Category Archives: politics

literature, philosophy, politics

>Theodore Kaczynski, The Unabomber – Part Fourteen

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Before summarizing what I’ve written about Kaczynski, I’d like to write about his life in the wild. As stated earlier, this wasn’t as ”into the wild” as people seem to think. He was always in sight of his nextdoor neighbour, for example. The place he chose offered no solitude. The area was pretty much clogged with summer and hunting cabins. Snowmobilers, hunters, gold diggers and loggers constantly roamed the woods. If he’d went further into the wild he’d also find much cheaper places. The thing is that being this close to civilization made it easier for him to execute his revenge. Planting the bombs required travelling. Had he been too far off it would have been too time consuming getting where he wanted to kill. Also, with all these people disturbing the peace he would increasingly become very angry. They fueled his hatred.

The cabin in the lower left.

As we now know, the culture of despair had undergone transformation, from worry about society to worry about nature. Ecologists in the 1940’s concluded that in nature, every part plays a role in keeping the system in balance. If the system loses parts we will suffer ecological collapse.
Guided by this reasoning, ecologists began searching for signs of balance in nature. However, they could only find very few, and instead found great instability. Therefore, by the 1960’s, they would conclude that we were in the middle of a global environmental crisis. This caused pessimism to spread and it obviously nurtured the culture of despair, and The Unabomber and his anti-technology agenda.
However, by the mid-1980’s, most ecologists would realize that their previous assumptions were false. There is no balance in nature. There never had been any balance to find. But in the 1970s, they didn’t know that… And in 1971 Ted starts to build his cabin.

Many young people were willing to try anything to get away from everyday pessimism, slave-like labour and hopelessness. They wanted to reach a higher level of consciousness. Self-hypnosis, meditation, dream journals, Tai Chi, karate, Feldenkrais, Kabbalism, Buddhism, therapy studies… stuff like that. Some of them sought escape in nature, hoping to construct new communities, often supported by the economy of marijuana. They moved out and grew pot, so to speak.
Some of them soon embraced a form of terrorism labelled ”ecotage” – ecological sabotage – dedicated to saving nature, where monkeywrenching soon became the thing to do. Monkeywrenching is a tactic which was used at first by students protesting the Vietnam war. It’s all about vandalism in the name of environmental protection, like destroying machinery, roadside signs, hammering lots of nails into the trees which will cause chain saws to virtually explode in the operator’s hand… At first, since these people did harm to property, not people, they were treated almost as harmless by the national media. But like all historical movements, ecotage came to have its imitators who didn’t shy from real violence. Alston Chase writes in his book Harvard and the Unabomber: ”In these groups, America was for the first time encountering the mind of the modern terrorist”.

Another group of people, sometimes called the Silent Generation, believed that the collapse had already occured. They found that their world had simply disappeared. The 1960’s should have been their days of joy, their salad days, but instead everything went over their heads. The 1960’s were years of chaos. They didn’t fit in. Some of them simply kept low profiles, getting on with their day to day lives, sticking to the family and the job. Others sought escape in nature. 
But while the young people were motivated by a desire to get close to nature, the Silent Generation wanted to get away from a world gone mad, away from public life, away from people. The young were optimistic and active, the Silents were pessimistic and passive. Kaczynski’s birth date – 1942 – lay at what demographers consider to be the gap between the Silents and the youngsters. He was pessimistic, but he also wanted action. Despair and commitment would be a deadly combination.

Kaczynski’s life in the cabin was mostly dedicated to learning and gathering information. He was a frequent visitor to the library, to say the least. He read books on woodcraft, botany, organic chemistry, poison antidotes, nutrition, pesticides, Indian customs, rifle shooting, first aid, wilderness medicine, seeds, weeds, trees, animal tracks, mushrooms, edible and poisonous plants, wildflowers… You name it, he read it and made efficient use of it.
The cabin he built was ten by twelve foot (3 x 3,5 metres), and he also dug a root cellar and planted a garden. Instead of digging a well, he got water from a creek with a hose. Life would’ve been good, but as Chase writes: ”No sooner had he settled in his Eden than serpents appeared”. Kaczynski was very sensitive to noise, and the sounds of chainsaws, snowmobiles, jet planes, helicopters, people – the serpents – made him even more angry. So he decided to take action. He strung wires across trails hoping to get the bikers, he shot at helicopters and he destroyed peoples’ stuff.
He writes in his journal:

Risky to commit crime so close to home. But I figured if I did not get those guys, the anger would literally kill me. Anyway, so one night in fall I sneaked over there, though they were home, and stole their chainsaw, buried it in a swamp. That was not enough, so couple weeks later when they had left the place, I chopped my way into their house, smashed up interior pretty thoroughly. It was a real luxury place. They also had a mobile home there. I broke into that too, found silver painted motorcycle inside, smashed it up with their own axe. They had four snowmobiles sitting outside. I thoroughly smashed engines of those with the axe.

