It is interesting that the dates don't quite match up with his answer. The Wikipedia article says the bombings occurred between 1978 and 1995, while his journal entry was from 1983. Perhaps the journal entry was just a poignant example of his experiences.
I'm not sure how one makes the logical leap to killing people in revenge for chopping down trees. It was not even his own land: he hadn't bought it, and he hadn't made it, but was angry for its destruction anyway. Angry enough to kill.
If he was the kind of anarchist who believed in property rights, then his reaction makes no sense, since an owner can do what he wants with his own property. And if he was the kind of anarchist who did not believe in property rights, then his reaction also makes no sense, since without property rights, who is to say what someone else can or can't do with open land?
In a letter interview with a Turkish anarchist that I found online (linked to from the above Wikipedia article as well), Kaczynski writes the following:
Kara (interviewer): How/when did you decide to bomb?
Kaczynski: It would take too much time to give a complete answer to the last part of your ninth question, but I will give you a partial answer by quoting what I wrote for my journal on 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 7th 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 Roaster 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.
My journal continues: “[...] and then I returned home as quickly as I could because I have something to do!”
The Unabomber Manifesto is about 30 to 50 pages, so I won't be posting it here. Here's the summary about it from the same Wikipedia article:
In 1995, Kaczynski mailed several letters, including some to his former victims and others to major media outlets, outlining his goals and demanding that his 50-plus page, 35,000-word essay Industrial Society and Its Future, abbreviated to "Unabomber Manifesto" by the FBI, be printed verbatim by a major newspaper or journal. He stated that if this demand were met, he would then end his bombing campaign. The document was a densely written manifesto that called for a worldwide revolution against the effects of modern society's "industrial-technological system". There was a great deal of controversy as to whether the document should be published. A further letter threatening to kill more people was sent, and the United States Department of Justice, along with FBI Director Louis Freeh and Attorney General Janet Reno, recommended publication out of concern for public safety and in hopes that a reader could identify the author. Bob Guccione of Penthouse volunteered to publish it, but Kaczynski replied that, since Penthouse was less "respectable" than the other publications, he would in that case "reserve the right to plant one (and only one) bomb intended to kill, after our manuscript has been published." The pamphlet was finally published by The New York Times and The Washington Post on September 19, 1995. Penthouse never published it.
Throughout the manuscript, produced on a typewriter without the capacity for italics, Kaczynski capitalizes entire words in order to show emphasis. He always refers to himself as either "we" or "FC" (Freedom Club), though there is no evidence that he worked with others. Donald Foster, who analyzed the writing at the request of Kaczynski's defense, notes that the manuscript contains instances of irregular spelling and hyphenation, as well as other consistent linguistic idiosyncrasies (which led him to conclude that it was indeed Kaczynski who wrote it).
Industrial Society and Its Future begins with Kaczynski's assertion that "the Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race." The first sections of the text are devoted to discussion of the psychology of various groups—primarily leftists (a group he defines, in part as "hat[ing] science and rationality [paragraph 18 of his manuscript]")—and of the psychological consequences for individual life within the "industrial-technological system", which has robbed contemporary humans of their autonomy, diminished their rapport with nature, and forced them "to behave in ways that are increasingly remote from the natural pattern of human behavior." The later sections speculate about the future evolution of this system, arguing that it will inevitably lead to the end of human freedom, call for a "revolution against technology", and attempt to indicate how that might be accomplished.
For your wishlist post: This is the introduction section from Wikipedia, when searching for "Unabomber." The full article is probably too long to include here.
Theodore John "Ted" Kaczynski (born May 22, 1942), also known as the "Unabomber", is an American murderer, mathematician, social critic, anarchist, and Neo-Luddite. Between 1978 and 1995, Kaczynski engaged in a nation-wide bombing campaign against modern technology, planting or mailing numerous home-made bombs, killing three people and injuring 23 others.
