A research text dump on ‘Abe Cabrera’

[ITS] has explicitly rejected association with anarchism, and via a subsequent (i.e. second generation) moniker, rejected both the label of “leftist” and “insurrectionary”.

In a rare interview the group provided in 2014, it describes its purpose, stating:

[ITS] deemed it necessary to carry out the direct attack against the Technoindustrial System. We think that the struggle against this is not only a stance of wanting to abandon Civilization, regressing to Nature, or in refuting the system’s values, without also, attacking it.

ITS has received international attention after repeatedly targeting scientists and researchers with lethal force. ITS has stood out from other bombers due to its lengthy, academic-styled communiqués and direct attacks on individuals from outside the typical target set: heads of state and corporations, officials in law enforcement, jailing, etc. ITS is unique in at least two matters: its stated objective to kill, and its specific, tech-related target set. In the 2014 interview, cell members explain:

Our immediate objectives are very clear: injure or kill scientists and researchers (by the means of whatever violent act) who ensure the Technoindustrial System continues its course. As we have declared on various occasions, our concrete objective is not the destruction of the Technoindustrial system, it is the attack with all the necessary resources, lashing out at this system which threatens to close off all paths to the reaching of our Individual Freedom, putting into practice our defensive instinct

… ITS has from the beginning proposed the attack against the system as the objective, striving to make these kinds of ideas spread around the globe through extreme acts, in defense of Wild Nature, as we have done.

According to their own historical account, the group began experimenting in 2011 with “arson attacks on cars and construction machinery, companies and institutions … until we decided to focus on terrorism and not sabotage”. From 2011–2014, ITS deployed at least 13 mail bombs, two mailed threats accompanied by bullets, and assassinated Méndez Salinas, a biotechnologist with the Institute of Bio-Technology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Salinas was shot in the head, and according to ITS, killed by “the most violent cell of ITS in Morelos, being already familiar with the purchase and use of firearms.”

Through their various communiqués and interviews, ITS has claimed responsibility for a series of attacks, many of which were claimed under other monikers and later linked to the ITS network. For example, in August 2014, ITS declared the formation of Wild Reaction (RS):

After a little more than three years of criminal-terrorist activity, the group … [ITS] … begins a new phase in this open war against the Technoindustrial System … we want to explain that during all of 2012 and 2013, various groups of a terrorist and sabotage stripe were uniting themselves with the group ITS, so that now, after a long silence and for purely strategic reasons, we publicly claim [10 attacks from newly affiliated networks] … All of these have now fused with the ITS groups in Morelos, Mexico City, Guanajuato, Hidalgo, Coahuila and Veracruz … Due to this union, the extravagant and little-practical pseudonym of ““Individualists Tending toward the Wild’ (ITS) ceases to exist, and from now on the attacks against technology and civilization will be signed with the new name of “Wild Reaction”(RS).

Prior to this announcement, in April 2014 a group calling itself Obsidian Point Circle of Analysis (OPCAn) activated a new clandestine cell (which would later be absorbed into RS) called Obsidian Point Circle of Attack (OPCA). The formation of OPCAn was preceded by three commentaries on ITS and the authors “becoming tired of simply writing.” In its opening declaration OPCA writes:

It has been some time since we started writing about some situations that had arisen in Mexico concerning the terrorist group ITS; we published a total of three analyses, in which we have publicly demonstrated our support of the group ITS, in their actions as much as their position. Until now we have decided to solely be those who comfortably spread and highlighted the group’s communiques and actions, but that is over. The violent advance of the techno-industrial system, the degradation that civilization leaves in its wake and the oblivion they are forcing us toward, ceasing to be natural humans to the point of turning into humanoids: there must be a convincing response.

We abandon words and analyses in order to begin with our war … We only seek confrontation with the system, the sharpening of the conflict against it. From this day we publicly put aside the word “analysis,” in order to become The Obsidian Point Circle of Attack.

Thus, according to its own narrative, ITS inspired public commentary and critique by OPCAn and, in September 2014, when ITS became RS, it was announced that RS included OPCA as well. In the first declaration by RS, the authors explain: “during this year … two more terroristic groups have united with us who have put the development of the Technoindustrial System in their sights … The ‘Obsidian Point Circle of Attack’ … [and] … The ‘Atlatl Group.’” Therefore, a complete history of ITS’s actions includes both attacks claimed under their name, those claimed under the OPCA and RS, as well as smaller groupings merged under the network’s banner. According to a chronology assembled from the networks’ communications, the network has claimed at least 27 distinct actions including 22 IED attacks (mostly mail and package/parcel bombs), three written threats, several arsons of property, one animal release, and one fatal shooting.

In early 2016, the ITS moniker saw its first usage outside of the borders of Mexico. In the second ITS communiqué of 2016, the “Uncivilized Southerners” cell “abandoned a homemade explosive charge” on a bus in Santiago, Chile writing:

The Eco-Extremist tendency spreads … We are accomplices to its ideas and acts, forming part of it. We are giving life to an international project against civilization.

Because we are bullets to the head, mail-bombs, indiscriminate bombings and incinerating fire, we are:

Individualists Tending Toward the Wild – Chile.

A few days later, in the fourth ITS communiqué of 2016, an ITS cell in Argentina claimed responsibility for placing an IED in a Buenos Aires bus station. In the message accompanying the bomb, the attackers wrote: “ITS is in Argentina”. The emergence of new ITS cells appears to be an ongoing trend. Five days after the Argentina communiqué was posted to a Spanish-language insurrectionary hub, the same site featured a communiqué signed by five cells of ITS, three from Mexico, and one each from Argentina and Chile. The communiqué traces the origin and expansion of the ITS and RS monikers and announces “a new phase of the war against all that represents and sustains the advance of civilization and progress”.

In Mexico, ITS’s bombs have targeted civilian, seemingly ‘non-political’ scientists, professors, technical experts, researchers, and technocrats and within a politic most closely described as (Green) anarcho-primitivism. Famed “Unabomber” Theodore Kaczynski popularized this framework in the 1980s during a 17-year (1978–1995) bombing campaign involving 16 bombs, which killed three people and injured 23. Following the publication of “Industrial Society and its Future” – popularly known as the “Unabomber manifesto” and released five months after his final attack – Kaczynski’s spirit has been carried forth by ITS and a few similar networks.

On eco-extremism and anarchy (May 2016)

Author: Pack of Saboteurs Heriberto Salazar (FAI-FRI)

Date: 2016/05/23

Source: <autistici.org/cna/2016/05/23/chile-comunicato-del-branco-di-sabotatori-heriberto-salazar-fai-fri/>

We really do not want to stand in firm defense of every soul that sets itself up as an enemy against the state and every form of government (over man, animals and nature). We believe that — and many anarchist and other prisoners agree with this — not everyone can be friends and that it is not possible to develop a relationship with everyone.

More specifically, we want to encourage discussion about direct action groups that reject anarchy as a political goal and as a daily struggle. These are the so-called eco-extremists who relentlessly shout “death to anarchy”, rejecting their own origin and formation, an idea that nourished them through a fraternal relationship with the urban guerrilla fighters of today and the past, only to later move on to emphasize certain aspects that have always been part of anarchist milieu and its struggle for the liberation of man, our animal brothers and the earth.

Far from the constant tension that we who want and fight for a life of anarchy want to maintain, a certain trend that is considered eco-extremist throws in the trash the libertarian ideal that manifests itself through the insurgent struggle.

One small group, tied to a certain imaginary of “symbolic” peoples and to musical/alternative and university environments (they reject the university they still attend... and study what they hate so much), hates the human animal and therefore sees the enemy everywhere.

In that “wild fog”, caused by their own smugness and messianism, they include the last worker, the victim of this crappy exploitative system, among their enemies. They talk about killing workers, farmers or any other person who, let’s be honest, the discussion of our relatives over the years has not considered worthy interlocutors. Although we are accomplices, the enemy is someone else, and that is quite clear to any anarchist, libertarian, punk or nihilist. But for the eco-extremists, it is not so, in an attempt to be avant-garde and even trendy.

That is why we call on individuals and coordinated affinities who are fighting today to continue fighting for the liberation of all living beings and the earth, without losing sight of the political aspect of our actions, and the real enemies and targets.

Seven years since the death of Mauricio Morales, we salute the group “Manada de Choque Anarquico Nihilista” for its sober and insurgent action during the protests of May 1 and April 21, when they once again proved the success of coordination among affinities. In order to be clear and refute the “Maldicion Ecoextremista” page, which tried to present these acts as an act of irresponsible urban guerrillas, in order to appropriate libertarian activity!

We salute the fighters of the Paulino Scarfó Revolutionary Cell (FAI-FRI), who wrote in their statement of responsibility for the attack on the Santander Bank in La Cisterna: “ The attack has its ethics and is not indiscriminate; we have embraced the arson attack and we no longer support the ideas that are trying to spread .”

Pack of Saboteurs Heriberto Salazar (FAI-FRI)

There’s Nothing Anarchist about Eco-Fascism (May 2017)

Author: Scott Campbell

Date: May 12, 2017

Source: <https://itsgoingdown.org/nothing-anarchist-eco-fascism-condemnation/>

“When horror knocks at your door, it’s difficult to hide from. All that can be done is to breathe, gather strength, and face it….I shared news of the woman found in University City. From the first moment, I was angered and protested the criminalization of the victim. The next morning I woke up to the horror and pain that she was my relative.”

– Statement from the family of Lesvy Rivera to Mexican society

“[W]e take responsibility for the homicide of another human in University City on May 3^rd….Much has emerged about that damned thing leaning lifeless on a payphone… ‘that she suffered from alcoholism, that she wasn’t a student, this and that.’ But what does it matter? She’s just another mass, just another damned human who deserved death.”

– 29^th Statement of Individualists Tending Toward the Wild (ITS)

Some things shouldn’t have to be said, but as is too often the case in this disaster of a world, that which should be most obvious often gets subsumed to the exigencies of politics, ideologies, money, emotion, or internet clicks. The purpose of this piece is to condemn the recent acts of eco-extremists in Mexico and those who cheer them on from abroad.

This critique does not aspire to alter the behavior of Individualists Tending Toward the Wild (ITS), Individualities Tending Toward the Wild (ITS), Wild Reaction (RS), Indiscriminate Group Tending Toward the Wild (GITS), Eco-extremist Mafia, or whatever they will change their name to tomorrow. Like any other deluded, sociopathic tyrant, these individuals have declared themselves above reproach, critique, reason, or accountability. They have appointed themselves judge, jury, and executioner; the guardians and enforcers of Truth using a romanticized past to justify their actions. As absolutist authoritarians, they have constructed a theoretical framework that, while ever-shifting and inconsistent, somehow always ends with a justification for why they get to hold a knife to the throats of all of humankind. In short, they think and act like the State.

There was a discussion about ITS on an IGD podcast from last December. For those unfamiliar, ITS and its spawn of affiliated acronyms publicly emerged in 2011 as an anti-civilization grouping that blew things up and tried to kill people they didn’t like, primarily university research scientists. In early statements, they spoke of favorably of anarchism and revolution. Over the course of just a few years and various groupings and splittings, they adopted a firm stance of rejection and reaction. They disavowed anarchism, revolution, leftism, or anything related to the social or human. They proudly adopted the mantle of eco-terrorism and proclaimed their disgust for the likes of John Zerzan or Ted Kaczynski, who they previously praised.

Unsurprisingly, through their increasing isolation and reactivity, ITS has turned into just plain murderers. (Or at least they’d like you to think so.) “The human being deserves extinction” and “We position ourselves against the human being, without caring about the use of civilization to carry out our acts” is now their creed. As such, in the State of Mexico, ITS claims it went out hunting for loggers to kill, but not finding any, they decided to ambush, shoot and murder a couple on a hike on April 30^th, because, “We just want it to be clear that no human being will be safe in nature.” They suggest humans should instead stay in the cities, but then claim responsibility for the May 3^rd femicide of Lesvy Rivera at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, stating, “Not even in your damned cities will you be safe.” The ITS phenomenon, while beginning in Mexico, has spread throughout much of Latin America, with groups using the ITS name claiming responsibility for attacks – including attempts at the mass murder of ordinary, working-class people – in multiple countries.

Understanding what led to the creation and evolution of groups such as ITS is a topic best addressed in a separate piece. As mentioned above and in the podcast, they find their roots in the insurrectionary and anti-civilization streams of anarchism. Mexico in particular has a vibrant clandestine, direct action insurrectionary movement. Mexico is also where 99 percent of all “crimes” go unpunished, where narcos, police, military and politicians either work hand in hand or kill one another and anyone else nearby in the tens of thousands. They also team up against aboveground social movements – repression being the only language the Mexican state speaks. It is not difficult to understand, in a country being gutted by neoliberalism, where appeals to the state are met with batons and bullets, where anarchists are already blowing things up, and where everyone else with an agenda seems to be killing people and getting away with it, why a group like ITS would emerge.

Yet at the same time in Mexico, aside from a few websites, ITS and its actions have not been praised or embraced by anarchists or anyone else. This likely also contributes to the escalating violence on ITS’s part – no one really pays attention to them except to dismiss or condemn. At least one anarchist group has publicly stated its belief that ITS is a state-run operation, designed to delegitimize the broader radical movement.

It seems more likely that ITS is a genuine group that believes what it says. Whether it has actually done what it says is another matter. Some attacks have certainly occurred, but a curiously large number of ITS attacks fail or go unmentioned anywhere except in their statements. They claim this is due to the police and media conspiring to not call attention to their acts. Yet the typical insurrectionary anarchist direct action is almost always reported with precise information, photos showing the damage caused, and can be verified in corporate media reports. How ITS is so much worse than other direct action groups at carrying out direct actions is an unanswered question. That ITS killed any of the three people they recently claimed to have killed is unlikely. The statement shares no details of the killings and only includes a photo taken from Facebook. Especially with regards to the femicide of Lesvy Rivera at UNAM, ITS is likely seeking to get a free ride on the coattails of a tragedy that has generated considerable action and coverage amongst the anarchists and radicals they hate so much yet whose attention they so desperately seek.

So do we anarchists give it to them? Admittedly, even the existence of this piece is a capitulation to their attention seeking. But worse are those that promote, even implicitly, the actions of ITS. Sites such as Anarchist News, Free Radical Radio, Atassa, and Little Black Cart. The “a retweet does not constitute endorsement” excuse doesn’t fly here. As ITS says, “We’ve been warning you since the beginning.” And now they are claiming to have killed three humans simply because they were human. Will ITS fans continue to distribute the propaganda of a group that by its own admission is not only not anarchist, but proudly terroristic, rejecting of all ethics, morals, or principles of liberation? They solely exist to kill people. It should not have to be explained why such a position does not merit support. Of a less pressing matter is the way in which ITS conceives of “nature” is itself a social and civilizational construct. Their (already constantly shifting) ideological basis for murder falls apart under any real scrutiny.

Some defend the publications and discussions (or trolling, as it were) they engender because while perhaps they don’t agree with killing people, the analysis ITS presents is intellectually stimulating and worthy of consideration. If ITS did kill her, Lesvy Rivera can surely appreciate that her brutal murder was found intellectually stimulating for some. It is the peak of colonial, racist arrogance that those from the safety of their U.S. or European homes feel comfortable debating the finer points of an ideology that amounts to brown people killing other brown people. We eagerly await the publishing on these sites of ISIS or al-Qaida communiques due to their intellectually stimulating critiques of U.S. imperialism in the Middle East.

The only support ITS should be receiving from anarchists is encouragement that they practice their dedication to human extinction on themselves. Just as the fascists of ISIS are meeting a true anarchist response, the fascists of ITS should be called to task, rather than coddled.

Episode 49 – Abe Cabrera (Atassa) (June 2017)

Speakers: Abe Cabrera & Aragorn!

Date: 26 June, 2017

Source: The Brilliant Post & archive.org

Note: This episode was later deleted from The Brilliant website.

This an informal conversation between Aragorn! and Abe Cabrera the primary editor of the Atassa journal. It is not intended to be a defense of ITS or a serious attempt to engage in the criticisms towards us (Atassa, LBC, and me personally). It’s intended to sound like a conversation between people who share some similar perspectives. Obviously those who don’t share those perspectives are going to feel less comfortable and perhaps feel misrepresented.

Tick Tock

1.00 definition of eco-extremism as practice, splitting hairs
2:30 abe’s history
8:15 activism in berkeley in the 90s
12:15 eco-extremists moving away from ted k
12:30 early indiscriminate violence tendencies in E-E
15:15 breaking into different groups
16:35 is it a hoax?
21:00 tactics similar to ISIS, from nechaev
22:00 formation and reformation of various groups
27:45 reaction of NA anarchists
33:00 significance of anarchist label
34:30 types of allies
38:10 non-attraction of these ideas
40:30 theology, thinking in eons
42:00 abe: anarchists are irrelevant
44:00 a!: types of anarchists
44:30 the light of hatred
45:20 the challenge of ITS to anarchism
47:50 terrorist tactics are what is required now to do violence at all
50:35 talking about pieces vs the board and context of the actions
53: marx and the bible, st paul = first anarchist

Transcript

Aragorn!: This is going to be episode 49 of The Brlliant podcast. We just put up episode 46 I think. So it’s going to. Be up week or two before this posted up live, but obviously what we’re talking about was so very important to week. And now a week later feels a little less important, but clearly I think a lot of people. Care about this? Topic or just care about the conversation? Obviously both of us were sort of called out, but I wasn’t called out by me and just my projects were called out. You were called out about 10 days ago from IGDB and this person named. Scott Campbell, I think the name is Scott, something and more or less what the purpose of the article was to was to disassociate social anarchism. From its and from even considering its to be something worth talking about or thinking about. And I guess my first question. Well, actually you. Know what I think? I’d rather not talk about that article to start out with, I’d rather. Talk a little bit about. Your pedigree, because you actually came to the eco extremist position, not really from anarchism, but from a sort of ultra left Marxist position is that.

Abe: Well, this what this where all the legal distinctions come involved. I don’t feel I. Would could call myself any books similar.

Aragorn!: Sure, sure.

Abe: Obviously people would be like who don’t like these who they’re quite a female. Would go ha ha. Ha, you’re just making. For for injuries legally, but I think just the nature of what equal extremism equal extremism is. Very much a practice oriented sort of thing, and obviously I’m not doing that because like I said, the FBI would have opened up my door already. So, so that’s sort of the caveat you always have to put up with these things and all the same people will come up and say, well, they’re going to do it. One of these. Days you’ll see and it’s like, well, . Everything, everything has its limits right? So we try to minimize those, but OK. So after that’s sitting here, how did I come to sympathize with them? Yeah I. I mean, how far do you want to go back? Because I. Could go back. I mean I could go, I mean my formation was basically when I was. Young when I I could write for the Confessions of a young trusting this sort of thing because I had to trust kids when I was 16, and I’ve been to basically and then I had a spiritual crisis. So I was in the desert for a bit, almost literally, actually I was. I studied for the priesthood, I grew up Stafford, but that’s a whole other story. And then I was in a monastery for a couple of years. And then I got married and returned to normal life and then after that occurred, after my kids started being born then I started to return. Or the political thinking, but not, not in the practical sense, because I, in the practical sense, I could barely tie my shoes at that point, cause, young children in the job and so on and so forth. So I started. But yeah, that’s the point that I encountered. Anarcho primitivism or like radical anti civilization thought I was a Marxist because I sort of because when I returned to political thinking for religious thinking, if you are philosophical thinking, I actually took. Up where I? Left off and I was like OK, well I need to return to all these things. That as the young man I visited and tried to slander, sort of in the desert, perfusing the marches. And then, I encountered. You know when people were religious thought like their chances and Gary Schneider and on realism. So after a few years of that I started, this the. John Bolton show. Ironically, since he takes me now, but I heard of the people in Mexico who were and like being Mexican extraction, . You know my fear first up, so I obviously I googled it and I read the communicate. I read the communicate your first communicate that the first is to communicate in 2011. Yes, and I was very like oh OK, because it went off on. I mean, there’s sort of really tinfoil hat stuff and people will laugh at that now because we’re like, Oh well, you’re basically, apologize for being so fast. But I mean the 2011 and I, I have to just talk. They are doing recordings of those again, even though on these extremist website. Now these to the new site. It’s so funny because after a couple of days after they started doing those they did the recording one and two. They did this. It must have been like a seven or eight paragraph like a preamble, like we’re going to be post this. Link, but since so. You know, this how we’ve evolved. We’re we’re seeing like fine print sort of thing, but I was reading that they sort of for me. They sort of be very temporal hat on, and the technology is going to create robots. Follow the world, blah blah blah. And so I’m like, oh, that’s nice. So I sort. Of just kept. Going, with my physical, they’re sort of reading and writing at that point. And then it was only at the point that they became. While the action with people as well the action which is August 2014. That really perked my ears, because then we started to look off in another direction with the sort of historical historical allusions to what happened in ancient Muslim Americand the concepts and the war against civilization that occurred there over the period of about. Half a century, so that was interesting, and that’s what led to my, and that’s what led to my article towards savagery with the ritual magazine, which really started the ball rolling on that and. Like told. And it was just sort of a. There’s a website at that time that was part of. It was pretty well. A lot of interesting primary sources and a lot of it was. It was clear that something was going on, like there was something from from just being like, . Green anarchist, very eclectic, . I think sure her everyone concerned that I land. That was certainly starting to settle into something that hadn’t been. Really been before, if you will. That I mean, that’s sort of that. I mean where marks the 5^th and that. I mean, yeah, I’ve. I’ve actually never considered myself anarchist. I sort. Of I mean, when I when I was interested in that article, primitivism, when I still have, have called myself, and I’m not. I’m not sure about this article part if I just. Well, that was at Berkeley you. Know when I was. A Trotskyist and I just remember that the anarchists were, and I just didn’t associate that.

Aragorn!: You know when?

Abe: I was very much. Tell tell me more about that one paper.

Aragorn!: Tell me more about that. What period was? That in what anarchist were you? Did you?

Abe: I didn’t even. I mean, I didn’t really interact with anybody. I mean I have. I have some feedback from for sale, bagels or some demonstrations. When I was 16, . You know, I didn’t really. I guess I was in there after the scene I was in. You know, in that sort of thing. This was this was realizing that wasn’t banned. You know that?

Aragorn!: Ohh really.