By the summer of 1977 he wrote:

I set a booby-trap intended to kill someone, but I won’t say what kind or where because if this paper is ever found the trap might be harmlessly removed.

When Exxon did seismic explorations for oil, using dynamite from helicopters in the area:

 Early August I went and camped out […] hoping to shoot up a helicopter in area east of crater mountain. Proved harder than I thought, because helicopters always in motion, never know where they will go next. Tall trees in way of shot. Only once had half a glance. Two quick shots, roughly aimed, as copter crossed space between two trees. Missed both. When I got back to camp I cried, partly from frustration at missing, but mostly grief about what is happening to the country. It is so beautiful. But if they find oil, disaster. Even if not find oil, the blasts and helicopters ruin it.  Desecration. Where can I go now for peace and quiet?

The removal of the cabin as evidence.

The cabin, now an artifact owned by the FBI, I think.

As Kaczynski slowly became addicted to violence his campaign of terror slowly made him feel worse. He hated his family, and wanted to break totally with them, but he was dependent on their financial aid. The more complex his bombs, the more money he needed, and his family was the only source of income. His anger and frustration went off the charts. In February 1987, when planting the very deadly bomb number twelve, he was seen by an employee who gave a good portrait of him, and Kaczynski was frightened. Between 1987 and 1992 he stopped with his bombings, instead testing new mixtures and devices to find the perfect detonator at secret sites in the wilderness behind his cabin.

music, philosophy, politics

>Socialized death sentence

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You punch in at 8:30 every morning, except you punch in at 7:30 following a business holiday, unless it’s a Monday, then you punch in at 8 o’clock. Punch in late and they dock ya!
Incoming articles get a voucher, outgoing articles provide a voucher. Move any article without a voucher and they dock ya!
Letter size a green voucher, oversize a yellow voucher, parcel size a maroon voucher. Wrong color voucher and they dock ya!
6787049A/6. That is your employee number. It will not be repeated! Without your employee number you cannot get your paycheck.
Inter-office mail is code 37, intra-office mail 37-3, outside mail is 3-37. Code it wrong and they dock ya!
This has been your orientation. Is there anything you do not understand, is there anything you understand only partially? If you have not been fully oriented, you must file a complaint with personnel. File a faulty complaint and they dock ya!

Isn’t it strange? A job I loved a couple of months ago (November 2008) has turned into crap. This isn’t supposed to be a blog about my private life, but some things cannot go unnoticed. Work kills.
Dystopia, one of the best bands to ever grace this beautiful planet infested with rotten humans, puts it well in their super smash hit Socialized Death Sentence. Check out the earlier Dystopia post for even more joy. Happy time!


I am just a fucking slave
bust my ass for minimum wage
Before I’m paid the system comes and takes half away…
for bombs someday
My boss hates my fucking guts
I was never good enough
If I’m injured on the job
he’ll say ‘tough luck’
He’ll find someone else to fuck
My job… My life

Landlord’s pissed, rent is due
Haven’t worked in a few
If I don’t pay I get evicted
I’m fucking screwed
What am I supposed to do?
Each day… I die

Your… Your job sucks
The system fucks
A timeclock head
I’m dead
Employed… Mind void
Destroyed… Can’t avoid

I try… to survive
…losing…
Work, work
Socialized death sentence
System, system
Fucked all around
Work, work
like taking cyanide
System, system
Washing it down…
And I die again tomorrow…
When I wake up

This is Louis Harrell with his retirement award from J.P. Stevens Mill, his employer, shortly before his death 1978. Harrell died at age 62 of byssinosis, or “brown lung,” after years of inhaling dust generated in cotton manufacture. Brown lung – a term coined by Ralph Nader – occurs almost exclusively in cotton processing workers who handle raw cotton.
Byssinosis could have been recognized sooner. Health officials as far back as the 1930s were aware of the dangers of workers’ prolonged exposure to cotton dust. Because it was able to control the outflow of health data, the cotton industry stalled acknowledgment of the disease for 50 years. Finally in 1978 OSHA imposed a protective standard on textile factories. It estimated that 35,000 people had the disease and 100,000 more were at risk.
Today cotton production and byssinosis are largely ended in the US, but both are common in the third world.

