Category Archives: philosophy

>Theodore Kaczynski – The Unabomber, Part Seven

>

Left: Theodore Kaczynski, 9 — Right: David Kaczynski, 2

The Unabomb Taskforce of the FBI had – over 17 years – dealt with 3,600 volumes of information, 175 computer data bases, 82 million records, 12,000 event documents and 9,000 evidence photographs. And still they couldn’t catch the Unabomber, this one man living in a tiny cabin in Montana, terrorizing the country, killing innocent people.
It was with the help of David Kaczynski, Ted’s younger brother, that they managed to solve the case.

Ted and David were very much alike. David admired his older brother for his ideals and conviction, and Ted enjoyed having an equal partner when it came to discussing philosophy, amongst many other subjects the two brothers shared similar interests in. Ultimately, faced with a moral dilemma, David turned his brother in. Theodore Kaczynski, who loved his brother, could not bear David’s betrayal and to this day deeply hates his whole family.

Yet the two were very dissimilar as well. Ted had no time for abstract philosophy or ethics, while David was more romantic, humble and sought discussion and was willing to compromise. Ted was unrelentless in believing he was right, he believed only in what was scientifically verifiable and rejected everything else as pure emotion. He thought of David’s abstract thinking as weak, and claimed David lacked energy and persistence, and he became furious when David summoned up the courage to argue back. Over time, though, his feelings of guilt about his unjust treatment of his little brother grew.

Ted began building his cabin in 1970. In 1985 David, obviously inspired by his brother, quit his job as a teacher, writer and bus driver, and also went into the wild. He bought five acres of land in the Christmas Mountains of West Texas and literally lived in a hole he had dug in the ground. Later on he purchased thirty acres nearby and – exactly like Ted – built his own cabin, living there until 1989.
In those days he was even more outspoken than Ted. He worried a great deal about the destruction of mankind, the destructive use of technology and the extreme materialism in our society. He often spoke about a need to revolt against it all. ”If he had known about my experiments”, Ted said later on, ”he would’ve regarded me as a hero”.
However, David’s conviction didn’t last. In 1989 he abandoned his desert home and moved to New York to marry an old girlfriend, a philosophy professor at Union College. This made Ted furious. He wrote a long letter to David about his ”betrayal of their shared resolve not to capitulate to the system”. David had ”committed the ultimate sin: ideological disloyalty”.
Ted believed all truths were like mathematics: either true or false. There was no room for compromise. Thus David – in Ted’s mind perfectly aware of the evils of industrial society – was living a lie when rejoining the middle class, and thereby proved his dishonesty. There was no forgiveness for such weakness and Ted turned to hate and total alienation.

By the early 1990s David began to worry about Ted’s extreme alienation. His wife said, half jokingly, ”You’ve got a weird brother, maybe he’s the Unabomber?”.

>Theodore Kaczynski – The Unabomber, Part Six

>

Previous posts about The Unabomber:

Theodore Kaczynski, the militant atheist who believed that violence was the only solution.
In an untitled essay in 1971 (pre-Manifesto) he wrote: ”The principal effect of technology is to increase the power of society collectively. This empowers social forces that are then able to use the machinery of society to impose their choice universally… The eventual result will be a world in which there are only one system of values”.

Kaczynski was a literary man. He was particularly fond of the Uruguayan writer Horacio Quiroga, he liked his works so much he even translated at least two of them into English. He also enjoyed Joseph Conrad immensely (real name Józef Teodor Conrad Korzeniowski – they shared the same name, and Kazcynski often used the pseudonym “J. Konrad” when travelling to plant his bombs), The Secret Agent being one of his favourite novels. No wonder, since it’s about terrorist revolutionaries who declare war on science…
His acts of violence were supported by his reading of history, and he found his role models in literature.

When in the last week of June 1995, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Penthouse Magazine and Tom Tyler (social psychologist) recieved the 35,000 word document entitled Industrial Society and Its Future, soon dubbed The Unabomber Manifesto, they were given an ultimatum: ”If the enclosed manuscript is published reasonably soon and recieves public exposure, we will permanently desist from terrorism”. He gave all three publications three months to respond.