Abe: And I was in the I was like the very early stage of that. Like I. Like caucuses at its foundation. I was there and so, but I mean I don’t. I don’t know I feel bad about playing this, but let’s just say that there that a lot of them are trustless if you will. So I live in that and so that was my real. You know it was. It was sort of that was my only real fault if you will, so I didn’t really have anybody any other. You know, interactions with the only people I would only ever sort of. Trends . Cross Street activity I would have is basically in real life trolling of the sparks and the ISO which is a fighter that’s means of International Socialist organization. For those who aren’t for. So, just like fellow Trotsky is foods and then. The RC working and going viral. But things like that it was just it was just what it. Was ? And I do remember it was funny because I always think that when I was at that stage, I mean ethological. Radical thought was like the furthest thing from my mind because this what like late 90s, right? So you’re older than you were you were you were in Berkeley at that stage, right? I I still in here in the Bay Area for a number of years, yeah so I mean, I remember once there was that as the captain really in the middle of campus I was. Spanish class and. Some guy hung a banner that’s been in 1998 from the capital and he just suspended like. I don’t know how many hundred hundred couple 100 feet above ground or however tall that is and it’s she had a benefit and animal vivisection, you just trained there for like two or three days and I rolled my eyes at it. And I always thought that it was, . Referring me, I was a good I. Was a good Bolshevik. So that was that was my. And that will further my political theory. But I mean that lasted only a few years. I mean, I was when I would drop out of Berkeley that. Word 2021 and when I started my spiritual journey or whatever.

Aragorn!: And so and so then.

Abe: I don’t know.

Aragorn!: You had a gap. Between that time and when you became interested in eco extremism and so, I guess, continue to talk about the evolution of the ITS phenomenon through from, from the time it became wild, react.

Abe: Right well, I mean they what the big thing was is they started out doing that. They were they were either just something that was another thing that Scott Campbell article that was sort of like. 1/2 truth like they had anarchists in them and the group shout outs. You know the typical shout outs. To the anarchist person. And so on and so forth, as in about the six communicator. Right now, we’re not doing that anymore. And and they, they’re sort of saying we’re not going to the. Political correct language? We’re just gonna we basically we just felt that the left is worth dealing with, which is really sort of cause. In which in? Anyway, yes, so I. I guess it’s just sort of what became more consistent consistency right at that point. But the but the one thing that they’ve never done with liberty and accuracy is the article. Something that never actually, the one thing they’ve never advocated this revolution, so that’s the big thing about, . Industrial society and its future in the whole tech revolution. They were like no. It’s not gonna, that’s not gonna fly. We don’t believe in that and it was funny. Because initially. The case they were like no no. We know this. Physiciand he’s been in jail for another year. So she will out right now. He would see that revolution as impossible. You know you can’t, create a mass movement in this way. Technology like that’s just not possible, so that and the whole life industry minded attack that’s in there since they want that’s been, more or less. I mean not in the sense, not in the sense. Maybe that they’ve been doing it now, but in the sense of like if we send the. And it’s it just throws up your who’s the secretary and says off or something like that instead of the person. Well, that’s just, that’s just how we’re going to do it. That’s just how it is. So we’re sort of like. That, and it’s just very much. Fighting its way. You know from there and also very very fast. It’s very rational. Like I said, when you’re looking to go on and on about mental technology about battery and so on and so forth. So that’s a very that’s another sort of thing that’s between then and now. I mean, they really are. Are very different ideologies within the same field 2011 but within six years where they’ve gone much more than idealistic, much more virtual. If you will, because although that’s interesting because there are there are certain. People who get those folks more than others because. If you wanted to go into that or you wanted to keep on a large scale so one of the things about the 29^th stimulatory, if you, if you think of people just, Oh my God, they kill people, but which of course is, is significant, however.

Aragorn!: Oh no, that’s great no no.

Abe: If people saw it. If people know the curve.

Aragorn!: Actually, can we pause for a second? The first thing is the first thing is, you’re a little close to the microphone, so you’re. Breaking up quite a bit, I’m not. Sure, if the if you’re if.

Abe: OK.

Aragorn!: You’re holding the microphone if you’re or if. You can if you can. Move it just.

Abe: A little while because I’m sort of standing let.

Aragorn!: OK, OK and yeah.

Abe: Me just sit down.

Aragorn!: OK so then continue continue. You’re talking about the 20^th. Communique and what it said. Other than that they were taking credit for killing. Some quote UN quote innocents.

Abe: So is this better, yes. Better OK, let me just. I’ll sort of what we’ve been doing all. This stuff, yeah. Yeah, I’m just talking to myself in the in the way so the kid was signed by two groups, which was one with the ITF and then there’s a which is the individual. In the in the group. These are two groups, the. The latter which is the GPS which which I don’t know how you would, how how they. Would say it. I think it’s a particular individual and he I guess you could just. Indiscriminate if you will, and she before it was. She had a something called an industrial attraction. She’s interested. She writes in a very cold. Mexican, Spanish and he has his own sort of theme going either them or I should just clarify right now. I don’t know who ITF is. I don’t know how many there are. You know theoretically or it could be just, if it’s just a prank bro, it’s. I mean it’s. Possible, I mean I don’t. I don’t know. I think at this point there’s something. Going on so I don’t know. Is who’s who and who’s what. I have no idea. I just figured it out from when they issued the communication. The faster than the Spanish and the fact that I’ve read a lot of the same things they have. So with that out of the way, well, actually actually actually, let’s let’s.

Aragorn!: Expand on that one. One more level, which is to your. To your understanding, how much of what they take credit for. Is there any sort of like external source validated that they actually did? What is they did? In other words, how much of this could be a joke if they were just joking around?

Abe: 50% well let me put it to you. This way there hasn’t been anything that has come out like that. Has what people have said. Well this wasn’t done this with somebody else and I know I’m actually told that’s difficult and that’s also different with Scott Campbell’s article. He was like 99% of the crimes in Mexico goal. That’s all which is funny, since a lot of people come that are in jail for the only people who get caught in Mexico are. Assassins it’s a drug cartels. Give up anarchist, but anyway that’s an interesting thing so nobody’s been. Caught nobody has ever come out and said or somebody else did this, not them. There’s a caveat about that because I know that the, the Enron worker, they work at the. The national economy. University of Mexico. The chemistry they had thead of chemistry. The Chemistry Department services people were the police report. One initial report from the Tourney General’s Office said that it was. Coworkers left with it. However, both coworkers were never caught. So I mean, I mean, I’m assuming that they were his coworkers. Why didn’t ? Why didn’t the police just go to their house and the rest of them? So you go to the Mexican media now right now. And that’s gonna be the September board at all. But they’re saying yes, it hasn’t been solved yet. So who knows who I mean? Somebody could have said something, so unless this built in the fact that. You know we, we just don’t know. I mean, it’s it. It’s but. However, the only thing that the only people who seem to be saying anything about it is like yes well, I mean they killed the Restor vice rector of a prominent Mexican technical. Literacy in the. North they shot him when he was going at a map map out of out of math. Going to church and they shot him coming out of church. Having they have they caught anybody in regards to that and you could just say ohh the Mexican police are incompetent. OK they’re in. Like that unless you can say at this point they’ve been in the national news about that. If they got caught or they said oh this was done, they would just, somebody would just come out and say it and nobody said it. But I think a lot of this stuff is really strange, like when they killed the two hikers. Also the 29^th. Backpack, backpack and they weren’t robbing them. You know that should be very interesting and the other big significant thing that is underplayed in the United States is when they sent the tax package done to Oscar landed Richard, who is thead of the which is the Chilean mining company, which is one of the largest mining companies. In the world they sent the ITF group and one of the ITF groups in Chile sent a package from China’s house. And and it, it blew up it really. And the only reason that she was a little bit more is because there was there was some sort of way that just by sheer chance of. Having opened there, most of the shot will flew away from the state, but it was on that within the child. For weeks, the President of Chile Commons, the person the Supreme Court. When the I think is the President of the Chilean Supreme Court that may change your prudence. You know which reflects sometimes bond. That ICF is used, other places, nobody solves it. You know it’s just like Oh well, you’re just you’re just out and about. But I’ll I’ll, I’ll give you, I’ll give you a reason why we probably don’t get caught. And this just this actually if you do the password, there’s a. An article called surviving Civilization is the reference to the Devil rights of these extremists, which, if you do a little bit of digging, actually based on a similar work that I actually like. Avoid the seeing just like a normal person. Talk with normal person. Don’t tell anybody that’s you. Know what you’re doing and just various things and might be aware of how you dress and what you do and just . Just be normal, just like the normal life when it comes time to do it, to do it and then. And so, and one of the things they say about that is like, yeah, they put that anarchist anarchist thing because they’re calling the cops.

Aragorn!: Orders and so you.

Abe: See how that works. You know supposedly want to influence the people and they wanted, influence and they have all the infighting and they have all those rules and those pictures, and the people that them out. And that’s why they end up in prison. It’s just doesn’t do that, it’s is. Disease is basically like a physical. Well, they don’t. Nobody goes through the honor.

Aragorn!: Isn’t similar to ISIS? Both of them are similar to Netziv.

Abe: Yeah, well that’s where all my history is deficient. Yeah, very extensively though that particular article is based on that.

Aragorn!: Any words onward?

Abe: Like I’ve actually read.

Aragorn!: That argumentation is almost verbatim from Natchez’s catechism of the Revolution.

Abe: OK, well I have reading reduces and I guess OK we might have something about that and we have to pass that. You know, if we do get it and then she or something like that if we do get to that point, right? Actually, why don’t? Why don’t we when we talk about yeah when we talk?

Aragorn!: About how did the Rs fall apart in your understanding and sort of return to ITS and so talk a little bit about that journey from there to communicate 29.

Abe: I don’t know actually what happened, So what would happen then? What happened in August 2014? They put people back there so while we actually put out the first two minutes and then they were like a group of criminals and politically and for like people. And then they did things like like. Higher on various. You know, various construction sites and then those incidents. Bombing at the Towers, Mexican telephone. And then there’s things like that and then. Then we after year if they that they disbanded. And I don’t. It’s kind of well. I have no idea. I like, I just have no idea what happened. OK, so I’ll give my guts to learn about this and then I could be wrong. And then I think there’s a lot of. When you were trying to say to me. There there are more groups than possible group groups of rules and possible members. I think people move around the. Law, I think some groups are only just one person I think. I do think that there’s a lot of so because of that since. A lot had. A lot of supposedly had all these groups. You know all over central Mexico and stuff like that. I’m just lazy. I mean maybe that’s what it is. I just I just the number of groups that they. That they claim to. Have the logistics of keeping that under wraps. It’s kind of hard. It’s kind of hard to swallow, sometimes up little bit that you are you following each other that I think. I’m sorry if I could back up. I think I think they’re there. The books are just like the book names just represent that level, shifting number of individual.

Aragorn!: Oh so you so you so.

Abe: You know, really sort of moving around.

Aragorn!: You don’t think? Because it, I do think that year where Rs was sort of the way in which these were. Being talked about. ITS did not issue any communications during that year and then after that year they started issuing their. Own communications again.

Abe: So, so you want to know about that? No, that’s just really at all. So what happened was OK, so no, that I change. This doesn’t became wild reaction. So that’s what happened before either of your two before and then after a year they just discovered and became nothing. Between August 20, 2015 and January 2016, there were various groups like 16 with proof Terror and something else in the middle of the page. Taking stuff from the mountains and stuff that they were still around. But they were sort of trying to inform my idea of why IP has reformed was because it runs international. That’s what happened, and there’s evidence that before during the stage of Rs they were in, they were in talks with people with in China. For example, in Argentina, so that’s why I think ITF. Very much a Mexican had a very much a Mexican feel to it because I mean they were all they were all they have like indigenous names like which is the. Language, it’s real, like there’s a physical they really love. And things like that. So we all have. So I mean, if I were to guess, maybe maybe, maybe they were like legitimate. Differences between each other? I mean, I really like that the guy is returning to the gift side that then discriminate guy like he’s always been sort of resenting. And I know I mean, for example, last year he claimed, or he or she claimed to have assassinated. A computer engineering student, actually a computer science student. He was also like in. The middle of. The street and in the communication issue. He said that some of these people issued like oh, don’t worry. At least she. Put up a fight.

Aragorn!: That communicate was I was pretty interested in it because yeah, it was like tell his family tell his family he put up a fight.

Abe: Yeah, so it’s. Yeah, it’s only that person in that particular group has always been like that, and like you and she, and actually in the and the communicate with the 29^th communicate. I’m sorry I’m jumping around. All over the place. Or spirits or everything. We’re just here to like. You know, kill people because we don’t want to see their what they’re doing to the environment, and that’s it. So he all the spiritual style about cheaper North Star and the and the spirits and the gods or whatever he said. Yeah I don’t believe in that, I’m just I’m sorry . So she you could sort of have a gallows humor about it, but yeah, so that’s a very particular person. So yeah, with that since the last of their probably their tensions, but I have no idea why they just standard, but I think a lot of us have to do. Yes, the ITS is going to be assigned the initials under which they would go international basically.

Aragorn!: OK, so let let’s shift gears because so far what we’ve mostly allowed you to do is sort of rant and rave about. The Who’s where’s and how’s of ITS directly from. And from a North American audience, the thing that I think has been very notable the past two weeks has been that a lot of people a lot of our friends, a lot of anarchists all of a sudden are extremely nervous about ITS because the consequence of ITS being a bunch of murdering Mexicans. Has dawned on them, especially because of this critical. What do you think of this sort of moralistic hand wringing? Do you, do you think that there is some solid points there? What I guess? And what did you think of Scott Campbell’s points that it’s racist? To pay attention to ITS or to or to give them any ink.

Abe: Well I’m Mexican. I mean I do. I mean my mom she in Mexico. I mean I visited Mexico when I was growing up. I grew up speaking Spanish.

Aragorn!: But you can.

Abe: I’m a know.

Aragorn!: Be you can be a racist you can. Be a racist.

Abe: Mexican whatever, anyway? So let me back up so well. So the question was exactly what? What do I think? I just don’t think. People have been paying. Attention, I think what I mean. I have a Facebook. Age for a consumer unfortunately, I’m I. I try to troll too much for my own good, but I think it’s like ITF is one of the only groups that sells what it’s gonna do and then does it. Right, so I will recite the country info and 3:25 no state and all these other people who are so excited to release their. The first ITF Communication 2016 of last year obviously did not read them. Because people are going to be horrified by that or whatever, but it’s like when have they said they’re not going to do exactly what they’re doing. No, I mean you could go back to 2011. Maybe they were. Basically this wouldn’t be far from that word. You know where it is, but I know there’s 2 they’re caught up. There’s always some social anarchists. And then it’s you actually anarchist who have been very critical of the opportunism. But I mean, I guess people put, put it out at first because it was. You know, and for the edgy people or whatever. Everybody for being edgy. But whatever I mean, you can do you visit that place later, but I don’t think people have been paying attention. I mean where were they when in 2011 they just rolled up this guy. You know, since that for scientists. You know who is riding on the, on the motorcycle and shot him in thead and the role they released stabbed the guy last year, and they were. They were they when they when they stabbed that computer science and where they were landed at. You know, almost when your daughter you have a 3 year old daughter left to the. Bomb that he could have potentially been like blinded by it or something, but what it really is. Like they got triggered by the fact that there was a woman first of all, and second of all, before ITS released to communicate they were always marching up your lawn. So the at the University of Mexico of Women. You know we’re currently, . Discuss if it was, within the continuity of the terminal side of other places, that she’s gonna plotted and places like that, and and they and they just they. Basically they hit too close to home for them.

Unknown Speaker: I think.

Abe: And was before just ago, because they they got. So the left in Mexico got so upset over it. And then the. Yeah we did that. You know that. That’s what it. Is and it’s not like they don’t have president. I mean they have attacked me wrong several times. That’s just the staffing from last year. I think that I heard the rumor. I don’t know if it was in the community or something. I think they’ve insinuated. Even that one of them the gift driving which in that guy who put like a bomb outside of like the other gifts or whatever the auditory and the wherever the left is gather there’s like should give that out or something like that. Auditorium is going outside of it, but they’re just like it’s not like. And this comes out of the blue, . Should they see somebody wandering in front? You know, walking in front of the engine room building and they, and they do. What they really done? You know, so I don’t. I’m sorry you lost the train of thought, but we’re were getting that OK so why was that reaction? I guess that’s it. I mean it. It. You know how? It’s just not, . It’s not a. Rational, though I mean, people aren’t paying attention, it’s not on their radar, so how.

Aragorn!: The other way to go about this that the ITS doesn’t have a rational revolutionary program, and so it’s taking a while for people to reconcile the that the fact that they’re not rational. Has is actually a program of, ? Again, not spontaneous violence, but it’s sort of a violence first program, and that is not anarchist.

Abe: Yeah, I mean, but that we could get into a whole discussion of, why are you so obsessed with this label? Saying like why are you? Why are you so obsessed with being the Presbyterian? I mean that there’s something more to presbyterianism than just having a label. I’m not gonna. I’m like I’m not gonna discuss who’s that? As this not on the system and that’s not. That’s not to be that’s interesting to me, so I’m not gonna. I’m not going to get into that, but it’s. It’s just one of those things that you had admitted this stuff into. Your into, your, your, your and then you pulled after right? I don’t, I don’t. I don’t faster than you. Why you have this? It’s sort of not clear to me, with them. You know well, I mean, the whole thing about Scott Campbell, I don’t. I don’t know if you wanted to talk about the explicitly, but the whole thing about calling. It equal fashion. You know, for me, that’s just sort of like that’s the flavor of the month because of the whole Trump game of the Black bloc and soft frozen just gonna sort of, spin off of it. It’s a spin off because it has no, do you even know what fascism means? I mean, I don’t think it’s. They black book, they mask up against their fascists. I mean not really, I mean.

Aragorn!: Have you? Have you studied Scott CV? Because he I think he has pretty deep ties in some of those social anarchism of Mexico City. So for instance he might have some connections to the wherever the bombing was that happen.

Abe: Yeah, I mean I listened to his it’s going down podcast what he did with the Mexican business, which is sort of sighted in my. Trailer EP. You know the GPS, a public service announcement that I had, . Yeah, I know, I know. I know his type. I want to go see, I know what he’s like I. Know what I? Know his type you.

Aragorn!: Know, yeah, I believe I’ve actually run into him in person couple of different times and he’s almost like a walking billboard of the sensitive North American gringo who. Who speaks who speaks Spanish at any opportunity and says Chile and like literally has a kafia on alongside a poncho. If he isn’t, I think if he if he is who I think he is, we actually saw him get dropped off at the book at the book Fair in Orange. Tony by his mom and a Prius who’s. Urban music

Abe: Well, I mean, I was reminded of when I was the 1^st through my first time around when I was a first year long time ago. Everything I was that the merican classes studies program and she had a she had a like a. With the shoulder bag with a prominent USW. Sutton it. And Richard United Pharmacies, which is really ironic since I actually come from the family farm workers and when I was a kid I actually worked with perfect strangers that it’s just I don’t know. Just the whole racism thing. Yeah, yeah, when?

Unknown Speaker: Sure, give give it, give it.

Abe: When I when I see stuff like.

Aragorn!: Real give it give a real response to that.

Abe: When I see stuff like that, it just reminds me. Of that. Of virtue singling, I mean, first of all from this side of the border, finding things can be more, we can feel we can be more it just, it isn’t destroyed radicalism to it that that and it’s really, really really really. Where this flower? Really, yeah, because they’re because they’re poor and oppressed.

Aragorn!: What does that mean?

Abe: They have some sort of. They’re sort of. They think of people and all of their and all of their causes their things and causes. These are the people like IPS along with IPS. Just everybody in general. They’re just like I mean, that’s the reality. They don’t. Care ? Actually know what about Mexico City, the. Senior pilot **** That’s what they don’t. They’re it’s like if you think that if we develop, if you’re fighting terrorism, that’s in a sort of majesty. Save us from from whatever. Either there are no. I mean, all of these things are, fighting things that colonialism imperialism. That’s just. I mean that’s just 1960s knowledge propaganda. I mean, that’s not even how the world works now. You know, really, looking Mexico so far from. God supposed to the United States, I mean. The ice caps. Are melting the emotions are dying and we want that politics? Like really I mean every single leftist movement like every single one has falling apart like it just doesn’t. I mean, It’s. It’s a non issue it’s a non starter. And we’re still on this politics, where have you been the past?

Aragorn!: Well, but I think that there is a there. There is a large segment of people.

Abe: Where have you been the past 40 years?

Aragorn!: There’s a large segment of people in North America who still respond to. To this type. Of name calling to this kind of terminology, I mean, it’s not out of the blue that they that he used it. I mean, I mean he’s clearly using it to draw a line in the sand say you’re on that side and he’s on this side and I guess to what extent do you think he’s going? To be successful with that. And the real question is, to what extent are these ideas attractive to people? What kind of people are they attractive to? What’s being referred to when? When sort of these leftist talk about edgy? People, yeah, I mean I guess for me I try to take these arguments seriously on the level of they work for somebody.

Abe: I mean, they’re not. I mean, I’m, I’m sorry that. I mean, we could. We can. We can sort of call the whole possible thing tomorrow because they’re not. They’re basically equal extremism calls for the extension. Extension of the. Human race, I mean they’re not. I mean, they’re not popular, I mean, and they’re not going to fashion themselves to be popular. You know It’s not. It’s just not gonna happen. And the actual the paradigm you’re working with is what you’re lism is like a totally different paradigm. You’re you have a totally different basis. Why you do something? Why you think something? Why you say something? Just totally different. It changes out of other. You know other races in Americanism and Primitivism antisymmetrization that, and just in the sentence apology and political thought. But It’s not, there, there. There really isn’t. You know there really isn’t anything. Else to say. Which is sort of why my approach? Just at this point it’s OK if somebody criticizes the copy of the. I’ve actually already been written because in reality we don’t really have anything to say to these people. Kind of thing. And two weeks from. I’m a nice person so I and I try to like relate to people so I will try to do what I can to be like Oh yeah, like this. OK, well how’s that life or you have left this and how’s that life? But in reality my core values and the core values and a lot of people involved in this.

Unknown Speaker: OK.

Abe: No, I mean they’re, they’re completely waiting. Shall let we’re not doing. We’re not doing politics. We’re straight doing theology, and it might be a little bit bloody, but it’s that’s what we’re sort of doing. We’re we’re just like we’re we’re in that in that, 10 years, 20 years movements. My lifetime, well, how can I get my liberation now? No, we don’t we’re not interested in.