philosophy, politics

>Theodore Kaczynski, The Unabomber – Part Thirteen

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The 60’s were years of chaos. People began feeling a sense of disillusionment with the system. To Kaczynski this would become disastrous. As he continued to suffer through Murray’s experiments, he began to worry about society’s use of ”mind control”. He was convinced that academics – in particular scientists – were servants of the system, employed to develop techniques for behavioral control of populations. And Murray, who treated human beings as guinea pigs, and who was at the forefront in his field, widely accepted by everybody, wasn’t the only cause for Kaczynski’s conviction.

Alston Chase, in his book Harvard and the Unabomber, has a seemingly endless list of what caused the chaos and conviction:
Technological progress, the space race, the escalation of the Cold War, the sexual revolution, the birth of drug culture, television, the civil rights revolution, consumerism, the environmental awakening, The Cuban missile crisis, A Clockwork Orange, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, The Manchurian Candidate (a movie about brainwashing and mind control), the first Wal-Mart store, the birth-control pill, the women rights movement, Timothy Leary, the assassinations of Jack and Bobby Kennedy, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., the ”Summer of Love”, anti-Vietnam war protests, riots in hundreds of cities and college campuses, the moon landings, Woodstock, the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the Cambodia bombings…

In 1967 around 150,000 people marched against the Vietnam War in New York and San Francisco. Later that year, another 150,000 protestors marched against the Pentagon. The CIA launched ”Operation CHAOS”, a plan to spy on American citizens that would eventually collect the names of 300,000 people. In March 1968, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover initiated a Counter-intelligence program against what they called ”Black-Nationalist-Hate-Groups”. Two weeks later, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. triggered race riots in 125 cities, causing 46 deaths, 21,270 arrests, and involving 55,000 National Guard and federal troops. In November, students at San Francisco State College began a strike against the war that would last five months.
At Harvard, April 9, 1969, the home of Theodore Kaczynski, things would change too. Without warning, three hundred students charged the steps of the administration buildings and hung the red and black banner of the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) from a window. Altogether, forty-one students were injured.
Chaos reigned and The Age of Reason had come to an end. The last nails in the coffin of the Western civilization was about to be driven down.

The influental French philosopher, historian and sociologist Michel Foucault had come to the conclusion that ”there was morality nowhere” (in the words of Norman Cantor). ”His culture is a culture of political despair. He sees only a struggle for power, a manipulation of ideas and ethical values by all groups of society through all moments of time, including the present.”
The shift of emphasis from the individual to the system reinforced feelings of helplessness. The system ruled and everyone was a victim. This was eventually distilled down into one thought: The system rested on power alone and therefore must be destroyed.

Theodore Kaczynski chose to retreat to the wilderness. He wanted to escape the clutches of civilization and then later plot its destruction.

philosophy, politics, religion

>Belief and Bloodshed: The Religion of Genocide

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First and last illustrations in this article are stolen from Babalon Graphics.
Go there for more relevant art.

My belief in humanity and God was shattered many years ago. The belief in humanity and God to do good, that is. But ignorance, injustice, hypocrisy and plain evil are always present, and thus form the basis of the ultimate truth of mankind.
There’s no doubt in my mind that humanity would be better off dead, and it seems to me quite strange how one could see it any other way. What signs are there that tell of a brighter future? Signs of dystopia are present wherever there are humans.
It should be obvious. The history of mankind is sealed with blood. Man was put on earth to fight, wage war and destroy. That’s what history tells us, and why would this ever change? Mankind is not good enough. Never will be. Our future breed is the last, to quote a brilliant Neurosis song (read the lyrics here), and rightfully so.

The shrouded reason, the bleeding answer
The human plague in womb
Bring clouds of war
Let us rest
Our future breed is the last

Violence and religion have been closely related since the dawn of civilization. While institutionalized religions have used violence against both their disciples and their real (or imagined) opponents, there is also this thing with religion as a provider of spiritual and material comfort to its victims of political/social violence. It works both ways; religious faith can both motivate aggression as well as constrain it. Religion helps to normalize genocide by providing myths of ultimate redemption, or by saying that it’s ok to annihilate your neighbour… In short, religion is used to legitimize and motivate mass murder.