Kaczynski was born in Chicago, Illinois, where, as a child prodigy, he excelled academically from an early age. Kaczynski was accepted into Harvard University at the age of 16, where he earned an undergraduate degree, and later earned a PhD in mathematics from the University of Michigan. He became an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley at age 25, but resigned two years later.
In 1971, he moved to a remote cabin without electricity or running water, in Lincoln, Montana, where he lived as a recluse while learning survival skills in an attempt to become self-sufficient. He decided to start a bombing campaign after watching the wilderness around his home being destroyed by development, according to Kaczynski. From 1978 to 1995, Kaczynski sent 16 bombs to targets including universities and airlines, killing three people and injuring 23. Kaczynski sent a letter to The New York Times on April 24, 1995 and promised "to desist from terrorism" if the Times or the Washington Post published his manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future (also called the "Unabomber Manifesto"), in which he argued that his bombings were extreme but necessary to attract attention to the erosion of human freedom necessitated by modern technologies requiring large-scale organization.
The Unabomber was the target of one of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's costliest investigations. Before Kaczynski's identity was known, the FBI used the title "UNABOM" (UNiversity & Airline BOMber) to refer to his case, which resulted in the media calling him the Unabomber. The FBI pushed for the publication of Kaczynski's "Manifesto" which led to his brother and his wife recognizing Kaczynski's style of writing and beliefs from the manifesto, and tipping off the FBI. Kaczynski tried unsuccessfully to dismiss his court appointed lawyers because they wanted to plead insanity in order to avoid the death penalty, as Kaczynski did not believe he was insane. When it became clear that his pending trial would entail national television exposure for Kaczynski, the court entered a plea agreement, under which he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole. He has been designated a "domestic terrorist" by the FBI. Some anarcho-primitivist authors, such as John Zerzan and John Moore, have come to his defense, while holding some reservations about his actions and ideas.
Hi Mike, thanks for sharing this with us at BTB. I'm really sorry that you are estranged from your family, but I bet they haven't forgotten you. Sometimes it's just hard to keep in contact with someone when there is a lot of hurt concerned. But I really hope that one day they see this letter and you can have some sort of correspondence.
Hi Gary, thanks for your blog. You raise a really interesting and important issue that I hadn't considered before. Things move so quickly these days - I am 27 and started using the internet in 1999 and I forget that that span of 12 years or so could make up an entire sentence for a prisoner. I am now entirely used to using the internet etc but it's a relatively short time since it was "the norm". I wish you luck in your project.
Hi John, thanks for the blog post. I wonder if you have ever read any of the work of the so called "Carroll Myth" authors? This is a group of books that attempt to put the case against the mid 20th century perception of Carroll as a social misfit in love with little girls, and I find their arguments quite persuasive.
Basically the argument is that we've been influenced by our own times and need to look at Carroll through the lens of late Victoria morals. Carroll was unmarried, as Oxford dons of that time had to be, and for an unmarried man to be around groups of children was actually more acceptable than being alone with an adult woman! Of course now it's the opposite and a man alone with children would be a target of suspicion.
There is also the fact that Carroll's first biographer was a member of his family and actually toned down his friendships with adults to make him seem more acceptable! When in reality he did get on with adults and had adult female friends. He even seems to have been in love with someone at one point, and wrote a lot of tormented poems to her - possibly a married woman, hence his shame about his feelings.
As for the nude photos, out of the many pictures he took, only a small fraction are naked or semi-naked. The picture of Alice Liddell commonly used to illustrate that Carroll was attracted to her is actually half of a set, the scantily clad photo being of a 'beggar girl', whose clothes are torn, and the other being 'rich girl' who is dressed finely. Victorians were very keen on 'the cult of the child' where children were a symbol of innocence, and were commonly photographed naked - these photos were even sent as Christmas cards!
Of course, no one can know what went on in someone's head all that time ago, and there were no doubt people who took advantage of the 'cult' to abuse children, but I find the anti Carroll Myth authors' viewpoint very interesting in terms of how our perceptions of social norms changes. I recommend "The Mystery of Lewis Carroll: Understanding the Author of Alice in Wonderland" by Jenny Woolf which is a very comprehensive biography, with lots of sources.
