynski was furious because his lawyers insisted on using an insanity defense. A very troubled man, but he knew what he was doing, and he wanted to talk about it. He wanted to share his violent rhetoric. And he correctly, I think, identified that desire by the press and others to call him insane as a refusal to recognize the political critique he was making. I think we need to recognize it, if we're going to refute it. If we kind of plug our ears and say "inexplicable evil," then we're not going to learn anything about it, and we're going to be surprised the next time it happens.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you for being with us, Jeff Sharlet, author of the bestseller The Family, contributing editor for Harper's Magazine and Rolling Stone, also author of C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. Jeff Sharlet was speaking to us from Dartmouth College, where he is an assistant professor of English. We'll be back in 30 seconds in Stockholm, Sweden. Stay with us.
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AMY GOODMAN: We turn to look at the rising tide of far-right extremism in Norway, in Sweden and elsewhere in Europe. Despite the increasing prevalence of anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant sentiment in the country and region, many were surprised that the attacks were carried out by a Norwegian nationalist. The head of the security program at the Peace Research Institute in Oslo said he was one among many who thought the attacks were carried out by al-Qaeda.
PETER BURGESS: I was among those who first thought, in the first 24 hours after the attack, that it was a jihadist or a al-Qaeda-inspired attack. And there were a few reasons why that might be plausible. And I think that was really the only scope of threat that was considered by the Norwegian Security Services. So now that we find out that it's a right-wing extremist, we're all the more surprised. And I think that the Security Services were even more surprised. There was nothingthe statements from the Security Service are that there was nothing about this man which came upwhich should have come up on the security intelligence radar. Everything he was doing was within the realm of legality. There was really no reason to suspect him. And yet, there was every reason to suspect him.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Peter Burgess of the Peace Research Institute in Oslo.
According to observers, many of Anders Breivik's views have increasingly moved into the mainstream. Right-wing parties have also re-entered European politics in recent years, including the Dutch Party for Freedom, the Sweden Democrats, the True Finns, the National Front in France, the National Democratic Party of Germany. Europe's right fringe has secured seats in numerous national and regional parliaments across the continent.
Well, the man whose work we turn to now is known less for his extensive research into right-wing extremism in Scandinavian Europe than for his international blockbuster bestselling books known as the Millennium Trilogy: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest. The author is Stieg Larsson. His books were actually published after his death. You see them at every airport. You may read the books. You may have seen the movies. But Stieg Larsson was also the editor of Expo, which was a magazine, a journal, that researched far-right movements in Sweden and beyond. So we're turning to Sweden right now, to Stockholm, to speak with his life partner, Eva Gabrielsson. She has just published her memoir called There Are Things I Want You to Know about Stieg Larsson and Me.
We welcome you to Democracy Now! You did this work into the right wing together. When Stieg Larsson wasn't writing these books, he was writing, doing his research for years into the right. When this took place in Norway, Eva, what were your thoughts?
EVA GABRIELSSON: Well, I thought immediately that this must be a madman, but a politically motivated madman. And my thoughts went tothat this was a person inspired by some extreme right wing, because he went to slaughter the youth at the youth camp. So I had never thought it was al-Qaeda.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the work that you and your partner, Stieg Larsson, now known throughout the worldcertainly not the case when he was alive; he only dreamed that the books hethe manuscripts that he had would help to finance the research that you both have done, his lifehis real life commitment. Talk about what spurred Stieg to begin his research into the right wing. You talk about it in your book, the wave of racist violence in Sweden in the '80s, after which the extreme right became increasingly active in Sweden.
EVA GABRIELSSON: Well, he started being more openly active already in 1983, when he started to write for the British anti-fascist magazine Searchlight, which is based in London, and just because they needed somebody who could cover Scandinavia at the time. We had racist incidents. We had racist groups. We had neo-Nazi groups. And they all kept growing all through the 1980s. So, in the middle of the 1990s, it was time to also launch a Swedish magazine, a sort of sister magazine to Searchlight, but to make it its own, and that was Expo. So Stieg was actually working on these issues actively from 1983 up until his death.
His last article in Searchlight was published the same month as he died. That was November 2004. So he never gave up, and he continuously tried to explain that these groups aren't deluded youth. You can't say its their psychology or their social background which make them do these things. You have to understand that they do have a message and they do have a goal. And you have to regard their politics and take it seriously and see where they are going.
AMY GOODMAN: There isyou're involved in an ongoing legal dispute with Stieg's father and brother over the estate, which reallyyou know, it was after he died that these books became such massive blockbusters. But one of the issues you've raised and talked about was the reason that you, together with Stieg, for what, some three decades, didn't get married, and it had to do with registering your location. Can you talk about that?
