A research text dump on stochastic terrorism

A Critical Introduction

In the last meeting of the most active Earth Liberation Front (ELF) cell in the US, some members argued they should next attempt to assassinate captains of industry. It’s possible that them bringing the idea up to people who disagreed was the only reason it didn’t happen, as they might have feared that other members of the group would sabotage their life rather than let them go ahead with it.

Quoting Daniel McGowan, a former ELF member:

The last circle meeting basically cleaved between people who seemingly wanted to talk about it, not even plan it, but just talk about it, and the people that were repulsed by it.[1]

Quoting Bron Taylor:

Court records in the case of those accused of participating with Rogers in arson indicate that an activist-turned-informant claimed that Rogers had discussed the possibility of drive-by assassinations.[2]

In July 1998 Earth First! held its national Earth First! Rendezvous in southcentral Oregon. Green anarchists among them distributed the seventh issue of Live Wild or Die. It included a striking amount of violent and revolutionary images, including a reproduction of a previous ‘Ecofucker Hit List’. It was the same list that had previously been published and that included on it a Timber Association official and that some believe the Unabomber may have used to target one of his victims. The Association official and address was crossed out and the words ‘Who’s next?’ were scrawled nearby. On the opposite page was printed a statement made by Theodore Kaczynski protesting his defense team’s efforts to portray him as insane and promising that ‘more will be heard from me in the future’.[3]

Later it emerged that 2 of the ELF members had become Neo-Nazis:

[A] former ELF member told me that two comrades, Nathan “Exile” Block and Joyanna “Sadie” Zacher, shared an unusual love of Scandinavian black metal, made disturbing references to Charles Manson, and promoted an elitist, anti-left mentality. While their obscure references evoked Abraxas, Feral House, and Bouchet’s distribution networks, their politics could not be recognized within the milieu of fascism at the time. However, their general ideas became clearer, the former ELF member told me, when anti-fascist researchers later discovered that a Tumblr account run by Block contained numerous occult fascist references, including national anarchist symbology, swastikas, and quotes from Evola and Jünger. These were only two members of a larger group, but their presence serves as food for thought regarding important radical cross-over points and how to approach them.[4]

Onan On Guns and Stuff...

Author: Onan the (Reconstructed) Barbarian

Date: Winter 1995

Source: Wild Rockies Review, Vol. 8 No. 1, Pages 16–17.
<www.environmentandsociety.org/sites/default/files/key_docs/wild_rockies-ef_vol8-no1.pdf>

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War, Guns blazing, corpses lying in blasted streets surrounded by pools of congealing blood, the scream of heavy artillery raining constant, faceless death from afar, the innocents hiding in burned out buildings waiting for a break in the action to go scrounge food or water before it starts all over again. This is the story most of us know of domestic wars raging in Chechnya, the former Yugoslavia, and Somalia.

It is with these various examples of world conflict that I consider the intention of some regional “eco-,warriors,” the E-Rangers (dun-da-da-DUM!), to wage their own war against the forces of ecological destruction. Take on the Freddies, put the logging, mining, drilling and road building companies on notice, show that the land, the animals, Gaia herself, is worth the shedding of blood and the taking of life. The idea, I suppose, is to take the notion of “No Compromise in the Defense of Mother Earth” to its logical extreme, although I question the logic in reaching that extreme.

One dictionary definition of compromise is “a settlement in which both sides make concessions,” not a terrible premise from which to pursue an objective, indeed, it is the very nearly the premise that underlies our beloved consensus circle. But the politics of compromise-the current political paradigm-is the referent for the “No Compromise” slogan, not Webster’s. In the politics of compromise, those with power make very small concessions and those without power give up everything but a hollow shell of their principles. In this arena, the reality of compromising means we lose. So compromise has become a dirty word, a slur when used in reference to one’s character, and rightly so. In contrast, “No Compromise” has taken on the connotations of strength, but unfortunately, for some, its connotations are rife with sexist imagery of what is strength, and what is compromise. “No compromise,” for some, is the new code phrase for “let’s get drunk and kick some ass!” But no matter how these types of attitudes are couched, they are still bullshit. “No Compromise” is not about tactics, it’s about heart and steadfastness, and how wilderness can and will be saved.

With a No Compromise approach, we’re trying to affect change by standing up for what is right, by refusing to accept powerlessness and its concomitant loss of biological diversity. The big question is how do we transcend our inherent powerlessness and gain the ability to save ecosystems? One way is to change the arena we have to work in (“Subvert the Dominant Paradigm”) and foster a worldview that holds wilderness as fundamentally important. In lieu of this, the goal is to affect the current political system in order to achieve our objectives. If this is not, or does not seem possible, at least make a personal stand for one’s beliefs, and for the wildness at stake. The benefits and rewards of making such a stance are often surprising and greater than anticipated (although usually not without some associated judicial ramifications) because even the most rabid of foes can appreciate the courage needed to stand in opposition armed only with the righteousness of one’s ethics, and strength of conviction.

This courage, the act of taking a non-violent stance, is power. And this non-violence is the heart and soul of EF! and one of the main reasons for its the success. Without it, we would be nothing more than a bunch of armed goons destined for failure. Why? Because we can’t compete in their game of violence, intimidation and ‘might is right’ for very long, for they, the government/corporate alliance of eco-fuckers, have 99.99999% of the chips, and all the aces. More importantly, we cannot win because the taking up of arms negates the intellectual, moral and spiritual power that we possess. Non-violence confers far more power than we can ever achieve using force. And finally, we can be have all the facts in the world on our side, but the truth of ecosystem collapse and environmental calamity are quite hard to convey as one’s skull is exploding from the force of lead entering at high speed.

I am no hippie geek who thinks we just have to think pretty thoughts and eat tofu and then the earth will be saved; just the opposite, I think everything is fucked and we are probably doomed. It comes down to this: if we take up arms we have no chance, but if we avoid ego-maniacal, macho, martyr gun trips there is still some chance that maybe everything isn’t doomed. Maybe. As for those testosterone poisoned E-Ranger boys with the lead shootin’ pecker poles, I suggest they consider the option of self-immolation, now that is suicide with Style!

An Experimental List of Anarchist Principles

Author: Theo Slade

Date: May 1, 2022

Source:
<www.activistjourneys.wordpress.com/2022/05/01/an-experimental-list-of-anarchist-principles>

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Some groups and projects try to put together an aims and principles list to explain what campaign news and philosophy they will focus on, and I think this can positively influence what actions people take and think are justified. Some examples I know of include:

• By Any Means Necessary

• Anarchist Radio Network

• Green Anti-Capitalist Front

You also have people using slogans like ‘by any means necessary’ going all the way back to Malcolm X & Franz Fanon in the 60s, which I guess is an attempt to say we’ll go as far as we’re pushed, so be careful what state terror tactics you use on us.

My aims are reflected in the CrimethInc exercise in what an anarchist program might look like. And I’ve already written about my ethics broadly, but I’ll try to be more specific here, in experimenting with drawing up a list of principles that I think would be useful to the calculation of what tactics I think are useful and justifiable in the UK today which is obviously not on the verge of revolution, which to me just means a period in time when social tensions are not at their height:

1) Never act with reckless indifference to human and non-human animal life.

2) Never physically hurt people for the purpose of achieving political goals as it runs counter to our philosophy on the left that material conditions create the person and so we should make every peaceful effort to rehabilitate people.

Some tricky to explain examples that are justified, but only just outside this principle are:

(A) Community self-defense and self-defense by proxy, where you might desire to fight fascists in the street in order to block them from marching through immigrant communities or where you might desire to push your way through huntsmen in order to save a fox from getting mauled to death by dogs.

(B) Survivor-led vigilantism, where to the extent that some current institutions fail to rehabilitate people and the process of seeking justice through the institutions available can sometimes cause more trauma than its worth, then personal violence in order to resolve feelings of helplessness in the face of evil acts can sometimes be reasonably viewed as justified to regain feelings of agency.

3) Never take actions on the basis of anti-science beliefs or with the intent to propagate anti-science beliefs e.g. disproven conspiracy theories.

4) Take care to respect the difference between property which is personally and privately owned.

So, it could be seen as ethical to choose material targets of evil actors in order to cause economic damage and make a statement, so long as in the case of personal property, the item has no intrinsic sentimental value and can be replaced because the person is wealthy and that the item was paid for through the exploitation of others labor. Or is private property, meaning the means of production which should be owned collectively anyway.

The action would be an outlet for legitimate anger against that which causes us suffering and a means of developing people’s thinking and creating a wider base of people joined in sympathy for those ideals.

For example, if taking the risk to slash slaughterhouse trucks’ tyres in the dead of night both draws attention to animal suffering and also helps you to develop stronger bonds with a group of people and learn from other liberation struggles, then the action is both productive and leads to personal growth.

5) Never take actions in the hopes of helping in part instigate a revolutionary war sooner than it’s reasonable to believe you would have the capability to win. Similarly don’t use rhetoric about how tensions in society have escalated to the state of civil war or a third world war. For example, even if the revolutionary left got really good at assassinating captains of industry and getting away with it, there would be reasonable fears around the psychology of people who would take such an act against people who they could have grown up and been socially conditioned to be themselves, which would inexorably lead to a more authoritarian society and worse foundations on which to work towards a better society.

I do think we can hypothesize the unrealistic case of 99% of society desiring a referendum on a shift from parliamentary representative system to a federated spokes council system and the MP’s dragging their feet, the same way both parties gerrymander the boundaries to make it easier to win despite it being the one issue most everyone agrees is bad, and people needing to storm the halls of power to force a vote to happen.

More likely though, an opportunity for revolution might arise from such a confluence of events as climate refugees and worker gains forcing the state and corporations into trying to crack down on freedoms in order to preserve their power and enough people resisting that move, who are then able take power and usher in radical policy change, with either the army deciding to stand down or splitting into factions.

Most can sympathize with quick revolutions against dictatorships where the result is a freer society, like the Kurdish uprising in Northern Syria which took power from a regime who had rolled tanks on demonstrators and outlawed teaching of their native language.

But, even there, there are key foundations you need to work from, like the probability you won’t just give an excuse for the oppressor committing even worse horrors as was the case with the Rohingya militants who ambushed a police checkpoint, resulting in army & citizen campaign to burn down many villages, plus murder and rape those that couldn’t get away.

Also, there would be a responsibility to put down arms after winning political freedoms and a majority are in favor of diplomacy through electoral politics, like in Northern Ireland today.

Under representative democracies, the sentiment of most is that, even if it could be argued that a war of terror (not a revolutionary war) against the ruling class was the easiest route to produce a better society, that it would still be ethically wrong to be the person who takes another’s life just because it’s the easiest way. Since regardless of manufactured consent or anything else you still could have worked to build a coalition to overcome those obstacles.

And I agree, it would be an act of self-harm to treat life with such disregard when we could have been that same deluded person shrouded in the justificatory trappings of society which normalizes that behavior. I don’t think the way we win today is by treating a cold bureaucratic system with equally cold disregard, by justifying our resort to threat and violence because we have fewer resources, and a belief in the importance of our message. Time on earth is a foundational value worth fighting for, and everybody deserves some amount of breathing room to make mistakes and learn from them.

Primary Source Reading

How Far Should We Go? (1988)

Author: Anonymous

Date: 21 December, 1988

Source: Earth First! 9, no. 2 (1988).
<environmentandsociety.org/sites/default/files/key_docs/rcc00098005-9-2_1.pdf>

Notes: The author in the Earth First! Journal was listed as ‘Tom Stoddard’, with a line at the end reading “Tom Stoddard is a former bank vice president living in California.” In the volume ‘Beware! Sabotage!’ the authors were listed as the “Lightning Sprite Brigade”.

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Some environmentalists say Earth First!ers are saboteurs, destroyers and even terrorists. They say we go too far and alienate potential friends. These anemic environmentalists are as flabby as Kobe beef, boozed and massaged by the system into near apathy. They want to save the Earth provided it is no more difficult and dangerous than walking to the corner for their newspaper. Their commitment to rescue this ailing sphere is about as ridiculous as Jimmy Swaggert’s morals.

The humans trying to destroy Earth have passionate determination. They are motivated by that magic elixir, greed, and its first cousin, power. Using the destroyers’ gauge, Earth First!ers look as pastoral as a mountain meadow. How far would EF!ers and other serious conservationists go to save this battered orb?

Maybe as far as water hungry promoters wanting to drain Mono Lake for profligate Los Angeles humans. Perhaps as far as auto makers and oil drillers bent on concreting the countryside and depleting natural resources. Hopefully as far as the R.J. Reynolds, Ligget & Meyer and Skoal go in providing air pollution, carcinogens, and litter. Certainly as far as Maxxam, Georgia Pacific and Boise Cascade in destroying our old growth forests. But probably not as far as the Catholic and fundamentalist crazies bombing Planned Parenthood Centers.

Possibly as far as Consolidated Coal and Kennecott Copper carving vast open pit wounds in the earth. Surely as far as hazardous waste disposers, leaking underground tank owners and government deep mine radioactive burial experts polluting the aquifers. But perhaps not as far as Union Carbide and Dow Chemical creating Bhophallic witch’s brews of PCBs, DDT, aldrin and dieldrin.

Assuredly as far as dedicated litterers desecrating every stream and seaside with Bud bottles, Big Mac cartons, and plastic wine dispensers. Certainly as far as the humanistic and religious fanatics wanting to waste Earth’s resources keeping every misbegotten human alive at any cost. Undoubtedly as far as the Vicar of Christ and other religious ostriches who encourage every human to breed us into SRO population crises causing deforestation, drought, and desertification. But maybe not as far as poachers, hunters, furriers and smugglers who kill and deal in Black Rhinos, Snow Leopards, Cougars, Grizzlies, and Harp Seals for every shade of human superstition and vanity.

Maybe as far as every hamburger chomping ORV SOB who wants to leave the Earth a wasteland covered with 4 X 4 tracks of Bridgestone Desert Duelers. Reasonably as far as the gill net fishermen using and losing plastic nets which “incidentally” kill millions of sea mammals, sea birds, and non-commercial fish every year. Perhaps as far as farmers draining their deadly fertilizers and pesticides into Kesterson and other National Wildlife Refuges. Assuredly as far as the corrupt governments trying to liquidate the Inuit, Penan, Maasai and other native peoples who have lived for millennia in harmony with Earth.

Maybe not as far as the sheep ranchers who poison wolves, Coyotes, eagles, California Condors and other “varmits.”

Potentially as far as the timber firms, slash and burn farmers, and hamburger ranchers who are destroying 75,000 acres of Earth’s tropical rainforests every day.

Monkeywrenchers, Stumps Suck and Ecoavengers are not going far enough fast enough to outdo Mother Nature’s enemies. Defenders have too long been too tepid and too slow. Maybe that is why we are losing the race to save our planet. If we resolve to go as far as the destroyers, it would leave damn little we can’t do. If we want to save Earth we had better quit taking our marching orders from our friends and start taking them from our enemies. That is how far we should go!

Bombthrowing: A Brief Treatise (1993)

Author: Pajama

Source: Wild Rockies Review, Vol. 6, no. 1.
<www.environmentandsociety.org/sites/default/files/key_docs/wild_rockies-ef_vol6-no1.pdf>

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I have a theory. My theory is that if, every time the Forest Service or some other entity commits an act of destruction of the wild, if every time they plow under another roadless area, or murder a wolf, or mangle and plunder and sack a wild place, if every time they do this I take my anger and I place it in a certain compartment inside my brain, then when it becomes time to throw bombs I will be able to access those pieces of anger that I have stored and be a very good bombthrower, perhaps better than the other bombthrowers.

So, I spend my days patiently contriving means to stop the madness which drives the Forest Service and other renegades, and each day I read the mail, perhaps I file another appeal, and then at the end of the day I open up this special compartment inside my brain and I put the anger of some new atrocity in it, in anticipation of the day when I shall need this anger in order to throw bombs.

But a new fear has overcome me. I perceive my anger calling me from inside its compartment, I hear the door unlatching from inside, and this new terrible question approaches me:

How shall I know when it is time to throw bombs?

If the Forest Service decides to cut occupied owl habitat in Oregon, is it time to throw bombs?

Or if the Fish and Wildlife Service decides to trap and kill wolves, or to shoot them from the sky, is it then time to throw bombs?

What if the Park Service decides to imprison Grizzly bears in a zoo for the benefit of tourists, if the Forest Service ignores the appeal process, or if the largest intact grove of Redwoods is only 500 acres in size, if the Endangered Species Act is abolished or sidestepped by people with enough money, if corporations continue to wreak havoc upon the ozone layer, if reason is blindly cast aside in favor of profit, if the last remaining herd of wild Bison is slaughtered for following their migratory instincts, if my generation watches the very last Chinook salmon perish in a home choked with silt, if certain nameable parties proceed in a manner which is clearly imperilling the lives of the multitude of glorious and beautiful critters and plants on our fine planet, our only planet, what then? Is it then time to throw bombs?

Think: when the very last wolves on this continent are trapped and caged for captive breeding (as the remaining Condors were, not so long ago), will it finally be time to throw bombs?

Or will it be too late?

Environmental Rangers (1995)

Subtitle: Biodiversity Defense

Author: Avalon

Date: Winter 1995

Source: Wild Rockies Review, Vol. 8 No. 1, Pages 16–17.
<www.environmentandsociety.org/sites/default/files/key_docs/wild_rockies-ef_vol8-no1.pdf>

“If a stranger batters down your door with an ax, threatens your family and yourself with deadly weapons, and proceeds to loot your home of whatever he wants, he is committing what is universally recognized—by law and morality—as a crime. In such a situation the householder has both the right and the obligation to defend himself, his family, and his property by whatever means are necessary. This right and this obligation is universally recognized, justified and even praised by all civilized human communities. Self defense against attack is one of the basic laws not only of human society but of life itself. The American wilderness, what little remains, is now undergoing exactly such an assault”—Edward Abbey

World War III is happening right now. It is humanity’s war against the planet and the casualties are ever increasing. Fewer and fewer species each year have stable, genetically viable populations, and new threats to population health spring up in today’s techno-industrial world as fast as MTV videos. Whole ecosystems seem to be balanced on the edge of what Christopher Manes has called “ecological meltdown.”

As the core continues to heat almost unchecked, a growing number of activists are becoming disillusioned with the ‘too little, too late’ reform efforts of mainstream environmental groups. In response, the radical environmental movement, popularized by Earth First! and the Animal Liberation Front, grows and expands each year. The Environmental Rangers are the latest embodiment of no-compromise activism.

The Environmental Rangers (E Rangers) are an avant-garde group that will redefine the parameters of the radical movement. The E Rangers, a paramilitary organization founded by Ric Valois, are extensively trained, fit, and possess strict standing orders and state-of-the-art firearms.

I met with Ric at an activist strategy conference for the Cove-Mallard campaign. I was at first intimidated by the uniform, his perfect posture and several high-caliber stories I’d heard last summer which made the E rangers a favorite topic of conversation. Ric turned out to be a friendly, almost endearing individual. He is an articulate spokesperson for a doctrine of activism born out of the disparity of ecological meltdown. The E Rangers go a step beyond the nonviolence codes held almost religiously by all other groups engaged in direct action or civil disobedience: E Rangers will not be coerced by the heavy-handed methods of armed Forest Service officers.

The paramilitary operations of Forest Service law enforcement have made it possible for timber barons to raze systematically old growth forests in spite of nonviolent activists’ diligence and creative protests. The paramilitary operations of the E Rangers, on the other hand, are intended to balance the playing field in this critical game of planetary survival. In addition, E Rangers have provided physical support for campaigns seeking to protect biodiversity. I have heard eyewitness testimony that a single E Ranger is more helpful around base camp than a half-dozen tie-dyed hipsters.

The formation of the E Rangers comes at a time of increasing death threats against environmental activists from coast to coast. Activists have had their wells salted, their barns and houses burned and their families harassed. I don’t have to tell you about Judi Bari and the car bomb that has maimed her for life. Diné activist Leroy Jackson is dead under suspicious circumstances, probably murdered. Ric Valois hopes that the presence of his group will act as a deterrent to the violence that has been inflicted upon activists.

Mainstream groups, such as Audubon and the Sierra Club, admit that the no-compromise stance of Earth First! makes their groups appear more moderate and helps them gain more political clout. It has long been the hope of many Earth First!ers that other groups will push the fringes of the environmental debate further, so that Earth First! will look moderate by comparison. After all, hanging banners, performing guerrilla theater and incapacitating big, yellow machines is hardly an extreme reaction to worldwide ecological melt-down. In contrast, the mere presence of armed Environmental Rangers calls attention to both the seriousness of the environmental crisis and the seriousness of their resolve to halt the today’s blatant attack on biodiversity.

