Tamas Gellert

Den här var fan sjukt bra!! Visst är den ibland lite väl skönlitterärt skriven med tanke på att det är en faktabok (mycket dialoger och inre tankar som vi nog inte kan känna oss säkra på att någon haft), men aldrig så att det känns töntigt, det gjorde den bara lättare att läsa.

Sen var den extremt jobbig att läsa också eftersom den dealar mycket med den rasistiska anda som rådde i Sverige på 90-talet och liksom är lite bakgrunden till hela grejen. Dels för att sånt är jobbigt att läsa om men också för att it hits a liiiite close to home med tanke på hur det är idag. Det går liksom inte riktigt att komma undan.

Men, men, ibland måste man må lite dåligt.… (more)

This is a very insightful and complex book about John Ausonius, the man called "Lasermannen", where not only his life is portrayed, but in contrast with Swedish culture and politics during the 1980s and 1990s, where xenophobia plays a massive part, not only in how Ausonius reacted to things, but to how people reacted to his acts, where he murdered one person and shot many.

The author is, which is correct to me, critical of how the police handled the case, as well as giving praise where it is deserved. It's interesting to see how incompetent parts of the police were, as well as how strange the Swedish political scene was, especially as Ny Demokrati entered as a new, weird and xenophobic political party.… (more)

I chose Lasermannen as one of my reads for this year’s challenge because I missed it in 2002-2003 when everybody else was reading it and talking about it. But after the horrible terrorist attacks in Norway just a few weeks ago, reading this seemed urgent. In the light of that Lasermannen is probably my most important read of this year. It deals with a series of racist shootings that shook Sweden in 1991-1992, which can be seen as the point where Sweden as a nation became aware of it’s aggressive domestic racism. Another piece in our loss of innocence, perhaps, that began with the murder of prime minister Palme a few years earlier.

It deserves to be repeated in this time of islamophobia, that in Europe at least, racist/nationalist terror acts are much more common than Islamic terrorism. As horrible as Al Qaida are, they are not the only threat. They are not even the biggest. And yet media and officials are usually very quick to label a person committing systematic violence against immigrants or homosexuals “a crazy loner” rather than terrorist. Right after the horrible recent events on Utöya and in Oslo, experts in TV studios were going on and on how this was almost certainly a well-organized Al Qaida attack. Until it stood clear that the shooter was Norwegian (which was talked about as “confusing information” in the beginning) – after which he was quickly labeled a crazy person acting alone. Only several days later the media seemed to come to the conclusion it should be called an act of terrorism – “non-islamic terrorism” (sic!) in some instances.

Recent events here in Sweden get the same treatment. The guy who –acting alone - blew up a car and himself in central Stockholm because of our involvement in the war in Afghanistan was rightfully called a terrorist. The guy shooting dark skinned people in Malmö last year was “a crazy loner” – despite the deeds happening at the same time a political party rooted in the Swedish Nazi movement were on the bandwagon to get into parliament.

Tamas’ book takes us back to a similar time. Xenophobic and populist Ny Demokrati were storming forward in the polls before the 1991 election, violent Nazism was showing it’s ugly face as VAM (White Aryan Resistance) were beating up immigrants and gays, robbing banks and creating bomb threats. And everyday racism were brewing more or less everywhere – not least in the press. It’s easy to see how John Ausonius thought he was just doing what everybody else was thinking when he mounted a laser sight on his rifle and started shooting random people with foreign looks. What followed was over a year of fear and hard policework, when Ausonius shot 11 people in ten different attacks, killing one and maiming several for life.

Tamas has really done his reaserch, including many many hours of interviews with Ausoius himself and the police who were hunting him, and the book is very effective in it’s going back and forth between a biography of Ausoinus and the events around the shootings, the police investigation (painfully without leads at first) and it’s corrolation to the Swedish zeitgeist of the time. It really reads like a thriller, and I devoured it in big chunks. Tamas can’t write good dialogue, making the imagined conversations feel a bit clumsy, but this is the book’s only real flaw.

Lasermannen is an important time document, but also very relevant as a mirror of today. Ausonius was a “crazy loner”, but he was not alone. A lot of trends in society were pointing out the way for him. (I remember “Lasermannen – a bright spot in the darkness” t-shirts sold at the spring fair in my home town around the time of the shootings). And in the same way Breivik, the shooter in Norway, was not alone. He was an active member of numerous web communities who agreed with his hateful analysis. Any article about the deed has numerous comments saying he was a hero for killing over 75 people - most of which were teenagers. Both these terrorists acted alone, but right up to the point of stepping over the final boundary, were both backed by a public choir of hatred.… (more)