SUPO had jackets on hundreds of hate activists. The sheer number of them intimidated me. Even if I assembled a large team of investigators, how could we possibly look at them all in sufficient depth?
Each so-called hate crime had to be considered. Was the crime committed because of a person’s ethnicity, or was that incidental? For instance, the beating of bus drivers. Some black bus and taxi drivers had been beaten, but so had white ones. Those crimes weren’t necessarily racially motivated. Legally, however, if the victim had been attacked by a person or persons of a different ethnicity than his or her own, they were almost always considered hate crimes. There were no instances of racially motivated decapitation or anything like it. As the hours passed, neither Milo nor I saw anything that might make any individual stand out enough to be considered a suspect.
At about five p.m., news of the murdered soldier and the theft of the AK-47 rifles hit the Internet. Every newspaper pumped it up on its Internet page. Someone had taken a close-up of Rami, the boy whose throat was cut, his tongue flopped through the incision. The image captured the nation. And young Harri had told—or sold—his story.
Real Finns Party leader Topi Ruutio remained silent on the subject.
Roope Malinen wrote a hate tract gloating over his prescience. His every word and thought had been vindicated. His blog received fifty-four thousand hits that day. A new record for him.
Hate coalesced.
Anti-foreigner animosity roared through the media. In the moderated newspaper commentary sites, readers voiced their opinions following the articles on the soldier’s murder. All blacks should be immediately deported, stripped of Finnish citizenship if they possessed it. We took them into this country out of the goodness of our hearts and now they waged jihad against us. Blacks and Muslims should be placed in concentration camps. Finnish Gypsies are scum. What the fuck kind of Gypsies take up residency and don’t move around nomad style. Finnish Gypsies go back and forth from Sweden to Finland on the ferry, claim residency in both countries, and draw on the welfare systems of both. Finland was a white man’s paradise, now destroyed by the black man’s seed. If they won’t go home and stay there, drive the Gypsy beggars into the sea.
Un-moderated bloggers and social networking sites ran wild. Sterilize blacks and Arabs to prevent the dilution of Finnish blood. The mud people make mud babies. Tar babies. Burn mosques. Fuck Lisbet S?derlund, the dead nigger dick licker got what she deserved. Niggers destroy order, breed chaos.
Finland roiled with hatred. Race crime threats abounded.
In Joensuu, five neo-Nazis wearing bulletproof vests, presumably in case police shot them with rubber bullets to quell the riot, attacked a left-wing candidate and her supporters during a speech. The anonymity of social networking generated straight talk. Facebook pages sprang up and discussed the pros and cons of sending the niggers back to Africa versus feeding them to gas chambers and ovens. They discussed eliminating more politicians from the left with bullets.
Plus, there were two more junkie suicides and one more pharmacy robbery.
I got a call from SUPO. The country’s major newspapers had all received a fax. It appeared constructed in the same way as the note accompanying Lisbet S?derlund’s severed head. It read, “For every crime committed by blacks against whites, we will kill a nigger in retribution.”
They sent me a scan. The angles at which the letters had been cut out looked like work by the same hand.
Milo shook his head, disgusted. “You know, they brought a lot of this on themselves.”
If I’d felt emotions, I don’t know if I would have been angry, or laughed at his ignorance, or both.