“[The Environmental Rangers] practice and espouse non-violence but with one minor variation. We will go fully armed on all of our missions. Weapons will be carried as a symbol of our commitment and willingness to put our lives on the line and of course will be used if necessary. Observation of nature teaches that violence (change) is omnipresent but never malicious. So while it is true that any fool can pull a trigger, many find the courage within themselves to refrain from doing so until all else fails.

“The Environmental Rangers are an equal opportunity organization. Anyone with the heart and the soul for it is welcome. You must be self supporting and in good mental, physical and spiritual condition and capable of sustained hardship and risk in the outdoors. A sense of humor will come in real handy too.”

Politics and the Ethical Void (1996)

Subtitle: A summary of Steve Booth’s ground-breaking expose of politics as technique

Author: Steve Booth

Date: September 1996

Source: Green Anarchist Journal, Issue #43–44, Autumn 1996, Pages 22–24.
<thesparrowsnest.org.uk/collections/public_archive/9175.pdf>

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We cannot apply the ethical to the political. To try to do so is to be like a small boy with his finger in the dyke, while a hundred yards away, the sea rushes through a gap as wide as the Atlantic Ocean.

This is a far bolder and more emphatic thesis than saying we must value the political in a negative ethical sense (as bad or evil), although people do insist on trying to evaluate it as such. No. The case is stronger than this. The political is completely divorced from the ethical. The political is not quantitatively at odds with the ethical like a naughty child who sometimes does good, sometimes bad but qualitatively severed from it.

A HUNDRED INTERLOCKING QUESTIONS

It is meaningless to try to employ an ethical critique of politics. People nevertheless often do so. Sometimes this takes the form of an ought. “John Major ought to do something about Europe...” Perhaps one of the best ways into my thesis that it is meaningless to try to apply the ethical to the political is to make the attempt by asking specific questions:

• The Unemployment Statistics Question: Unemployment statistics are systematically falsified. Politicians frequently use these lies in arguments to show how the economy is getting better. Why do politicians believe they are entitled to lie in this way?

• The Genocide Jets Question: As a matter of government policy, jets are being manufactured in Britain and supplied to Indonesia for purposes of committing genocide in East Timor. Many people believe this is wrong. Why do the politicians refuse to acknowledge this and stop supplying those jets?

• The Register of Sleaze Question: The Nolan Committee said that MP’s should register their earnings in public so that voters could find out who pays these so-called ‘representatives’. Some MP’s declined to register their interests. If the MP’s think themselves immune and refuse to follow their own laws, why should anyone else?

• The Ambulance Roulette Question: The government has cut funding to the NHS to pay for tax cuts to the well-off. At the same time the lack of funding causes hospital wards to close and reduces the number of intensive care beds. A man dies after being driven around Lancashire and Yorkshire from hospital to hospital in an ambulance. Do we consider the Tory health minister responsible for this death?

• The Windscale Leukaemia Question: After several decades, radioactive material from Sellafield has contaminated Cumbria, causing people to die of leukaemia. The government ordered a full cover-up as usual, and then issued a report (a) denying there are any cases of leukaemia, and (b) blaming them on sewage from camps used to house construction workers back in 1947. Given this ‘clean bill of health’, the plasm goes on operating. Can we give the politicians operating this system a similar clean bill of ethical health?

If you don’t like these particular examples, try to think of your own. These questions are simple attempts to apply the ethical to the political. Il is very easy to generate these sorts of questions just by looking at the newspapers. We could build up hundreds of them, thousands of them, millions of them. Eventually there comes a point where we have to stop asking and acknowledge the futility of trying to apply the ethical to the political.

POLITICIANS OUGHT TO BE ETHICAL...

The liberal at this point will seek refuge in an ought Politicians may be liars, bullshitters, crooks, embezzlers, murderers, mass murderers, mass poisoners etc, but they ought not to be like that. Instead they should behave in the best interests of their constituents...

Before we laugh contemptuously at the naïve believer in ‘liberal democracy’ we ought to notice the disjunction. The only kind of politician the reformist acknowledges is one based on a theoretical projection, a picture of what ought to be. Wherever has such a politics ever been practiced on earth? The liberal reformist makes the ‘No True Scotsman’ move of declaring that proper politicians are honest Etc. The reprobate examples we are saddled with in the real worlds of Westminster or Brussels are not ‘real’ politicians at all but imposters, wolves in sheep’s clothing. By defining politicians in this way and excluding the reality, the shysters, our apologist begs the question. Let us return to the real world.

THE WELFARE STATE OBJECTION

Have we not skewed our analysis too, by refusing to acknowledge that politicians can, sometimes, do good? Take the Welfare State, for example. (For those who have forgotten, this was a system of free benefits, paid for out of taxation, providing education, health care etc which applied in Britain between 1948 and 1984 or so.) The Welfare Slate is put forwards as an example of a good policy. How do we determine that such a policy was indeed ethical? Through reference to ethical criteria.

I readily concede that some of the politicians putting forwards the NHS, Butler Education Act and so on did so for ethical treasons. Others will have done it for reasons of political expediency. Some politicians will have been indifferent to it, and some will have opposed it. The government, however was not forced to introduce the Welfare State. It could have followed other policies; intensified the Cold War or adopted other policies with regard to the Commonwealth. The choice of policy was politically guided. Later, much of the Welfare State was abolished. Were we to try to apply the same ethical criteria to the abolition as well as the setting up, we might say that the start was right (ethically correct), and the ending of it was wrong (ethically flawed). One thing this shows is that the political is not guided by the ethical, and so we are trying to examine the political with the wrong sort of tools.

An example like the Welfare Slate shows the political still cancels the ethical. At one point there is an apparent link between them, and at other times this docs not exist To apply the ethical to the political is to try to measure the process using the wrong equipment (like measuring a straight line with a protractor). The correspondence between the ethical and the political is arbitrary, the ‘link’ selected or disregarded according to expediency or whim or other (non-ethical) criterion. The overriding factor is not ethical but dictated by expediency and the imperative to get, retain and to cling to power. The political, if it uses the ethical at all, uses it as a fig leaf — something to camouflage its proper motives.

One more point with regard to the Welfare State objection. Above, I asked “Wherever have we seen such a politics practiced on earth?” Think about the example of Aneurin Bevin, the Minister of Health, who resigned in 1950 when the basic principle of free health care was watered down by the introduction of dental charges. Now, at last, we see an example of the ethical politician — but it is noteworthy that the only way he could exercise his state of being moral was to resign his office and so cease being that official. A parable of the void between politics and the ethical.

THE REMOVAL OF CHOICE

In the hundred interlocking questions, why do we have to give up asking ethical questions of the political? Partly because of the sheer futility of asking them. We realize that the political has never acknowledged the ethical, not for one second. Politics assets something else — its own power to deny choice. It is true that politicians sometimes use the rhetoric of the ethical as an electioneering ploy or as an argument to encourage obedience; “If you don’t pay your poll tax, how will the hospitals keep going and the bins keep being emptied?” One of the reasons why politics docs not acknowledge the ethical is that it cannot do so, because if it did the political would be abolished as a category.

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THE BUSINESS OF POLITICS

The business of politics is to govern — to make more mechanisms of control, to systematically block the paths to freedom, to stop them up. With politics the capacity for choice is already taken away and so we cannot value what happens. It is not appropriate to offer praise or blame where there is no choice.

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Politics is about the way we organise and administer society as a collective entity. The business of politics is to govern, that is to say to make more and more mechanisms of control, to systematically block the paths to freedom, to syop them up. The ethical is about how we value actions and choices as individuals. With politics, the choice is already taken away and so we cannot value what happens. We cannot offer praise or blame where there is no choice, it is just not appropriate to do so.

To accept the political is to subordinate yourself to the process, to acknowledge the Divine Right of Parliament to rule. The political arrogates that power to itself and the power of the individual to choose is annihilated. Suppose, for just one second, that we declared the ethical to be superior (or to have power over) that divine right. The distinctive character of the political would thereby be abolished. Something other than the political would be given the power to decide. What is ethical is equally clear, or equally obscure, to all. The privileged position of the politicians, judges and bureaucrats to arbitrate what is correct would vanish. The ethical is public property in a way the political is not. You do not need a voting card or the membership of a political party or elite to determine what is cancer.

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POLITICS ASSUMES A MODE OF AUTHORITY WHICH CANCELS THE ETHICAL

Were we to declare the political as subordinate to the ethical, politics would be abolished as a separate entity. The divine right of the political to govern would be abolished. The call to obedience overturned, politics would be subsumed as a sub-branch of applied ethics.

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Were we to declare the political subordinate to the ethical, the distinctive nature of the political would be swept away. To make this declaration is to classify the political as a sub-branch of applied ethics, the part of it relating to collective decisions and choices, a kind of ‘ethics in aggregate’. This leads to another objection.

THE WHOLESOME APPLE THESIS

Not all politicians are bad, the apologist asserts just as not all apples in the barrel have gone bad. Some apples arc wholesome, just as some politicians arc capable of good (ethically valued) actions and choices. If the aggregate of politicians behaved ethically then politics would be moral. In effect, this is an attempt to subsume the political underneath the ethical, as in the preceding paragraph. The difference between the open declaration of ethical priority over the political, and the wholesome apple thesis is that this time the declaration is mute, it works by sleight of hand.

In this hypothetical example, politics is never openly declared subservient to ethics, it is just that in some way the politicians subordinate their actions and choices to the ethical. The only way we could know they arc doing this is by observing their deeds. They still retain the myth of political infallibility, and still make the decisions for other people, but they secretly allow the ethical to determine their choices.

Under its own terms the wholesome apple objection only works so long as the controlling majority of politicians go along with the subterfuge. They walk a thin line between; on the one hand openly declaring the ethical superior to the political and thereby doing themselves out of a job; and on the other hand losing that moral majority and seeing the political once again regain the upper hand, thereby demonstrating the ethical void.

In so far as me politicians allow something outside the political (namely the ethical) to govern their choices, they cease to be politicians. To accept the ethical is superior to the political is to cancel the political.

Does the wholesome apple objection apply in the real world? Suppose we were to secretly persuade a controlling majority of politicians to make ethical choices, we would still have the political as something apart from the ethical, demanding our unconditional obedience. Once we start asserting the ethical over the political, whether as a stated ethical principle or in our deeds, the whole corrupt political web begins to unravel.

INTERCONNECTEDNESS

Part of the reason why we had to give up asking the specific ethical questions of the political was that they connected up. The ethical politician (if indeed it makes sense to talk of such a being) is apt to challenge all their corruption. Start to ask the ethical questions and it all goes. Ask enough of them and you end up asking just one, the ‘Who are these bastards?’ question which leads to open doubt about the divine right of Parliament to rule; or just a few specific questions. The answer comes back just the same from the politician: “I do these things because 1 want to do them, and you do not have the power to stop me”. This is the core of politics. The politicians sneering at the questioner is not an ethical position al all but something else — it is the declaration of disinterested independence from morality. You can try to go on applying the ethical to the political, but t is futile. The politicians refuse to acknowledge the power of the ethical. It has no leverage. Hence my description of the political as an ethical void.

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ETHICS IS WITHOUT LEVERAGE

Are works of art to be valued ethically?
Are machines? Inanimate objects? Where are the people, the actors? If they are not materially part of the process, how can the process be valued?
How can the people be blamed?

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The hundred questions interconnect. What is there to value, ethically speaking, with the political? They lead to the “Who are these bastards?” question, but to ask that is to step outside the political, to move towards retaking authority and responsibility over your own life and so to become ethical once more. What is there to value, ethically speaking, with the political?

The political is not about individuals, the individual is only seen as steamroller fodder, cannon fodder, a cross on a lottery ticket, as a taxpayer, customer, a unit on a balance sheet. The individual is precisely nothing. The wholesome apple thesis asserts that if the aggregate of politicians chose differently, the politics would become ethical. It would cease to be what it is. A what if...? argument By contrast, my concern is to describe politics as 1 find it, and not uncritically repeat the myth. With politics as we find it, even individual politicians count for nothing. The party machines rumble on, with or without them. This insignificance can be demonstrated by turning the questions asked at the start of this article:

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• The Torture Batons to Iraq Question: A (hypothetical) junior I minister discovered the government I was supplying torture batons to Saddam Hussain. He raised the mailer at a cabinet meeting. The I other ministers just laughed at him I and so he resigned in disgust.

  “There’s plenty more yes men I where you came from” the Prime I Minister told him, pressing the bell I under the table for the cabinet minister’s replacement to be sent up. If he believed in the ethical, why was he sitting there in the first place?

• The Ambulance Roulette Question: Due to the crisis in NHS funding, an Orpington man was helicoptered 187 miles to Leeds (7^th March 1995) and died in the intensive are unit 12,935 of his fellow Orpingtonians voted Tory in 1992. How much are this man’s neighbours to blame for his death?

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If the gap is as wide as the Atlantic, it doesn’t matter how many boys slick their fingers in the dyke, the water still pours through the gap.

Attempts to value the political are hopeless because we either end up blaming the individuals (who arc only components) or we end up blaming everybody, and therefore nobody. So long as The Machine has enough components in place, it will continue to function and resignations by cabinet ministers or angry letters in the Orpington Advertiser will not change that. When they all resign at the same time, the political will no longer exist and the question will change. As it is. The Machine goes on “There are plenty more yes men where you came from”... We cannot value this system, we cannot value a network of abstractions. Such attempts at value become so diluted they are meaningless. It doesn’t make sense to try to apply collective value judgements in this way.

THE POLITICAL AS MACHINE

The political is like a machine which has been built up over the centuries by people with different objectives. We cannot claim that they had a single, coherent overview of the political. If today the political has any practical, observed coherence this is a consequence of what it is and not a product of the will of the system-builders. What is this coherence? — Mere survival of the Machine, the exercising and enhancement of its power. The fact these zombies can march in the same direction, and march in step says nothing about whether their corporate destination is any good. The destination is incidental, their marching the important fact. The system is likened to a colony of bacteria but we cannot apply ethical judgements to this, either. Here we must note that mee survival is not an ethical attribute.

A colony of bacteria, a virus, a corpse of marching men — these are analogies of the system, but the best analogy of all is the idea of the system as something like a vast Artificial Intelligence computer programme designed to simulate the mind. People insist on applying what I call the Organic Metaphor’ to the political. These think that politics is alive, that it has a mind, or that it is a moral entity to which we can pin moral judgements. They speak about The Body Politic’ but all of this is delusional thinking. It doesn’t work like that. The political is not a moral entity but a mechanism of control, it works through power — the annihilation of value.

THE MYTH OF OFFICE

The myth of office asserts that the politician or bureaucrat etc is not responsible. The Machine is the actor, the official merely the component They use uniforms, funny clothes, insignias, ritual and titles to distance themselves as individuals. There is a distinction being drawn between the person as official and person as private individual. Yet people insist on trying to apply the ethical to the political, and blame the person of the official for the part they have played in the running of The Machine.

When the apologists try to blame an official or component, they claim that the individual is responsible and should not have surrendered his / her will to that political regime. The apologist draws a distinction between a particular regime, and political systems in general, thereby avoiding the denial of the divine right of authority (properly constituted) to govern. In so far as people ever get round to punishing these miscreants, we hang them as individuals (something apart from the political system). The officials are stripped of their offices and ranks, their uniforms. The Nazi Slate beat the rap al Nuremberg. Only individuals were hung. The state itself goes on marching, still asserting its divine right to rule. Indeed, the idea of political trials itself reinforces that dominance and subservience mindset. Outside, the vast mass of people remain spectators, abdicating their responsibilities.

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GOVERNMENT IS NOT A PERSON

When we make ethical judgements about government, there is no one there to praise or blame. When we try to judge individuals for the actions of states, we ignore the political and it escapes our grasp. The political is impervious to ethical criticism.

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How can we apply an ethical judgement to the political? The individuals are blamed for thou- actions in supporting it but that is something apart from the system itself. Yet, I find something intuitively unsatisfactory in my view that the political and ethical are completely separate. One is left with the distinct feeling that the political ought to be ethical, and people do persist in trying to apply the ethical to it.

Ethical judgements about politics might lake the following form: ‘This political system is evil’ or That political party is ethically flawed’ or This policy decision is morally wrong’. Yet it is meaningless to try to apply an ethical judgement to an entire system. We end up scapegoating a few individuals while ignoring the mass of passive ‘wrongdoers’. They escape unpunished. The concentration camp commandant would be nothing without the industrial and technological systems of mass murder behind him. What are the workers in the English armaments factory doing about those electric torture batons they are making for Saddam?

THE ETHICAL VOID MERELY RECORDING A DETERMINATION TO USE WORDS IN A CERTAIN WAY

Perhaps one of the strongest objections to my argument is that all of this is simply a problem of terminology and classification. In declaring the ethical to be divorced from the political I am simply recording my determination to use these words in different ways. Other people may choose to use these words in different ways. Other people may choose to apply them differently and so to make ethical judgements about the political: e.g. “Sexual or racial discrimination is morally wrong”.

Against this objection that to describe politics as an ethical; void merely records a definitional wish to use words in a certain way, I say that for the people who choose otherwise, we still have this problem of applying he ethical to the political, and this is a real problem, not just one of words. The activist who wishes to reduce discrimination almost certainly will be ethically motivated, but so far as that person remains inside the ethical s/he will be unable to engage with the political. In stepping into the public arena and trying to act against prejudice, the activist will run into political problems, legal problems, problems of local authority funding, getting their case across to the media, the balance of parties in the local council chamber etc. All of these not only refuse to recognise the ethical but annihilate it. “This is not a court of justice, but of law”. I return to a restatement of my thesis: The political assumes a mode of authority which cancels the ethical.

ETHICS BY THE BACK DOOR -ALL THIS IS REALLY ONLY A DISGUISED ETHICAL CRITIQUE OF POLITICS

The last objection I wish to deal with here is the view that all of this — my position that the political and the ethical are fundamentally divorced — is simply a disguised ethical critique of politics. Politicians ought to submit themselves to the ethical and the fact they do not is a powerful ethical criticism of politics. “Dear Mr Portillo, please be moral...” Political parties and countries ought to enshrine moral principles in their constitutions. Against this I say the objection fails to take account of what politics is. We need to avoid this type of wishful thinking. The ethics by the back door objection depends on politics as it ought be and not politics as it is.

If I am correct here, my view has consequences. No individual with any claim to participate in the ethical can have any part in the political. We need something different, something self-determined but which recognises the importance of the ethical. What then? you say. Are you an anarchist — But of course...

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AN ASSERTION OF MORAL RESPONSIBILITY

To understand that politics is an ethical void is a call for us to take back control over our own lives. We cannot value The Machine but we can and must find value in our own lives.

He means it — do you? (1997)

Author: John Zerzan

Source: Running On Emptiness (Book).
<archive.org/details/JohnZerzan-RunningOnEmptiness>

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Today opposition is anarchist or it is non-existent. This is the barest minimum coherence in the struggle against an engulfing totality.

And while ten years ago the milieu generally called anti-authoritarian was largely syndicalist, those leftist residues are fading out altogether. Very few now find a vista of work and production at all liberatory.

As the smell of this false and rotting order rises to the heavens, registering an unprecedented toll on all living beings, faith in the whole modern world evaporates. Industrialism and its ensemble looks like it has been a very bad idea, sort of a wrong turn begun still earlier. Civilization itself, with its logic of domestication and destruction, seems untenable.

After all, is there anyone who is happy in this desolation?

Lovely new indicators of how it is panning out include increasing selfmutilation among the young and murder of children by their own parents. Somehow a society that is steadily more impersonal, cynical, deskilled, boring, artificial, depressing, suicide-prompting, used up, drug- ridden, ugly, anxiety-causing and futureless brings a questioning as to why it has come to this/what’s it all about.

Leftism with its superficial program is nearly extinct. Its adherents have folded their tents of manipulation and, in some cases, moved on to far more interesting adventures.

Anarchism, if not yet anarchy, is the only scene going, even if the blackout on the subject is still in effect. As if to match the accelerating decomposition of society and displacement of life at large, determined resistance is also metamorphosing with some rapidity. The rout of the left, following the swiftly declining prestige of History, Progress, and techno-salvation, is only one development. The old militants, with their ethic of sacrifice and order, their commitment to economy and exchange, are already fixed on the museum shelves of partial revolt. Enter the Unabomber and a new line is being drawn. This time the bohemian schiz-fluxers, Green yuppies, hobbyist anarcho-journalists, condescending organizers of the poor, hip nihilo-aesthetes and all the other “anarchists” who thought their pretentious pastimes would go on unchallenged indefinitely—well, it’s time to pick which side you’re on. It may be that here also is a Rubicon from which there will be no turning back.