Aragorn!: Well, that’s actually a different direction to take this conversation, which is to say. Because you don’t have like it, it appears that you do have a social. Life. That’s sort of. Around these topics and I see the same people sort of talking to you about this stuff, most of the. Time, does it hurt your? Feelings or does it? Help you out to sort of. Be hated by strangers. For your interest in a in a set of ideas and. A set of people. That other. People don’t like or whatever.

Abe: In the truck? No, because they don’t. Better, I mean they they’re what I mean. I know they’re gonna love you and you haven’t basically and I know you love it, not the rest. Of the world. Neither is even even, buy water in New Orleans, which also has a. Who I’ve never met cause I’ve never thought or whatever I mean I’ve never no it doesn’t matter Eric isn’t failed left is in the failed the rest of it in the failed why, why, why fight people who have been defeated they just don’t we don’t we don’t matter. Anymore, so why so why bother? I mean, humanity doesn’t sort of matter either, but I mean the least humanity. You know what I’m reading right now? You want to know what I’m reading right now?

Unknown Speaker: Go ahead.

Abe: Theology, because the Catholic Church has a billion people. On it. You know, I, I could have known Catholic theology. You could. Have more conversations with more interesting people that I read reading for production or performing or whatever. Or one of those or any of the other. No, I mean you’re you sugar sugar, so I mean why? Why so? I mean, you’re probably going to be like, OK, we’re we’re done. You know bye and at the same time, OK, you’ve given me this opportunity to do the journal. Something very interesting. So I’m gonna do it. And I don’t know if what you think is the conference in the. Past and how much you actually addressed. It, but it doesn’t have. I mean, I guess I started out my. Article that my one of my major articles with marks, even with Carl Marks and you can reach you from there or whatever politics.

Aragorn!: Those little head breaks.

Abe: One anomaly theology about the spirits telling tearing down the cosmos with the machete. So back that people don’t have time to scream. And even even equal extremist action, there will be like you’re any political. You’re not political. This not a political thing. And that’s why sort of individual people who are.

Aragorn!: But I get.

Abe: Who are they?

Aragorn!: I guess I. Guess you’re answering a question, but you’re also making huge assumptions and it’s one of the reasons why I asked you about your anarchist pet. Because the kind of anarchism that I represent for lack of another language has always not been the same type of anarchism that pays attention to Trotskyists or to what you would call politics. In other words, that kind of anarchism that I’m involved with would broadly be called anti political. Clericalism so a lot of the sort of. Attitude that you have. Is about something different or like in other words, I’m playing a type of devil’s advocate because I, because I wanna I wanna take as much like when people have energy about something. That to me is a. That’s a. That’s a little blinker of light and I crave light and. So when someone? Hates a project that we’re working on. Whether it’s a Tosa or another little black card project. For me the goal of that. Is to be like. OK, like in my life like I’m I. I play around with ideas. I use ideas, I try to grow and change and learn from ideas and I’m totally a *****. Like I’m. Happy for those ideas to be ones I disagree with, or ones that perhaps thing where the burn and so for me the conversation are under tonsa. Like why I’ve been so excited about Itts has been because I call them a post anarchist challenge to anarchy. And part of that challenge is a challenge. That’s a that’s a political challenge, but there’s other challenges in there too. Like one of the other challenges is most anarchists don’t, but they can just portray their politics in these very safe ways and AT and ITS points to. This what it looks like to do your politics. And a less safe way. Now, of course, the social anarchists. Like if they. Are if they were right, and that and that if we could get a large enough crowd. And if we if we could rally large enough, then we could change the world. That’s an even more exciting and dangerous transformation. But I, firmly believe, and I think that it’s agrees with me. Is that what they’re doing is impossible, right? In other words, that there. Is no like they could make. It the biggest rally. In the world and. It’s not going. To be enough. To change ********. Right, because change doesn’t happen that way and we don’t live in France. And 1798 or whatever and the **** and so and so. For me ITS is interesting because it feels like it’s it grasps something very 21^st century, which is that violence is almost a universal solvent. And it’s playing out with. What the consequences of that of that sort of theory is? But that said, of course I. I mean, it makes perfect sense. Cause a social anarchist position is going to say well that’s unacceptable because social anarchism says that you have to do anarchism all the way down. And of course that’s not how society has changed. That’s how revolution happens, . Et cetera. Et cetera, et cetera. So that’s more sort of the questions I’m getting at is like to. What extent like? Unless and a quote UN quote apocalypse happens in the foreseeable. We’re probably going to have to live with politics as we see it on television for the rest of our natural lives, and so in that context, what does ITS versus social anarchism look like? Because I think that in that context, it’s kind of interesting. There’s something interesting happening.

Abe: Well, what it is that if I were. Which is called floor gate card title and what it really is that if you’re going to. Do the type that. Things that they used to do. Now, I mean, if you’re going to do that stuff, the bomb throwing and stuff like that, you’re going to have to do use ITS as yourself.

Unknown Speaker: Yeah, right?

Abe: At this point. It’s not gonna be like we’re gonna shooting this slot. We’re gonna have to struggle session. We’re gonna talk and talk and talk about it. No, It’s gonna be like it’s gonna come out of the blue it’s gonna come out of nowhere and then let’s say that people are going to be on the move like quiet and . We are far away from Islam. We didn’t know he would have been that, .

Aragorn!: No, that actually yeah.

Abe: And that’s and that’s purifies the social anarchist. It’s purified, it horrifies them. They, they and that’s where they feel. They’re just a bunch of serious relationships, don’t they? This, but I mean the intentions are if they have a political ish intention behind that, and that’s only that’s how we’re. Going to have. To do it. It’s not, it’s not an issue of. I mean, it’s just as capitalism develops as the machinery. It’s just some industrial society as well. You know the meaningful resistance of having been with. They all have improved the meaningful oppression, the needs for control. What what rating right against that? I recommend you use the chambers of any sort of opposition through that. It’s going to look like it’s going to be extremely much more chaotic. It’s going to look much more individualistic. It’s going to look much more. Yeah, antisocial, it’s going to. It’s going to be severely, disproportionate to what people think should be the action and so on and so forth. It’s just not going to be controlled anymore. And that’s like around the side of kiosk. You know, and that. Horrifies people people still think it’s so like you. Could be sick in Spain. You know still think and that’s sort of when they, when they when they when people have got called they or I equal fascist or fascist. Thisn’t this, 2017. This not this time. Even how ISIS does it in Europe. I mean, come and do the car and drive it. The people no don’t go on the subway.

Aragorn!: Well, and for me this actually like we’re kind of talking about the pieces. For me this a little bit more about the board, which is to say that if there were a CNT that were in point of fact large and healthy, and doing things of consequence, then I would. Say Scott Campbell. You know, I wish that you would spend your time building and working. You know, in your zone rather than spending time focusing on a zone that’s not yours at all, because it. It really feels like. To me that the social anarchist perspective has very little to point to say, we’re doing great good news, and so instead this sort of where the energy is spent and it feels very strongly to me. Like of course nobody believes. Including ITS and ITS is sort of the way forward for a movement for social change. And so you’re basically criticizing them for. Something that they. That they don’t say that they are. Or that they’re not. Even trying to. Achieve and so the real question and then. And I asked this question a lot is yeah, are we just talking past each other? Why are we actually ? Why are we engaging with each other? Because in this case we’re really talking very different zones. And the only real reason that we’re talking to each other is basically you called a virtual signaling, but it’s sort of like It’s like a mob rule, just a sort of a motivation. And obviously you’re not that impacted by that, because your. In the in the social milieu of anarchism. But of course I am quite impacted by it because I am.

Abe: But no, I guess what I would say I don’t know if this touches on the point or not. Going back to the point where I said, well, why, why, why, why? Are you? Why are you so obsessed with labels like anarchist like Presbyterian? Whatever I’ll back up and say when I see things like other cable. Even though I maybe maybe I don’t know enough to comment, ? On every single detail or marks or witness that I don’t see it as and this just my own particular philosophical and ideological information. I don’t see this as sort of physical, it’s full of that. That’s well in case and have these very definitive lines separating them. And previous ideology or from the history of thought, human thought itself. I mean, if you want to go into anarchism, I mean there’s a. There’s a really interesting book called Watching the Bible. Has superficial Mirandand she said that Saint Paul, the person who wrote, wrote the New Testament. Was actually the first down artist. I mean, he said that there are passages in Saint Paul about the law that would put protecting. The community change. And that might be. Exaggerating, but that’s right. And then you could. Get a lot. Fuller and then you could get dialogues and stuff like that. So the questions between anarchism and Marxism and all these things were going back to thousands of years. Thisn’t just like. You know you’re not, you’re not part of my tree house, so I’m kicking you out. It’s like your tree house is part of a larger legacy of Western thought and global thought that even if you don’t know it, you’re basically dealing with it. If you don’t know, It’s. The outlook of all philosophy, the footnotes. To Plato. You know, even though you think that you’re coming up with this whole very special position, you’re basically being haunted by goals or these factions of ideological ancestry. You know, and if you don’t deal with those, you’re just sort of returning. You’re just sort of repeating yourself over and over, maybe slight with slight variations, but it’s just, you just sort of the things didn’t go over and over again. You don’t know why so I don’t know when people say Oh well, you don’t you? ‘cause you don’t know anything about others . Like yeah, I’m not. I’m not interested in the. Fact that you’re in church. Thank you, but at the same time it’s like, but that whole thing about child Child would series of predestination. And the yeah, I mean that’s. Something that’s interesting. You know, that those those points of doctrine, yes, because those come from somewhere. Theological, theoretical foundations. And that’s what I could comment on explicitly. You know whether or not that conforms to your club house rules. That’s up to you. If you don’t want to. You know the diagnosis and the other. Outlets for you to come and give your attention.

Aragorn!: Yeah, I mean I don’t know how, how much you pay attention to some of the projects I’m involved with, but this basically exactly the conflict that happened between Johnsos and Kevin Tucker and black seed, which is 1 projects I’m involved in. Have you seen any of the issues with Black Sea?

Abe: No, I actually haven’t recording. Sorry, I don’t.

Unknown Speaker: All right?

Abe: I think you may have sent one to me and I put it somewhere, no? The whole the whole model is something that’s one of the day. It was so funny because I have read back anything with you.

Unknown Speaker: Don’t hurt.

Abe: Me, but I have read all of them. And there was a very cute essay about nihilism about negative theology in there, and it was so it was just so like freshman in English. Like people style excited Wikipedia like try the site with negative theology of the level. Oh my God that they choose because when theology is one of the things that I actually know about, that the whole idea of negation and you can only know who God is by what he’s not and that sort of thing that. When what does what does it mean? What does that mean for? After that, so I don’t know I don’t know if that if that’s one of theories of the whole, because I know. I mean, I do listen to John Person show because the on board and whatever and I do listen to it and I know he’s just like everything everything. Every episode is just the excommunication of the violence. Over and over and over again that to the board, right? I’m just wondering please.

Unknown Speaker: Trying to think in.

Abe: I just think It’s like. You know, I, I don’t, I. I would hold short venture about how the whole talk or something about how I don’t really feel like something wireless that sort. Of the knowledge that. I am. It’s only it’s because it’s a it’s. A tool, but I’m. Rambling letter know what you wanted to make.

Aragorn!: Yeah, well It’s. It’s fun actually. Why don’t we wrap this up for now? I think maybe we could do another episode where we just talk about denialism.

Abe: OK yeah I have to see where where I’m at, yeah?

Aragorn!: Yeah indeed, thank you very much.

Abe: OK, you have a goodbye.

Eco-extremism and the indiscriminate attack (July 2017)

Subtitle: The Church of ITS Mexico

Author: L

Date: July 26, 2017

Source: <web.archive.org/.../325.nostate.net/.../>

“And Severino Di Giovanni’s actions were never violent for the sake of it. They were never indiscriminate or striking at anything at all in order to create a tension that would favour power and its politics of consolidation. They were always guided by a precise revolutionary reasoning: to strike the centres of power with punitive actions that find their justification in the State’s violence, and which were aimed at pushing the mass towards a revolutionary objective. Di Giovanni always took account of the situation of the mass, even though he was often accused of not having done so”

— JW & AMB, Anarchism and Violence: Severino Di Giovanni in Argentina by Osvaldo Bayer, Elephant Editions

I don’t represent any organisation or group, I am writing this from my personal perspective, as nihilist-anarchist of an anti-civilisation insurrectional tendency. I have carried out direct action in defense of the Earth, so the state and society would probably view me as an “Eco-Extremist,” although I’m unconcerned with this term as it’s become a sect-like ideology of the Church. I haven’t written before about the Church of ITS Mexico or the idiot pseudo-nihilist(s) in Italy because over the last few years they clearly became reactionary and more akin to far-right “black” groupscules.

It has been some years since the Church of ITS Mexico said something like that “the FAI doesn’t represent us,” that the “CCF doesn’t represent us”… Well I can’t recall anything like that being said by CCF or FAI or anyone else in the first place, so why is the ITS Church still issuing sermons about it now and why have they not embarked on a one-way trip far away from the black anarchy they proclaim is irrelevant and gone off into the nihilising abyss like they said they would, leaving all us anarchist nuns alone?

It was obvious to foresee what this groupscule and their related neurotic fanclub was going towards—cultish green authoritarianism, paganism, irrationalism and indiscriminate attacks—and haven’t we seen this before? Although the Church of ITS Mexico with its tiny few self-described eco-extremists and pseudo-nihilists like to pose as the most radical and truly anarchistic and chaotic latest trend that is very different and abyssal, far from anything that goes before, they are just another offshoot of an old idea with rotten roots in soil and blood, either that or they just have shit for brains.

The murders that ITS Mexico has done in their current phase and the words that accompany the actions are those of one of the enemies, no equivocation—it doesn’t matter at this point what justifications and philosophical manipulations they use to explain how they became irrationalist fanatics. Those who indiscriminately attack regular people are authoritarians and would-be dictators, mass killers, and they and their fanclub of sychophants brag and boast as such behind a myriad of regressive ideas.

Reactionary, nationalist, neo-nazi, racist and pagan networks converging inward autonomously in Europe at least, is nothing new, because for decades we can find their groups dwelling in a spectrum of misanthropic nihilist-right planes of thought, often informed by various degrees of biocentrism, traditionalism, green authoritarianism, anti-humanism, anti-progress etc. It’s easy to find their blogs with old runic indigenous obscurantism, glorification of mass murder, death camps, genocide imagery and glorification of weapons and killing.

In the UK in the 90’s, a tiny few anarcho-primitivists also flirted with this eco-fascist thinking which had seeped in amongst “when animals attack”-type stories and news-clippings about earthquakes and plagues, in the newspaper “Green Anarchist.” The idea was that indiscriminate attacks and/or mass killings of people are justified as “war against civilisation/society.” There was a split in the newspaper “Green Anarchist” about the topic (“The Irrationalists” by Steve Booth). One of the editors left and started an eco-fascist paper. Green Anarchist continued to provide lists of direct actions which were taking place and had articles and reports. The controversy came during an operation by the state against the earth and animal liberation movement which was strong at the time (so-called GANDALF operation). The state spent millions of pounds trying to shut GA down and one of their editors was jailed. Looking back on the text that started the affair it is nothing in comparison to the shit that ITS Mexico have been spewing for the last few years, a hex upon them.

Indiscriminate killings and attacks only have authoritarian outcomes, the methods are elitist and fundamentally anti-individualist. The acts end up only entrenching power and the existing strategy of the techno-industrial system. It is a very dominant and conditioned human behaviour of mass psychology to harm or kill indiscriminately. It’s what humans do to each other all the time, it gears the machine and it’s certainly not an anti-civilisation act or one that cuts radically to the social system. Each person is just pathologically programmed under the stress of society—by religion and hierarchical orders—socially coded to distrust, hate, abuse and kill others. I want something different; it enlightens me as an anarchist and a nihilist—an individual defending their life and experience of the world. Discrimination of thought, choice and action.

The last couple of months in UK there have been three spectacular indiscriminate killings: the Manchester suicide bomb against a crowd of mostly (very) young women at an Ariana Grande concert, the London Tower Bridge suicide van and knife attack, both by those inspired by Daesh, who ITS Mexico and their adoring flock seem to idolise and fetishize now, much like the rest of the misanthropic and nihilist-right; and there also was the Grenfell Tower fire, which killed unknown scores of people, arguably a massacre which had an unavoidable class basis and which is a social murder. But who cares, society is the enemy, right? In the ultra-moralising Church of ITS Mexico where they issue regular sermons you don’t have to think about things too much.

The Church and the sheep have already rejected anti-authoritarianism and “liberation,” so such concepts do not illuminate them, by their own admission, opting for a direction where from their friendless epic-loser script they endlessly preside over their dastardly marginalisation of anarchy and the extermination of humanity in the lowly and minor acts they have recently been taking responsibility for.

Their critique of the anarchist movement is both nothing new and yet deluded with ignorance about many facts and yet they want to use the names of Severino di Giovanni and Mauricio Morales to cover their cowardice. I’m no stranger to criticising civil anarchism but the Church of ITS Mexico have remained so boringly obsessionate in their anti-anarchism discourse that it is obvious that they don’t know when they are banging a dead horse. Their desperate clinging to the anarchist movement—now issuing death threats against anarchists that bother to publically criticise them—is indicative of individuals who, claiming to have shot dead a hiking couple from the bushes and choked a woman to death in a phone box at university, at heart don’t appear to feel they have any power in their own lives and obviously spend too much time on the internet worrying what others think of them whilst taking their pain out on other people. Sounds like quite a few civilised people I know except some don’t see the results of their actions. I mean, haven’t ITS actually killed some people, why are they crying about it on the internet? As the saying goes, they “gotta lot to learn” as a terrorist group. Hearing that ITS apparently got “tired of waiting for 325’s critique” is a sloppy, revealing and highly amusing admission of how much they actually do care about being the subject of dialogue and discussion amongst an (unruly and anarchic) humanity they hate!

To go back to why I haven’t bothered to write anything before now about ITS recent experiments in serial killerdom, I think just simply I had better things to do and my comrades were debating whether or not it was even worth making any critiques since, we figured, we don’t make critiques of any other random serial killers?! Why would we bother contributing to the fiction that ITS are actors with any validity by commenting on their wanton acts of pointless and sadly untargetted murders? And nor are they anarchists, saying for many years to the anarchist movement internationally that they were not interested, and were even hostile to concepts such as prisoner solidarity, internationalism, anarchist revolution (so leftist!) and so on and to just leave them alone. So we did… And so why are they now chasing after our views and after the opinions of FAI/IRF cells, anarchist-insurrectionalists, blogs of counter-information, etc. when they have been rejecting them for years and years? Why is their fanclub sending us their ridiculous texts and claims? To remind us they exist in anger and frustration? And who cares? I don’t care but the Church of ITS Mexico evidently does care and can’t bear that somehow others have a path seperate to theirs. It shows up their blatant isolationalist narcissism and sociopathic psychosis.

Consequences…

Reading the nationalism, racism and homophobia evident in the recent communiques of ITS, a new pathological, repetitive, singular voice trying to lash out vainly is emerging. I’m sure they will respond with a threatening old testament sermon; or is that an earthquake coming?!

Although the Church has given many sermons where they pontificate about feeling superior, laughing in fantasy, it’s striking how much they reveal their silly obssessions, psychological loops and regressive traits in public. This key weakness is certainly a sign of the regressive nature of narcissistic authoritarians, who as individuals display, collectively, unintegrated psychologies, lacking in empathic intelligence and emotional centering.

Maybe in the age of the internet the ITS Church did not know there was a far-right of maladjusted pagan eco-religious fanatics in Europe already? Join and share your savage racialist rituals of purity, blood and black metal records! The Pope of ITS Mexico should issue an immediate elect order to direct the faithful sheep to send their bible of testaments to those web-crazies of the nihilist-right and failing that, “New Scientist” magazine or some such other shit as they seem to be obsessed with, instead of bothering those nasty sectarian anarchist nuns who have excommunicated them. Wouldn’t want you to get upset and send in the inquisition after killing some women.

After banging their keyboards on anarchists for running around the world “intervening” in every topic under the sun other than killing random individuals in the name of some wacko gods, they offer out an invitation to intervene in Mexico and have it out with them! Why would anyone bother? I certainly shall stay here in my own native indigenous lands and get on with my life. If they feel that strongly, why don’t they come here? We have gangs and murders here too, not just the Queen and Cricket. I think that the ITS in “Church of ITS Mexico” stands for “Idiots Tending toward Stupidity.” Who knew that the Church was so linked to the “Mafia”? Pretty hilarious really, as it fits into their displaced wish to project a “strong” or “hard image”; “ruthless,” “organised,” “murderous” etc. The reality appears that they have dropped any individualist or nihilist-egoist values, any pretense of ecological struggle and are rather weak, conduct easy (basically cowardly), opportunistic, random and valueless actions and come across like a bunch of wet bananas with a hurting self-obsessed sociopath as leader, blowing their mouths off in public. So what’s new?

The idiots that we know of in this “Eco-Extremist Mafia” are all wee dafties, like the pseudo-nihilist fool in Italy[1] and this Greek robot of chaos, Archie the Scot[2], who are exactly the same types, socially disfunctional mal-geeks, arseholes basically and losers without a sense of humour, looking to play the bigman. They definity don’t have a sense of humour, but we guess you have to have some “human” values to have a decent sense of “humour” never mind “humility.” I mean, some of the actions we just laugh at, you are a joke, Church of ITS Mexico and faithful flock! Even the killings, you are embarassing yourself! Like a shit on a corpse! And you want the names of Severino Di Giovanni and Mauricio Morales to cover your shit?! Fuck off and die! You are a joke!! Ha Ha Ha!

I shit on your pagan gods!

Love to all the friends and comrades; imprisoned, out and on the run!

Removing the Trash (Oct 2017)

Author: L

Date: October 29^th, 2017

Source: Web archive capture on 29 Oct 2017 from <web.archive.org/.../325.nostate.net/2017/10/29/removing-the-trash-by-l-uk>

“There are so many stupidities, lies, fakes that it is almost impossible to respond in the rhythm indicated… lies after lies and a rhythm of vertiginous updating.
Millimeter by millimeter it is necessary to remove this trash… without discussion, without half-tints and without space for dialogue. Since always we were quite critical of the anarchist pages that began to publish ITS and its derivations… it was to give them space in view of the “novelty”, to feed egos and messianic delusions that today we have to pay dearly.”