New York Times and Washington Post published the entire essay as a special supplement on the 19th of September. The reaction was incredible. No other essay in recent times had created such a stir in society. A criminologist specializing in serial killers observed that ”Numbers of people seem to identify in some way with him”. The Nation announced that the manifesto’s first sentence ”is absolutely crucial for the American public to understand and ought to be on the forefront of the nation’s agenda”.
The first sentence reads:

The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

Alston Chase writes in his book Harvard and The Unabomber: ”The manifesto was ignored, in sum, not because the ideas were so foreign, but because they were so familiar. Except for the call to violence, its message was ordinary and unoriginal. The concerns it evinced about the effects of technology on culture and nature, are widely shared, especially among the country’s most highly educated”.

The Unabomber, Chase writes, simply warned about what we all should be concerned about: ”genetic engineering, pollution, pesticides and herbicides; brainwashing of children by educators and consumers by advertising; mind control, cars, SUVs, power plants and power lines, radioactive waste; big government, big business; computer threats to privacy; materialism, television, cities, suburbs, cell phones, ozone depletion, global warming; and many other aspects of modern life”.
What he wrote appealed to the vast majority of the population, and of course it was entirely intentional. He borrowed ideas from Spengler, Nietzsche, Marx, Aristotele, Schopenhauer, Freud, Adorno, and many, many others, so that people could relate to his philosophy.

As for the ecological part, many claim that Kaczynski didn’t care at all about the environment: it was just a flirtation with ecological groups to gain their support. The manifesto, in sum, consists of two theories: the philosophical one (him being opposed to ”bigness” – big business, big government, big science – that destroy and limit human freedom) and the environmental one (which he, according to many, used for tactical reasons).
Alston Chase notices that these two theories are incompatible:

Of course, it is possible that Kaczynski put forward these two (chronological and cultural) theories not for tactical reasons but simply because he failed to note their incompatibility. But given his logical mind, this is unlikely. It is more probable that his proffering both theories was, indeed, tactical. And if so, then in having his manifesto published he had pulled off a colossal stunt. His previous deceptions… […] …the word games and package bomb adresses – may have momentarily confused the FBI. But now he had fooled the entire country, not just for a few weeks but for years! Everyone believed he was an environmentalist.

>Chomsky on demoralized societies

>

Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power pp. 397-398

The vestiges of an integrated, socially cohesive, functioning society, with some kind of solidarity and continuity to it, have just been destroyed here. It’s hard to imagine a better way to demoralize people than to have them watch T.V. for seven hours a day – but that’s pretty much what people have been reduced to by now.
In fact, all of these things really illustrate the difference between completely demoralized societies like ours and societies that are still hanging together, like in a lot of the Third World. I mean, in absolute terms the Mayan Indians in Chiapas, Mexico [who organized the Zapatista rebellion in 1994], are much poorer than the people in South Central Los Angeles, or in Michigan or Montana – much poorer. But they have a civil society that hasn’t been totally eliminated the way the working-class culture we used to have in the United States was. Chiapas is one of the most impoverished areas of the Hemisphere, but because there’s still a lively, vibrant society there, with a cultural tradition of freedom and social organization, the Mayan Indian peasants were able to respond in a highly constructive way – they organized the Chiapas rebellion, they have programs and positions, they have public support, it’s been going somewhere. South Central Los Angeles, on the other hand, was just a riot: it was the reaction of completely demoralized, devastated, poor working-class population, with nothing at all to bring it together. All the people could do there was mindless lashing out, just go steal from the stores. The only effect of that is, we’ll build more jails.
[…]
See, there’s an experiment going on. The experiment is: can you marginalize a large part of the population, regard them as superfluous because they’re not helping you make those dazzling profits – and can you set up a world in which production is carried out by the most oppressed people, with the fewest rights, in the most flexible labor markets, for the happiness of the rich people of the world?
[…]
Can you have an economy where everything works like that – production by the most impoverished and exploited, for the richest and most privileged, internationally? And with large parts of the general population just marginalized because they don’t contribute to the system – in Colombia, murdered, in New York, locked up in prison. Can you do that? Well, nobody knows the answer to that question. You ask, could it lead to a civil war? It definitely could, it could lead to uprisings, revolts.

Isn’t that pretty much what happened in France in 2005 and 2007?
Here’s what the French duo Justice has to say about it, this is STRESS (boycotted by several TV-stations):

>ABOUT PORN!!!!!