Some, no doubt, would prefer to wait for a perfect victim. Many would like to unlearn what they know of the invasive and unchallenged violence generated everywhere by the prevailing order—in order to condemn the Unabomber’s counter-terror.

But here is the person and the challenge before us.

Anarchists! One more effort if you would be enemies of this long nightmare!

Ted Kaczynski is no Madman (1998)

Author: Richard Tate

Source:
Wildcat. <www.wildcat.international/ted.html>

Date: Jan 23, 1998.

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“The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.... We therefore advocate a revolution against the industrial system. Its object will be to overthrow not governments but the economic and technological basis of the present society.” — Ted Kaczynski, Industrial Society And Its Future. This is not the statement of a lunatic.

“Now we’ll have plenty of time to watch the Superbowl”. This comment by Ted Kaczynski’s lawyer, Quin Denvir, following Kaczynski’s plea of guilty to the Unabomber charges in return for life imprisonment without parole, summarizes the quality of his defense team.

Denvir, and his other representative Judy Clarke, complained that they had problems controlling their client. They deliberately prevented sympathetic people from meeting Ted by losing letters addressed to him. They refused to take his instructions. Of course, they could say that they were only trying to save his life, by pursuing a mental illness defense, the only strategy which could have avoided the death penalty given the evidence for the prosecution. But Ted Kaczynski is not insane. He is perfectly capable of weighing up the risks in a political defense.

The whining of the media, the judge, the defense and the prosecution all pointed to Ted’s success in terrifying them with the prospect of a political trial.

“The system is playing right into his hand... Except for the necessity to accord him a fair trial, the best solution would be to bundle him off to the federal prison equivalent of his Montana cabin and keep him there, incommunicado, until he dies a natural death. No speeches. No parading around the courtroom. No Internet sites. No book contracts. Nothing.” — San Francisco Examiner, January 14.

He was not allowed to use the services of Tony Serra, a brilliant lawyer who would have defended him for nothing. He was not even allowed to defend himself.

This article by Michael Mello, a prominent public defender, explains why Ted should have been entitled to the defense of his choosing, comparing him with abolitionist John Brown.

After he was diagnosed as schizophrenic, the government would have found it difficult to execute him. Ted was not some mentally retarded defendant like the one Clinton had executed in Arkansas to boost his election chances in 1992. Here was a man who could put the system on trial.

There was virtually no chance of the jury letting him off. But he would have made the prosecution squirm, perhaps forcing them to give a better plea bargain than the one he ended up with. He should have retained the right to appeal the legality of the original search of his cabin.

“Clearly, the government recognized the risk that a jury wouldn’t have sentenced Kaczynski to death, even if he had been convicted, because of sympathy or pity for him or his family. The Feds also probably understood that any conviction and/or death sentence for Kaczynski would have been terribly suspect and subject to reversal because of doubts about his competency to stand trial and the judge’s refusal to allow him to represent himself.” — Andrew Cohen on Fox News.

But in any case, Ted has achieved an outstanding victory. Industrial Society And Its Future is now one of the most famous documents of our time. There is no question that his strategy — conducting a campaign of sporadic bombings against active promoters of industrial development — has worked. Civilization is being questioned. This is not to deny or minimize the ethical problems involved in sending devices through the post, whereby innocent people could obviously get hurt. We do not entirely agree with the Unabomber manifesto, but we are part of the same general trend — the struggle for the future, against industrial society.

Re-visiting Uncle Ted (2011)

Subtitle: A look at Technological Slavery: The collected writings of Theodore J. Kaczynski a.k.a. “The Unabomber”

Author: Panagiotis Evangelos Nasios Tsolkas

Date: 2011/05/15

Source:
<www.earthfirstnews.wordpress.com/2011/05/15/review-a-look-at-technological-slavery-the-collected-writings-of-theodore-j-kaczynski>

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AUGUST 14, 1983: “The fifth of August I began a hike to the east. I got to my hidden camp that I have in a gulch beyond what I call “Diagonal Gulch.” I stayed there through the following day, August 6. I felt the peace of the forest there. But there are few huckleberries there, and though there are deer, there is very little small game. Furthermore, it had been a long time since I had seen the beautiful and isolated plateau where the various branches of Trout Creek originate. So I decided to take off for that area on the 7^th of August. A little after crossing the roads in the neighborhood of Crater Mountain I began to hear chain saws; the sound seemed to be coming from the upper reaches of Rooster Bill Creek. I assumed they were cutting trees; I didn’t like it but I thought I would be able to avoid such things when I got onto the plateau. Walking across the hillsides on my way there, I saw down below me a new road that had not been there previously, and that appeared to cross one of the ridges that close in Stemple Creek. This made me feel a little sick. Nevertheless, I went on to the plateau. What I found there broke my heart. The plateau was criss-crossed with new roads, broad and well-made for roads of that kind. The plateau is ruined forever. The only thing that could save it now would be the collapse of the technological society. I couldn’t bear it. That was the best and most beautiful and isolated place around here and I have wonderful memories of it.

One road passed within a couple of hundred feet of a lovely spot where I camped for a long time a few years ago and passed many happy hours. Full of grief and rage I went back and camped by South Fork Humbug Creek.

The next day I started for my home cabin. My route took me past a beautiful spot, a favorite place of mine where there was a spring of pure water that could safely be drunk without boiling. I stopped and said a kind of prayer to the spirit of the spring. It was a prayer in which I swore that I would take revenge for what was being done to the forest.

“[...] and then I returned home as quickly as I could because I have something to do!”

Many of us grew up with a wild-ass grandpa or grumpy uncle. Whether they were preaching conspiracy theories, needling us to invest in gold or embarrassing us in front of our friends by gleefully threatening to get revenge on the techno-industrial empire, they usually made quite an impression. Ted Kaczynski might just be that relative to those of us in the radical ecological movement. Over the past few decades, some have cringed at his sight and others have cheered, but we’ve all had to ask ourselves, is he really related to us?!

Did he subscribe to the Earth First! Journal? Didn’t I see him eating at the Food Not Bombs picnic once? Was he at the Rendezvous? (or did he get kicked out?!)

While the speculations could take on mythical proportions, the only evidence to surface suggested an obscure relation at best—despite some persistent attempts to connect him to an organized movement. For example, in April ’96, Tampa Tribune columnist Cal Thomas reported, “Kaczynski went to an Earth First! meeting at the University of Montana where a hit list of enemies of the environment was distributed.” Thomas, a former publicist for Jerry Falwell, conflated both allegations: the meeting was actually a Native Forest Network conference and the list came from Live Wild or Die, not the Earth First! Journal (although when FBI agents raided Kaczynski’s Montana cabin, they claimed to find copies of both).

According to the Center for Consumer Freedom’s famous Earth First!-bashing website, WWW.ACTIVISTCASH.COM, the FBI said Earth First! Journal was one of Kaczynski’s favorite periodicals. As annoying as these industry fronts tend to be, their sources are occassionally solid. In this case, a 1998 court transcript stated that a letter titled “Suggestion for Earth First!ers from FC” (said to be the Unabomber’s pseudonym) was found in Kaczynski’s cabin, which read in part: “As for the Mosser bombing, our attention was called to Burston-Marsteller [sic] by an article that appeared in the Earth First! Litha [sic].” The transcript also states “the cabin searchers also found a copy of a letter to a radical environmental group known as Earth First!, and that letter began: ‘This is a message from FC. The F.B.I. calls us Unabom. We are the people who recently assassinated the president of the California Forestry Association.’”

In the Beltane ’96 issue of the Journal, co-editor Leslie Hemstreet authored a thorough rebuttal to media accusations following Ted’s bust, primarily by distancing the movement from him to the greatest extent possible (including inaccuracies). The editorial collective went as far as filing the first stages of a lawsuit against the FBI, which was mostly fruitless. With the Journal bearing the brunt of the pressure, the angle taken by the Eugene collective at the time is understandable. The anxiety, fear and confusion show most clearly when Hemstreet asserts that “to even identify the Unabomber as environmentally motivated is stretching it. Of his 26 victims, only two had any environmental connection.” [see A Few FC Targets]

Little else ever appeared about Uncle Ted in the Journal— no analysis of targets, no critique of the manifesto—but plenty of whispers, rants and arguments could be heard around our campfires. In June ’99, a former Journal editor, Theresa Kintz, attempted to break the silence by conducting the first interview with Ted Kaczynski; however, at that year’s Round River Rendezvous in Colorado the movement rejected the idea of running it. Instead Anarchy: a Journal of Desire Armed and the UK edition of Green Anarchist published it jointly. Neither of which was, for better or worse, constrained by public process or movement accountability.

In response to Kintz’s question about his influences, Kaczynski responded: “I read Edward Abbey in mid-eighties and that was one of the things that gave me the idea that, ‘yeah, there are other people out there that have the same attitudes that I do.’ I read The Monkeywrench Gang, I think it was. But what first motivated me wasn’t anything I read. I just got mad seeing the machines ripping up the woods and so forth...”

To reflect on three decades of the ecological resistance movement while ignoring the dialogue about industrial civilization that Ted’s endeavors sparked would be negligent. For the most part, however, Earth First! has shied away from any open discussion about Kaczynski. At what point can we move on past that?

Feral House Publishers offered a guiding step in their opening note to the readers of Technological Slavery by reminding us that even technophiles like Bill Joy, founder of Sun Microsystems, have been able to express their regard for Ted’s writing:

“Like many of my colleagues, I felt that I could easily have been the Unabomber’s next target. He is clearly a Luddite, but simply saying this does not dismiss his argument… As difficult as it is for me to acknowledge, I saw some merit in the reasoning in [Kaczysnki’s writing].”

About the book

Technological Slavery opens with an author’s note from Ted: “I expect it to be advertised and promoted in ways that I will find offensive. Moreover, I do not like the new title…” (Editions Xenia published a first edition in French in 2008 as The Road to Revolution, as well as a limited release of 400 copies in English). Ted again expresses his deep dissatisfaction with the book in the first line of his forward.

In case you don’t get the picture, Uncle Ted is bitter. Despite the author’s discouragement, I kept reading. And I’m glad I did. In fact, Technological Slavery took me back to age 17 and my telemarketing cubicle job, where I read his words for the first time. A dozen years later, it still evoked much of the same intellectual stimulation (only now I was staring at a computer in the EF! Journal office).

Speaking of EF!, only four pages into his book EF! makes its first appearance. According to Ted, “Whenever a movement of resistance begins to emerge, these leftists (or whatever you choose to call them) come swarming to it like flies to honey until they outnumber the original members, take it over, and turn it into just another leftist faction, thereby emasculating it. The history of Earth First! provides an elegant example of this process.” He reiterates this idea throughout the book in various letters to correspondents.

Uncle Ted obviously preferred the overly-masculine, right-wing patriarchal days of Earth First!. Even if the reality is that his preferred faction couldn’t hold its own in the Earth First! movement and much of it has since gone status quo, obsessing over pro-border policy and population, does that mean we should dismiss everything he has to say? I don’t think so. In my opinion, it’s far past time we take a deeper look for ourselves.

Industrial Society’s Future

In his famous treatise to the developed world, “Industrial Society and Its Future” (ISAIF), originally published in the New York Times and Washington Post in exchange for an end to the bombing, there were some thoughtful, basic tips on strategy:

“The line of conflict should be drawn between the mass of the people and the power holding elite of industrial society… For example, it would be bad strategy for the revolutionaries to condemn Americans for their habits of consumption. Instead the average American should be portrayed as a victim of the advertising and marketing industry, which has suckered him into buying a lot of junk that he doesn’t need and that is a very poor compensation for his lost freedom. Either approach is consistent with the facts… As a matter of strategy one should generally avoid blaming the public.”

“One should think twice before encouraging any other social conflict than that between the power holding elite (which wields technology) and the general public (over which technology exerts its power)… [which] may actually encourage technologization, because each side in such a conflict wants to use technological power to gain advantages over its adversary. This is clearly seen in rivalries between nations. It also appears in ethnic conflicts within nations,” (from paragraphs 190 and 191).

Uncle Ted must have had doubts about the efficacy of some of his strategies (like 204 and 205 where he encourages revolutionaries to have as many babies as possible!), because he then says in 206: “If experience indicates that some of the recommendations made in the foregoing paragraphs are not going to give good results, then those recommendations should be discarded.”

A Critique of Anarcho-Primitivism

The book’s next essay, “The Truth About Primitive Life”, is in agreement with what Ted sees as the philosophical position of the green anarchist tendency, but focuses on a deep challenge to what he sees as the tamed, mythical version of anthropology it bases itself on, concluding “you can’t build an effective revolutionary movement out of soft-headed dreamers, lazies, and charlatans. You have to have tough-minded, realistic, practical people, and people of that kind don’t need the anarcho-primitivists’ mushy utopian myth.” And he backs up his position with a whopping 313 footnotes to his anthropology research.

The System’s Neatest Trick and Hit Where It Hurts

In this short essay, Uncle Ted points out what “the System” is, and how it turns rebellion to its own advantage. He observes that “commentators like Rush Limbaugh help the process by ranting against activists: Seeing that they have made someone angry fosters the activists’ illusion that they are rebelling.”

He warns that university intellectuals also play an important role in carrying out the system’s trick: “Though they like to fancy themselves independent thinkers, the intellectuals are (allowing for individual exceptions) the most oversocialized. The most conformist, the tamest and most domesticated. The most pampered, dependent, and spineless group in America today.”

Kaczynski’s grudge with Universities might have something to do with throwing away his youth by going to Harvard at 16, not to mention the CIA-sponsored MKULTRA studies he endured there in which he was subjected to extremely stressful and prolonged psychological attack, strapped into a chair and connected to electrodes that monitored physiological reactions, while facing bright lights and a two-way mirror… Just saying.

Uncle T also waxes briefly on the topic of veganism, vivsection and animal rights: “…opposition to mistreatment of animals may be useful to the System: Because a vegan diet is more efficient in terms of resource-utilization than a carnivorous one is, veganism, if widely adopted, will help to ease the burden placed on the Earth’s limited resources by the growth of the human population. But activists’ insistence on ending the use of animals in scientific experiments is squarely in conflict with the system’s needs, since for the foreseeable future there is not likely to be any workable substitute for living animals as research subjects.”

In “Hit Where it Hurts”(originally published in Green Anarchy, 2002), he continues on a similar theme, responding to a letter from an animal liberationist in Denmark: “I agree that keeping wild animals in cages is intolerable, and that putting an end to such practices is a noble cause. But there are many other noble causes, such as preventing traffic accidents, providing shelter for the homeless, recycling, or helping old people cross the street. Yet no one is foolish enough to mistake these for revolutionary activities, or to imagine that they do anything to weaken the system.”

Only half that original article made it into the Feral House book (at Ted’s request). The article in its entirety can be found in Green Anarchy or – gasp! online. It is interesting for his identification of the vital organs of the “System” for revolutionary targeting, “...but only [for] legal forms of protest and resistance,” of course.

Excerpts from letters

Although the book’s republished letters and essays are repetitive, some excerpts lend themselves to interesting dialogue and insight about Ted’s life and the choices he made.

From his letter to MK (a Turkish anarchist), October 2003: “Because I found modern life absolutely unacceptable, I grew increasingly hopeless until, at the age of 24, I arrived at a kind of crisis: I felt so miserable that I didn’t care whether I lived or died. But when I reached that point, a sudden change took place: I realized that if I didn’t care whether I lived or died, then I didn’t need to fear the consequences of anything I might do. Therefore I could do anything I wanted. I was free! That was the great turningpoint in my life because it was then that I acquired courage, which has remained with me ever since. It was at that time, too, that I became certain that I would soon go to live in the wild, no matter what the consequences. I spent two years teaching at the University of California in order to save some money, then I resigned my position and went to look for a place to live in the forest.”

“Whatever philosophical or moral rationalizations people may invent to explain their belief that violence is wrong, the real reason for that belief is that they have unconsciously absorbed the system’s propaganda.” … “Green anarchist, anarcho-primitivists, and so forth (the ‘GA Movement’) have fallen under such heavy influence from the left that their rebellion against civilization has to a great extent been neutralized. Instead of rebelling against the values of civilization, they have adopted many civilized values themselves and have constructed an imaginary picture of primitive societies that embodies these civilized values.” … “I don’ t mean that there is anything wrong with gender equality, kindness to animals, tolerance of homosexuality, or the like. But these values have no relevance to the effort to eliminate technological civilization. They are not revolutionary values. An effective revolutionary movement will have to adopt instead the hard values of primitive societies, such as skill, selfdiscipline, honesty, physical and mental stamina, intolerance of externally-imposed restraints, capacity to endure physical pain, and, above all, courage.”

In another excerpt, from FC to Scientific American, 1995, Ted had this to say: “The engineers who initiated the industrial revolution can be forgiven for not having anticipated its negative consequences. But the harm caused by technological progress is by this time sufficiently apparent so that to continue to promote it is grossly irresponsible.”

The (Coming) Road to Revolution

These two essays, “The Coming Revolution” and “The Road to Revolution”, have the same premise. The former was originally written in Spanish (no publication date or location is provided). It opens with a quote from Albert Einstein: “Our entire much-praised technological progress, and civilization generally, could be compared to an ax in the hand of a pathological criminal.”

Kaczynski makes the case that a “great revolution is brewing”, likening it to revolutionary social changes in centuries past. “The values linked with so-called progress—that is, with immoderate economic and technological growth—were those that in challenging the values of the old regimes created the tensions that led to the French and Russian Revolutions. The values linked with ‘progress’ have now become the values of another domineering regime: the technoindustrial system that rules the world today.”

Disappointingly, the second version of the essay opens with a quote from Mao Tsetung. Yes, Ted, the revolution is not a dinner party. We know. Maybe not a vegan pot luck either. But where does that leave us—those who feel affinity with much of Ted’s convictions but who engage in the Earth First! movement because of its decentralization, non-hierarchal structure and rejection of a narrow strategy? I know what Ted would say, but by the end of the book, I was ready to know what the rest of y’all think.

Why now?

The final chapter explains the reason for the timing of the book’s publication. Ted runs through several pages of legalese explaining his efforts as a jailhouse attorney to defend his rights to maintain control of his writing under First Amendment protections and, essentially, losing. The rest of his property was sold with the money going towards restitution of injured recipients of his bombs. Now his papers may also go to auction.

In 2000, his enemies’ quest for profit took a strange path. The SF Weekly reported that Gellen, who lost his left arm as a result of one of Kaczynski’s mail bombs, took Kaczynski to court in an effort to repossess his property and offer it for sale to the highest bidder. “There were interested parties who were willing to pay more than $1 million dollars for the property,” claims Julian Hill, lawyer for timber industry executive and Unabomber victim, Dick Gellen, “and instead it was sold for only $7,500. That $1 million should have gone to the families of his victims.”

The property was sold to Joy Richards, with whom Ted maintained correspondence for ten years. She told the Sacramento Bee that she hoped to eventually live on the property, build a residence and to preserve it. “His ideas are what really matter, and I thought his ideas were brilliant.”

She passed away in 2006. His book is dedicated to her memory, with love.

When Kintz asked him in 1999 if he was afraid of losing his mind in prison, Kaczynski replied:

“No, what worries me is that I might in a sense adapt to this environment and come to be comfortable here and not resent it anymore. And I am afraid that as the years go by that I may forget, I may begin to lose my memories of the mountains and the woods and that’s what really worries me, that I might lose those memories, and lose that sense of contact with wild nature in general. But I am not afraid they are going to break my spirit.”

Ted is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole. Letters can be sent to: Ted Kaczynski #04475–046, US Pen-Admin Max Facility, P.O. Box 8500, Florence, CO 81226.

A Few FC Targets

In all, 16 bombs—which injured 23 people and killed three—were attributed to Kaczynski. All but the first few contained the initials “FC”, which Ted later asserted stood for “Freedom Club.”

Timber Industry

In April, 1995, a bomb killed Gilbert Murray, president of the timber industry lobbying group California Forestry Association. Murray was described as a “Wise Use Leader” by Ron Arnold’s Center for Defense of Free Enterprise.

Corporate Public Relations

In 1994, Burson-Marsteller (BM) executive Thomas J. Mosser was killed by a mail bomb sent to his North Caldwell, New Jersey home. In a letter to the New York Times FC stated that the company “helped Exxon clean up its public image after the Exxon Valdez incident” and, more importantly, because “its business is the development of techniques for manipulating people’s attitudes.”