From comrades in Chile

The eco-fascist and nihilist-right groupscule ITS Mexico, which originated from individualist and anti-technology ideas and which has begun attacking and threatening anarchists in Mexico and elsewhere, has established itself as an irrationalist authoritarian tendency, carrying out reactionary and repressive actions designed to inflict injuries and deaths against random individuals in the name of their religious concept, Wild Nature. In their exhortations to this sacred ideal, their militants have built a Church of ideological purity, repenting of their anarchy and gathering unto themselves an ultra-moralistic and sycophantic internet choir of shit-talkers, fakes and show-offs.

“We are worse than Hitler. We are worse than eco-fascists.“ Atassa

In those cases which have been made known, of anarchist comrades being at the receiving end of pathetic attacks, threats and smears from these fanatics of “eco-extremism”, we agree with the comrades in Mexico when they echo the call of the Conspiracy of Cells of Fire, to eliminate negative and reactionary influences in the defense of anarchist space.

Taking the words of the “eco-extremist mafia” for what they are, their claims of responsibility, their intentions, their choices, it is obvious to us.

Those who threaten us, attack us, blur our anarchic discourse with authoritarian words and speech are enemies. As they aim to divide, provoke and manipulate our anarchist comrades and us, we’ll definitely respond and push back to prevent them from trying to insinuate themselves among us to recruit and move tolerated through our networks.

This means collecting and spreading analytical data about them like we already do as an existing part of the total liberation struggle against reactionary and authoritarian groups. It means exposing their rotten ideology, exposing what they are doing and antagonising them in all the ways we can. It means physically stopping their projects and suppressing them through force if necessary. Instead of waiting, we should aggravate them and cut them off where we find them. These provocateurs and their idolising flock can get what they deserve after asking for it for so long.

Strength to the comrades in Chile, in Mexico, and the other places that are fighting against this anti-anarchist trash that seeks to justify indiscriminate murders, religious ideology and other cultish shit.

For black anarchy and international solidarity.

The Doxxing

Who is [REDACTED], a Paralegal or an Eco-Extremist Mafia? (Sep 2018)

Author: L

Date: September 15^th, 2018

Source: <web.archive.org-[REDACTED]-a-paralegal-or-an-eco-extremist-mafia-usa>

[REDACTED]
[REDACTED]
[REDACTED]
Telephone: [REDACTED]

ES: ¿Quién es [REDACTED], un asistente legal o uno de la “Mafia Eco-Extremista”? — web.archive.org-[REDACTED]-un-asistente-legal-o-uno-de-la-mafia-eco-extremista/

BAHASA: Mengungkap Art Cabrera! (Mengungkap Gereja ITS bag i)

DE: Wer ist [REDACTED]? Ein Anwaltsassistent oder ein Oeko-Extremist? — web.archive.org-[REDACTED]-ein-anwaltsassistent-oder-ein-oeko-extremist/

Let’s help pull back the curtain on the so-called “Eco-Extremist Mafia” and expose them a bit more with the aid of our contacts. Tracking and collecting information on our authoritarian, fascist, reactionary and irrationalist enemies is part of our activities as anarchists. This “Mafia” have said they have been hiding in the shadows for a long time, but possibly this one has been hiding in the broom cupboard with the envelopes, papers, pens and computers.

“Art Cabrera” is [REDACTED]. Who is “Art Cabrera”? That is the editor of the eco-fascist journal Atassa, which is the English language mouth-piece of the Church of ITS Mexico, ‘Individualists Tending Toward the Wild’.

[REDACTED], a piece of trash who is responsible for translating and spreading so-called ‘Eco-Extremism’ from the United States, is trying to advance his reactionary doctrine whilst living a completely fake and inauthentic double-life. We are happy to publish his real name, photo and workplace contact details to cause him problems, minor or major. Since [REDACTED] has always been very glad to serve the Church of Eco-Extremism, instigated death threats against our anarchist comrades and is believing he is untouchable, we take great delight in doxxing him. This is the company he works for in his real life, not the fantasy one where he is the boss of the “Eco-Extremist Mafia” in America:

https://www.[REDACTED]

Maybe some of the anti-fascist and anarchist comrades in America would like to contact his workplace and his wife to warn her that he is a dangerous member of the “Eco-Extremist Mafia”, all their contact details are to be found there.

[REDACTED] is a paralegal in his day job. If he isn’t fully lying, his day job is supposed to be legal work for migrants, but he claims he voted for Trump. Considering the infusion of corporate espionage these days, it’s just as probable that a troll like [REDACTED] might just as well be a corporate spy, as a deluded fantasist authoritarian. According to the workplace website of his real life, [REDACTED] graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a Bachelor’s Degree in Latin American Studies, and he works primarily in the area of employment-based immigration law. It also mentions that [REDACTED] spent considerable time in both Mexico and Argentina, and is fluent in Spanish, which certainly fits the picture of a Berkeley University graduate who travelled abroad and thinks himself rather clever.

That this simple-looking, ugly, bald, fat-necked Catholic asshole has convinced quite a few supposedly radical ‘anarchists’ and ‘nihilists’ to join the Choir of the ITS is hilarious, more fool them. This is who Aragorn and LBC is willing to get into bed with just to irresponsibly try to stir shit up. [REDACTED] is a fucking loser and should be used as target practice. Shot, stabbed, beaten, burned, whatever. Come to Europe, [REDACTED], on a speaking tour and promote your book, let’s see what will happen to you. May there be some willing anarchists of praxis near-by who will put you out of your misery, you misanthropic waste.

And, as what most of us suspected to be true, the editor of Atassa is a Catholic, ex-Liberation Theologist, with a Marxist back-story. [REDACTED]’s wife works for the same Legal firm, her name is [REDACTED]. Apparently, neither [REDACTED] nor [REDACTED]’s kids know about his online eco-fascist “Mafia“ life at all. [REDACTED] studied Biomedical Engineering in Texas A&M University and has a doctorate in Neurobiology from the University of [REDACTED]. Are they not similar studies to those ITS targeted in Mexico?

Maybe [REDACTED] wants his wife dead, raped or maimed too in his secret life.

[REDACTED], maybe it’s time to tell your wife [REDACTED] and your kids that you believe in rape culture, femicide, and indiscriminate terror in the name of your newest religious concept, Wild Nature. Or does [REDACTED] already know you had a ‘Wild Nature’, a Janus? Is there something else that also is as two-faced and inauthentic in [REDACTED]’s inner life that expresses itself in a life lived in deceit? Let’s find out.

Thank you to our source.

[REDACTED], wife of “Eco-Extremist Mafia” is a vivisectionist (Sep 2018)

Author: L

Date: Sep 16^th, 2018

Source: web.archive.org[REDACTED]-wife-of-eco-extremist-mafia-is-a-vivisectionist-usa/

Continuing our exposure of the nihilist-right and eco-fascist group, Church of ITS Mexico, we briefly look at the wife of [REDACTED] (Abe Cabrera), editor of “Eco-Extremist Mafia” publication Atassa. We inform the facts that his wife, in the course of her studies into fields of ‘scientific research’, Biomedical Engineering and Neurobiology, has performed horrific experiments on animals.

A little bit of research can confirm that she has committed vivisection; useless and torturous cruelties done on living beings for no other reason than to progress with her own paltry and worthless career papers, just to throw away those little animals like they were nothing. So, this is the life-partner of the editor of the supposedly ‘iconoclastic’ ‘eco-extremist’ journal Atassa, and this is the family environment [REDACTED] is in with his kids.

Let’s not forget the divisions, incitements, smears, hatred spread by [REDACTED], because he believed his secret ideology was somehow more ‘radical’ than the anarchist ideas.

The death threats against our anarchist comrades, against Scott Campbell, John Zerzan, ourselves and others. The claims for the ITS murders, the attacks on anarchist spaces, the reveling in the killing of Lesvy Berlín Rivera Osorio, Brad Will, Heather Heyer, those mocked in earthquakes and floods, killed in terror attacks in Europe and the Middle-East by IS/Daesh. This is what [REDACTED] is responsible for glorifying in, translating, inciting – a fantasist of death living in the banality of middle-class American life.

And now it is revealed, that this partner of [REDACTED] is a vivisectionist and a Catholic. What sweet irony.

Where is your eco-extremist curse now?! Where the fuck is it?!

[REDACTED] now works as a paralegal at the same firm as [REDACTED], her workplace email is:

[REDACTED]

https:/www.[REDACTED]

The Fallout

More non-news about the “Eco-Extremist Mafia” (Oct 2018)

Author: L

Date: 2018/10/23

Source: <web.archive.org/.../325.nostate.net/2018/10/23/more-non-news-about-the-eco-extremist-mafia-by-l-uk>

Our last release of information about the so-called “Eco-Extremist Mafia” caused a commotion in the Church of ITS Mexico. Without giving them the oxygen they require in their parasitic nature on the international anarchist movement which they need to survive, we release a report and reply to the smears and idiocy of their position.

Within 12 hours of the doxxing of [REDACTED] being released, the so-called ITS “Mafia”, who virtually live on the internet now, were so upset they had to describe the age and dryness of my Vagina! And take responsibility for the “massacre” beating of an anarcho-punk after a Zapatista rally last December! What is there left to say either to or about these misogynist, misanthropic, psychopathic high priests of the ITS death-cult?

Predictable smears from the post-truth ITS, who take responsibility for actions they have not done, imitating a tactic of IS/Daesh, and now, calling us “cops” who apparently emailed the UK police to inform them that the laughable ‘Archie the Robot’ “Archegonas” is responsible for the ‘Misanthropos Cacoguen’ ITS bomb that was indiscriminately left in a busy street in Edinburgh, Scotland where young people hang out and meet each other. Hilarious! And the basis for this? That a mainstream newspaper reported that cops received the communique (which reads more like a psychotic meltdown), from a Riseup.net mail server! It is more likely that the ‘Archegonas’ or another member of the “Eco-Extremist Mafia” did such a stupid act just to cause shit for Riseup, as they hate it so much, and now print lies against us as befits them. After years of shit from this idiot ‘Archegonas’, is this all that he and ITS can achieve? No, their words and texts reveal it all, and we are fucking laughing at the Church of the ITS Mexico and their choir-boys. That is the tactic of their silly smear, now repeated by some delusional idiot in Brazil. If that is the extent of their logic, it is no wonder that they have made the ideological and practical mistakes which have taken them to the abyss of shit, taking responsibility for minor homicides and planting bombs in public places with the sole intention of hurting as many people as possible. Eco-fascist scum.

After almost ten years of threats, smears and attacks, we are fighting back with some of the means we have, and we will continue to collect and publish information about the Eco-Extremists; the same as we do with the fascists. This is a known anti-fascist tactic proven to work, and we are not afraid of any reprisals. This tactic is an open source method to alert true comrades to the location and identity of their enemies: Our comrades who have been repeatedly smeared, threatened and harassed by this cringing little ITS gang. It has nothing to do with the police, we don’t give a fuck about the police, it is for us. Our comrades are using this tactic to great effect in UK, Germany, Spain, Australia, Canada, United States, Greece, Italy, Netherlands and everywhere that there are anarchists of action. Since ITS have always made it clear that they intend to kill us, that they are not anarchists and their actions and their ‘philosophy’ are not anarchic, we owe them nothing, nor do we owe their sheep-like supporters in America or Europe anything. The Church of ITS is nothing more than the murderous and mentally disturbed acting-out of any ordinary psychopath to whom we equally owe no allegiance whatsoever. We are not sure why they think they can demand any silence from us on the grounds of, what? Comradeship (or not even)? Criminalism? Don’t make us laugh, the ‘code of the streets’? ‘Moralism’ from those who don’t believe in anything? As one of our comrades in America wrote to us, “Funny how the nihilists turn into politicians as soon as another side draws a line in the sand and says enough is enough”.

The Church of ITS is an opportunistic authority of those that try to throw enough shit until some of it sticks, the classic tactic of fascists and bosses – “repeat a lie enough times and it becomes true”, propaganda at its best, written like the liars that they are. In the typical way of ITS, they try to use the words of other anarchists against us, in this case the CCF. We cannot and will not speak for our comrades of CCF, but in the quoted section by this minor ITS Brazil loser, CCF are describing their relationship to those they have worked with, not those who are already enemies and targets. Information regarding targets is to be circulated, and ITS are now Eco-fascist targets, having always eschewed any anarchist solidarity and comradeship. Maybe there was a time in the past there was some confusion as to the destination of the Church of ITS Mexico and their choir-boys, but now it is clear and has been for so long. Where are the original comrades of ITS? Where has the intelligent and articulate writing concerning technology and the direction of the techno-industrial-society gone? Disappeared in injuries, in arrests, not made public? Disappeared into hatred, fear and terror? Reduced to the garbage of blogs and social media? The international anarchist space is much more than this, and ITS needs conflict and division to feed their project, which has been given a platform by some of the most irresponsible shit-stirring post-modernist gamers and book-nerds in Europe and USA.

ITS and their sub-groups are simply vile, abusive performers in their own sick circus of hate and homicide. If we have the ability to fuck with them and make things difficult for them, even disrupt or attack them, then we will. Especially their “Eco-Extremist theorists” like [REDACTED] and co. If it is possible for us to arrange for dozens and dozens of comrades to travel to Iraq and Syria to fight IS/Daesh, then we can send a few comrades to Mexico and Brazil. We are not scared, come and try to attack us, we will obliterate your wee dafties ‘Wildfire Cell’ and ‘Archegonas’. It’s not a problem for us, they know that they have never even emailed us to arrange a meeting in all this time. Same goes for the pathetically proud and thin-skinned ‘Maldicion Eco-Extremista’, what a joke. We have been emailing you, why won’t you meet our people in Mexico? Is it because your IP address is in Berkeley, San Francisco? The Church of ITS are nothing but cowards playing games, using the anarchist space for their own entertainment, just fucking scum who will get hurt and die soon.

[REDACTED], ‘Abe Cabrera’. Now he has problems. Both himself and Guillory, his partner ,‘removed’ from the website of their employer, and here we publish his address, as a response to the smears of ITS. This is how your ‘indomitable’ translator and “theorist” [REDACTED] ended up. A coward, and his “comrades” all betrayed him in public and left him for the dogs. That is the “Eco-Extremist Mafia”, the “theorists” who will go “forward”. The deafening silence from the “eco-extremist theorists” is really revealing after all the baiting, smears and threats taking place. And for each new provocation of the Church of ITS we will add the fire to the flames for the Americans and those we find in Europe. That each threat and attack will be answered.

[REDACTED]
[REDACTED]
[REDACTED]
Telephone: [REDACTED]

[REDACTED]’s house is a $250,000 family home, not in the Latin American “Jungle” nor the “Ghetto”, nor the “Favelas”. He’s just another poser and fake like the rest of the “Eco-Extremist Mafia”. As part of our doxxing campaign, let’s look now at the emails we received from [REDACTED] via the Atassa email account as [REDACTED] tried to formulate an exit-scam and mitigate the impact we had on his life. These emails reveal a lot about his character and state of mind, and that of an “Eco-Extremist theorist”…

–

From: Atassa
Date: Sunday, September 16, 2018, 4:21 am
Subject: You Win

While we only have a vague idea of who told you that paralegal guy is the master mind behind all this, it’s evident that you care about this stuff more than we do. So you win. We’ve disappeared and you will never hear from us again. We wish you well in your projects.

–

Yes, [REDACTED] wishes us well. What a cowardly piece of shit. He immediately ceased his Atassa project and took down every online evidence that Atassa existed, helped by the pseudo-comrade Aragorn/LBC, who continues to distribute the Atassa book-journal; hell, everything helps sales, right? [REDACTED], who was translating the ITS texts, helping ITS/MaldicionEE write texts, make threats and glorifying in the murders, buckled so quickly. He even sent this next email shortly after, just to beg us a little more to save his miserable life, here it is.

–

From: Atassa
Date: Sunday, September 16, 2018, 5:12 am
Subject: You Win

Also, in exchange for taking down the supposed doxxing post against Mr. [REDACTED], we can offer a public retraction of the Atassa project which you can publish on your site. You can assess whether that retraction is enough to end this whole business. We are not entirely unsympathetic to your aims and regret any damage that our actions have caused.

–

A retraction to “regret any damage that our actions have caused”. I had to repeat that, because it is just so beautiful. The Church of ITS Mexico who gave a long pontification about my old ‘anarcho-cop’ Vagina, and who had so much faith in [REDACTED], and in his Catholic vivisectionist wife, and this is how he repaid them. Beautiful. [REDACTED] has no idea how much danger he is in, maybe now he’s starting to understand. What did the so-called “comrades” of [REDACTED] have to say about it? Nothing. They dumped him. All of them.

–

From: Ramon Elani
Date: Wednesday, September 19, 7:10 am
Subject: Re: 7

Thank you for sending this to me. I no longer have dealings with this person or his project.
for the wild
ramon

–

Thanks Ramon, for confirming [REDACTED] was Abe Cabrera, you did the right thing and it’s good to see that kind of solidarity “eco-extremist theorists” show each other.

–

From: Ramon Elani
Date: Wednesday, September 19, 8:56 am
Subject: Re: Betrayal

yes, i’ve long since regretted my involvement. though i still feel that my essay was misunderstood.
for the wild
ramon

–

Poor Ramon, he’s so misunderstood. As a co-editor of the ‘Black Seed’ garbage journal distributed by Aragorn/LBC, which tries to mix green anarchism and eco-extremism, and insert this toxic poison into the international anarchist ‘movement’, you are not misunderstood. It was clear in the decision to print the text ‘To the World Builders’ and it’s inclusion in the ‘The Anarchist Library’ what the position is you all have taken. Post-modern crap theorising around rape culture and murder, fuck you and die.

Elani is so “misunderstood” that the shit eco-academic-activist philosophy and creative writing project ‘Dark Mountain’, has published his new text, where he takes the opportunity to fully renege; disavowing property destruction, sabotage and attacks. So much for the “indomitable” Eco-Extremist theorists, what cowards.

–

From: Armenio Lewis
Date: Sunday, September 22, 2018, 1:46 pm
Subject: Atassa

I dont even know how to really word this so im gonna make this simple.
ALL participants and friendlies around the atassa project have reached out to me hoping I can, for lack of a better term, alleviate any animosity over the atassaproject.
Abe went off the deep end. What started as theoretical exploration of violence with no one except abe actually declaring and supporting ITS
Nobody wants beef, I’m just a middle man relaying this.
You can email back, call @ +150********, or completely ignore.
Fuck with abe all you want, he deserves it, but everyone else doesnt.

–

There it is; there is “ALL the participants and friendlies around the Atassa project”, which we assume includes LBC/Aragorn totally throwing [REDACTED] under the bus just to save themselves any bother. They must seriously underestimate us to write such ridiculous shit – Ah, just a “theoretical exploration of violence”. What a fucking collection of cretins. So much for the claims of the Pope of ITS Mexico about their “theorists”, these people couldn’t theorise themselves out of a paper bag.

“Eco-Extremism” is an opportunistic trend of parasitism, online fakes and sacred beliefs, recycling on facebook, twitter and the “altervista” or “wordpress”. Although they would like you to think that their groups are spreading, instead they are dwindling, with a few people traveling between countries (or staying put in Mexico!) and believing in their sacred misanthropic mission. A mission which is expressed as hatred of women, hatred of anarchy, and ‘humanity’.

What we did find out, was that a few months ago [REDACTED] promoted on his summer reading list on Atassa Facebook, the book “Iron Gates,” which is a fascist written and published book that is set in a concentration camp. Part rape fantasy, part pro-Nazi propaganda. It’s also one of the ‘go-to’ texts promoted by Atomwaffen Divison in the USA, which is like the American version of National Action (Neo-Nazi group in UK). A lot of comrades have pointed to a potential cross over between the Eco-Extremist material and Satanic/Neo-Nazi crap like Atomwaffen who has killed about half a dozen people in the US.

Yeah, so much for all these “theorists” and ITS “cells” that like to philosophise about what is and what is not “fascism”, and how dare the ‘anarcho-cops’ call them fascists.

We specifically warn against this EE tendency because of the potential for cross-overs with the nationalist-autonomous & nationalist-anarchist, neo-nazi and indigenous pagan “white tribe” eco-fascists who target the dredge of the anarchist scene with their irrationalist, green authoritarian and runic occult bullshit.

In the last text-threat from ITS Brazil, where they blame the Hambach Forest defenders for the death of the comrade who fell from the trees, we find the jealousy, the resentment, the bitterness of those who understand nothing about what it is that we are fighting for. In all the texts from ITS these past years we find a gross lack of understanding of what the anarchist ideas are and what anarchist methods are. Instead we just find a perverse and fanatic pathology and a weakness, leading to their ongoing blatant failures and authoritarian outcomes.

The “Eco-Extremist Curse” remains a joke, and for all the lies and smears that come from their mouths, we will target those that come within our reach.

As one of our comrades remarked “keep on threatening me with the evil-eye, come on…”

From my vast, old, soul eating Vagina…

The Snitching

“Eco-Extremist Mafia” [REDACTED] submits legal & FBI threat to anarchist counter-info site 325 (Nov 2018)

Source: <325.nostate.net-[REDACTED]-submits-legal-fbi-threat-to-anarchist-counter-info-site-325>

Date: Nov 17^th, 2018

Just as we had been convinced that the eco-extreme/nihilist-right “Mafia” could not get even more ridiculous, we were sent this email below by the comrades of nostate.net. It’s a threat via their domain provider by the boss of the North American ‘indomitable’ “eco-extremist theorists”, [REDACTED], editor of eco-fascist journal Atassa to call the FBI. After all those other ‘indomitable’ ‘comrades’ of his hung him out to dry the only thing for him to do is threaten to call the police.

This threat the eco-fascist makes is nothing but a gift to us and shows what the pope Atassa is really about. A miserable snitch fantasist who thinks he can mock and threaten without consequences, moving around online spaces and blogs promoting the indiscriminate terrorism and authoritarianism of the Individualists Tending Toward the Wild (ITS) whilst attacking anarchy. A Catholic flea attached to the anarchist space and the controversy of spreading death threats against comrades, mixing up anarchist ideas with irrationalist and religious ones.

[REDACTED], informer and worthless coward, doesn’t he think that the FBI and dozens of other security agencies don’t already monitor our site? Doesn’t this “Mafia” already know that if our small organisation can find out exactly where he lives, who he associates with, where he works and spends time, then the FBI might also know exactly who and what he is? [REDACTED] always was a useful idiot to the arms of the State, just like the entire “Eco-Extremism” trend.

