Against Reality
Me and the Unabomber Against the World

Industrial Society and Its Future — the Unabomber Manifesto.
£1.50 from Active Distribution

THERE ARE AT least 3 versions of this going about. The one to get has got to be the edition by Green Anarchist as it has a well written and enthusiastic introduction by GA and better still a piece by anti-technology anarchists “autonomous Anarchists Anonymous” from Oregon. This second piece slags off other US anarchist groups (Love and Rage and Slingshot) for not welcoming the Unabomber to their arms. Fair enough in some ways: criticising the bombings for inviting repression on anarchists is plain naive, criticising the Unabomber as a “murderer” is slightly hysterical. This doesn’t cover the fact that a shopkeeper, albeit the manager of a store selling computers (!), might not seem on first glance a legitimate target any more than a record store owner or a publican. Graduating in maths might also seem to qualify you for a letter bomb. However, the enthusiasm that GA and others seem to have for these attacks is far more naive than the kneejerk reactions from leftists and anarchists. It is only when you read the manifesto itself that you get a real sense that there are no politics involved here anyway and, yes, the bloke is a complete nutter.

The basis of the manifesto is quite reasonable and utterly predictable. Technology is evil (a word used a lot), unreformable, not neutral in any way. Most of the manifesto deals with the depersonalising and alienating aspects of technology rather than the economic/ political side of industry. Much of the rest is an attack on “leftism” which means liberals and those who look to the establishment for solutions.

The first signs that someone isn’t playing with a full deck are the constant references to we or “FC”. This refers to the Freedom Club, the unabomber’s “group”. Not even the US primitivists seem to think that there is more than one person involved but FC discuss everything amongst themselves. Either it is the royal we or he has a lot of imaginary friends.

The references to anarchism that have so excited all of us fall a bit flat. There are constant references to “welfare leeches” and to the “unthinking majority” (people who don’t agree with him). “History is made by determined active minorities”. Napoleon complex or what. Though arguably he could have got that from Bakunin as easily as from spending too much time on his own.

My favourite paragraph from the Unabomber manifesto is paragraph 204 where it says “Revolutionaries should have as many children as they can. There is strong scientific evidence that social attitudes are to a significant extent inherited....no one denies that children tend to hold social attitudes similar to those of their parents.” Sadly, if the man turned in by his brother is “FC”, this was not true enough.