BM is one of the largest public relations agencies in the world. It is now a unit of Young & Rubicam, owned by WPP Group. The firm has 58 whollyowned and 45 affiliated offices in 59 countries across six continents.

BM works with global producers and marketers of petroleum products in training their employees how to respond to crises and working on key communications of specific crisis situations such as oil spills and serious accidents. Among those served by BM are Shell, Exxon Mobil, Conoco, Chevron, BP and Gulf.

BM represented Union Carbide, jointly responsible for the Bhopal disaster in 1984 that killed some 2,000 people. After the Three Mile Island accident of 1979 became the most significant accident in the history of US commercial nuclear power generation, BM conducted public relations work for the plant’s manufacturers, Babcock & Wilcox.

The Indonesian government paid BM millions to help improve the country’s human rights and environmental image, following the 1991 Santa Cruz massacre in East Timor. They campaigned against human rights organizations at the behest of the last Argentine military dictatorship and conducted a PR campaign in the Czech Republic on behalf of TVX Gold, which threatened the Sumava Mountains.

In 1991 BM began a PR campaign for Dow-Corning to handle the growing public health controversy over silicone breast implants.

Most recently, BM represented Blackwater USA following a 2007 incident in which Blackwater employees killed 17 Iraqi civilians.

Computers, Robotics

In May of 1982 Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee received an FC bomb, injuring university secretary Janet Smith. Vanderbuilt’s Institute for Space and Defense Electronics housed in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, is the largest such academic facility in the world.

In 1985, a California computer store owner was killed by a bomb placed in the parking lot of his store. A similar attack against a computer store occurred in Salt Lake City, Utah 1987.

Electrical Engineering

Diogenes J. Angelakos who served for four decades as a professor at the Berkeley campus, had his labs attacked by bombs twice, in 1982 and 1985. Angelakos served as director of the Electronics Research Laboratory at Berkeley from 1964 to 1985 and was widely credited with building one of the university’s largest research laboratories. He was recognized as one of the world’s foremost experts on scattering of electromagnetic waves, as well as on the design of wireless antennas. One injured him, the other, a Berkeley graduate student.

In 1993, David Hillel Gelernter, a neoconservative professor of computer science at Yale University, was critically injured. He helped found the company Mirror Worlds Technologies based on his book Mirror Worlds: or the Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox...How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean, 1992. Among his other published books are Americanism: The Fourth Great Western Religion, 2007; Machine Beauty: Elegance and the Heart of Technology, 1998; The Muse in the Machine: Computerizing the Poetry of Human Thought, 1994.

Geneticists

June 1993, geneticist Charles Epstein from University of California, San Francisco was injured by a bomb. Gelernter’ brother, a behavioral geneticist, received a “You are next” call. Geneticist Phillip Sharp at Massachusetts Institute of Technology also received a threatening letter two years later. Kaczynski wrote a letter to the New York Times claiming that FC was responsible for the attacks and threats.

Behavioral Sciences

James V. McConnell was also a target of FC. In 1985, he was injured along with his research assistant Nicklaus Suino by a bomb, disguised as a manuscript, sent to his house in Ann Arbor, Michigan. McConnell was a biologist and animal psychologist known for his research on planarians. His paper “Memory transfer through cannibalism in planarians” , published in the Journal of Neuropsychiatry, reported that when planarians conditioned to respond to a stimulus were ground up and fed to other planarians, the recipients learned to respond to the stimulus faster than a control group did. His findings were eventually completely discredited. He also believed that memory was chemically based and that in the future humanity would be programmed by drugs, commenting that he would rather be “a programmer than a programee.”

Ted Kaczynski and Why He Matters (2016)

Author: John Jacobi

Date: 6^th May, 2016

Source:
<www.dark-mountain.net/ted-kaczynski-and-why-he-matters>

The Unabomber Affair

Ted Kaczynski, also known as the ‘Unabomber’, is a US terrorist known for his 17-year bombing campaign as the terror group ‘FC’, which targeted individuals involved in technical fields like computing and genetics.

In early 1995, the New York Times received a communique from FC in the mail:

This is a message from FC…we are getting tired of making bombs. It’s no fun having to spend all your evenings and weekends preparing dangerous mixtures, filing trigger mechanisms out of scraps of metal or searching the sierras for a place isolated enough to test a bomb. So we offer a bargain.

The ‘bargain’ offered by the group was simple: publish its manifesto, and it will stop sending bombs.

The manifesto, entitled Industrial Society and Its Future, was a 35,000 word polemic detailing the threats that industrial society posed to freedom and wild Nature. At the crux of the document’s analysis was a concept called ‘the power process’, or an innate human need to engage in autonomous goal setting and achievement. Despite this psychological necessity, ‘in modern industrial society, only minimal effort is necessary to satisfy one’s physical needs.’ As a result of the mismatch between human need and industrial conditions, modern life is rife with depression, helplessness, and despair, and although some people can offset these side-effects with ‘surrogate activities’, the manifesto says that these are often undignifying, menial tasks. Interestingly, these concepts have numerous parallels in contemporary psychology, the most notable similar idea being Martin Seligman’s concept of ‘learned helplessness’.

Ultimately, the manifesto extols the autonomy of individuals and small groups from the control of technology and large organisations, and it offers the hunter-gatherer way of life as a vision of what that kind of autonomy might look like. Still, the end of the manifesto only argues for the practical possibility of revolution against industry (rather than a complete return to hunter-gatherer life), and it outlines some steps to form a movement capable of carrying out that revolution.

Up until FC tried to force the publication of the manifesto, the FBI had referred to the group as the work of a single terrorist. But the proposal put the agency in a difficult situation: it had a policy of not negotiating with terrorists, but was in no position to reject this one’s offer. By that time, the FBI had been searching for the Unabomber for 17 years and had little to nothing to show for it. Much of what they did have to work with, such as the profile that pinned him as a blue collar airline worker, turned out to be complete nonsense. Even the famous FBI sketch looked nothing like the man they later captured.

Worse for the FBI, the Unabomber was determined to strike until they agreed to the offer. Shortly after sending their proposal, FC sent a bomb to a timber industry lobbyist, who became the third death in the bombing campaign. Later, two Nobel Prize winners received letters warning them that ‘it would be beneficial to [their] health to stop [their] research in genetics.’ Finally, to make the offer even more convincing, FC sent a hoax bomb threat that delayed two flights and shut down California’s airmail system for almost the entire day.

Hoping that it would allow someone to identify the perpetrator, the FBI encouraged the New York Times and Washington Post to publish FC’s manifesto. The two newspapers took the advice, and the manifesto was soon published as an eight-page insert to the Washington Post, with publication costs partly funded by the Times. From that point on, the agency officially classified the Unabomber as ‘serial killer rather than a terrorist with a political agenda, as was originally hypothesized.’

The FBI was right about the manifesto: it did help someone identify the author. Shortly after the work’s publication, David Kaczynski contacted a lawyer to share his suspicion that the Unabomber was his brother, Ted. After examining the submitted evidence, the FBI raided the man’s home, finding everything they needed to put him on trial for the crimes of the Unabomber.

When Kaczynski was apprehended, he looked dirty and dishevelled, with an unwashed body and torn clothing and hair that reached in every direction. It was a typical look for Montana men in the winter, but it nevertheless solidified the media image of the man as a lone wingnut. In reality, Kaczynski was very likely a genius. He was accepted into Harvard at the age of 16, later went to the University of Michigan for his Masters degree, and then taught at Berkeley as an assistant professor. His doctoral thesis solved several difficult problems relating to ‘boundary functions’, which even Kaczynski’s maths professor, George Piranian, could not figure out. ‘It’s not enough to say he was smart’, Piranian said.

But Kaczynski decided that university life was not for him, and he soon left Berkeley to build his own cabin in a remote area of Montana, where he lived without running water and electricity. One FBI investigator said to the man upon his arrest, ‘I really envy your way of life up here.’

After a circus of a trial, Kaczynski ended up pleading guilty to the Unabomber crimes, and in turn he was given a life sentence and sent off to the Supermax facility in Florence, Colorado. Today, he diligently responds to letters he receives, and he is working on publishing an upcoming book, Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How.

The Response to Kaczynski

The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life expectancy of those of us who live in ‘advanced’ countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world. The continued development of technology will worsen the situation.

— Industrial Society and Its Future, paragraph 1

Although it is easy to dismiss Kaczynski as crazy, a wingnut, beneath consideration, support for his ideas is not hard to come by. Critiques of technology similar to those outlined in the manifesto have long been available underneath the names of famous thinkers. In 1863, for example, British essayist Samuel Butler wrote in ‘Darwin Among Machines‘:

Day by day, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them…the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants…Our opinion is that war to the death should be instantly proclaimed against them. Every machine of every sort should be destroyed by the well-wisher of his species.

Consider how eerily close Butler’s statement is to the recent warnings about artificial intelligence made by Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, and Elon Musk (all of whom nonetheless continue to advocate for technical progress).

The response to the manifesto, while certainly not without a fair share of criticism, included many positive comments from well-adapted and successful members of society. One of these people, Bill Joy, was the inventor of the Java programming language and the founder of Sun Microsystems. In other words, he could easily have received a bomb from FC. Yet in 2000 Joy wrote his now-famous essay ‘Why the future doesn’t need us‘, in which he describes his troubled surprise when he read an incisive passage on the threat new technologies pose — only to discover that the passage was pulled from the Unabomber Manifesto. ‘He is clearly a Luddite,’ Joy writes, ‘but simply saying this does not dismiss his argument; as difficult as it is for me to acknowledge, I saw some merit in [his] reasoning…’

Other reactions have been similar. Journalist and science writer Robert Wright famously stated, ‘There’s a little bit of the Unabomber in most of us.’

And political scientist and UCLA professor James Q. Wilson, the man behind the famous ‘broken windows theory’, wrote in the New York Times that the manifesto was ‘a carefully reasoned, artfully written paper… If it is the work of a madman, then the writings of many political philosophers — Jean Jacques Rousseau, Tom Paine, Karl Marx — are scarcely more sane.’

Perhaps most striking, however, was how much the general public expressed adoration and fascination with the Unabomber. ‘I’ve never seen the likes of this,’ said one criminologist, ‘Millions of people … seem to identify in some way with him.’ Kaczynski was arrested and on trial during the early age of the internet, and fan websites quickly popped up all over, including the famous Usenet group, alt.fan.unabomber. Stickers appeared that said ‘Ted Kaczynski has a posse’; t-shirts appeared that had the famous Unabomber sketch and the word ‘dad’ printed on it; and many organisations contributed to a nationwide ‘Unabomber for President’ campaign. ‘Don’t blame me,’ one campaign ad said, ‘I voted for the Unabomber.’

Even now Kaczynski has his open advocates. For example, David Skrbina, a philosophy of technology professor at the University of Michigan, corresponded with Kaczynski for years, edited a book by him, and has written several essays supporting genuine engagement with Kaczynski’s works. One of the essays is provocatively entitled ‘A Revolutionary for Our Times‘.

Despite all this, Kaczynski’s ideas are some of the least-talked-about aspects of the Unabomber affair. Instead, people tend to focus on the man’s family drama, his early life, or various conspiracy theories, such as the idea that Kaczynski was the Zodiac Killer. When his ideas finally do appear for consideration, they are oftentimes dismissed with inane comments on the ‘academic style’ of the manifesto or the unoriginality of its critiques of technology. Even more often, the ideas are dismissed with a statement on Kaczynski’s mental state: ‘He’s crazy, a wingnut, beneath consideration’. And then, of course, there are the moral arguments, some asserting that the violence was unjustified for the stated or assumed goals, and some asserting that violence is never OK.

All of these arguments are terrible ones. Not only do they fail to address the central points that Kaczynski raises, most of the time they are unfounded or flat out wrong, and at least some of the time the arguments’ logical conclusions would be uncomfortable or appalling to the very people who argue them. Let’s take a closer look.

Was Kaczynski insane?

The industrial-technological system may survive or it may break down. If it survives, it MAY eventually achieve a low level of physical and psychological suffering, but only after passing through a long and very painful period of adjustment and only at the cost of permanently reducing human beings and many other living organisms to engineered products and mere cogs in the social machine. Furthermore, if the system survives, the consequences will be inevitable: There is no way of reforming or modifying the system so as to prevent it from depriving people of dignity and autonomy.

— Industrial Society and Its Future, paragraph 2

Most of the evidence used to show that Kaczynski is insane comes from his chaotic and pitiful trial. But this idea is has been thoroughly debunked. For one thing, every person I know of has confirmed that Kaczynski is not obviously insane, and most have suggested the opposite, including the journalist William Finnegan, many of his college professors, many individuals who encountered him in Montana, professor David Skrbina, and even the judge during Kaczynski’s trial.

On 7 January 1998, Judge Burrell said:

I find him to be lucid, calm. He presents himself in an intelligent manner. In my opinion, he has a keen understanding of the issues. He has already seemed focused on the issues in his contact with me. His mannerisms and his eye contact have been appropriate. I know there’s a conflict in the medical evidence as to whether his conduct, at least in the past, has been controlled by any or some mental ailment, but I’ve seen nothing during my contact with him that appears to be a manifestation of any such ailment. If anything is present, I cannot detect it.

Indeed, all throughout the Unabomber trial, Kaczynski’s mental health was a recurring point of tension between him and his lawyers. Kaczynski absolutely did not want to be portrayed as insane, even anticipating in his pre-arrest journals that the media would attempt to paint him as ‘a sickie’ if he was ever captured. In true Orwellian fashion, this fear was used as one of the main pieces of evidence that Kaczynski was insane, and the only other primary piece of evidence was his political views and writings. For example, in her psychological report Dr Sally Johnson cites Kaczynski’s ‘clearly organized belief system that he was being harassed and harmed by modern technology’.

Several factors compelled almost all involved parties to declare Kaczynski insane, most of all an ethical one. Kaczynski’s defence team was bound by personal or, at the least, professional ethics that compelled them to avoid the death penalty at all costs. The only sure-fire way to do this, they believed, was to present Kaczynski’s mental health as a mitigating factor. William Finnegan wrote in The New Yorker, ‘There was never any real doubt that Kaczynski was legally sane. But his lawyers believed that the degree of his culpability for his crimes could be made to depend on his psychiatric classification — the more serious the diagnosis, the less his culpability.’

Because of Kaczynski’s aversion to the strategy and his defence team’s repeated dishonesty, Kaczynski requested to be represented by the civil rights lawyer Tony Serra, but Judge Burrell denied his request. When the man then requested to represent himself, Burrell ordered a psychological evaluation to see if he was fit to stand trial. The result was an evaluation conducted by Dr Sally Johnson, who, as was mentioned, cited Kaczynski’s belief system, rejection of being mentally ill, and family troubles all as evidence that the man had a psychological disorder. Johnson concluded with a ‘provisional diagnosis’ of paranoid schizophrenia that was ‘in remission’ at the time, and she declared Kaczynski fit to stand trial. Still, stricken with a sudden case of amnesia regarding the man’s sanity, Burrell denied Kaczynski’s request.

The only other party to assert that Kaczynski was insane was his family, specifically his brother, who turned him in, and his brother’s wife. But they, like the legal defence team, expressed a deep desire to keep Kaczynski from receiving the death penalty. Furthermore, given that the Kaczynski family had rather strained relationships, their testimony is at worst unreliable and at the least insufficient for declaring Kaczynski insane.

Closely related to the idea that Kaczynski was insane is the idea that Kaczynski is a sadist. But the man showed explicit compassion for at least some of the people who were harmed or could have been harmed from the FC bombs. In one letter to the New York Times, FC wrote:

…we will say that we are not insensitive to the pain caused by our bombings.

A bomb package that we mailed to computer scientist Patrick Fischer injured his secretary when she opened it. We certainly regret that. And when we were young and comparatively reckless we were much more careless in selecting targets than we are now. For instance, in one case we attempted unsuccessfully to blow up an airliner. The idea was to kill a lot of business people who we assumed would constitute the majority of the passengers. But of course some of the passengers likely would have been innocent people — maybe kids, or some working stiff going to see his sick grandmother. We’re glad now that that attempt failed.

Similarly, in his journals, one can observe Kaczynski struggling with his feelings toward John Hauser, who opened a bomb left in UC Berkeley’s computer science building. He wrote that he was ‘worried about [the] possibility that some young kid, undergrad, not even computer science major, might get it.’ He also wrote ‘I must admit I feel badly about having crippled this man’s arm. It has been bothering me a good deal.’ Still, he goes on to argue that the bombing was justified, as Hauser was a pilot and aspiring to be an astronaut, ‘a typical member of the technician class’. Later in his journals he mentioned Hauser again to say, ‘I am no longer bothered by this guy partly because I just “got over it” with time, partly because his aspiration was so ignoble.’

In other words, in Kaczynski’s eyes his ideology legitimated his killings, not his personal psychological satisfaction. Thus, in order to understand and face the real implications of the UNABOM case, we need to come to an understanding of the worldview presented or hinted at in Kaczynski’s writings, including the infamous Manifesto.

Was Kaczynski’s ideology opportunistic?

If the system breaks down the consequences will still be very painful. But the bigger the system grows the more disastrous the results of its breakdown will be, so if it is to break down it had best break down sooner rather than later.

— Industrial Society and Its Future, paragraph 3

Two arguments challenge the idea that Kaczynski justified (and continues to justify) his actions in light of his ideology. One, an implicit argument that functions as backup to the ‘Kaczynski was crazy’ thesis, claims that the entire ideology was a ruse, just a way to fulfil the man’s own emotional angst. The other, explicitly argued for most prominently by the journalist Alston Chase, argues that the ideology had two parts: a libertarian one and an environmentalist one. The latter, Chase suggests, was used to draw support for the real source of Kaczynski’s political motivation, a love of freedom.

The first is actually a reasonable argument, given the limited journal excerpts and information the public was given about Kaczynski. The man often made statements in his journals that, standing alone, suggested that his own emotional satisfaction was all that motivated his killings. These statements were a huge part of the case against him.

For example, about Hauser, the aspiring astronaut, Kaczynski wrote, ‘But do not get the idea that I regret what I did. Relief of frustrated anger outweighs uncomfortable conscience. I would do it all over again.’ Pulled from the context of the entire passage, some of it mentioned above, it certainly sounds as if Kaczynski was only interested in emotional relief. But if the context already given was not enough, consider what Kaczynski wrote immediately after:

So many failures with feeble ineffective bombs was driving me desperate with frustration. Have to get revenge for all the wild country being fucked up by the system….Recently I camped in a paradise like glacial cirque. At evening, beautiful singing of birds was ruined by the obscene roar of jet planes. Then I laughed at the idea of having any compunction about crippling an airplane pilot.

Once again, ideology plays a fundamental role in Kaczynski’s justification. This passage should inspire some empathy from anyone who has seen a wild place they loved become torn apart for development, a part of the man’s motivation that is rarely ever talked about. We hear about his bombs and his dirty clothes, but we have not been shown the forests that he loved or the rivers that he drank from. In at least two interviews, both of which have received suspiciously little attention, Kaczynski gives us a glimpse into the kind of life he lead in Montana. One passage in particular stands out:

“This is kind of personal,” he begins by saying, and I ask if he wants me to turn off the tape. He says “no, I can tell you about it. While I was living in the woods I sort of invented some gods for myself” and he laughs. “Not that I believed in these things intellectually, but they were ideas that sort of corresponded with some of the feelings I had. I think the first one I invented was Grandfather Rabbit. You know the snowshoe rabbits were my main source of meat during the winters. I had spent a lot of time learning what they do and following their tracks all around before I could get close enough to shoot them. Sometimes you would track a rabbit around and around and then the tracks disappear. You can’t figure out where that rabbit went and lose the trail. I invented a myth for myself, that this was the Grandfather Rabbit, the grandfather who was responsible for the existence of all other rabbits. He was able to disappear, that is why you couldn’t catch him and why you would never see him… Every time I shot a snowshoe rabbit, I would always say ‘thank you Grandfather Rabbit.’”

In another story, he explains how one of his favourite spots in the Montana forests was developed, leaving him heartbroken — the event that finally pushed him over the edge. The story sounds very similar to the ones that conservationists and environmentalists tell to explain why they fight. Indeed, Kaczynski is really only different from these wilderness-loving men and women because he killed in response to the devastation he saw. This makes all the difference for some people, but, as we will see, this is probably missing the point.

Nonetheless, Kaczynski does often speak of his actions in terms of ‘revenge’, which is, after all, an emotional justification. But again, most of these entries are still accompanied by ideological justification.