>

Diego Beyró, Orgasm series 2008 (oil on bed sheets)
Click the images to enlage

What about porn? It’s an established culture, deeply rooted in today’s modern consumer society. Porn is everywhere, and since the arrival of the Internet it is everyfuckingwhere – and people are fucking everywhere too! There’s no escaping porn. And people wouldn’t really want to escape porn, because then it wouldn’t exist, right?

I’d say most of us get sexually aroused by watching (some kind of) pornography, there’s no shame in that. It’s a combination of that suggestive attraction and our simple biological needs, I guess. Still there are people trying to ban porn and inflict censorship. I can understand that to some extent, but no porn ban will ever last. Porn is in the mindset of just about everything and it’s all over the mainstream media (MTV, Sex And The City, commercials, fashion…). Big cable operators offer adult channels and giant hotel chains offer porn on pay-per-view (as well as the mandatory Bible!).
However, to me porn is more honest than hypocritical shit like Slitz, Café and Moore (Swedish equivalents to Esquire, GQ etc); auteur maestro Micke Eklöf’s olden goldies are definitely the most honest porn films in existance… Jesus. Christ. Spermafesten.
Some might argue that that kind of men’s magazines are sensual, leaving a lot to the imagination… Hoho. Fuck that shit. Please.
This is a consumer society (stuff you can put a price tag on is real, the rest is uninteresting) and pornography is big fucking business (and thus very real). The attitude in Slitz is just plain braindead and awfully sickening.


Here’s what I’m worried about, though. It seems like today’s extreme sides of porn are becoming norm. Degeneration is at hand when humiliation, throat gagging and ”forced sex” (a term I stumbled upon just recently) is what’s expected in commercial porn. This is what bothers me. Where’s the style and intelligence? All I see is commercialized crap. People making money off the humiliation of other people. To each his own, you might say, but of course it affects society in the long run. If rape sex and stuff like that isn’t forbidden fruit anymore – if it has become your everyday treat that you’re bored with – then what’s next? Commercial child porn? Yeah, I know it sounds sick, but society is grotesque and respect is nothing but a seven letter word. It lost its meaning a long time ago. This will show as porn is driven to new extremes…
I have nothing against porn per se, but when degenerating extremes become commercialized norm… Well, I guess it’s a sign of the times. Zeitgeist.


René Magritte, The Lovers 1928 (oil on canvas)

To finish this off I’d like to quote a brilliant essay written by Lou Reed, an essay that might skyrocket this blog’s visitors count by millions. ;) Lou shows what commercial porn is all about: exploiting humiliation. I just love his take on that porn spam shit that contaminates our mailboxes every hour (thank God for Gmail, the best spam filter ever. Who reads these mails anyway?).