Hey my name is john i live in clay hill middleburg i read everything that you write it is my favorite pass time do you no a gourd named doug norman are jessie carter i no them real well and i wanted to ask you if you no a guy named Kevin knight hes in there hes a good guy just a lil crazy well man keep your head up please feel free to write me pass sum time im a good friend and will always have your back my adress is 59 49 west wood rd north 32234 maxville florida write me ill write u back
hope you didn´t get the feeling that I don´t understand you to want to earn some money by yourself.
I wrote to you better not to do anything against the law because otherwise you´ll get into trouble again and I thought you´ve been in there long enough, haven´t you?
Keep your head up. I´m posting a letter to you this morning.
RSS
I'm not sure how one makes the logical leap to killing people in revenge for chopping down trees. It was not even his own land: he hadn't bought it, and he hadn't made it, but was angry for its destruction anyway. Angry enough to kill.
If he was the kind of anarchist who believed in property rights, then his reaction makes no sense, since an owner can do what he wants with his own property. And if he was the kind of anarchist who did not believe in property rights, then his reaction also makes no sense, since without property rights, who is to say what someone else can or can't do with open land?
Kara (interviewer): How/when did you decide to bomb?
Kaczynski: It would take too much time to give a complete answer to the last part of your ninth question, but I will give you a partial answer by quoting what I wrote for my journal on 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 7th 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 Roaster 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.
My journal continues: “[...] and then I returned home as quickly as I could because I have something to do!”
You can guess what it was that I had to do.
(end quote of interview)
In 1995, Kaczynski mailed several letters, including some to his former victims and others to major media outlets, outlining his goals and demanding that his 50-plus page, 35,000-word essay Industrial Society and Its Future, abbreviated to "Unabomber Manifesto" by the FBI, be printed verbatim by a major newspaper or journal. He stated that if this demand were met, he would then end his bombing campaign. The document was a densely written manifesto that called for a worldwide revolution against the effects of modern society's "industrial-technological system". There was a great deal of controversy as to whether the document should be published. A further letter threatening to kill more people was sent, and the United States Department of Justice, along with FBI Director Louis Freeh and Attorney General Janet Reno, recommended publication out of concern for public safety and in hopes that a reader could identify the author. Bob Guccione of Penthouse volunteered to publish it, but Kaczynski replied that, since Penthouse was less "respectable" than the other publications, he would in that case "reserve the right to plant one (and only one) bomb intended to kill, after our manuscript has been published." The pamphlet was finally published by The New York Times and The Washington Post on September 19, 1995. Penthouse never published it.
Throughout the manuscript, produced on a typewriter without the capacity for italics, Kaczynski capitalizes entire words in order to show emphasis. He always refers to himself as either "we" or "FC" (Freedom Club), though there is no evidence that he worked with others. Donald Foster, who analyzed the writing at the request of Kaczynski's defense, notes that the manuscript contains instances of irregular spelling and hyphenation, as well as other consistent linguistic idiosyncrasies (which led him to conclude that it was indeed Kaczynski who wrote it).
Industrial Society and Its Future begins with Kaczynski's assertion that "the Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race." The first sections of the text are devoted to discussion of the psychology of various groups—primarily leftists (a group he defines, in part as "hat[ing] science and rationality [paragraph 18 of his manuscript]")—and of the psychological consequences for individual life within the "industrial-technological system", which has robbed contemporary humans of their autonomy, diminished their rapport with nature, and forced them "to behave in ways that are increasingly remote from the natural pattern of human behavior." The later sections speculate about the future evolution of this system, arguing that it will inevitably lead to the end of human freedom, call for a "revolution against technology", and attempt to indicate how that might be accomplished.