For example, in 1972, six years before the first Unabomber package, Kaczynski wrote ‘About a year and a half ago I planned to murder a scientist — as a means of revenge against organized society in general and the technological establishment in particular…’

Later, after he had sabotaged some motorcycles and logging equipment around where he lived, he wrote that his acts were

particularly satisfying because it was an immediate and precisely directed response to the provocation. Contrast it with the revenge I attempted for the jet noise. I long felt frustrated anger against the planes. After complicated preparation I succeeded in injuring the President of United Air Lines, but he was only one of a vast army of people who directly and indirectly were responsible for the jets. So the revenge was long delayed, vaguely directed and inadequate to the provocation. Thus it felt good to be able, for a change, to strike back immediately and directly.

It seems that a better explanation for Kaczynski’s framework for ‘revenge’ has more to do with hopelessness than anything else. For years before he began his bombings, the man and his brother spoke to each other about the topics in the manifesto. This was, after all, the reason he was captured. Kaczynski also wrote about technological society, freedom, and wild Nature around that time and earlier. When he quit his position at Berkeley, he told his boss, ‘I’m tired of teaching engineers math that is going to be used for destroying the environment.’ And in 1970 he even wrote a letter to the editor of a local newspaper, in which he criticises one man’s suggestion that environmental problems are caused by excessive individual freedoms and could be remedied with collectivism. ‘Actually,’ Kaczynski writes, ‘most of the problems are direct or indirect results of the activities of large organizations — corporations and governments.’

In other words, it’s highly unlikely that Kaczynski did not hold dear at least a significant portion of his ideology, and ‘getting revenge’ was the least he believed he could do in response to the intense devastation that industry was (and is) causing. That he had to justify his actions in emotional terms was not a sign of his emotional instability, but of his perceived isolation, the sense that by himself he could not do much to truly make the difference that was required. This was perhaps the primary reason Kaczynski engaged in isolated acts of sabotage and terrorism — all the more reason to reiterate that Kaczynski is not alone, and neither are those wilderness-loving men and women who feel hopeless now.

If anyone doubts that this was the case, let him read the very last entry in Kaczynski’s journal before he was caught: ‘My opposition to the technological society now is less a matter of a bitter and sullen revenge than formerly’, he wrote. ‘I now have more of a sense of mission.’

Chase suggests that Kaczynski was indeed passionate about a portion of his ideology — but the environmentalist part, he says, was just pure opportunism. However, among other things, this assertion fails to take into account Kaczynski’s professed love for Nature in his early life and journals, all more than enough to show that Chase was far off the mark. Nonetheless, one quote from his journals stands out as particularly damning:

…I don’t even believe in the cult of nature-worshippers or wilderness-worshippers (I am perfectly ready to litter in parts of the woods that are of no use to me—I often throw cans in logged-over areas or in places much frequented by people; I don’t find wilderness particularly healthy physically; I don’t hesitate to poach).

However, in order to understand this entry, one has to understand the particular strand of environmentalism that Kaczynski was influenced by, which was best embodied by a towering figure in the environmentalist movement, Edward Abbey, and the characters in Abbey’s most famous work, The Monkey Wrench Gang. The Monkey Wrench Gang is a novel about a group of rambunctious, beer-loving rednecks who, frustrated with the industrial development of the American West, began committing acts of sabotage, such as cutting down billboards, pulling up survey stakes, and pouring sugar into the tanks of heavy equipment vehicles. The book inspired several groups, including (probably) the Bolt Weevils, who sabotaged power-line development in Minnesota during the 1970s, and Earth First!, a movement started in the 1980s and known for tactics like those described in Abbey’s novel.

Abbey, who consistently lived up to the ‘rednecks for wilderness’ image, once made a statement very similar to Kaczynski’s: ‘Of course I litter the public highway,’ the man said. ‘Every chance I get. After all, it’s not the beer cans that are ugly; it’s the highway that is ugly.’

The goal of the Ed Abbey kind of environmentalism (if you can call it that) is intimately linked to the notions of wildness and freedom. Further regulations are not the solution, but part of the problem. That industry and complex society require so much restriction on the freedom of individuals and small groups is a good reason to love wilderness and throw out the stuff destroying it.

The sentiment isn’t all that uncommon. In one stand-up routine George Carlin talked (or ranted, as he does) about Earth Day, environmentalism, and ‘saving the planet’:

I’m tired of these self-righteous environmentalists, these white, bourgeois liberals who think the only thing wrong with this country is that there aren’t enough bicycle paths. People trying to make the world safe for their Volvos. Besides, environmentalists don’t give a shit about the planet, they don’t care about the planet… You know what they’re interested in? A clean place to live. Their own habitat. They’re worried that someday in the future they might be personally inconvenienced… Besides, there is nothing wrong with the planet… The planet is fine. The people are fucked. Difference. Difference… The planet is doing fine, been here four and half billion years. Ever think about the arithmetic? Planet has been here four and a half billion years. We’ve been here, what, 100,000, maybe 200,000, and we’ve only been engaged in heavy industry for a little over 200 years. 200 years versus four and a half billion. And we have the conceit to think somehow we’re a threat?… The planet isn’t going anywhere — we are. We’re going away. Pack your shit folks.

Another comedian, Louis C. K., expresses a similar sentiment:

One day I threw a candy wrapper on the street. I didn’t do it [maliciously], like ‘Take that shit, street.’ I did it cuz I was like, you know, shaking, I wanted the candy. Anyway I was with a friend who said to me, ‘You just littered on the street. Don’t you care about the environment?’ And I thought about it and, you know what, I was like, ‘This isn’t the environment. This is New York City. This is not the environment. This is where people live. New York City is not the environment, New York City is a giant piece of litter. It’s like the giantest — next to Mexico City, the shittiest piece of litter… So if you have a piece of litter, what’re you supposed to do with it? You throw it in the pile of litter! Cuz if you don’t, if you put it in a receptacle, then it gets collected, and it gets taken to a dump, and a landfill, and then it goes on a boat, and it goes out and gets dumped in the ocean and some dolphin wears it as a hat on its face — for ten years.

In other words, Kaczynski’s ideology isn’t the urban environmentalism pushed by liberals and activists. It’s a love of Nature that’s inseparable from a love of freedom, very much the kind of love that non-activist nature-lovers profess already. But this is an uncomfortable fact to recognise, of course, because it makes Kaczynski’s ideology dangerous.

What about the deaths?

We therefore advocate a revolution against the industrial system. This revolution may or may not make use of violence; it may be sudden or it may be a relatively gradual process spanning a few decades. We can’t predict any of that. But we do outline in a very general way the measures that those who hate the industrial system should take in order to prepare the way for a revolution against that form of society. This is not to be a POLITICAL revolution. Its object will be to overthrow not governments but the economic and technological basis of the present society.

— Industrial Society and Its Future, paragraph 4

One argument I have avoided addressing until now is that Kaczynski’s actions were wrong because killing is wrong. This is, most importantly, because the moral status of Kaczynski’s terrorism does not discount his ideas, which can stand or fall on their own. Indeed, many have argued that point exactly, including Bill Joy and Skrbina. Another reason, though, is that anyone who truly believes the argument can’t be persuaded otherwise. If killing is always wrong, of course Kaczynski’s actions are wrong.

But I don’t think many people actually believe that killing is always wrong. In an unpublished text, Kaczynski mentions that only three kinds of people make this argument: conformists, cowards, and saints. ‘The first two,’ he writes, ‘are beneath contempt and we need not say anything more about them.’ But the saints, he says, could be useful to ‘keep alive the ideal of kindness and compassion’, especially since a revolution would likely be a pretty ugly affair. And he’s right. While some certainly do oppose all violence on principle, the majority of people pushing for nonviolence fall into one of the first two categories, and there’s no real way to respond to any of them.

In other words, most people recognise that it is sometimes okay to kill. Self-defence is the most obvious example, but there are arguable justifications for all kinds of wars, assassinations, and other violence. It seems that the problem many people have with Kaczynski isn’t necessarily that he killed, but that his killings were unjustified in some way. And, whether reasonable or not, because Kaczynski’s violence and its legitimacy is one of the most important considerations for people assessing the Unabomber affair, dismissing it as ‘not relevant to the legitimacy of the ideas’ is insufficient. So I will investigate Kaczynski’s violence and various possible justifications for it.

Bear in mind, however, that discussions about the legitimacy of violence depend heavily on inarguable moral principles, so past a certain point, much of the discussion around political violence is beyond consideration to some readers. It is up to them, then, to decide what kind of violence is morally legitimate. Here I only examine whether Kaczynski’s actions were justifiable assuming his arguments are valid.

Finally, note that this discussion is bogged down by an important consideration: the goal of Kaczynski’s terrorism. He states in one FC communique, ‘Don’t think that we are sadists or thrill-seekers or that we have adopted terrorism lightly. Though we are young we are not hot-heads. We have become terrorists only after the most earnest consideration.’ Indeed, anyone who has interacted with Kaczynski knows that the man, meticulous to the utmost degree, was probably well aware of what he was doing. Still, we are left with only two ends. First, of course, is the implicit end of revolution. And second is the explicit statement in several places that FC was interested in ‘propagating anti-industrial ideas’ and getting its message before the public. So we might ask the question: was Kaczynski justified in killing to propagate anti-industrial ideas for the long-term goal of revolution?

Perhaps the FC bombings were unjustified because Kaczynski had other means available: democracy, free speech, the mass media, etc. Anyone who makes this argument, however, should also be prepared to argue that political violence is acceptable if all of the justifiable avenues of political expression are closed. I’m fairly confident that when this fact is brought up, many people would default to the ‘nonviolence’ position described above. But assuming that a person is prepared to accept the implication of his argument, he ought to consider a few facts.

For one thing, Kaczynski was well-aware of these avenues of political expression. The 1971 essay used as evidence against him actually concluded with a programme for legal action. It suggested that people form an organisation that would lobby for the government to defund scientific and technical research, which was the only ‘halfway plausible’ solution Kaczynski could think of at the time. Yet by the end of the essay it is clear that the solution is very plainly implausible, which would no doubt leave anyone concerned with the cited issues feeling rather hopeless. Furthermore, if one accepts the arguments given in the manifesto (especially paragraphs 99–132), revolution, even if extremely improbable, is still the only solution likely to solve the problems in a satisfying manner. According to those arguments, other political avenues are closed. This does not necessarily mean that Kaczynski’s bombings were justified, but it does mean that, assuming he was right, they should be considered justified only insofar as they promote revolution.

And, as uncomfortable as this might make some, the man’s terrorism was profoundly successful at getting his ideas in front of an enormous population. Not only was the manifesto published, in full, by the New York Times and Washington Post, it was also published in numerous smaller publications; it was placed all over the internet, including one of the first internet portals, Time Warner’s Pathfinder; it was stored in government and legal databases and archives that would ensure his ideas lived on indefinitely; and it elicited the insight and commentary of countless intellectuals and public figures, among other things. In all, the manifesto reached an astoundingly large audience, which mostly consisted of everyday Americans, and which ensured that even if no individual or group took the ideas seriously immediately after publication, it would remain stored in countless places, waiting for potential future actors to be inspired. As of yet, no one has suggested a plausible alternative that Kaczynski could have taken to publish his text with the same amount of influence, response, and immortality that he achieved through his terrorism. As Skrbina puts it, ‘In the end, we are appalled by Kaczynski — because he won.’

Still, some say, no revolution has happened yet, so his actions can’t have been that effective. Yet the manifesto was published and Kaczynski caught only 20 years ago. Considering that 69 years separated the publication of The Communist Manifesto and the beginning of the Russian Revolution, it is unreasonable to demand that Kaczynski’s Manifesto already have made as large an impact in a third of the time. Furthermore, there is reason to believe that revolution is in the air. In particular, some of Kaczynski’s political partners in Spain have been fairly active. And although Kaczynski has broken contact with anarcho-primitivists because of ideological disagreements, he’s had a demonstrable impact on many in the anarcho-primitivist and green anarchist movements, who were largely to blame for the 1999 Seattle Riots. He’s also had a demonstrable impact on Derrick Jensen, a co-founder of Deep Green Resistance, and Earth First!, a radical environmentalist organisation known for direct action tactics and ‘monkeywrenching’ (the one based on Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang). Again, Kaczynski and his political associates have strong ideological disagreements with all of these groups, but that he remains so influential within them is a testament to how powerful of a force his ideas are.

Others might argue that even if Kaczynski’s terrorism was successful, it is not necessarily justified. And this is true. But the manifesto argues that if there is no revolution, the consequences of technological development will be absolutely disastrous. If Kaczynski is correct, and if his terrorism was successful at furthering his revolution, then the consequences of his violence might very well have been miniscule compared to the threat. We see this kind of logic at work all the time. The military drops bombs on houses with civilians inside because it’s more important to kill the terrorists in there with them. Grandfather Smith shoots a potentially dangerous dog in the head because it’s more important for his grandchildren to be safe. And so on. Given that Kaczynski believed that what is at stake is our freedom and our wild Earth, it’s not hard to see why he saw his violence as justifiable.

Finally, some people argue that Kaczynski’s specific targets were unjustified. They argue that he was indiscriminate and his targets innocent, and that this was what made his violence illegitimate. But Kaczynski was far from indiscriminate. In fact, he has stated repeatedly that he deplores indiscriminate violence.

More to the point, almost all of his targets were, as he puts it ‘typical member[s] of the technician class’, who include ‘scientists, engineers, corporation executives, politicians, and so forth who consciously and intentionally promote technological progress and economic growth.’ These people are ‘criminals of the worst kind’, and Kaczynski predicts that a revolutionary movement is likely to demand that they be punished.

Again, the idea itself can be challenged, but on his own terms was Kaczynski justified? He was, mostly, except for three instances, and the FC communiques express explicit regret for two of them — see the quote above concerning Patrick Fischer’s secretary and the airliner. The third instance was the bomb placed in the University of Utah’s computer science building. If it would have succeeded at going off, the bomb would have lit an entire hallway on fire and trapped students in their classrooms — certainly the level of indiscriminate violence that Kaczynski deplored. Put shortly, not even Kaczynski could have offered justification for this. He did, however, mention it in passing in one FC communique:

We would not want anyone to think that we have any desire to hurt professors who study archaeology, history, literature or harmless stuff like that. The people we are out to get are the scientists and engineers, especially in critical fields like computers and genetics. As for the bomb planted in the Business School at the U. of Utah, that was a botched operation. We won’t say how or why it was botched because we don’t want to give the FBI any clues. No one was hurt by that bomb.

Other than those three instances, Kaczynski’s targets are not surprising in light of his ideology, how responsible he perceived the technician class as being for ongoing technological problems, and his ideas on retribution. Dr Charles Epstein, for example, was a world famous geneticist, Percy Wood the president of United Airlines, and Diogenes Angelakos an important researcher in the field of micro- and electromagnetic waves. And although nowadays, in the age of smartphones, people may not understand why Kaczynski targeted computer store owners (twice), he did so about four years before the birth of the internet, at a time when personal computers were still the territory of big businesses, universities, and nerds. Computer stores at the time were mostly renting out whole sets of personal computers for businessmen and universities, making them an infrastructural target in line with Kaczynski’s other actions.

There’s also the question of why Kaczynski targeted universities and university professors rather than individuals who had more obvious and tangible impacts on technical development. Part of this, as FC explained in a communique, was strategic. Universities had weaker security and professors less of a reason to be wary of a suspicious package than large businesses and businessmen. But universities are no less responsible for technical development than big businesses, and in many ways they are more so. University research laboratories and university funding are the backbone of much of the research being done in the fields of genetics, artificial intelligence, and biotechnology. As one paper put it, ‘Since the 1970s, research universities have been widely recognized as the core of this nation’s science and technology system.’ Furthermore, according to the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, every university targeted by the Unabomber is classified as as having ‘very high research activity’, the highest classification for a research university. This clearly makes the universities rational targets for the Unabomber.

Final thoughts

All this is not to say that Kaczynski was correct about revolution. As Skrbina says of the manifesto, ‘The logic is sound. However, we are free to challenge any of the premises.’ But a discussion about revolution would require actually engaging with Kaczynski’s ideas, not dismissing them, as has been the dominant response so far. Such engagement ultimately brings us to the final argument: that Kaczynski’s bombings were unjustified because his ideas were wrong.

This argument is the strongest one that can be made against Kaczynski, as it cuts off the strength of his analysis. Those who really want to challenge the ideas presented in the manifesto will have to provide real evidence against his premises, such as the idea that the good of technology cannot be separated from the bad; and they will have to provide an alternative value set that challenges the idea that freedom and wild Nature are primary.

I say ‘have to’ because it truly is no longer optional for anyone who disagrees with Kaczynski. The idea that Kaczynski is crazy simply doesn’t hold, and the ideology presented in the manifesto makes a lot of sense to a lot of people. Furthermore, the issues cited in the manifesto are real and pressing. Artificial intelligence, biotechnology, climate change, antibiotic resistance, mass surveillance, the sixth mass extinction — all are rapidly taking centre stage in world politics, and with them the scientists and engineers, whom the general public is coming to realise have an inordinate amount of control over the circumstances of modern life. It’s very likely that some form of anti-technology populism is going to replace what was once an anti-government populism; whereas the main objects of disdain were once politicians, the new objects of disdain will be scientists and engineers, as well as technology itself.

Already we can see this sentiment in action. In the past few years we’ve seen TV shows about wilderness and outdoor-living, often with a tinge of anti-technological sentiment, skyrocket in popularity: Mountain Men, Naked and Afraid, and Duck Dynasty are just a few of the more popular examples. Books, too, like Wild by Cheryl Strayed or A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson, push a similar message of freedom, a search for purpose and meaning, and spiritual renewal in a decadent, materialistic world.

On the other end, complaints about ubiquitous technology are becoming popular as well. TV shows like Black Mirror convey a fundamental scepticism toward the idea of technical progress, and books like A Short History of Progress, Our Final Hour, and so on are all questioning, to various degrees, the technologies that dominate the modern world.

Most notably, it’s pushing into the political arena. Environmentalist sentiments are extremely popular today, and young people feel the need to address problems like climate change and the sixth mass extinction. Furthermore, because of the way the problems are being ignored, sometimes by economic necessity, radicalisation occurs easily among environmentalists. In fact, the FBI lists environmental terrorism, not Islamic terrorism, as the top domestic terrorism threat in the US.

If that isn’t enough, all this is taking place on a stage that is largely being determined and shaped by the environmental problems that take centre stage in Kaczynski’s thought. Much of the instability that is occurring and will occur in the coming years is and will be magnified tenfold by climate change. One headline in the New York Times states ‘Researchers Link Syrian Conflict to a Drought Made Worse by Climate Change’. A headline in the Guardian reads ‘Global warming could create 150 million ‘climate refugees’ by 2050.’ And the WHO has issued increasingly urgent warnings concerning antimicrobial resistance, which could, combined with modern transportation systems and densely populated city living, cause a global pandemic, or at least a very formidable one.

Clearly, Kaczynski was right about a lot, and unless someone offers a good challenge and alternative to his core ideas, the notion of ‘freedom in wild Nature’ is only going to continue attracting adherents. Dismissing the man as crazy, a wingnut, beneath consideration — well, that’s not going to work for much longer.

Incidentally, I agree with Kaczynski. Wild Nature matters, industry is destroying it, and the only real way out is the collapse of industry. For sure, various aspects of the manifesto deserve criticism, especially the parts regarding strategy, but on those three points Kaczynski is on solid ground.

In regards to the man’s actions, I find myself in a tough spot. I absolutely do not condone indiscriminate violence like the kind practised by radical Islamists, and I tend to agree with Lenin that even highly targeted acts of individual violence are a terrible tactic for a revolutionary movement. A primary role of revolutionaries is to spread social values, and terroristic acts of violence are usually a sign of weakness on this front. Furthermore, while those supporting growth and progress are indeed ‘criminals of the worst kind’, I have a hunch that Kaczynski overestimated how responsible some individuals are for our current predicament.

Nevertheless, it’s hard to overstate how successful Kaczynski was, and the man has a tendency to be right about things, mostly because he is (almost overly) meticulous about every detail. No doubt he applied the same attention to detail to his 17-year campaign. So as incompatible as it is with my views generally, it’s hard to say that Kaczynski could have done something else and achieved his goals as successfully. Still, even he is quick to tell those writing him letters that he does not think another Unabomber would be helpful for a revolutionary effort. The primary work to be done now, he says, is building cores of committed individuals who can sustain a revolutionary movement. And as I said already, I agree. In any case, I ultimately still defend my initial statement about Kaczynski’s violence: the ideas stand and fall on their own, and right now they’re still standing.