”Welcome Lou” by Lou Reed

Hey Lou! These chicks will do anything for a Buck. Horny bored Housewifes are waiting for you. Watch these Bitches be ANALLY DESTROYED. Big Black cocks! How do they do it! Insane Penetrations. A Fucking Baseball Bat. No B.S. These horny women will do Anything. Why Be alone. Japanese Hardcore Anime and Kentai Art. Nasty! Over 25000 xxx by today’s best Asian Artists. These women will moan for you. The Fleshpussy. Tighter and better than the real thing and they won’t TALK BACK! Order now Mr. J. Watson of Akron writes, ”I increased the lenght of my penis by 3 in. in one week. Girth by 2 in. My wife is delighted and so am I with your invaluable product. Bigfuckin African Bros put it to the white bitchin Ho’s. What these sluts won’t do. Facial Cum Shots and our Famous Cum Shake. Yes that’s Right – I want it – I have a HARD time saying NO! Check out my home tape collection from me and my HORNY girlfriends right now! I like it in the bumbum. LOU!
See the girl next door being POUNDED! Ron wanted to shoot his wad all over MY BIG BOOBS! I finger myself at the same time. Watch The Glory Hole. These Bitches don’t care who they suck. Watch this Bitch vomit all over herself! Hear her gag and beg for MERCY! Facial Fantasies caught On Film! Sex Without Strings! Defanged and Declawed Gerbils For you Anal Ecstasy. Captain Croaker’s Anal Adventures on the Open Seas! Me and my crew go out on the open seas on the SS Stabem and find some Backdoor Virgins for your video/dvd delight. A millionaire a yacht and some sluts. INSANE PENETRATIONS! This guy said he loved my ass so much he would LICK IT! Hunting down Moms Across America. Watch these mature bitches take the Big Pony! This slut sucks a fuckin horse off till HE BLOWS IN HER MOUTH. what won’t these horny wives do for money. Why Be Alone. There out here waiting for YOU. College Chicks or their mothers, Lou. See celebrities caught on tape with their pants down. See your favorite stars. Morgue and mug shots. What did they REALLY DO?! Piss Place – watch them make a SPLASH! You’ll never miss a single drop. Live Web-Cam. On command – these sluts will DO ANYTHING YOU WANT! TABOO INSERTIONS! KINKY LADIES TAKING IT DEEP. See the Space Shuttle Booty! Thelma Tounge – Tight Asses Pounded Hard. Wet Teens. Homeless Black Women! Instant Access. Extreme anal Sex! More Extreme! Crazy! Wild! Ruining Rectums since 1998!
Her first Lesson. Real Home Blowing! Young Sluts on Wheels. Watch what she does to that Bentley! Dirty Anal! Nasty Anal! My Body wants your body Lou! 1000’s of porn clips free free free!
She put it in her mouth for the very first time, These BABES are waiting for you! Panty staining Teens! Cute young Babes with FARM ANIMALS! Smile your on Fisty Camera. My name is Young but I’m 18 and Horny! Women doing men Women doing Women! What’s Left. It’s Insane. Garbage mouthed pigs squirting cum shots and cooking pancakes at the SAME FUCKING TIME. Goddamnit get Loose. How does an ungly pig like me get the beautiful Bitches! I don’t know MONEY MONEY MONEY! Watch this Mom put AN ENTIRE REFRIGERATOR UP HER BUTT. It don’t get Better than this Jonesy. Latin Asian Greek chicks waiting for you!!!! Respond for Chrissake. Do you need Viagra – cheap cheap cheap. Horny dogs and their masters. Wowee! Waiting for you Waiting for you Waiting for you! Sex Crazed Whores with Big Tits! Respond! Respond! Snatch Party! They’ll Hunt You down To Suck you Off!
Screwing Machine! Come See Huge Dicks pounding their tight Little Pussies as these Sluts Scream for more! Woman with PHD’s Taking it up the Dung Basket. Hear them BEG IN 5 DIFFERENT LANGUAGES. My God! Respond Please! Respond Please! These woman are Waiting For you. Fornicating Giraffes. Erect Baboons. What are you Waiting for!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Quoted from the book XXX 30 Porn-Star Portraits by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders.

>Children of the underworld

>There’s a crappy free paper here in Stockholm, Sweden, called City. They’re running this series about people who choose to live their lives without having kids. Should be pretty interesting. You can read the first article here (in Swedish, obviously).
I’ll give you my thoughts on the matter when they’re done, but if you’ve read this blog for a while I think you know what I have to say…

Until then:

>Escape from suppression – The school shooting in Finland

>
Ron Anderson – Escape From Suppression

The three dimensional empty straightjacket is incorporated into the painting of Planet Earth where all humanity resides. Does it imply that humanity is enslaved or does it imply that humanity has been released from suppression because the straightjacket is empty? When you view this from a distance, the jacket isn’t easily visible – and so is suppression often disguised and not easily seen. The decision to be free from the vested interests that would enslave humanity for their own purposes lies with every individual’s understanding of The Declaration of Human Rights and their resolve to make it a reality.

Yet another tragedy, this time in Kauhajoki, Finland. It seems to be pretty much the same kind of tragedy as when Pekka-Eric Auvinen killed eight people and injured twelve, so I urge you to read what I wrote back then.