Theodore John "Ted" Kaczynski (born May 22, 1942), also known as the "Unabomber", is an American murderer, mathematician, social critic, anarchist, and Neo-Luddite. Between 1978 and 1995, Kaczynski engaged in a nation-wide bombing campaign against modern technology, planting or mailing numerous home-made bombs, killing three people and injuring 23 others.
Kaczynski was born in Chicago, Illinois, where, as a child prodigy, he excelled academically from an early age. Kaczynski was accepted into Harvard University at the age of 16, where he earned an undergraduate degree, and later earned a PhD in mathematics from the University of Michigan. He became an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley at age 25, but resigned two years later.
In 1971, he moved to a remote cabin without electricity or running water, in Lincoln, Montana, where he lived as a recluse while learning survival skills in an attempt to become self-sufficient. He decided to start a bombing campaign after watching the wilderness around his home being destroyed by development, according to Kaczynski. From 1978 to 1995, Kaczynski sent 16 bombs to targets including universities and airlines, killing three people and injuring 23. Kaczynski sent a letter to The New York Times on April 24, 1995 and promised "to desist from terrorism" if the Times or the Washington Post published his manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future (also called the "Unabomber Manifesto"), in which he argued that his bombings were extreme but necessary to attract attention to the erosion of human freedom necessitated by modern technologies requiring large-scale organization.
The Unabomber was the target of one of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's costliest investigations. Before Kaczynski's identity was known, the FBI used the title "UNABOM" (UNiversity & Airline BOMber) to refer to his case, which resulted in the media calling him the Unabomber. The FBI pushed for the publication of Kaczynski's "Manifesto" which led to his brother and his wife recognizing Kaczynski's style of writing and beliefs from the manifesto, and tipping off the FBI. Kaczynski tried unsuccessfully to dismiss his court appointed lawyers because they wanted to plead insanity in order to avoid the death penalty, as Kaczynski did not believe he was insane. When it became clear that his pending trial would entail national television exposure for Kaczynski, the court entered a plea agreement, under which he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole. He has been designated a "domestic terrorist" by the FBI. Some anarcho-primitivist authors, such as John Zerzan and John Moore, have come to his defense, while holding some reservations about his actions and ideas.
Elizabeth-Anne
Your friend's artwork is really amazing, wow!
Elizabeth-Anne
Elizabeth-Anne
Basically the argument is that we've been influenced by our own times and need to look at Carroll through the lens of late Victoria morals. Carroll was unmarried, as Oxford dons of that time had to be, and for an unmarried man to be around groups of children was actually more acceptable than being alone with an adult woman! Of course now it's the opposite and a man alone with children would be a target of suspicion.
There is also the fact that Carroll's first biographer was a member of his family and actually toned down his friendships with adults to make him seem more acceptable! When in reality he did get on with adults and had adult female friends. He even seems to have been in love with someone at one point, and wrote a lot of tormented poems to her - possibly a married woman, hence his shame about his feelings.
As for the nude photos, out of the many pictures he took, only a small fraction are naked or semi-naked. The picture of Alice Liddell commonly used to illustrate that Carroll was attracted to her is actually half of a set, the scantily clad photo being of a 'beggar girl', whose clothes are torn, and the other being 'rich girl' who is dressed finely. Victorians were very keen on 'the cult of the child' where children were a symbol of innocence, and were commonly photographed naked - these photos were even sent as Christmas cards!
Of course, no one can know what went on in someone's head all that time ago, and there were no doubt people who took advantage of the 'cult' to abuse children, but I find the anti Carroll Myth authors' viewpoint very interesting in terms of how our perceptions of social norms changes. I recommend "The Mystery of Lewis Carroll: Understanding the Author of Alice in Wonderland" by Jenny Woolf which is a very comprehensive biography, with lots of sources.
hope you didn´t get the feeling that I don´t understand you to want to earn some money by yourself.
I wrote to you better not to do anything against the law because otherwise you´ll get into trouble again and I thought you´ve been in there long enough, haven´t you?
Keep your head up.
I´m posting a letter to you this morning.
Yours
Schneehase