Christian churches were clearly involved on many levels in preparing the theological, moral, political and mythical basis for genocide in this century. The Institute and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Religious Life, established in 1939, greatly contributed to spread the idea of Aryan-Christianity by ”proving” that Jesus was racially an Aryan who fought to destroy the Jews. Such German Christians defined themselves both as a chosen people and as a victimized people, and they were socially and academically respected. Even though there were supporters as well as opposers to Nazism among the church leaders, what most of them had in common was the dislike of Jewish presence in Germany. Instead of discussing the moral of what was going on, they provided the perpetrators of the atrocities with religious comfort. They provided a cozy home where the killers could find peace and support, resulting in moral numbness.


We all know about the traditional Jewish concept of Jews as the Chosen People, the Jewish exclusivity and the Holocaust with a capital H. It’s pretty ironic then that the Nazis adopted this concept, them being the racial superiors, the Chosen Ones, and that the Jewish victims, and those who helped rescue them, went for the Christian concept of universalism: all people are equal – especially the weak (!).
Nowadays universalism is rarely to be seen as the racist Zionist movement continues its relentless massacre. The Zionist movement insists on the uniqueness of the Holocaust and is consequently refusing to consider any other case of mass murder as comparable. For example, Zionists do not look upon Armenians as fellow victims of genocide. For many Jews the Holocaust was directly related to Christian antisemitism. Armenians are Christians. Hence, no support from the Zionists. Also, the state of Israel needs to maintain good relations with Turkey, which has never even acknowledged the Armenian genocide, not even expressing regret for it. Politics and religion, not a very good mix.

Speaking of the Holocaust, Palestine radical author Hayim Israel Tsimrman puts the blame for the Holocaust on the younger generation of pious Jews in the 1930s who rejected tradition and betrayed their task of carrying Judaism forward. Their abandonment of religion along with their failure to return to the Land of Israel made it even worse. In his book Tamim Pa’alo, written shortly after the war, he argues that this is the answer to the question ”Why did God do this to this nation?”.
Radical, indeed.

The genocide in Rwanda can be traced back to the impact of the Catholic church on the population. The Belgian and French colonialism – for its own purposes – separated the inhabitants into the ethnic groups of Tutsi and Hutu. The church took part in this process and shifted its support from one group to another according to whoever was in power. This eventually led to the phenomenon of priests taking an active part in decieving the Tutsi population, calling them to seek shelter in the churches, which then became sites of mass murder. Here was the true face of the church, who claimed to bring Western civilization and Western morality to non-European and non-Christian peoples. The Vatican still denies any role in this genocide, and many of those clergy men who were involved are still active in Rwanda.


Back in the day of the mighty Inquisition, one was able to escape getting killed simply by converting to Christianity, thus losing one’s true identity, risking social exclusion and most importantly facing divine punishment. The horror!
Modern genocide tend to outrule this option, since religion tends to be related to race. The most extreme example might be how Serbian religious nationalists claim that Slavic Muslims suffer from a defective gene and therefore must be cleansed by murder or expulsion, since they cannot be transformed even by conversion.

Genocide – savagery, limitless brutality and cruelty.
Spirituality – love, compassion and humanness.
They walk together, hand in hand.

Article inspired by the book In God’s Name (2001).

politics

>Theodore Kaczynski, The Unabomber – Part Twelve

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”We were told that we were to engage in a debate about our personal philosophies, and then found that our adversary in the debate subjected us to various insults that, presumably, the psychologists helped him to concoct. It was a highly unpleasant experience.”
Ted Kaczynski to attorney Michael Mello, September 19, 1998

So what was this experiment, The Dyad as it was called?
Its intent was to catch the student by surprise, to decieve him, bring him to anger, ridicule his beliefs and verbally and psychologically brutalize him. One month before the actual experiment – the confrontation – took place, the students were interviewed in depth by Murray and his colleagues about their hopes and dreams of the future. They were asked to write extensive essays explaining their personal philosophies of life, as well as detailed autobiographies answering intimate questions on a range of subjects from thumb-sucking and toilet training to masturbation and erotic fantasies. They were subject to a lot of tests that included a Rorschach test, a time-metaphor test, the TAT, analyses of their literary tastes, an odor association test, a word association test, and twenty more at the very least. The results were then analysed by researchers, who developed a psychological portrait of each personality in every possible dimension.
Then it was time for the confrontation.