Society’ sickness – November 13, 2007
Tool and die – April 17, 2007

And once again I quote Nikanor Teratologen (unfortunately in Swedish):

Det går inte att genom någon sorts överhetskampanjer eller mer omfattande kontroll-, övervaknings-, angivar- och stigmatiseringssystem heltäckande skydda skolor, arbetsplatser, offentliga platser överhuvudtaget mot enskildas planlagda och sedan lössläppta mordiska hämndraseri. Förändringarna måste inledas på individplanet, i människors beteende och attityder mot varandra. Man bör helt enkelt inte kränka och bete sig illa mot andra varelser på jorden. Allt är ett, sammanvävt, förgängligt.
[…]
Den grandiost sadomasochistiska och Kristusyrande självbilden som tröstande och upplyftande suggererar existensen av en andligt besläktad krets att höra hemma i och betyda något avgörande för har, imaginärt, förintat den invalidiserande känslan av att inte duga, inte räknas, inte vara älskad och inte tillåtas hysa känslor, inte finnas till…

>Theodore Kaczynski – The Unabomber, Part Five

>
Homemade gun, homemade bomb and the manifesto. (Click to enlarge)
(For supersized version click here)

Kaczynski’s bomb found by FBI:s top bomb expert James C. Ronay on American Airlines Flight 444 (November 15, 1979) is described in Harvard and The Unabomber:

Inside the container, Ronay found fragments of a meticulously constructed homemade bomb that had been mailed from Chicago. What struck him was how elaborately and carefully crafted it was – though made entirely from ordinary materials found in any hardware store.
These included a cheap aneroid barometer altered to measure ambient pressure changes in the aircraft and altitude changes. The bomb was designed to explode when the plane reached over 2,000 feet in elevation. A second, redundant triggering system was fixed to ignite if the package was opened. A large juice can contained the main explosive charge of smokeless power and fireworks chemicals. The fusing system consisted of four ”C” batteries wired to a modified barometer switch, all housed in a homemade wooden box. The postage on the box comprised several $1 ”Eugene O’Neill” and ”America’s Light Fueled by Truth and Reason” stamps.

For each and every bomb being made, the genius mad man came closer and closer to perfection. Though each bomb was made of pipe plugs and the fusing systems were powered by C- or D-cell batteries, each triggering mechanism was different. Old Ted was an imaginative man.

The Hauser bomb revealed the continuing evolution to ever more gratiously painstaking construction. The pipe was not the ordinary galvanized kind found at any plumbing supply store, threaded at each end and capped with threaded plugs. Rather, it was made of super-hard stainless steel that could only be cut, Ronay suspected, with a power saw. And the plugs were custom-made of a similarly hard material, crafted with care. At each end of the pipe were precisely sized square holes that coincided exactly with similar-sized notches in the plugs. The plugs were kept in place by square dowels carved out of hard steel. It took an excellent craftsman with a strong power drill and grinder to do this kind of work.
More troubling, the bomber was learning how to seal the explosives more tightly, thereby amplifying potential damage. And he was concocting more potent explosives. With the Hauser bomb, he had for the first time used a mixture of aluminium powder and ammonium nitrate, producing a much bigger bang and signaling to Ronay that worse was to come.

Reading this, and then looking at that tiny cabin he worked in, one becomes absorbed with fascination for the human mind. Or for this human mind, I should say. What really makes me wonder is how the hell he did manage to build his bombs when there was no electricity in the cabin? Ronay suspected he’d used a power saw and a power drill etc, but as far as I know no such tools have been found.
I hope I can find answers to that later on.

As for the final bomb, found in the cabin in April 1996, bomb-disablement expert Chris Cherry got a phone call from the FBI asking him to haul his ass over to the cabin. He lived in Albuquerque, whilst the cabin was located in Montana. Wasting no time the FBI flew down a special plane that night and picked him up immediately. He and his team were at the cabin for a week, and it took them three days to totally render safe the bomb itself.
”Our objective was not just to defuse the bomb but to surgically defuse it so that we would have all the evidence captured. We couldn’t just blow apart the bomb. We had to go into it to ensure that all the evidence was preserved and we understood the working functions of it”, says Chris in an interview.
The team used Kaczynski’s extremely detailed notes about all his devices and how they were put together. There were loads of them, but they were written in Spanish, so first they had to be translated.
The bomb was a fragmentation device designed to kill people. It was all home-made and designed to be rough-handled through the mail. The switch mechanisms Kaczynski used were hand-made switches that he would spend weeks building. He even machined his own screws.
Chris: ”The device was complicated in that it was guaranteed to work. It was not your basic pipe bomb. It was much more sophisticated than that. Every one of his devices functioned as designed.”

Some stuff found in the cabin: