Swedish writer Sven Lindqvist, who "argued that the racist brutality of European imperialism led to the horrors of the 20th century and survived into the 21st," died May 14, the Guardian reported. He was 87. Lindqvist "came to be considered one of his country's most important postwar writers, engaging controversially with a broad range of topics. From the 1960s onwards, his work was translated into English and other languages, with a focus towards the works which engage most directly with travel, war and what Professor Paul Gilroy has called 'the political ethics of antiracism.' "
"We want genocide to have begun and ended with Nazism," he wrote in Exterminate All the Brutes (1992). "That is what is most comforting." But his work "neither comforted nor diminished, but clarified," the Guardian noted.
Lindqvist's 33 books include A Proposal (1955), Advertising Is Lethal (1957), The Myth of Wu Tao-tzu (1967), The Shadow (1972), Land and Power in South America (1979), Diary of a Lover (1981), Diary of a Married Man (1982), Bench Press (1988), Desert Divers (1990), Terra Nullius: A Journey Through No One's Land (2005) and A History of Bombing (2001).
Lindqvist's many honors included the 2012 Lenin prize, awarded "to a Swedish author or artist who operates in a rebellious leftist tradition," the Guardian wrote. His acceptance speech noted that he was "an opponent of Lenin and most of his teachings," and "a feminist, traditional social democrat."