Counter-information is an ongoing, continuous practice directed towards our anarchist, nihilist and anti-authoritarian aims. It really doesn’t matter to us if our site is taken down, it will be back in one form or another. Everything will continue.

Solidarity to the comrades fighting against authoritarian and misanthropic trash.

–

Dear Sir or Madam: My name is [REDACTED], and I live in the United States. I have been the target of a harassment campaign based on mistaken identity from a site that you host, namely: 325.nostate.net

The offending links are listed here:
325.nostate.net[REDACTED]-art-cabrera-eco-fascist
325.nostate.net

As you can see, my picture, a picture of my wife, and my address have been posted on that site, as well as death threats. Due to the nature of the threats, I do not believe that the webmaster would take these articles down. Please advise if you believe that this content is acceptable according to your current policies of website hosting, otherwise we will be forced to investigate legal action, as well as inform the FBI. Their posting of my address and our pictures on their site is not acceptable. Please find my contact information below. I look forward to your reply.

Sincerely, [REDACTED]

phone: [REDACTED]
email: [REDACTED]

More Analysis

Children of Ted and a Response (Dec 2018)

Authors: John H. Richardson & Conor Arpwel

Subtitle: Two decades after his last deadly act of ecoterrorism, the Unabomber has become an unlikely prophet to a new generation of acolytes

Date: December 2018

Sources: New York Magazine & Protean

Children of Ted

Two decades after his last deadly act of ecoterrorism, the Unabomber has become an unlikely prophet to a new generation of acolytes

John H. Richardson

When John Jacobi stepped to the altar of his Pentecostal church and the gift of tongues seized him, his mother heard prophecies — just a child and already blessed, she said. Someday, surely, her angelic blond boy would bring a light to the world, and maybe she wasn’t wrong. His quest began early. When he was 5, the Alabama child-welfare workers decided that his mother’s boyfriend — a drug dealer named Rock who had a red carpet leading to his trailer and plaster lions standing guard at the door — wasn’t providing a suitable environment for John and his sisters and little brother. Before they knew it, they were living with their father, an Army officer stationed in Fayetteville, North Carolina. But two years later, when he was posted to Iraq, the social workers shipped the kids back to Alabama, where they stayed until their mother hanged herself from a tree in the yard. John was 14. In the tumultuous years that followed, he lost his faith, wrote mournful poems, took an interest in news reports about a lively new protest movement called Occupy Wall Street, and ran away from the home of the latest relative who’d taken him in — just for a night, but that was enough. As soon as he graduated from high school, he quit his job at McDonald’s, bought some camping gear, and set out in search of a better world.

When a young American lights out for the territories in the second decade of the 21^st century, where does he go? For John Jacobi, the answer was Chapel Hill, North Carolina — Occupy had gotten him interested in anarchists, and he’d heard they were active there. He was camping out with the chickens in the backyard of their communal headquarters a few months later when a crusty old anarchist with dreadlocks and a piercing gaze handed him a dog-eared book called Industrial Society and Its Future. The author was FC, whoever that was. Jacobi glanced at the first line: “The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.”

This guy sure gets to the point, he thought. He skimmed down the paragraph. Industrial society has caused “widespread psychological suffering” and “severe damage to the natural world”? Made life more comfortable in rich countries but miserable in the Third World? That sounded right to him. He found a quiet nook and read on.

The book was written in 232 numbered sections, like an instruction manual for some immense tool. There were two main themes. First, we’ve become so dependent on technology that the real decisions about our lives are made by unseen forces like corporations and market flows. Our lives are “modified to fit the needs of this system,” and the diseases of modern life are the result: “Boredom, demoralization, low self-esteem, inferiority feelings, defeatism, depression, anxiety, guilt, frustration, hostility, spouse or child abuse, insatiable hedonism, abnormal sexual behavior, sleep disorders, eating disorders, etc.” Jacobi had experienced most of those himself.

The second point was that technology’s dark momentum can’t be stopped. With each improvement, the graceful schooner that sails our shorelines becomes the hulking megatanker that takes our jobs. The car’s a blast bouncing along at the reckless speed of 20 mph, but pretty soon we’re buying insurance, producing our license and registration if we fail to obey posted signs, and cursing when one of those charming behavior-modification devices in orange envelopes shows up on our windshields. We doze off while exploring a fun new thing called social media and wake up to big data, fake news, and Total Information Awareness.

All true, Jacobi thought. Who the hell wrote this thing?

The clue arrived in section No. 96: “In order to get our message before the public with some chance of making a lasting impression, we’ve had to kill people,” the mystery author wrote.

Kaczynski at the time of his arrest, in 1996. Photo: Donaldson Collection/Getty Images

“Kill people” — Jacobi realized that he was reading the words of the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, the hermit who sent mail bombs to scientists, executives, and computer experts beginning in 1978. FC stood for Freedom Club, the pseudonym Kaczynski used to take credit for his attacks. He said he’d stop if the newspapers published his manifesto, and they did, which is how he got caught, in 1995 — his brother recognized his prose style and reported him to the FBI. Jacobi flipped back to the first page, section No. 4: “We therefore advocate a revolution against the industrial system.”

The first time he read that passage, Jacobi had just nodded along. Talking about revolution was the anarchist version of praising the baby Jesus, invoked so frequently it faded into background noise. But Kaczynski meant it. He was a genius who went to Harvard at 16 and made breakthroughs in something called “boundary functions” in his 20s. He joined the mathematics department at UC Berkeley when he was 25, the youngest hire in the university’s then-99-year history. And he did try to escape the world he could no longer bear by moving to Montana. He lived in peace without electricity or running water until the day when, maddened by the invasion of cars and chain saws and people, he hiked to his favorite wild place for some relief and found a road cut through it. “You just can’t imagine how upset I was,” he told an interviewer in 1999. “From that point on, I decided that, rather than trying to acquire further wilderness skills, I would work on getting back at the system. Revenge.” In the next 17 years, he killed three people and wounded 23 more.

Jacobi didn’t know most of those details yet, but he couldn’t find any holes in Kaczynski’s logic. He said straight-out that ordinary human beings would never charge the barricades, shouting, “Destroy our way of life! Plunge us into a desperate struggle for survival!” They’d probably just stagger along, patching holes and destroying the planet, which meant “a small core of deeply committed people” would have to do the job themselves (section No. 189). Kaczynski even offered tactical advice in an essay titled “Hit Where It Hurts,” published a few years after he began his life sentence in a federal “supermax” prison in Colorado: Forget the small targets and attack critical infrastructure like electric grids and communication networks. Take down a few of those at the right time and the ripples would spread rapidly, crashing the global economic system and giving the planet a breather: No more CO2 pumped into the atmosphere, no more iPhones tracking our every move, no more robots taking our jobs.

Kaczynski was just as unsentimental about the downsides. Sure, decades or centuries after the collapse, we might crawl out of the rubble and get back to a simpler, freer way of life, without money or debt, in harmony with nature instead of trying to fight it. But before that happened, there was likely to be “great suffering” — violent clashes over resources, mass starvation, the rise of warlords. The way Kaczynski saw it, though, the longer we go like we’re going, the worse things will get. At the time his manifesto was published, many people reading it probably hadn’t heard of global warming and most certainly weren’t worried about it. Reading it in 2014 was a very different experience.

The shock that went through Jacobi in that moment — you could call it his “Kaczynski Moment” — made the idea of destroying civilization real. And if Kaczynski was right, wouldn’t he have some responsibility to do something, to sabotage one of those electric grids?

His answer was yes, which was almost as alarming as discovering an unexpected kinship with a serial killer — even when you’re sure that morality is just a social construct that keeps us docile in our shearing pens, it turns out setting off a chain of events that could kill a lot of people can raise a few qualms.

“But by then,” Jacobi says, “I was already hooked.”

Quietly, often secretly, whether they gather it from the air of this anxious era or directly from the source like Jacobi did, more and more people have been having Kaczynski Moments. Books and webzines with names like Against Civilization, FeralCulture, Unsettling America, and the Ludd-Kaczynski Institute of Technology have been spreading versions of his message across social-media forums from Reddit to Facebook for at least a decade, some attracting more than 100,000 followers. They cluster around a youthful nickname, “anti-civ,” some drawing their ideas directly from Kaczynski, others from movements like deep ecology, anarchy, primitivism, and nihilism, mixing them into new strains. Although they all believe industrial civilization is in a death spiral, most aren’t trying to hurry it along. One exception is Deep Green Resistance, an activist network inspired by a 2011 book of the same name that includes contributions from one of Kaczynski’s frequent correspondents, Derrick Jensen. The group’s openly stated goal, like Kaczynski’s, is the destruction of civilization and a return to preagricultural ways of life.

So far, most of the violence has happened outside of the United States. Although the FBI declined to comment on the topic, the 2017 report on domestic terrorism by the Congressional Research Service cited just a handful of minor attacks on “symbols of Western civilization” in the past ten years, a period of relative calm most credit to Operation Backfire, the FBI crackdown on radical environmental efforts in the mid-aughts. But in Latin America and Europe, terrorist groups with florid names like Conspiracy of Cells of Fire and Wild Indomitables have been bombing government buildings and assassinating technologists for almost a decade. The most ominous example is Individualidades Tendiendo a lo Salvaje, or ITS (usually translated as Individuals Tending Toward the Wild), a loose association of terrorist groups started by Mexican Kaczynski devotees who decided that his plan to take down the system was outdated because the environment was being decimated so fast and government surveillance technology had gotten so robust. Instead, ITS would return to its guru’s old modus operandi: revenge. The group set off bombs at the National Ecology Institute in Mexico, a Federal Electricity Commission office, two banks, and a university. It now claims cells across Latin America, and in January 2017, the Chilean offshoot delivered a gift-wrapped bomb to Oscar Landerretche, the chairman of the world’s largest copper mine, who suffered minor injuries. The group explained its motives in a defiant media release: “The pretentious Landerretche deserved to die for his offenses against Earth.”

In the larger world, where no respectable person would praise Kaczynski without denouncing his crimes, little Kaczynski Moments have been popping up in the most unexpected places — the Fox News website, for example, which ran a piece by Keith Ablow called “Was the Unabomber Correct?” in 2013. After summarizing some of Kaczynski’s dark predictions about the steady erosion of individual autonomy in a world where the tools and systems that create prosperity are too complex for any normal person to understand, Ablow — Fox’s “expert on psychiatry” — came to the conclusion that Kaczynski was “precisely correct in many of his ideas” and even something of a prophet. “Watching the development of Facebook heighten the narcissism of tens of millions of people, turning them into mini reality-TV versions of themselves,” he wrote. “I would bet he knows, with even more certainty, that he was onto something.”

That same year, in the leading environmentalist journal Orion, a “recovering environmentalist” named Paul Kingsnorth — who’d stunned his fellow activists in 2008 by announcing that he’d lost hope — published an essay about the disturbing experience of reading Kaczynski’s manifesto for the first time. If he ended up agreeing with Kaczynski, “I’m worried that it may change my life,” he confessed. “Not just in the ways I’ve already changed it (getting rid of my telly, not owning a credit card, avoiding smartphones and e-readers and sat-navs, growing at least some of my own food, learning practical skills, fleeing the city, etc.) but properly, deeply.”

By 2017, Kaczynski was making inroads with the conservative intelligentsia — in the journal First Things, home base for neocons like Midge Decter and theologians like Michael Novak, deputy editor Elliot Milco described his reaction to the manifesto in an article called “Searching for Ted Kaczynski”: “What I found in the text, and in letters written by Kaczynski since his incarceration, was a man with a large number of astute (even prophetic) insights into American political life and culture. Much of his thinking would be at home in the pages of First Things.” A year later, Foreign Policy published “The Next Wave of Extremism Will Be Green,” an editorial written by Jamie Bartlett, a British journalist who tracks the anti-civ movement. He estimated that a “few thousand” Americans were already prepared to commit acts of destruction. Citing examples such as the Standing Rock pipeline protests in 2017, Bartlett wrote, “The necessary conditions for the radicalization of climate activism are all in place. Some groups are already showing signs of making the transition.”

The fear of technology seems to grow every day. Tech tycoons build bug-out estates in New Zealand, smartphone executives refuse to let their kids use smartphones, data miners find ways to hide their own data. We entertain ourselves with I Am Legend, The Road, V for Vendetta, and Avatar while our kids watch Wall-E or FernGully: The Last Rainforest. An eight-part docudrama called Manhunt: The Unabomber was a hit when it premiered on the Discovery Channel in 2017 and a “super hit” when Netflix rereleased it last summer, says Elliott Halpern, the producer Netflix commissioned to make another film focusing on Kaczynski’s “ideas and legacy.” “Obviously,” Halpern says, “he predicted a lot of stuff.”

And wouldn’t you know it, Kaczynski’s papers have become one of the most popular attractions at the University of Michigan’s Labadie Collection, an archive of original documents from movements of “social unrest.” Kaczynski’s archivist, Julie Herrada, couldn’t say much about the people who visit — the archive has a policy against characterizing its clientele — but she did offer a word in their defense. “Nobody seems crazy.”

Two years ago, I started trading letters with Kaczynski. His responses are relentlessly methodical and laced with footnotes, but he seems to have a droll side, too. “Thank you for your undated letter postmarked 6/11/18, but you wrote the address so sloppily that I’m surprised the letter reached me …” “Thank you for your letter of 8/6/18, which I received on 8/16/18. It looks like a more elaborate and better developed, but otherwise typical, example of the type of brown-nosing that journalists send to a ‘mark’ to get him to cooperate.” Questions that revealed unfamiliarity with his work were poorly received. “It seems that most big-time journalists are incapable of understanding what they read and incapable of transmitting facts accurately. They are frustrated fiction-writers, not fact-oriented people.” I tried to warm him up with samples of my brilliant prose. “Dear John, Johnny, Jack, Mr. Richardson, or whatever,” he began, before informing me that my writing reminded him of something the editor of another magazine told the social critic Paul Goodman, as recounted in Goodman’s book Growing Up Absurd: “ ‘If you mean to tell me,” an editor said to me, “that Esquire tries to have articles on serious issues and treats them in such a way that nothing can come of it, who can deny it?’ ” (Kaczynski’s characteristically scrupulous footnote adds a caveat, “Quoted from memory.”) His response to a question about his political preferences was extra dry: “It’s certainly an oversimplification to say that the struggle between left & right in America today is a struggle between the neurotics and the sociopaths (left = neurotics, right = sociopaths = criminal types),” he said, “but there is nevertheless a good deal of truth in that statement.”

But the jokes came to an abrupt stop when I asked for his take on America’s descent into immobilizing partisan warfare. “The political situation is complex and could be discussed endlessly, but for now I will only say this,” he answered. “The current political turmoil provides an environment in which a revolutionary movement should be able to gain a foothold.” He returned to the point later with more enthusiasm: “Present situation looks a lot like situation (19^th century) leading up to Russian Revolution, or (pre-1911) to Chinese Revolution. You have all these different factions, mostly goofy and unrealistic, and in disagreement if not in conflict with one another, but all agreeing that the situation is intolerable and that change of the most radical kind is necessary and inevitable. To this mix add one leader of genius.”

Kaczynski was Karl Marx in modern flesh, yearning for his Lenin. In my next letter, I asked if any candidates had approached him. His answer was an impatient no — obviously any revolutionary stupid enough to write to him would be too stupid to lead a revolution. “Wait, I just thought of an exception: John Jacobi. But he’s a screwball — bad judgment — unreliable — a problem rather than a help.”

The Kaczynski moment dislocates. Suddenly, everyone seems to be living in a dream world. Why are they talking about binge TV and the latest political outrage when we’re turning the goddamn atmosphere into a vast tanker of Zyklon B? Was he right? Were we all gelded and put in harnesses without even knowing it? Is this just a simulation of life, not life itself?

People have moments like that under normal conditions, of course. Sigmund Freud wrote a famous essay about them way back in 1929, Civilization and Its Discontents. A few unsettled souls will always quit that bank job and sail to Tahiti, and the stoic middle will always suck it up. But Jacobi couldn’t accept those options. Staggered by the shock of his Kaczynski Moment but intent on rising to the challenge, he began corresponding with the great man himself, hitchhiked the 644 miles from Chapel Hill to Ann Arbor to read the Kaczynski archives, tracked down his followers all around the world, and collected an impressive (and potentially incriminating) cache of material on ITS along the way. He even published essays about them in an alarmingly terror-friendly print journal named Atassa. But his biggest influence was a mysterious Spanish radical theorist known only by the pseudonym he used to translate Kaczynski’s manifesto into Spanish, Último Reducto. Recommended by Kaczynski himself, who even supplied an email address, Reducto gave Jacobi a daunting reading list and some editorial advice on his early essays, which inspired another series of TV-movie twists in Jacobi’s turbulent life. Frustrated by the limits of his knowledge, he applied to the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, to study some more, received a full scholarship and a small stipend, and buckled down for two years of intense scholarship. Then he quit and hit the road again. “I think the homeless are a better model than ecologically minded university students,” he told me. “They’re already living outside of the structures of society.”

Four years into this bizarre pilgrimage, Jacobi is something of an underground figure himself — the ubiquitous, eccentric, freakishly intellectual kid who became the Zelig of ecoextremism. Right now, he’s about to skin his first rat. Barefoot and shirtless, with an old wool blanket draped over his shoulders, long sun-streaked hair and gleaming blue eyes, he hurries down a rocky mountain trail toward a stone-age village of wattle-and-daub huts, softening his voice to finish his thought. “Ted was a good start. But Ted is not the endgame.”

He stops there. The village ahead is the home of a “primitive skills” school called Wild Roots. Blissfully untainted by modern conveniences like indoor toilets and hot showers, it’s also free of charge. It has just three rules, and only one that will get us kicked out. “I don’t want to be associated with that name,” Wild Roots’ de facto leader told us when I mentioned Kaczynski. “I don’t want my name associated with that name,” he added. “I really don’t want to be associated with that name.”

Jacobi arrives at the open-air workshop, covered by a tin roof, where the dirtiest Americans I’ve ever seen are learning how to weave cordage from bark, start friction fires, skin animals. The only surprise is the lives they led before: a computer analyst for a military-intelligence contractor, a Ph.D. candidate in engineering, a classical violinist, two schoolteachers, and a rotating cast of college students the older members call the “pre-postapocalypse generation.” Before he became the community blacksmith, the engineering student was testing batteries for ecofriendly cars. “It was a fucking hoax,” he says now. “It wasn’t going to make any difference.” At his coal-fired forge, pounding out simple tools with a hammer and anvil, he feels much more useful. “I can’t make my own axes yet, but I made most of the handles on those tools, I make all my own punches and chisels. I made an adze. I can make knives.”

Freshly killed this morning, five dead rats lie on a pine board. They’re for practice before trying to skin larger game. Jacobi bends down for a closer look, selects a rat, ties a string to its twiggy leg, and hangs it from a rafter. He picks up a razor. “You wanna leave the cartilage in the ear,” his teacher says. “Then cut just above the white line and you’ll get the eyes off.”

A few feet away, a young woman who fled an elite women’s college in Boston pounds a wooden staff into a bucket to pulverize hemlock bark to make tannin to tan the bear hide she has soaking in the stream — a mixture of mashed hemlock and brain tissue is best, she says, though eggs can substitute if you can’t get fresh brain.

Jacobi works the razor carefully. The eyes fall into the dirt.

“I’m surprised you haven’t skinned a rat before,” I say.

“Yeah, me too,” he replies.

He is, after all, the founder of The Wildernist and Hunter/Gatherer, two of the more radical web journals in the personal “rewilding” movement. The moderates at places like ReWild University talk of “rewilding your taste buds” and getting in “rockin’ fit shape.” “We don’t have to demonize our culture or attempt to hide from it,” ReWild University’s website enthuses. Jacobi has no interest in padding the walls of the cage — as he put it in an essay titled “Taking Rewilding Seriously,” “You can’t rewild an animal in a zoo.”

He’s not an idiot; he knows the zoo is pretty much everywhere at this point. He explained this in the philosophical book he wrote at 22, Repent to the Primitive: “My focus on the Hunter/Gatherer is based on a tradition in political philosophy that considers the natural state of man before moving on to an analysis of the civilized state of man. This is the tradition of Hobbes, Rousseau, Locke, Hume, Paine.” His plan is to ace his primitive skills, then test living wild for an extended time in the deepest forest he can find.

So why did it take him so long to get out of the zoo?

“I thought sabotage was more important,” he says.

But this isn’t the place to talk about that — he doesn’t want to break Wild Roots’ rules. Jacobi goes silent and works his razor down the rat’s body, pulling the skin down like a sock.

When he’s finished, he leads the way back into the woods, naming the plants: pokeberry, sourwood, rhododendron, dog hobble, tulip poplar, hemlock. The one with orange flowers is a lily that will garnish his dinner tonight. “If you want, I can get some for you,” he offers.

Then he returns to the forbidden topic. “I could never do anything like that,” he says firmly — unless he could, which is also a possibility. “I don’t have any moral qualms with violence,” he says. “I would go to jail, but for what?”

For what? The first time I talked to him, he told me he had dreams of being the leader Kaczynski wanted.

“I am being a little evasive,” he admits. His other reason for going to college, he says, was to plant the anti-civ seed in the future lawyers and scientists gathered there — “people who will defend you, people who have access to computer networks” — and also, speaking purely speculatively, who could serve as “the material for a terrorist criminal network.”

“Did you convince anybody?” I ask.

“I don’t know. I always told them not to tell me.”

“So you wanted to be the Lenin?”

“Yeah, I wanted to be Lenin.”

But let’s face it, he says, the revolution’s never going to happen. Probably. Maybe. That’s why he’s heading into the woods. “I want to come out in a few years and be like Jesus,” he jokes, “working miracles with plants.”

Isn’t he doing exactly what Lenin did during his exile in Europe, though? Honing his message, building a network, weighing tactical options, and creating a mystique. Is he practicing “security culture,” the activist term for covering your tracks? “Are you hiding the truth? Are you secretly plotting with your hard-core cadre?”

He smiles. “I wouldn’t be a very good revolutionary if I told you I was doing that.”

At the last minute, Abe Cabrera changed our rendezvous point from a restaurant in New Orleans to an alligator-filled swamp an hour away. This wasn’t a surprise. Jacobi had given me Cabrera’s email address, identifying him as the North American contact for ITS, which Cabrera immediately denied. His interest in ITS was purely academic, he insisted, an outgrowth of his studies in liberation theology. “However,” he added, “to say that I don’t have any contact with them may or may not be true.”