EVA GABRIELSSON: Well, we wanted to marry. I evenwe even got the rings in 1983, and I still wear them. But we had to keep Stieg safe, and he wanted to keep me safe, by making sure that he was registered as unmarried in the Swedish public records, because we knew that they then, and still do, use the public records to make up lists of enemies of all kinds. These enemies are journalists. They are political activists. They are policemen. They are lawyers. They are politicians and so on. And Stieg was on that list from 1990 to '93, when the first list was revealed in a court case. And they continued to build on that list. So by not marryingit was, of course, possible to find his address in the public records, but it wasn't possible to find behind which door he was living, because his name wasn't on the door. He never paid any electricity bills. He never paid any gas bills. He never paid any insurance, anything like that. It was all in my name. So, that's why we did not marry. And it worked. It worked fine.
AMY GOODMAN: Meaning you were both protected. One of the central themes of Stieg Larsson's work is his research into the far right and the issue of violence against women. It is also something you are deeply concerned about. And when you read his books, you see that everywhere. Can you talk about why he was so deeply concerned about this and how he linked it into the rise of neo-Nazi groups, right-wing groups?
EVA GABRIELSSON: Well, hewhen you talk about violence against women, or discrimination, Stieg used to say that they are just two sides of the same coin. They are directed towards different groups of the people in a society, but it's the same mechanism, it's the same ideology, it's the same terror or discrimination that they want to impose, to subject somebody to something to be able to get more power of their own. And so, he never really saw any difference between racism and anti-feminism, just thatbecause the extreme right-wing movements and the right-wing populist racist movements started to grow so much in Sweden and in Scandinavia, he never really got the time to develop his feminist views, until Millennium. So that's why that became such an important thing in Millennium.
And I also notedI listened to the program while standing here. I also noted that you finally have found out that this Breivik in Norway, he is also what you could call a man who hates women. He blames actually women for the state of things in Europe now, and he doesn't blame the global economy and the lack of political and economical responses to that, which he should be able to do, since he went to some commerce higher education in Norway. Instead, he blames women, saying that we have destroyed societies, we are for multiculturalism, we are against men, we have made men into something that they are not. And I'm horrified to see that his long-term aim, by using terror to destabilize whole nations and the whole of Europe, is supposed to end up in a coup, first civil war and then a coup, where which they will reestablish the patriarchy againobviously with him in some kind of lead then at some point in time.
And it's justit's just so backward. It's just so horrible. It doesn't reflect the ideas of Scandinavian societies at all. And I'm deeply upset by his writings. I'm even more upset by what he has done. It'splease don't think that we are like that up here in the north. We certainly aren't.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Eva Gabrielsson, if Stieg were alive today, since he had been researching far-right extremism in Sweden and Scandinavia, do you think he would be surprised what took place in Norway? Or do you think it links into the different groups that Stieg has been writing about in Searchlight, in his magazine Expo? In fact, the shooter said, in his manifesto, he said that he was working with others, and that's still being investigated, with other cells in Norway.
EVA GABRIELSSON: I don't think Stieg would have fallen into the trap of sort of enhancing this man into something more than a lone, very confused person at this point in time. What I've been able to see so far is that his contacts with the Norwegian Defence League and a similar thing in Great Britain seem to have been a lot contact by internet, by blogs, by emails and things like that. He doesn't seem to have been the kind of man who was able to be in groups with real people in real life. So, for the time beingand I hope the police investigation will show how much contact he had with others and if there is, in fact, any organization, but it seems to beso far, it seems to be a lone, lone guy.
I also would like to show you a book. This is an official government report from 1999, which dealt with the destroyers of democracy. This was a official government study into how to deepen and broaden and secure democratic ways of making politics. And Stieg wrote a chapter here, and it's about terror, it's about The Turner Diaries and these kinds of threats. So, we have been aware of this in Sweden, that democracy needs to be deepened and broadened and practiced by more than politicians. And I'm glad to hear Jens Stoltenberg, the prime minister of Norway, expressing some kind of the same ideas in his speech to the Norwegian nation last night.
AMY GOODMAN: Eva Gabrielsson, I want to thank you for being with us. I hope this is just part one of our conversation. Eva Gabrielsson is the life partner of Stieg Larsson, famous for the Millennium Trilogy. And she has written a book about her relationship with Stieg, called There Are Things I Want You to Know about Stieg Larsson and Me.