I am not arguing that everyone will come to the same conclusions. Indeed, those who simply don’t care about wild Nature and the freedom found in it won’t be very moved by the manifesto; neither will those who are convinced that technical development can be controlled by humans. But the piece is worth the read, and with complete conviction I can say that it is not only the best way to engage with the Unabomber affair, but that it is one of the most important ways to engage with the problems of our modern world.

Ishi and the War Against Civilization (2016)

Author: Chahta-Ima

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The emergence of eco-extremism and the tactics that it uses have caused much controversy in radical circles internationally. The criticisms that the Individualists Tending Toward the Wild (ITS in Spanish) and other aligned groups have received range from accusations of ultraradicalism to insanity. One major aspect of this polemic centers around the idea of indiscriminate attack. Inflamed rhetoric on the part of eco-extremists may exacerbate hostility towards these tactics among the already skeptical.

From how some talk, however, it would seem that ITS or other eco-extremists are engaged in the bombing of pre-schools and nursing homes, that is, random targets, rather than targets of specific importance to the techno-industrial system (laboratories, government ministries, etc.) It must be admitted right off the bat that many who engage in polemics against eco-extremism have an a priori negative bias against any argument no matter how well crafted, as they themselves admit that the maintenance of civilization and domestication is in their own self-interest. There is no point in arguing with them. On the other hand, eco-extremism still has much to say, so those who have ears to hear, let them hear.

The more sympathetic would ask why ITS and its allies feel that they must “double down” on the idea of indiscriminate attack. Why harm the people you are trying to help? In other words, civilization and the destruction that it unleashes upon the world are the fault of a small section of modern society, and we must focus on convincing the vast majority that is not at fault in order to have the balance of forces needed to overcome the evils that presently beset us. Aside from that, it’s just bad form. It’s understandable that “bad things” happen even in well-planned actions. The least that those who carry them out can do is say that they’re sorry. That’s just good manners. It’s better, as some Chilean anarchists did recently, to explode noise bombs at four in the morning when no one is around in order to express “solidarity” with whoever international anarchism has been asked to pray for… I mean, express solidarity with this week. But if you have to do something, the least that you can do is minimize harm and express regret if something goes amiss (but mostly you should do nothing…)

Of course eco-extremism rejects these objections as childish and hypocritical. Are these people expressing their moral superiority while playing with fire crackers in the middle of the night and then dedicating it to someone halfway around the world for no apparent reason? Do they want a cookie or a sticker for being such well-behaved children? Eco-extremism will readily admit that devout anarchism is more pious and holier than it is. It doesn’t want its help anyway. If left-leaning anarchists want to win the popularity contest in the insane asylum of civilization, by all means eco-extremism forfeits. Congratulations in advance.

There have been lectures to eco-extremists that this is not how a war against civilization is waged. Very well, let’s go ahead and take a closer look at an actual war against civilization. The editors of Revista Regresión have already written an extensive series of articles on the Mixton Rebellion and the Chichimeca War that swept much of Mexico in the 16^th century, and we heartily recommend their work here. In this essay, we are going to augment their arguments by having recourse to a well-loved example of a “cuddly” and tragic Indian, Ishi, the last of the Yahi tribe in the state of California in the United States. In this exercise, we don’t pretend to know everything about those members of a Stone Age tribe that was hunted to extinction by the whites. Insofar as any historical analogy is flawed ipso facto, here we will at least try to take the lessons from how the Yahi fought, their attitudes toward civilization down to the last man, and how the shape of their culture problematizes anarchist and leftist values held over from the Enlightenment. This essay hopes to show that the Yahi’s war against civilization was also indiscriminate, devoid of Western values of solidarity and humanism, and was a duel to the death with domesticated European life. In other words, it is a model for how many eco-extremists see their own war carried out from their individuality. Ishi, far from being a model “noble savage”, was the last man standing in a war against the whites waged with the utmost amount of brutality and “criminality” that the now extinct Yahi could muster.

The Yahi

On August 29^th, 1911, a naked and starving brown man of around fifty years of age was found outside of a slaughterhouse near Oroville, California. The man was soon taken into custody and locked in the town jail. At first, no one could communicate with him in any known language. Soon, anthropologists arrived from San Francisco and found that the man was Yahi, the southernmost band of the Yana tribe, known locally as “Digger Indians” or “Mill Creek / Deer Creek Indians”. It had long been suspected that a small group of “wild Indians” still lived up in the inhospitable hill country of northern California. The anthropologists made arrangements to take the last “wild Indian” with them to San Francisco to live with them in their museum and teach them about his culture. Having found an (imperfect) Yana translator, they could not get a name from the Indian other than “Ishi”, the Yana word for man. And that is the name he was known by from the time of his capture until his death four and a half years later.

The Yahi were the southernmost branch of the larger tribe called the Yana found in northern California north of the town of Chico and the Sacramento River. Before the Europeans came, there were perhaps no more than 3,000 Yana on their traditional lands bordered by the Maidu to the south, the Wintu to the west, and the Shastan tribe to the north. They spoke a Hokan language the roots of which they shared with tribes throughout North America. As a tribe, the Yana in particular were much smaller than their neighbors, but still had a reputation for savagery towards their neighbors. There is also speculation that the Yana may have lived in the more productive lowlands first before being driven into the less hospitable hill country by their much larger and wealthier neighbors to the south in particular. As Theodora Kroeber comments in her book, Ishi in Two Worlds:

“The Yana were fewer in numbers and poorer in material comforts than were their valley neighbors, whom they regarded as soft, lax, and indifferent fighters. Like hill tribes in other parts of the world the Yana, too, were proud, courageous, resourceful, and swift, and were feared by the Maidu and Wintu peoples who lived in the lowlands.” (25)

M. Steven Shackley, in his essay, “The Stone Tool Technology of Ishi and the Yana,” elaborates concerning the Yahi relationship with their immediate neighbors:

“Because of having to live in such a marginal environment, the Yahi were never on good terms with any surrounding groups for any length of time. Regional archeological evidence suggests that speakers of Hokan languages, probably what could be called proto-Yana, lived in a much larger territory that included the upper Sacramento River Valley as well as the southern Cascade foothills until the ‘Penutian intrusion’ at some point 1000 years ago. These groups speaking Penutian languages were the ancestors of the Maidu and Wintu / Nomlaki who lived in the river valley at the time of Spanish and Anglo contact. Considerable violence is suggested at this time in the archeological record and the proto-Yana evidently did not move into a smaller, more marginal habitat willingly. Violence at the hands of outsiders was not new with the coming of the Anglos after 1850; the Yala had maintained long-term enmity relationships with the groups speaking Penutian languages who had forcibly removed them from bottom land and surrounded them for some time.” (Kroeber and Kroeber, 190)

In general, however, the Yana lived as did most tribes, clinging to the cycle of the seasons and with little societal stratification. The one major difference among the Yana is that they had sex-duality in language, that is, a different form of the Yana language was used by each sex. As Theodora Kroeber explains, “Infants of both sexes were cared for by the mother with an older sister or grandmother helping. Their first speech was that of the womans dialect, always spoken by women, and by men and boys in the presence of girls and women. As a boy grew older and was independent of nursing care, he was taken by his father or older brother or uncle wherever they were going, for longer and longer times each day. By the age of nine or ten, well before puberty, he was spending most of his waking hours in male company and was already sleeping in the men’s house. Thus, he learned his second language, the men’s dialect.” (29–30)

Kroeber explains that female speech was often a “clipped” speech, with male words having more syllables. Though women only used one dialect of the language, they knew the male variant as well. Theodora Kroeber speculates that far from being a linguistic curiosity, the strict division of speech may have made Yana culture far more intransigent to interference from the outside world. She writes, “There remains a psychological aspect of this language peculiarity which is not subject to proof, but which should not be dismissed. The surviving Yahi seem never to have lost their morale in their long and hopeless struggle to survive. Could the language have played a role in this continuing tension of moral strength? It had equipped its speakers with the habit of politeness, formality, and exact usage freighted with strong feeling for the importance of speaking and behaving in such and such a way and no other, a way which did not permit slovenliness either of speech or of behavior.” (ibid, 31)

Theodora Kroeber examines this aspect of Yana life later in her book when describing Ishi’s relationship with his first half-breed Yana interpreter, Sam Batwi:

“Ishi was a conservative whose forebearers had been men and women of rectitude; whose father and grandfather and uncles had carried with dignity and restraint the responsibilities of being principal men of their villages. Ishi’s own manners were good; Batwi’s smacked of the crudity of the frontier town, which was what he knew best and which, by the custom of the time, he knew from its least enlightened citizens… It may well be that upon first meeting, Ishi and Batwi recognized that they were from different strata of Yana society, Batwi’s the less well regarded…” (153)

Most of Yahi culture was very similar to the indigenous cultures of California in general. The efforts of the men were centered on hunting game and fishing in the streams, particularly for salmon as seasonally available. The efforts of the women focused on gathering, storing, and preparation of acorns and other plants as a part of their staple diet. Anthropologist Orin Starn, in his book, Ishi’s Brain: In Search of America’s Last “Wild” Indian, states the following concerning the Yahi’s conservatism in particular (71):

“Yet the Yahi were also an ingrown community set in their ways. They may have intermarried with neighboring tribes (and sometimes kidnapped women in the mid-nineteenth century), but outsiders were absorbed into the Yahi way. Elsewhere in Native America before Columbus, there was volatility and change – disease, war, migration, cultural invention, and adaptation. In the Southwest, for example, the legendary Anasazi cliff dwellers suddenly vanished in the twelfth century, for reasons still debated. Over time, however, the Yahi showed more continuity and stability than these other groups. Relatively little modification occurred in fashioning spear points, laying out a camp, pounding acorns, or other routines of Yahi existence. By all appearances, Ishi’s ancestors followed more or less the same way of life of many centuries.”

As they were far north, snow and lack of food were often factors in the lean times of winter. Nevertheless, the Yana knew how to thrive on the land which they were given, as Kroeber summarizes in her picture of Yana life and its relationship with the seasons:

“Winter was also the time for retelling the old history of the beginning of the world and how the animals and men were made, the time to hear over again the adventures of Coyote and Fox and Pine Marten, and the tale of Bear and Deer. So, sitting or lying close to the fire in the earth-covered house, and wrapped in warm rabbitskin blankets, with the rain falling outside and the show moon bringing a light fall down Waganupa as far even as Deer Creek, the Yana cycle of changing seasons completed another full turn. As the food baskets emptied, one by one, and game remained hidden and scarce, the Yana dreams turned to a time, not far off, when the earth would be covered with new clover. They felt an urge to be up and about in an awakening world, while far away in the great ocean which they had never seen, the shining salmon were racing toward the mouth of the Sacramento River, their goal the Yana’s own home streams.” (39)

Starn also cites a chant sung by Ishi to the anthropologists summarizing Yahi fatalism. (42): Rattlesnake will bite. Grizzly bear will bite and they will kill people. Let it be this way. Man will get hurt falling off rock. Man will fall down when gathering pine nuts. He’ll swim in the water, drift away, die. They’ll fall down a precipice. They’ll be struck by arrow points. They’ll be lost. He’ll have wood splinters get in his eye. They’ll be poisoned by bad men, They’ll be blind.

The Yahi at War

As could be expected, the invasion by Europeans could make even once peaceful tribes openly hostile to outright savage. As Sherburne F. Cook stated in his book, The Conflict Between the California Indian and White Civilization:

“The general effect of these events was to bring about a shift in the entire social horizon of the natives, particularly that of the Yokuts, Miwok, and Wappo. The disruptive forces, previously discussed with reference to their influence on population decline, had also the effect of generating an entirely new kind of civilization. To put it in essence: a peaceful, sedentary, highly localized group underwent conversion into a semiwarlike, seminomadic group. Obviously this process was by no means complete by 1848, nor did it affect all component parts of native masses equally. But its beginnings had become veryapparent.” (228)

Nevertheless, not all Indians reacted energetically to the white Anglo invasion. The Maidu, the valley neighbors of the Yahi immediately to the south, seemed to have not put up much of a fight to the onslaught of whites coming onto their land, as one Maidu writer, Marie Potts, indicated:

“As more white men came, they drained the land. Ranches developed so fast that we, having had this country of mountains and meadows to ourselves, were left to become either laborers or homeless wanderers. Being peaceable and intelligent people, we adapted the best we could. Sixty years later, when we awoke to our situation and presented our case to the United States Land Commission, our claim was settled for seventy-five cents an acre.

There were no uprisings in Maidu country. The white settlers who came to our area were glad to have Indian labor, and the records show some fair dealing.” (Potts, 10)

As indicated above, the Yahi were hostile even to the Indian tribes around them, and brutally so. As Ms. Potts states concerning the Yahi’s relations with the Maidu:

“The Mill Creeks (Yahi) were what we called ‘mean’ people. They had killed a lot of our people, even little babies. They watched, and when our men were away hunting or working they attacked the helpless women and children and old people. One man returned once from hunting to find his wife dead and their baby lying on the ground, eaten by ants. After the Mill Creeks had killed a number of whites, they found out that the whites were gathering volunteers for a raid to punish them. Therefore, they set up an alarm system to warn themselves, living as they were in the canyons of their rough, unproductive country.” (ibid, 41)

When the white settlers arrived in connection with the finding of gold in California in the late 1840’s and early 1850’s, they brought with them the modus operandi of “the only good Indian is a dead Indian”. There was no love lost between them and the Yahi, and the Yahi were persuaded to hone their austere and intransigent ways in a guerilla war of terror against the whites. Stephen Powers, writing in 1884, describes the Yahi in the following passage:

“If the Nozi are a peculiar people, these [the Yahi] are extraordinary; if the Nozi appear foreign to California, these are doubly foreign. They seem likely to present a spectacle which is without a parallel in human history – that of a barbaric race resisting civilization with arms in their hands, to the last man, and the last squaw, and the last pappoose… [They] inflicted cruel and awful tortures on their captives, like the Algonkin races. Whatever abominations the indigenous races may have perpetrated on the dead, torture of the living was essentially foreign to California.” (Heizer and Kroeber, 74)

The California anthropologist Alfred Kroeber further speculated concerning the warlike tendencies of the Yahi:

“Their warlike reputation may be due partly to the resistance offered to the whites by one or two of their bands. But whether the cause of this was actually a superior energy and courage or an unusual exasperation aided by a rough, still thinly populated, and easily defensible habitat is more doubtful. That they were feared by their neighbors, such as the Maidu, argues them a hungering body of mountaineers rather than a superior stock. The hill dweller has less to lose by fighting than the wealthy lowlander. He is also less exposed, and in time of need has better and more numerous refuges available. All through California, the plains peoples were the more peaceably inclined, although the stronger in numbers: the difference is one of situation reflected in culture, not in inborn quality.” (ibid, 161)

Jeremiah Curtin, a linguist studying California Indian tribes in the late 19^th century, describes the “renegade” nature of Ishi’s tribe:

“Certain Indians lived, or rather lurked, around Mill Creek, in wild places somewhat east of the Tehama and north of Chico. These Mill Creek Indians were fugitives; outlaws from other tribes, among others from the Yanas. To injure the latter, they went to the Yana country about the middle of August, 1864, and killed two white women, Mrs. Allen and Mrs. Jones. Four children were also left for dead by them, but the children recovered. After the murders the Mills Creeks returned home unnoticed, carrying various plundered articles with them.” (ibid, 72)

One chronicler detailed a Yahi atrocity in the following passage:

“The killing of the Hickok children was in June, 1862. The Hickok children, two girls and a boy were gathering blackberries on Rock Creek about three-quarters of a mile from their home when they were surrounded by a number of Indians. They first shot the oldest girl, she was seventeen years old. When found she was entirely nude. They then shot the younger girl, but she ran to Rock Creek and fell with her face in the water. They did not take her clothing as she was in full dress when found. Just then Tom Allen came upon the scene. He was hauling lumber for a man by the name of Keefer. They immediately attacked Allen. He was found scalped with his throat cut. Seventeen arrows had been shot in him and seven had gone partly through so that they had to be pulled out the opposite side. (ibid, 60)

Mrs. A. Thankful Carson, once a captive of the Mill Creeks or Yahi Indians, also described other instances of Yahi brutality:

“A boy about twelve years old was killed in a most barbarous way: they cut off his fingers, cut out his tongue, and were supposed to have buried him alive, but when he was found he was dead. On another occasion a man by the name of Hayes was out herding sheep. Some time during the day he went to his cabin and found it surrounded by fifteen Indians. They saw him coming: he turned and ran, but the Indians followed shooting arrows at him as he went from tree to tree. Finally they shot him with a gun through the arm. He managed to escape capture by a narrow margin.” (ibid, 26)

Another local chronicler, H.H. Sauber, described the reasoning behind hunting the Yahi to extermination:

“Once they murdered three school children within ten miles of Oroville, and more than forty miles from Mill creek. Soon after, they killed a teamster and two cowboys in one afternoon, and were clear away and scudding through the hills loaded down with stolen beef, before anyone guessed that they had been out. Other victims, too numerous to mention, had fallen by their ruthless hands. In short they never robbed without murdering, even when the crime could aid them in no earthly way, in fact could only more inflame the whites against them.” (ibid, 20)

Alfred Kroeber echoed this sentiment in a 1911 essay on the Yahi, where he stated,

“The Southern Yana, or Mill Creeks, met with a much more romantic fate than their kinsmen. When the American came on the scene, took up their lands for farming or cattle raising, and at the point of the rifle drove them off if they interfered, as happened before ten years had elapsed after the first gold rush, the Mill Creeks, like so many of their brethren, resisted. They did not, however, after the first disastrous conflict taught them the overwhelming superiority of the white man’s firearms and his organization, tamely desist and accept the inevitable. Instead, they only hardened their undying spirit of tenacity and love of independence and began a series of vigorous reprisals. For nearly ten years they maintained unflagging warfare, destructive mainly to themselves, but nevertheless unparalleled in stubbornness, with the settlers of Tehama and Butte counties. Hardly recovered from one blow, the survivors would raid in another direction, and in such cases they spared neither age nor sex. Atrocities committed on white women and children roused the settlers’ resentment to the highest pitch, and every Indian outrage was more than requited, but still the diminishing band kept up the unequal struggle.” (ibid, 82)

Theodora Kroeber tries to temper these accounts with her own reflections on Yahi brutality and “criminality”:

“The Indians meanwhile took horses, mules, oxen, cows, and sheep when and where they could, wasting no part of these animals which were food and clothing to them. They made blankets and capes of the pelts, tanned the hides, and made “charqui’ or ‘jerky’ of such of the meat as was not eaten fresh. In other words, they treated the introduced animals as they did deer, bear, elk, or rabbit. They seem not to have realized that the animals were domesticated, the dog being the only domesticated animal they knew. They stole and killed to live, not to accumulate herds or wealth, nor did the Indians really understand that what they took was the private property of a single person. Many years later when Ishi was past middle age, he blushed in painful embarrassment whenever he recalled that by white standards he and his brother Yahi had been guilty of stealing.” (61)

Theodora Kroeber in her work does not seem to address the Yahi’s brutal style of warfare in depth, emphasizing the exigencies that they confronted during the massive white invasion into their lands.

Ishi

In spite of having “home field advantage” and an exceptionally energetic approach to attack on their enemies, the Yahi were gradually hunted down and destroyed until there were only a handful left. In 1867 or 1868, a massacre at Kingsley Cave killed 33 Yahi men, women, and children, which was the last major blow by the whites to the last wild Yana. As Theodora Kroeber States,

“Ishi was a little child of three or four years old at the time of the Three Knolls massacre, old enough to remember terror-fraught experiences. He was eight or nine when the Kingsley Cave massacre took place, old enough, possibly, to have taken some part in the cleaning up of the cave and in the ritual disposition of its victims. He entered the concealment in which he would grow up at not more than ten years of age.” (ibid, 91)

With the open military defeat of the Yahi, the savage began a time of concealment, which A.L. Kroeber would classify as, “the smallest free nation in the world, which by an unexampled fortitude and stubbornness of character succeeded in holding out against the tide of civilization twenty five years longer even than Geronimo’s famous band of Apaches, and for almost thirty five years after the Sioux and their allies defeated Custer.” (Heizer and Kroeber, 87)

The remaining Yahi hid, hunted, gathered, and stole all that they could under their difficult circumstances. They lit their fires in ways that could not be seen from far distances, they had their settlements distant from where whites would normally travel and frequent. Soon their presence became a rumor and then a mere legend. That is, until a few years before Ishi walked to civilization, their camp was found near Deer Creek in 1908. Ishi and some remaining Indians escaped, but within three years, Ishi was all alone, which made up his mind for him to walk to the enemy where he was sure that he would certainly be killed, as had the rest of his people.