Now he’s leading me into the swamp, literally, talking about an ITS bomb attack on the head of the Department of Physical and Mathematical Sciences at the University of Chile in 2011. “Is that a fair target?” he asks. “For Uncle Ted, it would have been, so I guess that’s the standard.” He chuckles.

He’s short, round, bald, full of nervous energy, wild theories, and awkward tics — if “Terrorist Spokesman” doesn’t work out for him, he’s a shoo-in for “Mad Scientist in a B-Movie.” Giant ferns and carpets of moss appear and disappear as he leads the way into the swamp, where the elephantine roots of cypress trees stand in the eerie stillness of the water like dinosaurs.

He started checking out ITS after he heard some rumors about a new cell starting up in Torreón, his grandparents’ birthplace in Mexico, he says, but the group didn’t really catch his interest until it changed its name from Individuals Tending Toward the Wild to Wild Reaction. Why? Because healthy animals don’t have “tendencies” when they confront an enemy. As one Wild Reaction member put it in the inevitable postattack communiqué, another example of the purple prose poetry that has become the group’s signature: “I place the device, and it transforms me into a coyote thirsting for revenge.”

Cabrera calls this “radical animism,” a phrase that conjures the specter of nature itself rising up in revolt. Somehow that notion wove together all the dizzying twists his life had taken — the years as the child of migrant laborers in the vegetable fields of California’s Imperial Valley, his flirtation with “super-duper Marxism” at UC Berkeley, the leap of faith that put him in an “ultraconservative, ultra-Catholic” order, and the loss of faith that surprised him at the birth of his child. “Most people say, ‘I held my kid for the first time and I realized God exists.’ I held my kid the first time and I said, ‘You know what? God is bullshit.’ ” People were great in small doses but deadly in large ones, even the beautiful little girl cradled in his arms. There were no fundamental ethical values. It all came down to numbers. If that was God’s plan, the whole thing was about as spiritually “meaningful as a marshmallow,” Cabrera says.

John Jacobi is a big part of this story, he adds. They connected on Facebook after a search for examples of radical animism led him to Hunter/Gatherer. They both contributed to the journal Atassa, which was dedicated on the first page to the premise that “civilization should be fought” and that the example of Ted Kaczynski “is what that fighting looks like.” In the premier edition, Jacobi made the prudent decision to write in a detached tone. Cabrera’s essay bogs down in turgid scholarship before breaking free with a flourish of suspiciously familiar prose poetry: “Ecoextremists believe that this world is garbage. They understand progress as industrial slavery, and they fight like cornered wild animals since they know that there is no escape.”

Cabrera weaves in and out of corners like a prisoner looking for an escape route, so it’s hard to know why he chose a magazine reporter for his most incendiary confession: “Here’s the super-official version I haven’t told anybody — I am the unofficial voice-slash-theoretician of ecoextremism. I translated all 30 communiqués. I translated one last night.”

Abe Cabrera: Abracadabra.

Yes, he knows this puts him dangerously close to violating the laws against material contributions to terrorism. He read the Patriot Act. That’s why he leads a double life, even a triple life. Nobody at work knows, nobody from his past knows, even his wife doesn’t know. He certainly doesn’t want his kids to know. He doesn’t even want to tell them about climate change. Math homework, piano lessons, gymnastics, he’s “knee-deep in all that stuff.” He punches the clock. “What else am I gonna do? I love my kids,” he says. “I hope for their future, even though they have no future.”

His mood sinks, reminding me of Jacobi. Shifts in perspective seem to be part of this world. Puma hunted here before the Europeans came, Cabrera says, staring into the swamp. Bears and alligators, too, things that could kill you. The cypress used to be three times as thick. When you look around, you see how much everything has suffered.

But we’re not in this mess because of greed or nihilism; we’re in it because we love our children so much we made too many of them. And we’re just so good at dominating things, all that is left is to lash out in a “wild reaction,” Cabrera says. That’s why he sympathizes with ITS. “It’s like, ‘Be the psychopathic destruction you want to see in the world’, ” he says, tossing out one last mordant chuckle in place of a good-bye.

Kaczynski is annoyed with me. “Do not write me anything more about ITS,” he said. “You could get me in trouble that way.” He went on: “What is bad about an article like the one I expect you to write is that it may help make the anti-tech movement into another part of the spectacle (along with Trump, the ‘metoo movement,’ neo-Nazis, antifa, etc.) that keeps people entertained and therefore thoughtless.”

ITS, he says, is the very reason he cut Jacobi off. Even after Kaczynski told him the warden was dying for a reason to reduce his contacts with the outside world, the kid kept sending him news about them. He ended his letter to me with a controlled burst of fury. “A hypothesis: ITS is instigated by some country’s security services — probably Mexico. Their real task is to spread hopelessness, because where there is no hope there is no serious resistance.”

Wait … Ted Kaczynski is hopeful? The Ted Kaczynski who wants to destroy civilization? The idea seems ridiculous right up to the moment it spins around and becomes reasonable. What better evidence could you find than the unceasing stream of tactical and strategic advice that he’s sent from his prison cell for almost 20 years, after all. He’s hopeful that civilization can be taken down in time to save some of the planet. I guess I just couldn’t imagine how anyone could ever manage to rally a group of ecorevolutionaries large enough to do the job.

“If you’ve read my Anti-Tech Revolution, then you haven’t understood it,” he scolds. “All you have to do is disable some key components of the system so that the whole thing collapses.” I do remember the “small core of deeply committed people” and “Hit Where It Hurts,” but it’s still hard to fathom. “How long does it take to do that?” Kaczynski demands. “A year? A month? A week?”

On paper, Deep Green Resistance meets most of his requirements. The original core group spent five years holding conferences and private meetings to hone its message and build consensus, then publicized it effectively with its book, which speculates about tactical alternatives to stop the “planet from burning to a cinder”: “If selective disruption doesn’t work soon enough, some resisters may conclude that all-out disruption is needed” and launch “coordinated actions on a large scale” against key targets. DGR now has as many as 200,000 members, according to the group’s co-founder — a soft-spoken 30-year-old named Max Wilbert — who could shave off his Mephistophelian goatee and disappear into any crowd. Two hundred thousand may not sound like much when Beyoncé has 1 million-plus Instagram followers, but it’s not shabby in a world where lovers cry out pseudonyms during sex. And Fidel had only 19 in the jungles of Cuba, as Kaczynski likes to point out.

Jacobi says DGR was hobbled by a doctrinal war over “TERFs,” an acronym I had to look up — it’s short for “trans-exclusionary radical feminists” — so this summer they’re rallying the troops with a crash course in “resistance training” at a private retreat outside Yellowstone National Park in Montana. “This training is aimed at activists who are tired of ineffective actions,” the promotional flyer says. “Topics will include hard and soft blockades, hit-and-run tactics, police interactions, legal repercussions, operational security, terrain advantages and more.”

At the Avis counter at the Bozeman airport, my phone dings. It’s an email from the organizers of the event, saying a guy named Matt needs a ride. I find him standing by the curb. He’s in his early 30s, dressed in conventional clothes, short hair, no visible tattoos, the kind of person you’d send to check out a visitor from the media. When we get on the road and have a chance to talk, he says he’s a middle-school social-studies teacher. He’s sympathetic to the urge to escalate, but he’d prefer to destroy civilization by nonviolent means, possibly by “decoupling” from the modern world, town by town and state by state.

But if that’s true, why is he here?

“See for yourself,” he said.

We reach the camp in the late afternoon and set up our tents next to a big yurt. A mountain rises behind us, another mountain stands ahead; a narrow lake fills the canyon between them as the famous Big Sky, blushing at the advances of the night, justifies its association with the sublime. “Nature is the only place where you feel awe,” Jacobi told me after the leaves rustled at Wild Roots, and right now it feels true.

An hour later, the group gathers in the yurt outfitted with a plywood floor, sofas, and folding chairs: one student activist from UC Irvine, two Native American veterans of the Standing Rock pipeline protests, three radical lawyers, a shy working-class kid from Mississippi, a former abortion-clinic volunteer, and a few people who didn’t want to be identified or quoted in any way. The session starts with a warning about loose lips and a lecture on DGR’s “nonnegotiable guidelines” for men — hold back, listen, agree or disagree respectfully, avoid male-centered words, and follow the lead of women.

By that time, I’d already committed my first microaggression. The cook asked why I was standing in the kitchen doorway, and I answered, “Just supervising.” Her sex had nothing to do with it, I swear — I was waiting to wash my hands and, frankly, her question seemed a bit hostile. But the woman who followed me out the door to dress me down said that refusing to accept her criticism was another microaggression.

The first speaker turns the mood around. His name is Sakej Ward, and he did a tour in Afghanistan with the U.S. Joint Airborne and a few years in the Canadian military. He’s also a full-blooded member of the Wolf Clan of British Columbia and the Mi’kmaq of northern Maine with two degrees in political science, impressive muscles bulging through a T-shirt from some karate club, and one of those flat, wide Mohawks you see on outlaw bikers.
Unfortunately, he put his entire presentation off the record, so all I can tell you is that the theme was Native American warrior societies. Later he tells me the societies died out with the buffalo and the open range. They revived sporadically in the last quarter of the 20^th century, but returned in earnest at events like Standing Rock. “It’s a question of ‘Are they there yet?’ We’ve been fighting this war for 500 years. But climate change is creating an atmosphere where it can happen.”

For the next two days, we get training in computer security and old activist techniques like using “lockboxes” to chain yourself to bulldozers and fences — given almost apologetically, like a class in 1950s home cooking. In another session, Ward takes us to a field and lines us up single file. Imagine you’re on a military patrol, he says, turning his back and holding his left hand out to the side, elbow at 90 degrees and palm forward. “Freeze!,” he barks.

We freeze.

“That’s the best way to conceal yourself from the enemy,” he tells us. He runs through basic Army-patrol semiotics. For “enemy,” you make a pistol with your hand and turn it thumbs-down. “Danger area” is a diagonal slash. After showing us a dozen signs, he stops. “Why am I making all the signs with my left hand?”

No one knows.

He turns around to face us with his finger pointed down the barrel of an invisible gun. “Because you always have to have a finger in control of your weapon,” he says.

The trainees are pumped afterward. “You can take out transformers with a .50 caliber,” one man says.

“But you don’t just want to do one,” says another. “You want four-man teams taking out ten transformers. That would bring the whole system to a halt.”

Kaczynski would be fairly pleased with this so far, I think. Ward is certainly a plausible contender for the Lenin role. Wilbert might be too. “We talk about ‘cascading catastrophic effects,’ ” he tells us in one of the last yurt meetings, summing up DGR’s grand strategy. “A large percent of the nation’s oil supply is processed in a facility in Louisiana, for example. If that was taken down, it would have cascading effects all over the world.”

But then the DGR women called us together for a lecture on patriarchy, which has to be destroyed at the same time as civilization. Also, men who voluntarily assume gendered aspects of female identity should never be allowed in female-sovereign spaces — and don’t call them TERFs unless you want a speech on microaggression.

Matt listens from the fringes in a hoodie and mirrored glasses, looking exactly like the famous police sketch of the Unabomber. I’m pretty sure he’s trolling them. Maybe he’s remembering the same Kaczynski quote I am: “Take measures to exclude all leftists, as well as the assorted neurotics, lazies, incompetents, charlatans, and persons deficient in self-control who are drawn to resistance movements in America today.”

At the farewell dinner, one of the more mysterious trainees finally speaks up. With long, wild hair, a floppy wilderness hat, pants tucked into waterproof boots, a wary expression, and an actual hermit’s cabin in Montana, he projects the anti-civ vibe with impressive authenticity. He was involved in some risky stuff during the Cove Mallard logging protests in Idaho in the mid-1990s, he says, but he retreated after the FBI brought him in for questioning. Lately, though, he’s been getting the feeling that things are starting to change, and now he’s sure of it. “I’ve been in a coma for 20 years,” he says. “I want to thank you guys for being here when I woke up.” One of the radical lawyers wraps up with a lyrical tribute to the leaders of Ireland’s legendary 1916 rebellion. He waxes about Thomas MacDonagh, the schoolteacher who led the Dublin brigade and whistled as he was led to the firing squad.

On the drive back to the airport, I ask Matt if he’s really a middle-school teacher. He answers with a question: What is your real interest in this thing?

I mention John Jacobi. “I know him,” he says. “We’ve traded a few emails.”

Of course he does. He’s another serious young man with gears turning behind his eyes.

“Can you imagine actually doing something like that?” I ask.

“Well,” he answers, drawing out the pause, “Thomas MacDonagh was a schoolteacher.”

The next time I talk to John Jacobi, he’s back in Chapel Hill living with a friend and feeling shaky. Things were getting strange at Wild Roots, he says — nobody could cooperate, there were personal conflicts. And, well, there was an incident with molly. It’s been a hard four years. First he lost Jesus and anarchy. Then Kaczynski and Último Reducto dumped him, which was really painful, though he understood why. “I’ve been unreliable,” he says woefully. To make matters worse, an ITS member called Los Hijos del Mencho denounced him by name online: The trouble with Jacobi was his “reluctance to support indiscriminate attacks” because of his sentimental attachment to humanity.

Jacobi is considering the possibility that his troubled past may have affected his judgment. He still believes in the revolution, he says, but he’s not sure what he’d do if somebody gave him a magic bottle of Civ-Away. He’d probably use it. Or maybe not.

I check in a couple of weeks later. He’s working in a fish store and thinking of going back to school. Maybe he can get a job in forest conservation. He’d like to have a kid someday.

He brings up Paul Kingsnorth, the “recovering environmentalist” who got rattled by Kaczynski’s manifesto in 2012. Kingsnorth’s answer to our global existential crisis was mourning, reflection, and the search for “the hope beyond hope.” The group he co-founded to help people with that task, a mixture of therapy group and think tank called Dark Mountain, now has more than 50 chapters worldwide. “I’m coming to terms with the fact that it might very well be true that there’s not much you can do,” Jacobi says, “but I’m having a real hard time just letting go with a hopeless sigh.”

In his Kaczynski essay, Kingsnorth, who has since moved to Ireland to homeschool his kids and write novels, put his finger on the problem. It was the hidden side effect of the Kaczynski Moment: paralysis. “I am still embedded, at least partly because I can’t work out where to jump, or what to land on, or whether you can ever get away by jumping, or simply because I’m frightened to close my eyes and walk over the edge.” To the people who end up in that suspended state now and then, lying in bed at four in the morning imagining the worst, here’s Kingsnorth’s advice: “You can’t think about it every day. I don’t. You’ll go mad!”

It’s winter now and Jacobi’s back on the road, sleeping in bushes and scavenging for food, looking for his place to land. Sometimes I wonder if he makes these journeys into the forest because of the way his mother ended her life — maybe he’s searching for the wild beasts and ministering angels she heard when he fell to his knees and spoke the language of God. Psychologists call that magical thinking. Medication and counseling are more effective treatments for trauma, they say. But maybe the dream of magic is the magic, the dream that makes the dream come true, and maybe grief is a gift too, a check on our human arrogance. Doesn’t every crisis summon the healers it needs?

In the poems Jacobi wrote after his mother hanged herself, she turned into a tree and sprouted leaves.

The Ableist Logic of Primitivism

A Critique of “Ecoextremist” Thought

Conor Arpwel

In his recent article for New York Magazine, Children of Ted, John H. Richardson ruminates on the recent rise of a fringe political movement centered on the writings of Ted Kaczynski, the ecoterrorist widely known as “the Unabomber.” On its face, Richardson’s article amounts to an eccentric human-interest story for a mainstream publication. Yet, in typical liberal fashion, Richardson approaches his subject with a dangerous combination of cynicism and naiveté. He frivolously mischaracterizes much of modern anarchist thought by describing the article’s main subject, John Jacobi, as an (idiosyncratic and largely mythical) type of leftist radical who is “sure that morality is just a social construct that keeps us docile in our shearing pens.” Richardson goes on to assert that “Kaczynski was Karl Marx in modern flesh, yearning for his Lenin”—a highly misleading and facile assertion. Due in part to this semi-implicit disregard for the potential for fundamental social change, Richardson does little to present alternatives to Kaczynski’s fascistic “solution” to our climate catastrophe that has already begun.

Although Richardson prefers to refer to this type of thought as “ecoextremism,” Kaczynski and his groupies are better understood as advocates for a callous strain of primitivism. This ideology is grounded in a belief that technological development must be stopped—even reversed. From Kaczynski’s perspective, industrialization and technological progress are responsible for societal instability and immense psychological suffering. To remedy this, Kaczynski advocates a prelapsarian “return to nature” in order to align our social realities to genetically prescribed human behavior. However, it is crucial to understand that this perspective is far more insidious than some romantic yearning for Thoreau’s Walden Pond. Kaczynski takes an artificially “constrained,” as Thomas Sowell describes it, view of humanity—namely, that we are defined by a “bedrock of selfishness,” over which altruism and cooperation manifest on occasion but remain mere exceptions to the cynical rule. This reflects the polemics of other reactionaries, such as white supremacist “race science” sophists and “intellectual dark web” charlatans like Jordan Peterson. Such ideologies all serve the same end: to foreclose the possibility of any systemic change to the status quo and dismiss any societal structure not predicated on hierarchy and subordination.

This notion runs counter to the fundamentals of socialist thought. While most socialists call for the destruction or dismantling of capitalism and believe in the necessity of working towards a stateless global society, primitivists want to go further: to, in a sense, turn back time, erasing every trace of industrial development—and with it, any advantages conferred by modern science. In other words, primitivism is hedged on the notion that humanity must cleanse itself, must build a new society on the bones of the weak and degenerate. Among other things, there’s a severe dearth of empathy here, shot through with an underlying assumption that people considered to be “extraneous” and “disposable” by capitalism and primitivism are rightly categorized as such. Socialists take the view that all people are in fact human beings who have an inherent right to fulfilling and dignified lives free of oppression. As it exists independently of one’s labor value and perceived utility, socialists hold that one’s humanity must not be means-tested.

Although oftentimes a helpful formulation, the term “ableism” has been casually bandied about to the extent that using the word in some circles results in derision. Nevertheless, it is still a concise and cogent framework for describing the oppression that disabled people experience in their everyday lives, both interpersonally and systemically. Like all forms of oppression, ableism is a manmade system of power that emanates from and is perpetuated by thoughts and actions both conscious and subconscious. Such kinds of discrimination are a firmly embedded component of the societal superstructure. More specifically, ableism is what “disables” disabled people. In a world without ableism, disabled people would merely be individuals who possess variant traits. The 19^th-century utopian novels of Charles Fourier depicted such a world, where human “brotherhood” was assumed rather than assigned, detached from any quantifiable metric of productive capacity.

The current iteration of ableism we live under is deeply tied to the capitalist system’s bottomless lust for profit accumulation, labor exploitation, and the enforcement of rigid social hierarchies. In other words, while prior forms of ableism are understood to have existed long before the rise of capitalism, our contemporary conception of ableism is profoundly intermeshed with the logics of the economic base. This symbiotic relationship is particularly apparent when examining capitalism’s maintenance of a “reserve” army of labor. When human labor is in high demand, people who were previously excluded from workforce participation are more likely to be hired. But these employees are often swiftly discarded and implicitly barred from formal wage labor when inevitable economic downturns—crises intrinsic to capitalism—dramatically shrink labor demand. Consequently, ableism manifests as one of the many forms of oppression that facilitate greater profit accumulation through the exploitation of marginalized communities. Due to this structural reality, the liberation of disabled people is impossible without the destruction of capitalism; likewise, capitalism cannot be considered fully destroyed until ableism too is dismantled. All veins of leftist thought should be united in at least recognizing the need to combat ableism and support the disabled community in the course of implementing the conscious ground-up redesign of society that a prerequisite for averting climate disaster.

Unlike most areas of socialist thought, primitivist ideology is inherently incompatible with disabled liberation. Although it is still a largely marginal viewpoint in most left-wing schools of thought, primitivism has a surface-level appeal that is likely to become more tempting as human suffering escalates under the mounting weight of the coming climate disasters. Under these dire circumstances, a cynical desire to destroy every trace of modern human development may prove quite alluring for some. While strong critique of technology and modernity is certainly merited in many respects, it is also crucial to remember that not all technologies facilitate the same types and degrees of oppression. Countless lives are entirely dependent on contemporary medicine and other recent innovations. There’s real potential for envisioning a better future without becoming a neo-Luddite. Some branches of leftist thought, such as “cybernetic” Marxists and similar proponents of fully automated production, are seeking approaches to retooling and reconfiguring production mechanisms in service of a better future. Such efforts point to a real potential for repurposing devices that were originally created for profit towards a socialist society predicated on ecological sustainability.

When practical realities are examined, it’s clear that a primitivist vision of the future is only achievable through fascist eugenics. This is especially evident in Kaczynski’s writings. In his manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future, Kaczynski writes,

“If the breakdown is sudden, many people will die, since the world’s population has become so overblown that it cannot even feed itself any longer without advanced technology. Even if the breakdown is gradual enough so that reduction of the population can occur more through lowering of the birth rate than through elevation of the death rate, the process of deindustrialization probably will be very chaotic and involve much suffering.”

On its face, this passage has a degree of sound internal logic. If the breakdown of industrial society is in fact inevitable, a world without efficient agriculture and basic medical services would indeed be a death sentence for billions of people. However, Kaczynski’s cynical pessimism is rooted more in his reactionary impulses than it is in an honest assessment of material reality. Crucially, Kaczynski’s argument in this passage is predicated on the notion of “overpopulation,” which is a myth belied by the realities of demographics, logistics, and productive capacity. There are not too many people, but there isa vastly unequal distribution of resources—thanks to capitalism. Individual consumer decisions can and do have large environmental impacts in the aggregate, but the largest individual carbon footprints are disproportionately concentrated within a small pool of wealthy people in Western countries. Rather than reaching a conclusion based on a sound analysis of present realities, Kaczynski’s beliefs on this subject are grounded in irrational fabrications, deriving in part from his contempt for the poor and disabled and marshaled in support of his misanthropic longing for global cataclysm.

Kaczynski’s political analysis also borrows heavily from 19^th-century social Darwinism. In particular, Kaczynski writes,

“[I]t is certain that technology is creating for human beings a new physical and social environment radically different from the spectrum of environments to which natural selection has adapted the human race physically and psychologically. If man is not adjusted to this new environment by being artificially re-engineered, then he will be adapted to it through a long and painful process of natural selection. The former is far more likely than the latter.”