The students had been led to believe that they were to debate their life stories and moral with another graduate student like himself. However, when the subject arrived for the debate he was led into a very brightly lit room and seated in front of a one-way mirror. A camera recorded his every move through a hole in the wall. Electrodes that recorded his heart rate were attached to his body.
Instead of a casual student they were confronted with a talented lawyer who knew everything about them. The lawyer was carefully coached to launch an aggressive attack on his younger and totally unprepared victim as he was trying to explain and defend his philosophy of life – for the purpose of upsetting him as much as possible. Many participants of course found this treatment severely traumatic.
After these sessions they were called back for several ”recall” interviews, and sometimes they were asked to comment on the videos of themselves, were they were being reduced to anger, often totally lost, not being able to finish sentences because they were caught off guard and so on. In the last year of the experiment Murray made the students available to his personal graduate students, to serve as guinea pigs for their own research projects.
Alden E. Wessman, a former research associate of Murray’s who had been bothered by the ethical dimensions of this study said: ”Later, I thought: ‘We took and took and used them and what did we give them in return?’”

Kaczynski’s code name during the experiment was ”Lawful”.
The confrontation took place during the winter of 1960.

politics

>The Demonized Ahmadinejad

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>Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration, as well as co-author of The New Color Line and The Tyranny of Good Intentions. I haven’t read any of his books, but his article Are You Ready for War with a Demonized Iran – Why the US Wants to Delegitimize the Iranian Elections, published by Counterpunch, is worth considering.

How much attention do elections in Japan, India, Argentina, or any other country, get from the U.S. media? How many Americans and American journalists even know who is in political office in other countries besides England, France, and Germany? Who can name the political leaders of Switzerland, Holland, Brazil, Japan, or even China?

Yet, many know of Iran’s President Ahmadinejad. The reason is obvious. He is daily demonized in the U.S. media.

The U.S. media’s demonization of Ahmadinejad itself demonstrates American ignorance. The President of Iran is not the ruler. He is not the commander-in-chief of the armed forces. He cannot set policies outside the boundaries set by Iran’s rulers, the ayatollahs who are not willing for the Iranian Revolution to be overturned by American money in some color-coded “revolution.”

Iranians have a bitter experience with the United States government. Their first democratic election, after emerging from occupied and colonized status in the 1950s, was overturned by the U.S. government. The U.S. government installed in place of the elected candidate a dictator who tortured and murdered dissidents who thought Iran should be an independent country and not ruled by an American puppet.

The U.S. “superpower” has never forgiven the Iranian Islamic ayatollahs for the Iranian Revolution in the late 1970s, which overthrew the U.S. puppet government and held hostage U.S. embassy personnel, regarded as “a den of spies,” while Iranian students pieced together shredded embassy documents that proved America’s complicity in the destruction of Iranian democracy.

The government-controlled U.S. corporate media, a Ministry of Propaganda, has responded to the re-election of Ahmadinejad with non-stop reports of violent Iranians protests to a stolen election. A stolen election is presented as a fact, even thought there is no evidence for it whatsoever. The U.S. media’s response to the documented stolen elections during the George W. Bush/Karl Rove era was to ignore the evidence of real stolen elections.

Full article here.

politics

>Ahmadinejad disclaimer

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>Earlier on, when I’ve written about Ahmadinejad, I’ve discussed his honest and straight-forward questions to George W. Bush (read his letter to the man here), his thoughts about the Holocaust and his relationship with the United States. I’ve never written about Ahmadinejad and his relationship to his people. It it obvious that he is an asshole opposed by many, and that the election was a fraud (or was it, really?). But he’s also worshipped by many.
However, when seeing what’s going on in Iran right now I hope that people will understand the need of civil rights and use their right to vote. I also hope that people will understand the importance of honest media.

Still, that doesn’t change my opinion about Ahmadinejad regarding what I’ve written earlier, because that’s a whole different ball game.

Click the images to enlarge
Hundreds of thousands of Iranian supporters of Mir Hossein Mousavi demonstrate in Tehran on Monday, June 15, 2009.

Supporters of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wave Iranian and religious flags during a victory celebration in central Tehran June 14, 2009.

A supporter of defeated presidential candidate Mousavi is beaten by government security men as fellow supporters come to his aid during riots in Tehran, Iran, Sunday, June 14, 2009.


The best way to get photos and updates seems to be Twitter:
#iranelection
#Tehran
etc…
Nima Dervish updates regularly in Swedish here.