By 1911, however, through the victors’ problematic benevolence, Ishi went from a sworn enemy to a minor celebrity, moving to San Francisco and having a constant stream of visitors coming to the museum where he stayed. People were fascinated by this man who was the last true Stone Age person in North America, someone who could knap and carve his own tools and weapons from stones and sticks. Ishi made “peace” with civilization, and even made friends. He developed his own preferences for foods and other goods, and meticulously kept his property as he had when he lived nearly forty years in hiding. Nevertheless, within less than five years of arriving in civilization, Ishi the last Yahi succumbed to perhaps one of the most civilized diseases of all: tuberculosis.

Nevertheless, there were some rather interesting details that are rather indicative of Ishi’s attitude towards life in civilization. Ishi refused to live on a reservation, and chose to live among the whites, in the city, far from the corrupt Indians who had long ago given into the vices of civilization. As T.T. Waterman stated in one indirect reference to Ishi in a journal article that he wrote,

“It has always been supposed that remnants of several tribes made up these Mill Creek renegades. From what we have recently learned, it seems unlikely that there was more than one tribe involved. In the first place, the only member of this hostile group who has ever been questioned [i.e. Ishi], expresses the liveliest dislike for all other tribes. He seems, and always has seemed, more ready to make friends with the whites themselves, than with the neighboring groups of Indians. In the second place, all the other Indian tribes of the region profess the liveliest horror for the Yahi. This awe extends to even to the country to-day which the Yahi frequented. Even the Yahi and the Nozi, though they spoke dialects of one language (the so-called Yana) express the most unrelenting hostility to each other. In other words, the Indians who lurked about in the Mill Creek hills for several decades after the settlement of the valley, were probably the remnant of a comparatively pure group, since there was little likelihood of intermixture.” (Heizer and Kroeber, 125)

[It should be noted here that Orin Starn rejects the idea of the ethnic purity of the Yahi in the historic period, but gives no real reasoning behind it (106). This theme will be discussed below.]

In his voluntary captivity in civilization, Ishi was noted for his sobriety and equanimity toward those around him, devoted to the duties assigned to him at the museum at which he lived, and also to showing the manufacture of artifacts he used for survival. Theodora Kroeber describes Ishi’s general attitude toward his civilized surroundings,

“Ishi was not given to volunteering criticism of the white man’s ways. But he was observant and analytic, and, when pressed, would pass a judgment somewhat as follows. He approved of the ‘conveniences’ and variety of the white man’s world – neither Ishi nor any people who have lived a life of hardship and deprivation underrate an amelioration of those severities, or scope for some comforts and even some luxuries. He considered the white man to be fortunate, inventive, and very, very clever; but childlike and lacking in a desirable reserve, and in a true understanding of Nature – her mystic face; her terrible and her benign power.

Asked how he would, today, characterize Ishi, [Alfred] Kroeber says, “He was the most patient man I ever knew. I mean he has mastered the philosophy of patience, without trace either of self-pity or of bitterness to dull the purity of his cheerful enduringness.’ His friends all testify to cheerfulness as a trait basic to Ishi’s temperament – a cheerfulness which passed, given half a chance, into a gentle hilarity. His was the way of contentment, the Middle Way, to be pursued quietly, working a little, playing a little, and surrounded by friends.” (239)

For the eco-extremist or anti-civilization perspective, Ishi’s latter years appear problematic, even contrary to the desired narrative. Even Theodora Kroeber uses Ishi’s seeming magnanimity as graciously accepting defeat and accepting the ways of the white man to be a supporting of the ideas of humanism and progress (140). However, this is a mere matter of interpretation. One cannot judge a person who lived forty years in hiding, seeing all of his loved ones die either violently, of age, or of illness, and pass judgment especially when he was at the point of starvation and death. Through it all, Ishi clung to the dignity and sobriety that is, ironically enough, the essence of Wildness as Ishi saw it. Most of all, however, Ishi bore witness to that Wildness, he communicated it, and shunned those who had turned their back on it and embraced the worst vices of their conquerors. As the editors of Revista Regresion stated in their own reply concerning the Chichimecas who “surrendered” to the whites in the 16^th century in the article, “On Ritual Magazine”, “San Luiz de la Paz in the state of Guanajuato is the last registered Chichimeca settlement, specifically in the Chichimeca Missionary Zone. Here can be found the last Chichimeca descendants, the Chichimeca Jocanes, who preserved from generation to generation the memory of the conflict that threatened the Viceroyalty during those years. A member of RS was able to engage in conversations with some of the people of this town. We will keep these sources anonymous so as not to have them associated with our ecoextremist group. Those involved in these conversations confirm the fierceness of the ChichimecaGuachiles and proudly emphasize their warlike past. They mentioned that, with the defeat of the last hunter-gatherer nomadic savage tribes, the surviving Chichimeca bands decided to concede and show the Spanish that they now followed the foreign religion; that they adhered to the new commandments and would adapt themselves to sedentary life. They only did this in order to preserve their language, their traditions, and beliefs. The elders as well as the shamans (madai coho), who came down from the mountains after many years of war with peaceful intentions, nevertheless decided to live apart so that their stories and customs would not be erased from memory. Thus they would be preserved as a legacy for coming generations.”

If it were not for Ishi’s walking into civilization instead of choosing to die in the wilderness, we would not know his story, or the story of the last free band of wild Indians in North America. Thus, even in defeat, Ishi’s “surrender” is truly a victory for Wild Nature, one that can inspire those who come after him to partake in similar struggles according to our own individuality and abilities.

It should be noted by way of a postscript that many “revisionist” historians see Ishi’s history as much more complicated than the initial story told by the anthropologists who found him. Some scholars think that because of his appearance and how he knapped his stone tools, Ishi may have been racially Maidu or half-blooded Maidu – Yahi. This would not be surprising as the Yahi often raided surrounding tribes for their women (Kroeber and Kroeber, 192). Linguists have found that Yahi had many Spanish loanwords, postulating that some in Ishi’s band had left the hills in the not-too-distant past and worked for Spanish ranchers in the valley, only to return to the hills once the hostile Anglos came. Though self-preening scholars think they are finding nuance in the Yahi story, in reality many of their insights were in the original reports, even if not emphasized.

Further, Starn himself, otherwise quite the revisionist, admits the possibility that Ishi and his band remained hiding in the hills due to a notable conservatism in their way of life and worldview:

“That Ishi was here so detailed and enthustastic [in re-telling Yana tales], Luthin and Hinton insist, evinced his ‘clear reverence and love’ for traditional Yahi ways, however difficult life was for the last survivors in the confines of the inaccessible parts of the foothills. Besides their fear of being hanged or shot, the decision made by Ishi and his little band not to surrender may also have measured attachment to their own way of life – a steaming bowl of acorn stew on a chilly morning, the gorgeous starry nights, and the reassuring rhythm of the seasons.” (116)

Lessons from the Yahi War

I have meandered from the original point of this essay but I have done so purposefully. The intention has been to let Ishi and the Yahi, the last wild tribe in North America, speak for themselves, instead of engaging in simple polemics where sloppy sloganeering replaces real in-depth attention to a subject. What is clear is that the Yahi did not wage war as Christians or liberal humanists. They slaughtered men, women, and children. They stole, they attacked in secret, and they fled into the shadows after their attacks. They were not well-liked even by their fellow Indians, those who should have been just as hostile to civilization as they were. And the prospect of certain defeat did not stop them from escalating their attacks until there were few of them left. Once that point was reached, they literally held out to the last man. In that, eco-extremism shares or at least aspires to many of these same qualities.

The Yahi were a perfect example of what the eco- extremist seeks as outlined in the editorial of Regresion 4:

“Austerity: This decadent society makes us want stuff that we don’t need, though some refuse to see this and are enslaved by the endless pursuit of more trinkets. The majority of people are trying to keep up with the Joneses, they dream of making it big, of having the latest gadgets and comforts, etc. For us, all of that is an abomination. Simplicity: making do with what you have and rejecting civilized vices regarding coveting unnecessary things. These are well-known traits of the ecoextremist individualist.”

The Yahi, like many of the Chichimeca tribes of what is now Mexico, lived in “inhospitable” hill country at odds with their more affluent and numerous neighbors in the lowlands; this was the case even prior to the arrival of the Europeans. These neighbors, notably the Maidu, did not fight back against civilization because their relatively affluent life made them more conducive to accepting the civilized way of life. Unlike the Mesoamerican kingdoms, the Maidu did not know agriculture, but they were nonetheless already “domesticated” on one level.

It was the harsh and Spartan culture of the Yahi that strengthened their opposition to the Europeans, even when the latter showed superior power, even when it was clear that it was a war of extermination that they would likely lose. They redoubled their efforts and fought their own war of extermination to the best of their ability, sparing neither women nor children. Through cunning, guile, and a superior knowledge of the landscape, they waged a campaign of terror on the whites, a campaign that confounded all who studied the indigenous tribes of the region. Even other Indians feared them (just as other people who say they oppose civilization excommunicate the eco-extremists) as they did not divide the world into neat dichotomies of Indians vs. whites. To them, those who were not with them were their enemies and were treated as such. The Yahi’swar was thus indiscriminate and “suicidal”, just as the eco-extremist struggle aims to be. “Indiscriminate” in the sense that it is not driven by humanistic or Christian considerations. It didn’t take into consideration who may have been “innocent” or “guilty”: it attacked all non-Yahi, all who had surrendered to the genocidal ways of the white man.

The Yahi weren’t aiming to make friends with other tribes: even when Ishi enters civilization, he refuses to associate with the Indians of his region who surrendered so easily to white civilization. To preserve his dignity, he prefered to stay with his conqueror rather than with the conquered. The Yahi war was “suicidal” in that it took no consideration of the future: it aimed to live free in the here and now, and to attack those who were attacking them, without weighing the cost. That is because their way of life was forged on the margins on hostile lands, and much of their dignity centered on attack on those who they considered soft and inauthentic. There was no future for the Yahi in civilization because there was no room for compromise with civilization.

Here I will speculate (purely based on my own opinion) as to why someone would adopt eco-extremist views in our context. Of course, there is much anger, perhaps even rage, involved. I imagine that there would need to be to carry out these actions. However, what does the eco-extremist love? Modern humans are so alienated from Wild Nature, so callous to a way of life where they don’t depend on civilization for their every need, that they lament someone being wounded by an exploding envelope, yet shrug off, or even endorse, the destruction of a forest or a lake or a river for the benefit of civilized mankind. They’re so numb to their own nature that they think that Nature itself is a product of their own ingenuity, that trees only fall in the forest so that they can hear them, and that the sine qua non of life on Earth is the continued existence of eight billion hungrier and ever greedier people. If anyone is blinded by hate, it is the humanist, the leftist, and the apologist for “law and order” who makes their own existence the non-negotiable condition for the continuity of life on Earth. If given the choice between the destruction of the planet and their own beloved abstraction called, “humanity”, they would rather destroy the world than see humanity fail.

What is even sorrier is that most civilized humans won’t even be thankful for the noble sentiments of the anarchist and the leftist. To them they will just be snot-nosed bomb throwing punks who should chill out, go to the football game, and stop bothering others with their politics or solidarity. The leftist / anarchist has Stockholm syndrome for masses who will never listen to them, let alone allow them to win them over. They want to be seen in a good light by society, even though society will never pay them any heed, let alone like them. They refuse to see society as the enemy, and that’s why they’ll perish along with it, not knowing why the dream of the Enlightenment failed, why all men will never be brothers, why the only thing in which civilized humans are equal is in their complicity in the destruction of Wild Nature. They aim to be the star pupils of civilization but will always remain the miscreants, the outsiders, the dirty anarchists who need to get a job.

Eco-extremism will grow because people know that this is the endgame. Indeed, from Muslims to Christians to all sorts of other ideologies, apocalypse is in the air, and nothing can stop it. That’s because civilization is a death wish, and always has been. It knows that man cannot be dominated, that the only way to make him submissive is to turn him into a machine, to mechanize his wants and needs, and to remove him further and further from the chaos within himself that is Wild Nature. In this sense, the spirit of Ishi and the Yahi remains, it will always resurface when you least expect it, as a tendency and not as a doctrine, as a cry that fights today without fear for tomorrow. Eco-extremism will have no end because it is the savage attack, the “natural disaster”, the desire to let the fire burn and to dance around it. The anarchist recoils and the leftist fears, because they know that they can’t defeat it. It will continue, and consume everything. It will burn up utopias and the dreams of civilized futures and leave only Nature in its place. For the eco-extremist, that is a cause of rejoicing and not of horror.

—Chahta-Ima
Nanih Waiya, Spring 2016

Works Cited

Murder of the Civilized (2017)

Author: Mallory Wuornos

Source: Black Seed, Issue 5.
<www.archive.org/details/black_seed_5>

Date: Summer 2017

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“The Indians who rose up against the New England colonies in 1675 had been exposed to the merciless concepts of European total warfare and had the improved technology and tactics to inflict heavy losses on the white populace. In their desperate attempt to save their culture and to take back their lands, the Indians abandoned most of the self-imposed restraints that had limited the death and destruction in their traditional patterns of warfare.”

-Patrick Malore, The Skulking Way of War

“‘Man,’ whatever people think of him, is never anything more than a temporary bourgeois compromise.”

-Herman Hesse, Steppenwolf

“The lesser the motive, the better the murder.”

-Answer Me! Motto

There is a never-ending debate among anarchists of the left regarding what constitutes violence, what revolutionary violence is acceptable, and whether or not it will motivate the working class to rise against its oppressors. Nowhere in these banal conversations do people take the position that interpersonal violence is inevitable, or even desirable, as it is part of our nature. It puts into question social projects aimed at bettering the world. The Homo Sapien has always been a bad lot, there is no denying that. The earliest skulls dug up have shown evidence of blunt force trauma. Even if every person on earth (currently over 7 billion people) had all our needs met, we would still find reasons to bludgeon one another. There is no rescuing humanity from itself. Illusions of a peaceful and safe world come at a huge price. You merely need to look at the prosperity and peace (mislabeled freedom) of the West, compared to the constant battle for survival in exploited countries.

My obsession with cruelty among humans began at a young age. I grew up in a European country with a much longer history of empire building than the US, but of course that brutality was not in our school’s curriculum (which centered around religious studies). I wouldn’t learn about what empires and colonization meant until I was much older. What was etched in my mind were the endless horrors of the Monarchy, sadistic methods of torture, how to instill fear of all manners of deviance, and the equally cruel methods of execution (which attracted huge crowds to see the gory spectacles of be-headings, hangings, and—most horrific of all—the burnings). Along with these nightmarish tales came stories of the misery of peasant life and the diseases that spread quickly in cities that grew more and more populated and filthy. I was fascinated by the black plague and other diseases that came with industrialization. Along with these gruesome history lessons came the implication that our society has progressed, materially and spiritually. And again, no mention of the brutal subjugation of and robbery from people in far away lands.

Most anarchists believe monsters are a product of society, rather than a uniquely human problem that no utopia, no matter how well prefigured, could ever banish. Anarchists shy away from being called terrorists when we should be accepting that label with open arms. Instilling fear in your enemies when they are much bigger and more powerful is an age-old military tactic for a reason. But lately there has been a reaction against any notion of individual power and the incomprehensible violence it can sometimes take the form of. “Edgelord” is now a common denigration by leftists and others who desire a social revolution for those who talk about the human impulse towards violence and cruelty and what that means for those who believe in a social revolution. In the words of author Christian Fuchs, “the exclusion of killers from humanity makes our world a phoney planet where every serious discussion of violence is repressed.” This is especially true in times where there is a real fear of terrorism and power-hungry authoritarians.

“We are all murderers to a greater or lesser extent.”

-Octave Mirbeau

We live in a world saturated by violence, but for most people it is distant and mediated. Despite all the evidence to the contrary—live-streamed suicides and murders on social media, police killings shot on body cameras or civilian cell phones, or the various acts of anti-social violence experienced in the cities and towns—the civilized want to deny that they themselves are capable of cruelty. Those who do violence are the barbarian others, beyond the gates, on the other side of the tracks. Most of the physical violence inflicted on people won’t be seen or felt by those living in prosperity (barring a natural disaster or painful death), who are as removed from this violence as the drone operator sitting safely in a container in Nevada. It’s as invisible to them as the cancer growing in a child’s lung from the choking industrial smog in far away places and as the violence perpetrated within a stone’s throw of Hollywood against those on Skid Row (to those who never have a need to go there).

Like alchemists, anarchists think they can turn shit into gold if only enough people will rise up. The people will revolt and bring on the socialist utopia. Anarchists might envision this magical leap happening through violent actions but the nitty gritty of political violence isn’t clear. How will people be targeted? Who will be up against the wall? How do you eliminate a global capitalist system that so many humans now rely upon to eke out a miserly existence, without increasing suffering? Would anybody be capable of dropping the blade of the guillotine in this age? It’s very messy. Those who take the war against society seriously will be denounced by the very same people who believe in the overthrow of the ruling classes, as if a spiritual awakening will bring about their new world. Remember, utopian attempts have notoriously had effects opposed to what their dreamers envisioned.

The belief that humans are inherently peaceful creatures, enlightened through our reason. is still a tightly-held belief, even for anarchists. There are far too many who would have us also forget those who bombed, assassinated, and plundered until their deaths. A common question among revolutionary anarchists is, why are anarchists so weak? Despite the revolutionary platitudes glorifying violence against the ruling class, the cops, the state, fascists, and every other form our enemies can take, the threats ring hollow for all but a few. Pointing out the brutality that would be necessary to accomplish this task is not macho posturing, it is an observation of the failures and excesses of revolutions. This is why the actions of the lone wolf will always, despite their vileness, be important: they aren’t waiting for a critical mass of “power from below.” They take power in their own hands. Sometimes this looks very ugly but at its core is always a desire for freedom.

Like a lion in a zoo, our freedom only extends to a concrete fence, making whatever small patch of grass she has to stretch out on seem even more pitiful. Being wild and free in the midst of mass society looks more like attacking anything and everything in the most vicious way possible. To seek freedom means making people, including ourselves, uncomfortable through attacking long-held beliefs, such as those telling us we deserve to be safe and that human life is more important than anything else.

What I call ecologically-motivated murder is more likely to be equated with fascist ideology (the volkisch movement has been researched extensively) than are “lone wolves” who have no clear ideology to explain their disturbing actions. These loners can only be degenerates. Society, including many anarchists, would rather forget its demons, but lately it seems that pessimism could be making a comeback, much to the chagrin of those doing positive social work. Few accept those existing on the fringes who are likely to be more apolitical and morally objectionable to a majority of people, but whose actions reverberate through society in a powerful way.

Cruel and violent people who transgress civilized boundaries, such as the rules of war, are not marketable to the masses, making them irrelevant to anyone who wants to brand anarchism as a cure- all for society’s ills. There is a notion that the viciousness of society is a side effect of civilization, rather than something innate in humans. Those who want to keep anarchy palatable to broader society quickly distance themselves from acts of savagery, and severely compromise anarchist principles (for example working with nationalists). Yet it takes savagery to successfully attack a much larger and stronger force, to instill fear. and to become offensive rather than reactive. Like George Bataille, I also believe we need a thought which does not fall apart in the face of horror.

One of the only Amazonian tribes to successfully fight off the Spaniards knew they had to match the ferocity of the invaders. And match them they did, by using the Spaniards’ own torturous method of execution. In the jungle the Shuar were used to moving to avoid conflict, but a man named Quirruba had a better idea. He gained followers who swore secrecy and ordered them to seek out as much gold as possible.

When the Governor of Logrono arrived in their area, they stealthily approached at midnight. One account reports that an army of over 20,000 Shuar surrounded and conquered the settlement, slaughtering the Spaniards in their homes before they could come together. Quirruba entered with troops carrying the gold they had amassed and the tools needed to melt it down. After everybody besides the Governor had been killed, they told him to prepare to receive the tax he had prepared:

“They stripped him completely naked, tied his hands and feet; and while some amused themselves with him, delivering a thousand castigations and jests, the others set up a large forge in the courtyard, where they melted the gold. When it was ready in the crucibles, they opened his mouth with a bone, saying that they wanted to see if for once he had enough gold. They poured it little by little, and then forced it down with another bone; and bursting his bowels with the torture, they all raised a clamor and laughter.”