This passage’s emphasis on humanity’s supposed need to sculpt society around (Kaczynki’s fallacious conception of) our primordial roots amounts to a highly reductive understanding of human evolution. His motivated reasoning dismisses the evidence that humans display overwhelming tendencies towards altruism and cooperation—when these natural bonds have not atrophied under the competitive conditions fomented by capitalism. And by creating a dichotomy between the natural and artificial, Kaczynski ignores the fact that the human brain’s boundless creativity and ingenuity is what has made it possible for us to engineer our social and physical environments. Though this transformational capability has of course been used for violent and destructive purposes on a multitude of occasions, our growing collective ability to mitigate death from disease and malnutrition is a fundamentally positive development.

Moreover, while Kaczynski dwells on fears about a future wherein people are genetically engineered to conform to the oppressive demands of a social system, he ignores the fact that his call to “return to nature” is itself a form of genetic engineering through artificial selection. In particular, he finds the notion of a world where millions die from lack of medical care to be less frightening than one where people change the composition of the human genome through other means. Nevertheless, critiques of Kaczynski’s perspective should take care to avoid imperialistic and chauvinistic readings of non-Western cultures that deliberately avoid the trappings of capitalistic modernity. In other words, it is crucial for us to respect indigenous cultures that still maintain societal practices dating back to, or deriving from, Neolithic hunter-gatherers. It’s bizarre to condemn other cultures as “backwards,” as if the longevity of a culture is somehow inversely proportional to its efficacy or value. Most ostensibly “advanced” Westerners are ignorant about the vast pools of knowledge that these communities possess—and the harms that our own practices inflict on us.

While critics of primitivist thought should be wary of reifying the colonialist mindset, it is also crucial to appreciate that subsets of Kaczynski’s current fandom are not known for their cultural sensitivity. In particular, online ecofascists have latched onto Kaczynski’s ideas and misanthropic persona. These types share his reactionary loathing for modernity and revel in the violent tactics he was willing to engage in to actualize his political agenda. While, in some of his writings, Kaczynski does denounce fascism, his primitivist politics are also fundamentally yoked to the ecofascist view of technology (and social justice) as forces that are perverting and undermining his acolytes’ precious, ahistorical, and incoherent notion of “Western civilization.” While violence is arguably a morally justified response to the horrors of oppression, the left is generally prudent and cautious about engaging in proactive force, due to the state’s monopoly on violence and the ever-present threat of repression. While nonviolent reactionary tendencies still play a crucial role in reinforcing the interests of capital, branches of fascist thought are free to be more cavalier, even fetishistic, about the bloodshed wrought by their historical antecedents. Consequently, while Kaczynski may insist that he does not want his politics repurposed in this manner, such developments remain an inexorable consequence of the fascistic mentality that undergirds his ideology.

Primitivist resentment towards left environmental organizing helps enable these reactionary impulses. This attitude is reflected in the writings of the Dark Mountain Project, a collective that advocates for a contemporary articulation of Kaczynski’s premises. In their manifesto, Dark Mountain writes,

“Today’s environmentalists are more likely to be found at corporate conferences hymning the virtues of ‘sustainability’ and ‘ethical consumption’ than doing anything as naïve as questioning the intrinsic values of civilization. Capitalism has absorbed the greens, as it absorbs so many challenges to its ascendancy. A radical challenge to the human machine has been transformed into yet another opportunity for shopping.”

Although this passage is an accurate critique of the recuperation that plagues neoliberal environmental activism, it erroneously ignores the far more radical strategies of established environmental justice organizing, which has paralleled the rise in ecosocialist thought. By failing to develop a more nuanced reading of the movement, The Dark Mountain Project exemplifies a reductive, purist demand for perfection among primitivists that only serves to reinforce a convenient artificial binary between the status quo and their destructive agenda.

Although the threat posed by climate change is apocalyptic, leftist thought has furnished humanity with a clear alternative: ecosocialism. More specifically, we can avoid Kaczynski’s doomsday scenario through the deconstruction of capitalism, a humane strategy of degrowth, and the equitable distribution of resources. Unlike Kaczynski, ecosocialists understand that plenty of human beings can and do live in modern society while also maintaining small carbon footprint. And crucially, ecosocialist thought also recognizes that a handful of massive corporations and the inherent wastefulness of capitalism are largely responsible for our ongoing ecological disaster. (Typical of virulent, fascistic philosophies, Kacyznski’s views declaims individuals and minority group as uniquely culpable and elides any rational systemic analysis that challenges existing power structures). In a system that is centered on human need and environmental sustainability, the lifestyles of wealthy people in the imperial core will change dramatically. But everyone will be adequately fed, and the number of people who have access to medically necessary healthcare will be drastically expanded. Forging this world will be one of the most difficult undertakings in human history, but it is possible. People are already building the foundations for this future in the here and now. In other words, you do not have to believe in luxury space communism to think that we can build a future where humanity survives climate apocalypse without devolving into murderous fascist eugenics.

So, why then are Kaczynski and his ilk in such a rush to condemn billions of people to certain death? In broad terms, they revel in these fantasies of human carnage because they buy into the fascist mythos of white supremacist and ableist purity. Kaczynski’s own writings demonstrate his commitment to this violent ideology. In Technological Slavery, Kaczynski writes, “Take measures to exclude all leftists, as well as the assorted neurotics, lazies, incompetents, charlatans, and persons deficient in self-control who are drawn to resistance movements in America today.” The underlying message here is that “degenerates” have no place in the world he hopes to build. Instead of recognizing the common thread of humanity we all share, Kaczynski sees those who do not possess normative traits as weak parasites who hold back people like himself, who are somehow more deserving of life.

Although Kaczynski claims that his politics are grounded solely in rational assessment of industrial society, his excessively nihilistic understanding of political economy demonstrates that his actual motives are more closely aligned with an impulse to scapegoat non-normative people for his personal failings and the alienation he has experienced under capitalism. The underpinnings of his ideology completely forego any appreciation for the joy and strength that can be derived from community and solidarity.

Our society is built from scaffolding that was forged in oppression, exploitation, and stratification. While cynical and pessimistic outlooks may be understandable, they are neither accurate nor productive. At a fundamental level, it is a mistake to assume that current circumstances predict future realities. The future is unwritten, and human beings are possessed of a profound social mutability. We all bear a multitude of emotional scars and flaws as a result of navigating the deep-seated indignities and inhumanities in our society, but we will always find healing through community. We may always find dignity and purpose in the struggle for collective liberation. We can and we must charge ahead and fight like hell for a world that, for all people, is worth living in.

Conor Arpwel is a writer, amateur graphic designer, and organizer. He is an advocate for accessibility and the disabled community in DSA. In his free time, he enjoys posting on Twitter @arpwel and making art.

An Excerpt from “Kaczynski Moments” (June 2019)

Subtitle: A Generation Of Unabomber Acolytes (& Apostates) w/ John H. Richardson

Author: Patrick Farnsworth & John H. Richardson

Date: June 17, 2019

Source: Last Born In The Wilderness Podcast. <www.lastborninthewilderness.com>

Note: This is an automatic transcript which has been partially error corrected. It could also do with more section headings.

PATRICK: Yeah, I know I agree with that. But I think what scares people again is this feeling of OK? This isn’t actually under control. where we are heading towards something inevitable. If we continue down this path and that’s the that’s the feeling, right? It’s just sort of waking up to that. and then the questions that come with that are terrifying for many people. Yeah, and I want to point to ‘cause we’re talking about John Jacoby, you. Follow his story. Through this whole article, and I mean and he. And this the thing, and this where it gets for me. I don’t want. I hate the word problematic but I want to say like there’s. There’s certain there’s a certain darkness that comes with this too. So you mentioned the journal. It’s a collection of various essays called Atassa.

JOHN: You mean yeah, ITS again?

PATRICK: Yeah, it is connected to this right?

JOHN: Individualists Tending to Savagery. And with the link here or the wild or whatever you want to Transfer those.

PATRICK: Yeah. and so, Jacobi wrote at least one or two pieces for this thing. You also ended up meeting towards later on in the article you mentioned Abe Cabrera, I believe is his name.

JOHN: Abe, I call him.

PATRICK: Abe Cabrera yeah and he also wrote a piece for that. So when you read it. And then so you say this very, very clearly it’s like this a very terror friendly publication, I mean, they’re actually advocating like go out ‘cause destruction, go kill people. Human beings need to be destroyed.

JOHN: Random violence, yeah.

PATRICK: Random violence, kind of this nihilistic, like we’re not trying to bring about. In optimistic future, like they’re even more dumb. You know, as you said like Kaczynsk is something of an optimist. In a certain way. These people that are behind it’s behind these groups, which from what I understand mainly come from not the United States. These are people in Mexico, they’re down in South and Central America, right? So these are these people that are publishing Atassa are actively trying to stir the pot a bit and say hey all of your political theory, all of your whatever is just ********. It’s not accomplishing anything, so we need to just lash out and as they describe it, it’s like they’re channeling. Wild nature as they describe it, or uh?

JOHN: Yeah, they changed their name to a wild reaction, yeah?

PATRICK: Wild interaction so. So in their point of view. They’re bombing, they’re shooting, they’re killing people, they’re attacking. Kind of the similar professions or people in professions similar to what the Unabomber did, right? So in their in their in their acts they are again in their mind. They’re like the Earth seeking revenge. They are the bloodthirsty. Vengeful cloud, yeah, animals, coyotes and, and that’s really, yeah, yeah. It’s extremely disturbing to me. Because I don’t actually think well, I can’t speak for the earth Yeah it’s like but this The thing is you again you, you follow you were with John Jacobi.

JOHN: Quote should be disturbing. It is disturbing. Yeah.

PATRICK: You also meet this Abe individual who last last night I was like, OK, I’ve heard so much about. Ah, so not just from your essay. Not for dissing your article, excuse me, but you know, being somebody who’s yeah.

JOHN: Thank you.

PATRICK: Yeah, being somebody who is how. How do I say this? I know people from deep green resistance and I’m not associating them with this I just wanna make that very clear, I know. People that.

JOHN: people what?

PATRICK: From deep green resistance. What you mentioned later on, and I’m not trying to connect these two things together, but what I’m trying to say is that there’s all of these intersecting kind of circles of people that have reacted against what Atossa is promoting and what it’s exactly that’s what my long winded way of saying that.

JOHN: Uh Oh yeah. Oh, the Lana. Just hate it, yeah. And I just. Paid him they. they they took her revenge on him.

PATRICK: Yeah, exactly so to me what I what I see is like. you spent time with some of these people. I mean, what was that like? I mean, I know you’re doing it as a journalist, but I mean, that’s. That was what was so compelling is like reading this I’m like, oh he’s not just observing this I mean, you’re like in the. ******* swamp with Abe. Behaving, you’re hanging out these people. I mean what? That blows me away. So what was that like? I mean. What what drew? You to that so that you were so compelled to actually go meet these people and contact them and all of. That I mean I don’t. Know if that’s really questioned.

JOHN: Yeah, I was trying to get in with that.

PATRICK: It’s fascinating.

JOHN: I was trying to get in with the guys at Wild Reaction and I thought it was it was a conduit to that and I gradually began to realize that he was, actually, uh chief propagandist in America. For that not propagandist, but you know, arguer for, Ableser really is a really interesting character. He’s a tortured soul. He’s a former Catholic priest of still some kind, he has an academic background he. Has gone through sort of all of them and I found the most moving thing he said was of course he’s got children and he doesn’t tell them anything about anything does. It’s a double life. Just as a wild reaction. It’s slash, ITS. Recommends, I never was quite sure how far that double life went, but I think now that he, he’s a theoretician and not an actor. But the most moving thing was he said we’re not destroying the world because of because we’re greedy. It’s not because of. The oil companies being greedy it’s because we love our children and we want a better life for them and so love is what’s you know? is messing us up. I think there’s a beautiful tragic truth in that, and that this another example. these people are unafraid of following something to its conclusions and they’re pursuing the conclusions. And there’s a validity to the ETS argument. You know, it’s unlikely that we’re going to retool the economic system overnight. Oh yeah, meaning they were like 1520 years and stopped doing what? We’re doing too. Many people lives depend on it at this point. and it would lead to what people like. ITS and Kaczynski unflinchingly see as a mass die off. That is, I mentioned there’s another guy in Europe. Pierre Licola I’m not pronouncing that right, no doubt, and maybe we’re not getting it right, but he’s calling out right for for environmental fascism where we control both sand shut down all everything but essential in industries, not industries. function so but. what my interest in these guys is all. Of them is that it presents a range of responses that are uncompromising and honest responses to what’s happening, it’s concluded broke with Kaczynski their prostates that’s why he hates them. Aside from the fact that they put him in jeopardy when we pay, when people mention him, ‘cause that’s that’s definitely a line that prison won’t let him cross. And would shut off his ability to communicate, which is this thing is the most passionate about that I can see. Yeah, but so, but the I TS sense that, OK? This isn’t going to be done. We’re not going to win this revolution. We’re not going to find a Lennon who can lead the people. As I told Ted in my post, journalist Congress correspondence like. the Lenin offered people? the peasants real freedom and the agenda more just world. He Kaczynski is offering on a hunter gatherer lifestyle and mass die offs that she doesn’t ring the same populist message. It’s never gonna if I would where I said. Yeah, that was a propagandist. You suck. You know, even if that’s where he wants to get to, you kind of say it. You know, we know we wanna follow that and in the same way I TS games are complete and that’s not going to happen. And we’re they’re They sort of looked to the indigenous tribes that resisted the Spanish conquest and admired. The tribe that fought the longest, knowing they would lose, and this sort of a tradition that’s also it, was in the happenings there was split between. Youth who want abuse weapon in modern weaponry. In their traditional, she said well, if we do that, we’re not Indian thing or not. You know, try with creeks or not in those or whatever. there’s truth to both sides of the argument, tragic and we’re all giving up our heritage. You know, that’s where it intersects with the right wing in order to Who can’t live in this world and function effectively and then raise our children as they would say? So you know, I think there’s a risk to what they’re arguing. It’s horrible, and it’s not going to do any good and so why even bother? Or why not just let it happen and not be part of this violence and horror? Uh, but I think what’s interesting is that these solutions are coming up. Paul Kingsnorth withdrew from the climate Change movement undecided and gave me the advice of I said I’m not a backwards kind of guy. I’m not going to retreat to Northern Ireland, and you know, rose vegetables. I like the city. I live in New York City. And he said, there’s plenty you can do there and he just believes that the global fight is lost and that we can do the best we can with our communities. …

… JOHN: Paul Kingsnorth said to me that he started one of the best things about deep region is this I mean about Dark Mountain for him was that it was a grief counseling. Group, you know? There’s not too many people you want to talk to you about this I hid my client change books from my kids. I didn’t even want my coffee table you don’t want to like bum people out and I’ve gotten into Jags where I bum people out with this You know, like playing out their denial. Different levels of denial and stuff. And what good does that do, really? what? Why bump people out? You shouldn’t run this podcast, I mean, I don’t, that’s why it’s like you know, I yeah it’s, I mean climate change. And to some extent I don’t want to leave out globalism ‘cause it’s part of the whole thing. And it’s also like one of the most immediately felt parts of it, the machine that’s overwhelming us that we created. You know, it’s like a. It’s like Frankenstein, Those early novels of industrial times. And poets of you know, Wordsworth, I mentioned you know, reacting to this thing, Emerson. So I think from my money I even feel uncomfortable talking about it sometimes, especially with friends and Abe Cabrera? he’s he’s is deeply intellectually involved with this As anybody I’ve met and he, like I said, he hid it from his family. He doesn’t talk about it to anybody who writes about it but Uh, he’s conclusion is not that different from Kingsnorth, so it’s like I’m not going to lie about it. I mean you. Know respond to people who already sort of get it because I’m not going to bum them out. They’ve already gone through that Kaczynski moment. but why, like? Talk about it I. I mean, the only hope is that allergy type stuff. that magic bullet. It’s like that just turns the direction of what we call progress in another direction and I don’t see Hunter gatherer type life as a solution. I told Kaczynski, I’d be pretty comfortable with the technology of the 18^th century. Seems to work pretty well. we had a great how very high level civilization, but also a very high level of social oppression and poverty. And that’s why it’s returned to other approaches then. the. Yeah, well, I really feel managers and then a few look like past system. 2^nd correlated again. It’s like we all love our children. We want to make a better world for them and how to do that without I think we could figure it out if we had the time. I don’t know if you brighter silicate with Glenn models and stuff, see sci-fi writers who’ve always been imagining alternate societies. there’s a lot of answers out there, but, but like I said, Jesus Christ offered us a pretty good answer. You know? Yeah, yeah. I’m. But I couldn’t say I was a person of faith. But you know, I loved what he said and I think he was right about so much. But I didn’t sink in too deep to it....

An Excerpt from “Does the Unabomber have any relevance to anarchism?” (2022)

Author: Theo Slade

Source: <https://www.thetedkarchive.com/library/does-the-unabomber-have-any-relevance-to-anarchism>

Date: 2022

The group’s origins broadly

ITS Mexico were originally part of the green & insurrectionary anarchist milieus and likely grew up on earth first monkey-wrenching manuals from the 80s:[3]

The group draws its inspiration from anarcho-primitivism, an “anti-civilization anarchy” from which ITS is largely inspired. “I took the theories of the ‘Earth Liberation Front’ further, and gave them a different tone,” explains Xale. “I was interested in the issues facing the American continent, in the indigenous cultures that opposed civilization,” assures the Mexican member of ITS in the video.

With anarchism, the relationship at the moment is one of rupture, although there is no dishonor in accepting that many eco-extremists and some members of ITS come from anarchism, mostly from insurrectionist and eco-anarchist tendencies. Although at the time there were some ties, today the vast majority of anarchists hate us.

Referring to the groups history, Xale, a member of ITS Mexico wrote:[4]

This chronology could well be added to that of Individualities Tending to the Wild (2011–2013), or that of the anti civilization cells of the Earth Liberation Front (2008–2012), but we decided to focus on RS, for now.

Searching through the over 300 sabotage actions that occurred in Mexico between 2018 & 2012, and the at least 10 with ELF in the title of the post, there do appear to be a few attacks that fit ITS modus operandi and communiqués which fit their early idiolect:[5]

Early this morning, September 21, our cell placed a bomb made of butane gas at the gates of the headquarters of Nueva Escuela Tecnológica [New School of Technology] in the municipality of Coacalco, Mexico State.

The authorities in that municipality had previously implemented security systems that belong in the worst nightmares of Orwell.

Security cameras, artificial eyes guarding their damned social peace, throughout the major avenues in Coacalco.

In the commercial area, the police presence is evident, state police and the mediocre municipal police pass through the streets and on Lopez Portillo Avenue.

Guarding the centers of domination and domestication that are also protected by surveillance cameras and the idiot guardians of the imposed order.

Facing this situation of high surveillance, it seemed impossible to strike, but rebellious creativity is greater than the highest degree of ‘security’ that the state implements.

The Coacalco commercial area had been previously visited by eco-anarchist cells who conducted significant strikes right in front of the police, who were flabbergasted by an arson, a butane explosion, graffiti and paint spilled in anthropocentric business.

Our action was censured both by the directors of the Nueva Escuela Tecnológica and the Mexico State authorities. They hid the damage that we caused and concealed the evidence of our presence at night. This is not unusual; it happened after the ‘celebrations’ of the ephemeral bicentennial celebration which were held in ‘total’ peace.

The Agencia de Seguridad Estatal [state security agency] as well as detectives from the Mexico City police department are aware of our actions and our presence; they know that we were there and that we detonated our explosive charge as the lackeys on patrol passed by unable to stop us.

We chose to attack the NET because it represents the new era of these centers of domestication called schools, where they learn things that are useless for a free life, but necessary for a life of slavery and alienation. They create beings that depend on technology in order to live in these concrete nests called cities, but more closely resemble large prisons. They train malleable minds to be used for entrepreneurship and to expand civilization over wild nature. We will not permit this.

Once again we say: not with their cameras, nor their police officers, nor with their investigators, nor their prisons, will they be able to stop us; we once again skinned the rotten bastards, godammit!

This action is dedicated to the Chilean anarchist prisoners, captured after the wave of repression in that country on August 14; we send much strength, from mexico we remember them in every direct action.

We did not want to wait until the 24^th to show our solidarity.

Support is not only for one day, it is in our everyday actions!

Direct solidarity for the eco prisoners Abraham López and Adrian Magdaleno, for the eco revolutionaries on hunger strike in Switzerland, for the animal liberation prisoner Walter Bond in the U.S., and the vegan warriors imprisoned in Italy!

Keep running Diego, you’re fucking awesome!

Earth Liberation Front/Mexico

Upon reading translated Unabomber material they started along a road that began with committing arsons aimed at sabotaging evil companies and ended with them desiring to have the wider effect of terrorizing people through fear of injury or death out of a simple hatred for humanity:[6]

… in 2011 the (newly formed) ITS was testing various modus operandi (from known and attempted arson attacks on cars and construction machinery, companies and institutions in Coahuila, Guanajuato, and Veracruz State of Mexico, until we decided to focus on terrorism and not sabotage).

Here are old members of the FAI / CCF in Mexico acknowledging former collaboration and ideological crossover:[7]

Exactly 5 years and seven months ago we signed a “joint statement” at the request of a comrade for whom we feel great affection and respect. That text was entitled “2^nd Joint Statement of the Anarchist Insurrectional and Eco-Anarchist Groups”. …

Back then, we let it be known publicly and energetically that:

“With these ITS partners, we can have theoretical differences and discuss them (always arguing fraternally in a constant attempt to update ideas and by building a unitary criticism attuned to the reality of the anarchist struggle), but we have never disagreed with the methods used, understanding anti-authoritarian violence and propaganda for the facts as they are : valid practices consistent with our ethical principles.”

Although ITS were one of the few clusters with which we did not directly coordinate when undertaking joint actions, we were in solidarity with them, in the same way that some of the comrades that made up our affinity groups obtained monetary resources for them to solve specific difficulties when requested. That has been (and is) the basis of practical co-ordination between the new anarchic insurrectionalism and eco-anarchism.

In their early communiques they would express solidarity with anarchist prisoners:[8]

Total support with the Anti-civilization prisoners in Mexico, with the Chilean comrades and with the furious Italians and Swiss. …

One more time: Direct and total support with the anti-civilization prisoners of Mexico, with those eco-anarchists of Switzerland, to the affinities in Argentina, Spain, Italy, Chile and Russia.

