Just needed a place to post this link really
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jan/08/nick-cohen-stieg-larsson?CMP=twt_guQuoteExcept that Larsson wasn't a feminist – or not a consistent one. He wrote with real anger about the oppression of women with white skins. When others tried to do the same about the oppression of women with brown skins, he denounced them as racists. My friend and colleague Johan Lundberg, the editor of the Swedish journal Axess, has done what I should have done and read Larsson's obscure book on honour killings. He waited for the release of the film to give us his findings.
Larsson did indeed break off from writing the Millennium trilogy to intervene in the debate about the "honour killings" of two Kurdish women in Sweden. Far from worrying about the suffering of women, Larsson and his co-author said those who campaigned for the rights of women in immigrant communities wanted "to portray all male immigrants as representatives of a single homogeneous attitude towards women". They had sexist as well as racist motives. They only talked about honour crime because they wanted to divert attention from how white men raised in the "patriarchal structures of Swedish society" abused and murdered women as a matter of course.
If all Larsson wanted to say was that the rights of women should be upheld, regardless of colour or creed, then no one could argue with him. He came close to asserting the opposite. Believe that western legal systems, for all their faults, were preferable to forced marriages, religious courts where the testimony of a woman is worth half that of a man and the stoning to death of adulterous women and you were a "rightwing extremist", carrying on the fascist tradition. In a final descent into paranoid dementia, he accused those who disagreed with him of preparing to unleash "special operations forces, which are ready to begin the ethnic cleansing".
