The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest

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The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest is the third novel and movie of the late Swedish Communist Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy ^[2]. The trilogy has sold 65 million copies as of December 2011, and in 2010, The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest was the best-selling novel in the US.

The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest is less a sequel to the second film, The Girl who Played with Fire ^[3], than a continuation. It has the same director and cast, and it picks up immediately where the previous film left off. It feels like they merely changed reels.

At the end of The Girl who Played with Fire, the “girl,” lesbian autistic hacker Lisbeth Salander, was shot three times, once in the head, and buried alive by her father Alexander Zalachenko and her half-brother Ronald Niedermann. Zalachenko is a Soviet defector living under the protection of the Swedish government. He is a criminal kingpin involved in trafficking sex slaves, drugs, and arms from the former USSR. Niedermann, a giant blonde thug, is his father’s chief enforcer.

Zalachenko routinely raped and abused Lisbeth’s mother, finally leaving her crippled. To avenge her mother, the 12-year-old Lisbeth doused her father in gasoline and set him on fire, leaving him crippled and hideously disfigured. Zalachenko’s handlers had Lisbeth committed to a mental hospital under the care of a child molester, Dr. Peter Teleborian. Later, when she came of age, she was declared legally incompetent and placed under the supervision of a creepy lawyer named Bjurman, who also raped her.

Naturally, when Lisbeth dug herself out of her grave (with a cigarette case), she took an axe and buried it Zalachenko’s head and leg. Yet both survived, and at the beginning of the new film, they are being flown off for emergency medical treatment. We are treated to Lisbeth’s brain surgery in gag-inducing detail. Then both father and daughter are wheeled off to separate rooms to recover. Both are looking at charges of attempted murder, among other things.

It turns out the Zalachenko’s handlers work for a secret body within the Swedish government that is unknown even to the cabinet and Prime Minister. The group was created during a brief conservative government in the 1970s, and when the Social Democrats returned to power, nobody in the new cabinet was informed of their existence. This “deep state” apparatus is apparently the hornet’s nest of the title, and Lisbeth Salander has them all abuzz.

Such “deep states” do exist, of course, but I have no doubt that its Swedish version does not take the form of a secret cabal of rapists and child-molesters assembled by a conservative government. That is about as unlikely as the menacing Nazi serial killers of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo ^[4]—or every single event of The Girl who Played with Fire, for that matter. Indeed, Larsson’s leftist fantasies about Sweden’s deep state are refuted by his own story, which reveals the real Swedish deep state, which has a familiar blueprint.

The Millennium magazine from which the trilogy takes its name is clearly modeled on Larsson’s own Expo magazine, which he founded in 1995 and edited until his death in 2004. Expo is an anti-racist, anti-fascist publication modeled on the UK’s Searchlight. Like Searchlight, Expo has close connections with Jewish and Communist groups, as well as criminal elements (anti-fascist hackers, vandals, and thugs). Expo seeks to harass patriotic Swedes who resist the Jewish agenda of white race replacement.

In The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, Millennium journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Larsson’s fantasy alter ego) works to clear Lisbeth of the charges of attempted murder by exposing Zalachenko and his handlers and their conspiracy to imprison, silence, discredit, and ultimately kill Lisbeth. (When Zalachenko tries to blackmail his handlers, who are sick old men like himself, they dispatch a 78-year-old geezer to kill him in this hospital. He also tries to kill Lisbeth, but fails and kills himself to avoid capture. There are no guards on the rooms of either prisoner, by the way.)

When Blomkvist begins to uncover the hornet’s nest, he is contacted by the Swedish secret police, who make him a consultant, using his research to take down the Right-wing cabal. The same pattern of Jewish-connected anti-racist, anti-fascist organizations working hand-in-hand with both secret police and criminal elements can be observed in the repression of white resistance to race replacement in the United States and the whole white world. It is a glimpse of the real “deep state”: the Jewish-dominated anti-white power structure that has steered all white countries onto the path of demographic decline, miscegenation, and non-white immigration, which, if allowed to continue, will drive our race to extinction.

This revelation of the truth is, of course, rather shocking given Larsson’s otherwise note-perfect politically correct inversions of reality. But even Homer nods from time to time. Surely if Larsson had lived to publish this book, he would have corrected this lapse.

Yes, the previous two novels/films that set the background story are ludicrous. Yes, Niedermann’s relentless brutality is cartoonish. Yes, Lisbeth’s acquittal makes no sense: she discredits the attempts to declare her insane, but this should not be sufficient for an acquittal on attempted murder charges. (Our plucky heroine’s courtroom attire certainly does not help her case.) But as a story, The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest is by far the least implausible and most interesting chapter of The Millennium Trilogy. But that’s not saying much. Moreover, the movie clocks in at 2-and-a-half hours, and you feel every minute of it. Even if it weren’t evil, I couldn’t recommend this movie. Life’s just too short.