Here is an answer members of ITS gave in a text interview in 2014 I think showing they were part of a leftist mileu, in that they only later rejected leftist mass movement building and so are not simply post-left-&-right:[9]

Individualists tending towards the wild formed at the beginning of 2011, and was motivated by the reasoning acquired during a slow process of getting to know, questioning, and the rejection of all that encompasses leftism and the civilized, and accordingly, employing all the above, we deemed it necessary to carry out the direct attack against the Technoindustrial System. We think that the struggle against this is not only a stance of wanting to abandon Civilization, regressing to Nature, or in refuting the system’s values, without also attacking it.

Finally, ITS also claimed that more ELF and Anarchist groups joined them later when they briefly took on the name Wild Reaction:[10]

First of all, we want to explain that during all of 2012 and 2013, various groups of a terrorist and sabotage stripe were uniting themselves with the group ITS, so that now, after a long silence and for purely strategic reasons, we publicly claim:

1) The “Informal Anti-civilization Group,” which on June 29, 2011, took responsibility for the explosion that severely damaged a Santander bank in the city of Tultitlan, Mexico.

2) “Uncivilized Autonomous,” who on October 16, 2011 set off a bomb inside the ATMs of a Banamex, located between the cities of Tultitlan and Coacalco in Mexico State. …

4) “Wild Indomitables,” who on October 16, 2011 left a butane gas bomb that did not detonate in a Santander bank in the Álvaro Obregón district of Mexico City. The act was never claimed until now.

5) “Terrorist Cells for the Direct Attack – Anti-civilization Fraction,” which in 2010 and 2011 left a fake bomb in front of the IFaB (Pharmacological and Biopharmeceutical Research), and detonated an explosive outside the building of the National Ecology Institute (INE), both in the Tlalpan district of Mexico City.

6) “Luddites against the Domestication of Wild Nature,” who during 2009 to 2011 had taken part in various incendiary attacks in some cities in Mexico State and various districts of Mexico City, claimed or unclaimed.

8) “Earth Liberation Front – Bajío”, which on November 16, 2011 set off an explosive charge creating damages within the ATM area of a branch of the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) in the city of Irapuato in Guanajuato.

All of these have now fused with the ITS groups in Morelos, Mexico City, Guanajuato, Hidalgo, Coahuila and Veracruz.

Due to this union, the extravagant and little-practical pseudonym of “Individualists Tending toward the Wild” (ITS) ceases to exist, and from now on the attacks against technology and civilization will be signed with the new name of “Wild Reaction” (RS).

These were groups that other anarchists were relating to as anarchists also. As the joint declaration of the insurrectional anarchist and eco-anarchist groups of Mexico referred to earlier was signed by some of these groups who later merged with ITS or had a very similar ideology:[11]

Luddites against the Domestication of Wild Nature (LDNS)

Earth Liberation Front (FLT)

Free, Dangerous, Savage and Incendiary Individuals for the Black Plague(ILPSIPN)

Kaczynski’s influence specifically

An ITS propagandist:[12]

Born out of various radical ideologies such as animal liberation, insurrectionary anarchism, anarcho-primitivism, and the neo-Luddism of Theodore Kaczynski, it has germinated and sprouted forth into something entirely other …

ITS:[13]

We have never denied that the essay, “Industrial Society and Its Future” has been an important part of our formation into what we are now. For that reason, in the past we used such terms as “leftists,” “power process,” “feelings of inferiority,” “liberty and autonomy,” etc. that in the present we have omitted or changed for other words so that we distinguish ourselves from the “indomitistas” of Kaczynski. …

Michael Loadenthal:[14]

[ITS] specifically address their relationship to Kaczynski in their fourth communiqué:

Have ITS copied Ted Kaczynski? The million-dollar question.

Without a doubt, we see this person as an individual who with his profound rational analysis contributed greatly to the advance of antitechnological ideas; his simple way of living in a manner strictly away from Civilization and the persecution of his Freedom in an optimal environment make him a worthy individual who due to a family betrayal is serving multiple life sentences in the United States … If we cite Stirner, Rand, Kaczynski, Nietzsche, Orwell, some scientists and other people in our communiques they are only for references, we do not have reason to be in agreement with all their lines and positions … It has been said that we imitate the Unabomber; perhaps we have seen as strategic the action of [Kaczynski’s moniker] the Freedom Club against scientific personalities in the United States in the 70′s, 80′s and 90′s, and we have adopted this, but let it be clear that we have not imitated all his discourse in its totality, since as we said above, there are points that are plainly contrary to the positions of the FC.

In their sixth communiqué, ITS (2012) notes that their early writings (i.e. first and second communiqués) did in fact borrow from Kaczynski, but that after reflecting on their “poor interpretations” the group has “discarded [Kaczynski’s ideas] and now for us they have no validity.” Despite what many regard as similarities in critique, and despite ITS occasionally quoting Kaczynski directly, ITS subsequently denies ideological connections. In the first communiqué as “Wild Reaction, ‘Kill or Die’ Group” (2014) the group writes:

We deny being followers of Ted Kaczynski … we have indeed learned many things from reading Industrial Society and Its Future, the texts after this and the letters before this text signed by ‘Freedom Club’ (FC), but that does not mean that we are his followers. In fact our position clashes with Kaczynski’s, FC’s … since we do not consider ourselves revolutionaries, we do not want to form an ‘anti-technological movement’ that encourages the ‘total overthrow of the system,’ we do not see it as viable, we do not want victory, we do not pretend to win or lose, this is an individual fight against the mega-machine; we don’t care about getting something positive from this, since we are simply guided by our instincts of defense and survival.

Here one can witness RS’s declared revolutionary intent, to “bring it all crashing down” while avoiding the trapping of movement building and conceiving of the conflict in terms of winners and losers. In this communiqué, after the group changed its name, RS goes on to further declare their ideological independence from the prominent critics of technology (e.g. primitivists) as well as the global anarcho-insurrectional milieu through which their communications are circulated and consumed. In their proclamation of non-affiliation, RS states:

Thus neither Kaczynski … or any other with the (supposed) “primitivist” stamp represents RS. Nor do the Informal Anarchist Federation (FAI), the Conspiracy of Cells of Fire (CCF), Feral Faun, or any other with the “ecoanarchist” or “anti-civilization cell of …” stamp. RS and its groups only represent themselves. (Wild Reaction, “Kill or Die” Group 2014)

Despite ITS/RS’s insistence to the contrary, prominent anarcho-primitivist thinker John Zerzen, often spoken of as the “founder” of the movement, notes that “ITS group is real slavish to Ted Kaczynski” (Morin 2014). Zerzen goes on to say that he does not believe ITS’s methods will prove successful and that he is “turn[ed] off” by their usage of mailed explosives and their cavalier dismissal of human causalities (Morin 2014).

Sean Fleming:[15]

In thought and in action, Kaczynski is a lone wolf. His Manifesto articulates a theory or worldview that is peculiar to him and built from a unique combination of Ellul’s, Morris’s, and Seligman’s ideas. Terrorism scholars have recently questioned ‘whether it is time to put the “lone wolf” category to rest altogether’, since alleged lone wolves are rarely as independent as they appear: ‘ties to online and offline radical milieus are critical’. Yet, as I have shown, Kaczynski is unusual in that most of his ideological formation took place in a library, outside of any radical milieu. His association with radical environmentalists, who shared his disdain for modern technology, was a consequence rather than a cause of his radicalization. The Unabomber case shows that terrorists can emerge from a relative ideological vacuum, even if this is rare, and that the concept of the lone wolf might therefore be worth retaining.

Although Kaczynski began his anti-tech bombing campaign as a lone wolf, he has since become the leader of a pack. Just as he had hoped, his Manifesto has spawned an ideology – a public discourse of anti-tech – and inspired a cluster of anti-tech radical groups. Kaczynski is not just an extreme example of an anti-tech radical, but also the founder and lodestar of a new form of anti-tech radicalism.

In the immediate aftermath of his arrest, many of Kaczynski’s followers came from the outer fringe of the green movement. One of his early correspondents and confidants was John Zerzan, a prominent anarcho-primitivist. Another was Derrick Jensen, cofounder of the radical environmentalist group Deep Green Resistance. Kaczynski’s alliances with green anarchists and radical environmentalists were tenuous and short-lived. He ultimately fell out with Zerzan, Jensen, and their respective movements for the same reason: they are committed to many ‘leftist’ causes that he considers to be dangerous distractions. Whereas Kaczynski’s opposition to technology is stubbornly single-minded, Zerzan and Jensen see technology as only one facet of ‘civilization’, alongside patriarchy, racism, and exploitation of animals. Only years later did Kaczynski begin to attract a following that was committed to his brand of anti-tech radicalism. As he notes in his 2016 book, ‘it is only since 2011 that I’ve had people who have been willing and able to spend substantial amounts of time and effort in doing research for me’. Coincidentally or not, 2011 is also the year that the Mexican terrorist group ITS emerged.

John Jacobi, a follower of Kaczynski, distinguishes three clusters of Kaczynski-inspired anti-tech radicals. First are the ‘apostles’ of Kaczynski, the indomitistas, led by his pseudonymous Spanish correspondent Último Reducto. The indomitistas devote themselves mainly to translating and analysing Kaczynski’s writings. They comprise part of his ‘inner circle’, which also conducts research for him and operates the publisher, Fitch & Madison, which prints his books. The other two clusters are the ‘heretics’, who are inspired by Kaczynski’s writings but diverge from him and the indomitistas about the finer points of doctrine, strategy, and tactics. One is Jacobi’s own group, the wildists, which broke away from the more orthodox indomitistas to build a broader coalition of ‘anti-civilization’ radicals.The other cluster of heretics, which is my focus in this article, comprises ITS and its offshoots. Whereas the indomitistas and the wildists focus on developing and propagating anti-tech ideas, ITS is eager for dramatic and violent action.

Journalists and terrorism scholars have labelled ITS ‘eco-terrorists’ and sometimes ‘eco-anarchists’, comparing the group to Deep Green Resistance and the Earth Liberation Front. ITS itself uses the term ‘eco-extremist’, which invites these comparisons. However, ITS is not just a more bellicose variant of radical environmentalism or green anarchism. An analysis of the group’s communiqués shows that its ideology is a distinctly Kaczynskian form of anti-tech radicalism.

Although ITS was influenced by radical environmentalism, the ‘eco’ in ‘eco-extremism’ is misleading. It does not refer to ‘deep ecology’; ITS rejects the ‘sentimentalism, irrationalism and biocentrism’ that it sees in many radical environmentalist groups. Instead, the ‘eco’ refers to the group’s ideal of ‘wild nature’, which accords a central place to human nature. ITS’s central concern, like Kaczynski’s, is that ‘human beings are moving away more dangerously from their natural instincts’. Adopting Kaczynski’s ‘bioprimitivism’, as I have called it, ITS argues that ‘the human being is biologically programmed … through evolution’ for the life of a ‘hunter-gatherer-nomad’.

Although it shares the hunter-gatherer ideal with green anarchists, ITS vehemently rejects any such label: ‘we are not “eco-anarchists” or “anarcho-environmentalists”‘. The group describes as ‘delusional’ those who ‘romanticize Wild Nature’ and ‘believe that when Civilization falls everything will be rosy and a new world will flourish without social inequality, hunger, repression, etc’. This thinly-veiled attack on Zerzan’s anarcho-primitivism echoes Kaczynski’s essay, ‘The Truth About Primitive Life’, where he sets out to ‘debunk the anarcho-primitivist myth that portrays the life of hunter-gatherers as a kind of politically correct Garden of Eden’. ITS follows Kaczynski in condemning green anarchism as ‘leftist’.

Kaczynski’s influence on ITS is difficult to miss. Many parts of the group’s communiqués are merely paraphrases of the Manifesto: ‘The essence of the power process has four parts: setting out of the goal, effort, attainment of the goal, and Autonomy’. But the depth of Kaczynski’s influence on ITS is difficult to appreciate without knowing the origins of his ideas. ITS cites Morris’s The Human Zoo in support of its claim that ‘the Wild Nature of the human being in general was perverted when it started to become civilized’. The same communiqué later echoes Morris without citing him: ‘it is totally abnormal to live together with hundreds of strangers around you’.

ITS explicitly acknowledges some of its debts to Kaczynski. But this has not been enough to prevent misconceptions, because Kaczynski himself has also been lumped in with radical environmentalists and green anarchists. It is necessary to understand Kaczynski’s distinct constellation of concepts in order to appreciate the ideological distinctness of ITS. The group uses his signature vocabulary: the technological system, the power process, surrogate activities, leftism, feelings of inferiority, oversocialization, etc. This is not the vocabulary of radical environmentalism or green anarchism. With the exceptions of ‘civilization’ and ‘domination’, ITS explicitly rejects the ‘leftist’ vocabulary of anarchism: oppression, solidarity, mutual aid, class struggle, hierarchy, inequality, injustice, and imperialism. Further, as I have already shown, even the ‘green’ parts of ITS’s communiqués have been filtered through Kaczynski. ITS is not an eco-terrorist or green anarchist group, but a novel kind of anti-tech terrorist group. The group’s ideology is distinctly Kaczynskian, genealogically and morphologically.

The modus operandi of ITS is not typical of radical environmentalists or green anarchists, who tend to be saboteurs or ‘monkeywrenchers’. Environmental radicals almost always target property rather than people. ITS, on the other hand, declares that it ‘is not a group of saboteurs (we do not share the strategy of sabotage or damage or destruction of property)’. Instead, as Kaczynski did, ITS aims to kill or maim people, such as scientists, whose surrogate activities propel the development of the technological system.

Anti-tech radicals and environmental radicals have different attitudes towards violence in large part because they have different ideals. As Bron Taylor argues, environmental radicals share ‘general religious sentiments – that the earth and all life is sacred – that lessen the possibility that [environmental] movement activists will engage in terrorist violence’. As he correctly points out, there is ‘no indication that Kaczynski shared the sense, so prevalent in radical environmental subcultures, that life is worthy of reverence and the earth is sacred’. Kaczynski is instead committed to the ideal of wild nature, which serves to naturalize violence. He argues, and ITS concurs, that ‘a significant amount of violence is a natural part of human life’. Part of what it means to be a wild human being is to be a violent one, unencumbered by the fetters of civilized morality.

The ideal of wild nature helps to explain anti-tech radicals’ target selection. For Kaczynski and ITS, living things have value only insofar as they are wild, and to be wild is to be ‘outside the power of the system’. When human beings become instruments of the system, they forfeit any value or dignity that they might have had. Scientists and technicians are permissible targets of violence because they have betrayed their wild nature, and they are desirable targets because they symbolize the technological system. Whereas environmental radicals’ reverence for life tends to steer them away from violence, towards destruction of property, anti-tech radicals’ ideal of wild nature serves to justify their violence.

Yet ITS diverges from Kaczynski about the purpose of violence. For Kaczynski, violence is primarily a means to overthrow the technological system. ITS, on the other hand, argues that Kaczynski’s proposed revolution is ‘idealistic and irrational’. Not only is this revolution bound to fail; Kaczynski also falls into the trap of leftism when he models his revolution on the French and Russian revolutions. For members of ITS, violence is not a means to revolution, but a way to affirm or reclaim their own wildness: ‘the attack against the system … is a survival instinct, since the human is violent by nature’. Kaczynski condemns ITS and accuses the group of misappropriating his ideas. He hurls the charge of leftism right back at them, along with a diagnosis of learned helplessness: ‘The most important error that ITS commits is that they express, and therefore promote, an attitude of hopelessness about the possibility of eliminating the technological system’. This attitude of hopelessness gives ITS a more vengeful and nihilistic character than Kaczynski himself.

A short thread (June 2024)

Author: William Gillis

Date: Jun 8, 2024

Source: <x.com/rechelon/status/1799516136645484935>

nihilistgf: book a friend gave me. no I’m not pro-ITS.

Anon: Counterpoint: you are an eco-fascist who has promoted ITS while pretending not to and approve of Atassa

nihilistgf: atassa and ITS are not eco-fascist. they’re eco-extremist. I call myself an eco-extremism because it has a lot to do with indigenous resistance. cope.

This Desiring-Machine Kills Fascists: To be clear, ITS’s “indiscriminate attack” is code for rape. It’s a deeply misogynistic collective and anyone looking approvingly on at them is not a friend of anarchists

ITS and its english language press office Atassa are not technically “fascist” because they’re not nationalist. They’re just hyper reactionaries who want to exterminate everyone on the planet, delight in misogyny, praise nazis, and had an alt-right trad cath spokesman/editor.

ITS was basically just a Mexico City crew that weren’t indigenous and tried to murder anarchists, plus, in the US, a trad cath Berkeley graduate lawyer who married a vivisectionist and hosted all their content on the Atassa site back before he turned it into a journal.

Like the Mexico City ITS crew, Arturo was not indigenous in the sense of involved in any tribe or community, etc, he just had some genes and fetishized that on occasion.

He was also, and this is important, a snitch who snitched on anarchists to the FBI

https://web.archive.org/web/20200601041750/https://325.nostate.net/2018/11/16/eco-extremist-mafia-arturo-vasquez-submits-legal-fbi-threat-to-anarchist-counter-info-site-325/

Arturo was Atassa. He created the website and popularized it, pretty much exclusively as the press office of ITS, then later he got together a crew (of mostly white contributors like the rich WASP John Jacobi) and edited them together in a print journal version of his site.

What NihilistGF is attempting to do with the “ITS is just ecoextremism which is just indigenous resistance” is a long chain of blurrings. This turns on the fact that when Arturo published the print journal version of Atassa he included an article cheering rape of colonizers.

Later, when there was anarchist blowup over the absurdity of LBC publishing Auturo and his Atassa website as a journal, they crafted the second issue with a pinwheel design on the cover taken from indigenous americans in the most immature “this’ll get them” level provocation.

Arturo is mexican and not a member of any tribe that used said pinwheel designs, plus the tribes in question explicitly retired and forbid use of the swastika/pinwheel after world war 2. Again Arturo is a trad cath. He’s fucking catholic!

It’s completely absurd to frame ITS and Atassa as being about “indigenous resistance”, they’re anarcho-primitivists who loudly and publicly ditched anarchism for nihilism, siding with Ted K over John Zerzan. Any reference to indigenous struggle was adopted opportunistically.

Ted explicitly rejected anarchism on the grounds that he believed that a non-industrial society would be patriarchal and warring, and that this was good. John clung to basic anarchist values against hierarchy. ITS were ideological primitivists who followed Ted in this.

ITS encouraged people to blow up nuclear plants and “kill 200 million in your local bioregion” as part of a campaign to exterminate humans. That kind of edgelording has absolutely nothing to do with indigenous struggles against settler colonialism and it’s gross to pretend so.

Now a whole fucking grip of edgelords in the US loved ITS, fucking adored it. The “anarchist” podcast Free Radical Radio that was prominent back then and run by the rich white dude Rydra pumped out endless praise for them and their “nihilism.”

In this original context “nihilism” was explicitly chosen as a term to signify a rejection of anarchism and break from it. Like ITS, over time Rydra repeatedly denounced anarchists and presented his nihilism as a rejection of anarchism.

While in Mexico City, ITS planted a bomb at an anarchist infoshop and planned to gun down an anarchist prisoner, in the US a bunch of rich white dipshit edgelords masturbated furiously to their provocations like endorsing murdering women for sport.

These US edgelords were completely unprepared for any sort of consequences, and after some Seattle insurrectos threw hands against them and the UK insurrecto journal 325 doxed Arturo and promised to murder him, they all fell apart trying to find excuses.

LBC tried pushing the line that Atassa was unrelated to ITS (utterly preposterous), and was just a journal that “raised interesting points that anarchists should engage with.” In this backpeddling the article praising indigenous warriors raping colonizers got held up.

In this desperate twisting, folks tried to reframe the entire issue as one of “do we abet violence and collateral damage in struggle?”

In this they tried to rally a bunch of older anarchists still smarting from the ideological nonviolence wars of the late 90s.

Basically LBC could go to a bunch of their genx and boomer connections and explain the backlash they were getting in terms these disconnected olds could get and would sympathize with. “The dastardly pacifists are back!!!”

Instead of being frank about the ITS/Atassa ideological platform of killing all humans, warring with anarchists, and endorsing rape and femicide as a return to “wild nature,” the shit got reframed as “some indigenous radicals said we should use violence and people hate that.”

But the problem is of course that while LBC’s middle aged book peddlers were terrified of drawing real fire and getting punched or even bombed and murdered by anarchists like we would respond to ITS directly, a bunch of younger edgelords didn’t want to retreat at all.

So the LBC line that Atassa doesn’t have anything to do with ITS got ignored, folks continued distroing ITS communiques (Atassa’s translations, but also it’s been widely claimed that Arturo just wrote his own communiques as ‘ITS’).

But of course occasionally they need to throw out defenses online when they get too much heat.

This creates a situation wherein the bullshit defense used to reframe Atassa as not ITS is now applied just as opportunistically to backpropagate into a defense of ITS.

Anyway, 325’s line on ITS/Atassa was shared widely by insurrectionary anarchists: It’s that ITS/Atassa should be ruthlessly murdered by anarchists and violence should freely be used against their defenders. This is not a pacifist position.

[1] Psuedo-nihilist serial blogger, collector of doubtful “terror” manuals and writer of complex verbs and words.

[2] Antisocial evolution, “Falcon of Chaos,” “Archie” Archegonos or whatever he’s decided to call himself this week in a ten-thousand word gush of verbal diarrhea.

[3] A text dump on eco-extremism

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Anonymous. Joint declaration of the insurrectional anarchist and eco-anarchist groups of Mexico [Essay]. War On Society. November 10, 2011. Original link. Archived link.

[8] A text dump on eco-extremism

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Anonymous. Joint declaration of the insurrectional anarchist and eco-anarchist groups of Mexico [Essay]. War On Society. November 10, 2011. Original link. Archived link.

[12] A text dump on eco-extremism

[13] Ibid.

[14] Michael Loadenthal. The Politics of Attack: Communiqués and Insurrectionary Violence [Book]. Manchester University Press. 2017. Original link. Archived link.

[15] Sean Fleming. The Unabomber and the origins of anti-tech radicalism [Essay]. Taylor & Francis. May 7, 2021. Original link. Archived link.

Personal information has been redacted on the chance that we’d be causing greater net suffering through harming innocent or reformed people years later. Plus, because the reason ‘Abe’ was doxxed and the author’s critique of Abe is still fully intelligible despite redacting personal information.