It would be amazing to see earth shoved down the throats of mining executives, or hot oil poured down the gullets of oil executives, giving them only a small taste of the excruciating pain they have caused so many others. Unfortunately we don’t live in the time or the world of the Shuar’s fierceness. We are taught from an early age not to solve problems with violence (unless, of course, you are a nation), and history likes to portray all “social progress” as a more or less peaceful expansion of the enlightened civilization of the West. But there are still Quirrubas’ in the world who disregard the rules of engagement and fight on their own terms.

John Linley Frazier was a typical middle-class American in the late 1960s. He had a wife and good solid work as a mechanic until he discovered drugs and the hippie subculture. Along with his new lifestyle, he also got interested in ecology. Suddenly, on orders from the Almighty, the mechanic stopped driving and quit his job, explaining that he would no longer contribute to the death cycle of the planet. As you can imagine, his new found love of Nature put a strain on his marriage. He left his wife and moved to a hippie commune, where he proceeded to scare the fuck out of his fellow hippies. They saw him as paranoid and volatile, something that, post-Manson, most in the counterculture were desperately trying to distance themselves from. Wandering from commune to commune Frazier began living what one article described as the lifestyle of an Aquarian Age hermit, and moved into a six-foot-square shack in the woods, (predating by decades Ted Kaczynski’s similar retreat from society) not far from a prominent ophthalmologist, Dr. Victor Ohta.

Dr. Ohta had also not ingratiated himself with the local hippie milieu. He flaunted his wealth: a Rolls Royce and a Lincoln Continental, expensive clothes and jewelry, sons enlisted in the best private schools, an opulent mansion designed by a student of Frank Lloyd Wright.

On the 19^th of October, 1970, it burned to the ground.

As the firefighters made their way up the two dirt roads leading to the property, they found both blocked by Ohta’s vehicles. After they had cleared the obstacles and reached the house they made a horrifying discovery: floating in the swimming pool were the bodies of Dr. Ohta, his wife, and their two sons, aged and 12. The doctor’s secretary (a wife and mother of two herself) and the family cat were not spared either. They had all been shot execution style, one bullet each, with the exception of the Doctor, who received four.

Frazier had entered the mansion and found Dr. Ohta’s wife Virginia alone. Holding her at gunpoint with her own .38, he bound her with one of her colorful scarves and waited. One by one the rest of the family along with Ohta’s secretary were taken hostage and bound with the same luxurious scarves. Moving them outside next to the pool, the doctor was given an ultimatum: burn your house to the ground and renounce your materialism, or die. The doctor couldn’t part with his worldly goods, and like an avenger for the forest that had once lived where he was standing, Frazier executed them all and tossed them in the pool. In the midst of the bloody carnage, Frazier sat down at the doctor’s typewriter before lighting the mansion ablaze. The note would be found under the windshield wiper of one of the cars.

“Halloween, 1970. Today World War will begin, as brought to you by the People of the Free Universe. From this day forward, anyone and/or everyone or company of persons who misuses the natural environment or destroys same will suffer the penalty of death by the People of the Free Universe. I and my comrades from this day forth will fight until death or freedom against anyone who does not support natural life on this planet. Materialism must die, or Mankind will stop.”

-Knight of Wands, Knight of Cups, Night [sic] of Pentacles and Knight of Swords.

In the end it was the local hippies who squealed on Frazier, who—even while locked up—continued to make people uneasy, showing up to court with half his hair, half his beard, and one eyebrow shaved off. Despite his odd behavior and bizarre crime, he was declared competent to stand trial and received the death penalty. After California put its executions on hold, his sentence was commuted to life in prison. He was found hanging in his cell on August 13, 2009.

A more contemporary ecological murderer is Adam Lanza. I know that to even mention him is a cardinal sin among morally righteous anarchists. He is the person who killed multiple people, most of them children, at his former elementary school. On December 10, 2011 he wrote on a forum he frequented: “I should call in on John Zerzan’s radio program about Travis. I’m really surprised that I haven’t been able to find anything he’s written or said about the incident, considering how often he brings up random acts of violence. It seems like Travis would be a poster-chimp of his philosophy.” [added emphasis] In his call to John Zerzan’s weekly radio show, Adam Lanza, who Zerzan described as being very articulate, discussed the effect domestication had on Travis the Chimp, who after ripping a woman’s face off in 2009 went on a violent rampage that only ended after the police unloaded their fire power on him:

“Travis wasn’t an untamed monster at all. Um, he wasn’t just feigning domestication, he was civilized. Um, he was able to integrate into society, he was a chimp actor when he was younger, and his owner drove him around the city frequently in association with her towing business, where he met many different people, and got along with everyone. If Travis had been some nasty monster all his life, it would have been widely reported, but to the contrary, it seems like everyone who knew him said how shocked they were that Travis had been so savage, because they knew him as a sweet child. And there were two isolated incidents early in his life when he acted aggressively, but summarizing them would take too long, so basically I’ll just say that he didn’t act really any differently than a human child would, and the people who would use that as an indictment against having chimps live as humans do wouldn’t apply the same thing to humans, so it’s just kind of irrelevant.”

A year later, Lanza’s crime sent shock waves through the nation. Zerzan had little to say about the incident. It was of course portrayed as another tragedy of civilization, and not as a natural response to an unnatural way of existing in the world. Like Travis, we were raised to be something we are not. Also like Travis, some humans escape the world of the civilized through acts of uncontrollable violence.

He left no manifestos and has been essentially erased, probably due to his immorality. While Zerzan said little to nothing about the nature of the shooting, society (including anarchists!) as usual in their desperate search for answers zeroed in on the easily digestible explanations of access to guns and mental health care. When tragedies occur, the liberal mask of many anarchists’ politics reveals itself as they also cry for the safety of answers. Lanza had demonstrated his interest in anti-civ ideas, not only wrestling with the ideas, but putting those thoughts into terrible action, yet people still seem mystified as to why anybody would do what he did.

People who cared to read what he wrote, knew exactly where Adam was coming from when he opened fire in that classroom. He couldn’t have been any clearer about his motivation. He was the embodiment of Travis the Chimp, Tyke the Elephant, and other beasts who viciously cast off their shackles, their violent rebellion ending with their own deaths. Like skirmishes in wars long forgotten, there is mass cultural amnesia surrounding these acts of hostility toward the civilized. The town of the elementary school destroyed the school (building a new one over it), and also razed the house that Lanza had grown up in. Apparently unsavory people had begun showing up at the site. Perhaps some of those people listened to Zerzan’s show and were making a pilgrimage to pay their respects. The erasure of Lanza extends to his Wikipedia page, which redirects to the Sandy Hook Elementary School Shooting page. This is true of personal wikis for many other school shooters as well.

Attacking innocents is incredibly taboo. Even to admit you understand, much less are sympathetic to, the actions of people like Frazier or Lanza, will cause you to be shunned. This is especially true when the taboo against the killing of children is transgressed. Everything must be palatable to the masses. Nothing is more sacred to the masses than children, who represent hope for the future of the human race. But that future will no doubt be as horrific in its banality as the world now. An article in Newsweek summarized Adam’s motivations (adding of course that this way of thinking is deranged):

“children were indoctrinated from a very young age to become part of a sick machine that was self-perpetuating. They were manipulated to live unhealthy lives. In Adam’s deranged world-view, they were already doomed to live in a joyless world that would use and abuse them. By killing them, he’d be saving them from the hell he was enduring.”

Both Frazier and Lanza’s messages were clear to those who understand, but mystified everyone else: humans have, to their detriment, completely removed themselves from nature and through the ways of civilization we have all been imprisoned. Frazier’s fury came from a transcendent moment where he saw the obscenity of materialism that we are bound to while Lanza saw how we are shaped from birth to accept this fate and enjoy being caged. Like warriors before them they refused to see humans as more valuable than other life on earth and had no moral qualms about extinguishing lives no matter how young and innocent. In fact, they may be seen as having acted from a place of kindness, as suggested by Adam Lanza’s very personal killing of his mother before he left for the school. In his mind he wasn’t deranged; he had been pacing his cage his whole life, until he could pace no more. Then he pounced. We are all capable of nurturing and compassion, but we are also capable of the most horrific brutality, given the right conditions. These instances of cruelty, whether from long ago or in our lifetime, shouldn’t be swept under the rug. They are not horrible abominations that we must do everything to forget. They are human responses, maybe one of the last meaningful human actions we can observe, which is perhaps what terrifies people so much. As Fuchs observes, “Deep down in every one of us there is a ruthless primal killer inside. Perhaps this is the fundamental truth from which all censors, moralists and inveterate optimists flee in panic.” Let us not flee in panic from our own impulses, but learn from them and come face to face with society, its warts and all.

Eco-Terrorism: A Cry of Desperation (2017)

Author: A.S. Robak

Date: December 18, 2017

Source:
<web.archive.org/.../www.medium.com/united-green-alliance/eco-terrorism-a-cry-of-desperation-bae38098a2d9>

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It should not come as surprise to the majority of our population that there is a fairly new phenomena that has arisen within the later half of the 20^th century that pertains to the preservation of our environment. Just as light green environmental groups and lobbyists have gained traction within the mainstream, so have their more radical underground counterparts. Groups such as Greenpeace and PETA have attempted to solve our impending ecological and environmental crises time and time again through peaceful methods, but have had absolutely zero success in accomplishing this. However, unilateral organizations such as Earth First! and Deep Green Resistance have taken it into their own hands to halt the industrial complex that has been devastating the life systems on our planet for so long. Not only have these groups had a substantial amount of success in preserving the Earth and its life systems, but have gained sympathetic supporters from the general population in the process. These groups are in opposition to the mainstream environmentalist drivel that has been in circulation for so long, without accomplishing anything. The perspective taken by many of these groups and individuals is not that our system can be reformed to accommodate the other life on this planet. The problems we are facing in regards to the environment lie at the heart of the techno-industrial system as a whole. The problem of our crumbling ecological situation cannot be solved through legal means. Nothing short of the immediate destruction of the techno-industrial complex will be able to save our environment from it’s impending obliteration. We have demonized and cast out individuals such as Ted Kaczynski, who did nothing more than take this problem into his own hands. These people and organizations are here for the betterment of the planet. It makes no sense that we push the agenda that they are wrong, and must be locked up for their actions, when they are the ones who are right. They are the ones who have the courage to see the problem of our crumbling environment, and do something about it that will actually matter. The public should not look down upon these individuals and organizations as “Terrorists,” but should be able to see that these are the measures that must be taken in order for our environment to be truly saved.

Demonization and propaganda against these individuals and organizations will never truly bring them down, it will only make them stronger. Whenever one of these groups is pursued by the authorities, it only garners more attention to the cause. This is a widely observed phenomena. Not to say that this is a bad thing, but it is only aiding the cause of radical environmentalists when the government and the media attempts to demonize them. Let’s take a look at the Earth Liberation Front, which has operated internationally as a “Domestic Terrorist Organization” since the early 1990s. However, up until the early 2000s, not much was known about this group. For over two decades, this group has coordinated unilateral attacks on complexes which seek to enforce the human strangle hold upon the Earth. In the late 1990’s the group gained a significant amount of popularity within North America, with multiple arsons and bombings directed at ski resorts, power lines, and truck dealerships within the Pacific NorthWestern United States. These attacks were not directed at individuals, only the structures that allow these individuals to destroy the Earth. The goal of these attacks was to cause significant amounts of property damage, causing these destructive operations to halt their exploitative practices. Remember, nobody was killed or injured in these attacks. That was not the goal. Despite press releases from the ELF Press Office concerning the motives of these attacks, the group had become classified as a “Domestic Terror Organization.” The classification of the ELF as such only brought more attention to the cause. This is why many within the radical environmentalist community would now justify and defend the actions of the Earth Liberation Front, seeing as their motives were just and necessary in the fight towards a clean Earth. Legal actions have been taken to break down the ELF, but to no avail. Yes, the “Terrorists” such as Daniel McGowan, who were guilty of committing arsons and bombings in the state of Oregon in the late 1990s were later arrested and convicted. However, this exposure brought more people from the general public to look at these actions and justify them. Now, we can look at the Earth Liberation Front in 2017, it is larger than ever, with cells across the globe. It would have never grown to the size that it is today if the United States Government had not classified it as the most dangerous domestic terror threat in the country in 2001.

In another example, we can take a look at Ted Kaczynski, or “The Unabomber.” For 19 years, he led a bombing campaign across the United States that was targeted at individuals who were responsible for the destruction of the Earth, and the advancement of the technosphere. He had managed to elude the authorities for so long, with zero clues whatsoever in relation to his identity or location. The only way that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was able to catch him, was through the publishing of his 35,000 word manifesto:Industrial Society and its Future. On September 19^th, 1995, the New York Times and the Washington Post published this manifesto in its entirety, in order to appeal to the Unabomber’s request, as stated in a letter mailed to both of these newspapers. This decision to publish his was very counterproductive on the part of the FBI. Not only did this decision lead to the American public becoming aware of the Unabomber’s motives, but may have sparked a new era of anti-technology and anti-industry movements. When this manifesto was released to the public, many people around the globe were able to access it through the internet, thus making the dispersal of this information very easy. In doing this, they created a whole new generation of future Unabomber’s, who are ready and willing to look past our technological facade, and rebel against it using whatever methods are possible. However, the publishing of this manifesto did lead to his arrest in 1996 in his cabin in rural Montana. His brother, David Kaczynski, was able to analyze and recognize the writing as his brother’s and subsequently reported this to the FBI. All in All, the decision of the FBI to allow the publishing of Industrial Society and its Future to the American Public was counterproductive. This manifesto has done nothing more than spawn a new generation of Ted Kaczynski’s, who are aware that technological society has done the exact opposite of liberation. It has only enslaved and weakened both us and the Earth. This feeding into the Neo-Luddite and Anti-Civilization ideologies is not necessarily a bad thing, however. Ignorance is not bliss, and it is only better for the general population to know the truth about the dangers of technological society, rather for them to be hidden within a techno-industrial masquerade of lies and deception.

If we are to define “terrorism”, we can see that it is clearly defined as “The unlawful use of violence and intimidation, in the pursuit of political aims.” Pondering this, we can explore whether or not these “Eco-Terrorists” are truly terrorists in the common sense of the word. In many of these circumstances, the attacks carried out were not directed at civilians, but at creations of the system itself. It doesn’t make much sense that one would be able to “Terrify” that which is not alive, but is a building or an industrial complex. Yes, these actions may be considered violent, and possibly using intimidation. However, in no way are these groups using “terror” to advance a political goal. On the other hand, who is the real terrorist in this instance? Is it the coercive complexes that uphold the techno-industrial system, which is used to rape the planet of all that is good, or is it those who are courageous enough to stand up to this environmental tyranny? It is the gambit of the techno-industrial system to demonize and destroy all who oppose it. Considering this, we can see that those who are labeled as “Eco-Terrorists” by the technocrats, will certainly be looked down upon by those who the technocrats influence, without thought that the true terrorist may be the technological system itself.

In addition to the fact that the government, as well as the media are only feeding into public sympathy for radical environmentalism, these complexes can do absolutely nothing to stop these operations from taking place. Hypothetically, we can say that the government passes a law that is supposed to debilitate “Eco-Terrorist” organizations. Let us say that a government passes a law which makes it harder for one to buy the materials required to build bombs or conduct arsons. In absolutely no way is this ever going to affect the ability or desire of the “terrorist” to continue doing these activities. Absolutely nobody who is already committing a punishable offense will see that these materials have been made harder to obtain, and thus means that they are unable to proceed as they were before. There are two options that will be followed in this instance. The first is that instead of obtaining materials on the free market, one would have to purchase materials from a black market instead. Yes, this is illegal. However, one would not care if it is illegal, seeing as they are already breaking the law by the mere existence of their “Eco-Terrorist” organization. The second option that will be pursued in this instance is the idea to improvise, adapt and overcome. If one already has their mind set upon an operation that will further the destruction of techno-industrialism as we know it, one will not halt their pursuit once it has been made harder to do it. The only logical way forward is for one to come up with alternatives that will allow one to accomplish the same thing, or something close to it. Hypothetically, let us say that it has been made harder for one obtain a material required to make a bomb. However, I had my mind set on the bombing of a local coal plant with a few of my comrades. We would not see this and think that there is no way that we can proceed. Of course it only makes sense that we either find a way around the obstacle, or find an alternative method. In this instance, it would make sense to find a replacement material that has the same use in the construction of explosives, or we could rescind our idea of a bombing, and resort to arson instead. There is no law that any government can pass that can possibly get between these groups and their goals. If these groups do truly believe in the complete and utter destruction of the techno-industrial system in order to liberate humanity and the Earth, then they will surely do whatever it takes to accomplish these goals. Under no circumstance will a revolution be halted due to illegality. History has shown us otherwise.

Seeing as there is nothing that can be done to prevent these attacks from taking place within the positive law spectrum, there is only one option that the public must take in regard to the rise of “Eco-Terrorism” in the 21^st century. It is not unrealistic for me to say that we as a society will have to learn from the motives of these groups and individuals, and see how they are relevant in our society today. Fighting this movement is not an option. The radical environmentalist movement is based on an ideology of non-failure. Nothing can be done to stop the movement that is willing to do anything to bring about the destruction of techno-industrialism as we know it. The adaptation of our society at large to the rise of this movement will allow it to succeed. As our society becomes more and more conscious of the truth underlying this destructive game, we will slowly but surely begin to side with these groups that were once deemed “Eco-Terrorists.” The only way that we will be able to prevent the violent destruction of this system, is through the peaceful dismantlement of the system itself. However, seeing as our society is currently only willing to take legal measures to reform the system, these attacks are necessary to further the ideology that will not stop until the civilized structure that is currently being used to rape the Earth of its resources has been entirely obliterated. As our crumbling civilizational structure continues to destroy itself under the weight of humanity’s industry, public opinion will become more and more favourable towards the construction of a new, improved, and sustainable society.

To conclude, these unilateral attacks that have been taken, and will continue to take place against the techno-industrial system can not be stopped by any form of natural law. The only method that will allow the violence to cease, is the adaptation of the general public to the fact that this way of life will never be able to sustain itself, and must be destroyed in favor of something that is not as harmful to the planet which we rely on. This popularization of radical environmentalism is entirely the fault of the government, and of the media, which has brought these groups to the forefront of environmental discussion within the general population. As the government and the media attempt to expose and demonize these environmental groups and radical individuals. As the government attempts to hinder the actions of these groups through new laws, these groups only become more innovative at finding ways to break through natural law in favor of the goals that will aid the Earth, not just us, within our selfish, human-centric point of view. We must learn from these so called “Eco-Terrorists” if we are to build a better future for all life on this planet. As our failure of a civilization continues to destroy itself, the few members of society who are willing to do something about it, will continue to fight against the injustices that take place across our planet, no matter how much they are demonized and suppressed by the government. These acts of “Eco-Terror” are no more than cries of desperation as the Earth is crushed under the weight of humanity.

A comment reply by a Wilderness Front contributor (2019)

Author: qpooqpoo

Date: Feb 15, 2019

Source:
<web.archive.org/.../www.web.archive.org/screenshot/https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/aqn29y/comment/egjmmrr/?context=3>

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For someone so smart and with valid points you can really see when crazy sets in and you start bombing people, like that’s going to change anything....

You’re completely wrong about this. History will judge his actions to have been instrumental in inspiring a serious revolutionary movement against the technological system. For any serious revolutionary movement, you WANT to alienate the kind of people who will be offended by violence. Those people make moderate reformer types--not the kind of rabid, fanatical, willing to die for the cause extremists you need for the core of a revolutionary movement. There are other important reasons you’re wrong: The people he killed were criminal promoters of the technological system and it’s a shame there might not be a hell for them to go to. If you find this statement bizarre, offensive, or hard to relate to, great! You and your ideas will stay away from people who are inspired by that statement and people like you won’t threaten to co-opt the revolutionary movement into a useless reform movement.

I suggest you need a more thorough study on the dynamics of successful revolutions. Read about the Russian, Chinese, American, and Cuban revolutions, especially the importance on placing a clear distinction between the uncompromising rabidly radical minority revolutionary movement and the compromising, wishy-washy, reform-minded movements.

[1] Marshall Curry (Director). If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front [Documentary]. Oscilloscope. June 22, 2011. Original link. Archived link.

[2] Bron Taylor. Dark Green Religion [Book]. University of California Press. 2010. Original link. Archived link.

[3] Bron Taylor. Religion, Violence and Radical Environmentalism [Essay]. Terrorism and Political Violence 10, no.4: 1–42. 1998. Original link. Archived link.

[4] Alexander Reid Ross. The Left Overs: How Fascists Court the Post-Left [Essay]. Anti-Fascist News. March 29, 2017. Original link. Archived link.