Ted Kaczynski dies at 81

From Washington Post

For 17 years, he picked his victims with cold deliberation, leaving a grisly trail of nail- and razor-blade-packed pipe bombs across the nation that killed three people and injured 23 others, several of them maimed for life.

He knew none of his victims and struck unpredictably from coast to coast in seemingly random acts from 1978 to 1995, baffling law enforcement officers and gripping the country in a kind of menacing unease — until his capture in early 1996 in the remote mountains of Montana.

There, Ted Kaczynski, the scrawny, bearded anti-technology anarchist popularly known as the Unabomber, surrendered peaceably at the primitive plywood cabin he had called home for 25 years. He was escorted by federal agents through slushy snow down a backwoods road to the main highway and, ultimately, to prison for the rest of his life.

The Harvard-trained mathematics prodigy turned lone serial bomber died June 10 at a federal prison medical facility in Butner, N.C. He was 81.

Kristie Breshears, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Prisons, said Mr. Kaczynski “was found unresponsive in his cell” and was pronounced dead at 8 a.m. In December 2021, the Federal Bureau of Prisons announced that Mr. Kaczynski was moved to the North Carolina compound from a supermax prison in Florence, Colo.

In letters and a massive 35,000-word manifesto, Mr. Kaczynski freely acknowledged his acts and called them necessary to save humanity from itself.

“Science marches on blindly, without regard to the real welfare of the human race,” he wrote in the manifesto, tapped out on a battered typewriter in his mountain cabin and then sent to The Washington Post and New York Times with a demand to print it or risk further attacks.

At another point, using the plural “we” and “our” to suggest, falsely, that he had collaborators, he wrote: “To get our message before the public with some chance of making a lasting impression, we’ve had to kill people.”

Under pressure from federal authorities, The Post and the Times agreed to jointly print the manifesto in a special section of The Post in September 1995. It was an agonizing decision, but as Times publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. said at the time, “This is not a First Amendment issue. This centers on the role of a newspaper as part of a community.”

The papers consulted with FBI Director Louis J. Freeh and Attorney General Janet Reno. Both recommended publication in the uncertain hope it would stop the attacks and possibly lead to the Unabomber’s discovery. The decision paid off. There were no more bombings, and the Unabomber was in custody within seven months, identified by his brother.

Alston Chase, an author and longtime Unabomber researcher, described Mr. Kaczynski’s thinking as having evolved from his days at Harvard in the early 1960s.

For Mr. Kaczynski, Chase wrote in the June 2000 Atlantic magazine, “Technology and science were destroying liberty and nature. The system, of which Harvard was a part, served technology, which in turn required conformism. By advertising, propaganda and other techniques of behavior modification, this system sought to transform men into automatons, to serve the machine.”

In the manifesto and letters, Mr. Kaczynski blamed his parents for raising him in social isolation. His sense of rejection, he said, caused him to spurn authority and develop a belief that modern technology was destroying the natural world and usurping human autonomy.

“Electricity, indoor plumbing, rapid long-distance communications … how could one argue against any of these things?” he asked in the manifesto. “[Yet] all these technical advances taken together have created a world in which the average man’s fate is no longer in his own hands … but in those of politicians, corporate executives and remote, anonymous technicians and bureaucrats whom he as an individual has no power to influence.”

As it turned out, the Unabomber’s targets were not randomly chosen but specific individuals he associated with technology and the destroyers of nature, including a computer scientist, an advertising executive, an airline president and a timber industry lobbyist.

In some cases, his bombs, concealed in scrupulously crafted wooden boxes, were misdelivered or intercepted innocently by others. Mr. Kaczynski went to great effort to elude detection, erasing identification marks from bomb parts, even avoiding licking postage stamps to prevent DNA matching. Tracking down the Unabomber led to one of the nation’s longest and most expensive investigations.

A moody and withdrawn child

Then came years of research tracing his habits, propensities and psychological markers. Still, a veil of mystery remained over the ultimate purpose of his acts beyond simple anger at a world that wouldn’t listen to him. A moody and withdrawn child Theodore John Kaczynski was born May 22, 1942, in Chicago, where his father helped run the family’s successful sausage-making plant.

Early on, there were signs that Ted was different. Hospitalized in isolation at nine months for severe allergic reactions, the once-alert baby returned home moody and withdrawn, his mother, Wanda, later said.

In 1952, three years after his brother, David, was born, the family moved to Evergreen Park, a conservative, lower-middle-class suburb just south of Chicago, where the Kaczynskis were a family apart.

Although raised Roman Catholic like most of their neighbors, the parents were atheists, pursued liberal causes and often kept their children inside to read and do homework while other youngsters played outside. They emphasized academic excellence.

Ted, bookish and socially awkward, scored at genius level between 160 and 170 on IQ tests. He skipped sixth and 11th grades and was admitted to Harvard on a scholarship at 16.

There, his isolation deepened. He was physically and emotionally younger than his classmates, and a social gulf divided public high school graduates like himself and the dominant private-school crowd on campus. He interacted little with others and took a single room.

He participated in a study — part of the controversial Project MKUltra “mind-control” experiments of the 1950s led by Harvard psychologist Henry A. Murray and backed by the CIA — to measure the effects of extreme stress on student volunteers by subjecting them to unrelenting belittlement and humiliation.

Mr. Kaczynski graduated in 1962 with a degree in mathematics and moved on to the University of Michigan, where in five years he completed a doctorate in mathematics and landed a tenure-track teaching post at the University of California at Berkeley.

But he abruptly quit in 1969 and, two years later, cobbled together the money to buy a small lot near Lincoln, Mont. He built a single-room cabin with no electricity or running water. He tended a vegetable garden and hunted small game. He enriched the garden with compost from his own waste.

He rode a homemade bicycle into Lincoln for supplies and to visit the local library, where he read newspapers. Shelves in his cabin were crammed with books — from 19th-century classics to obscure tomes of political science. He seldom worked for pay and relied on small sums from his family for minimal needs and occasional travel.

In the cabin, he also started planning his serial terror attacks, the first of which involved a crude, low-impact device that went off in May 1978 at Northwestern University near Chicago and injured a campus security guard.

A second bomb also went off at Northwestern in May 1979, leaving a student with minor cuts and burns. But a third, which exploded in November 1979 in the hold of an American Airlines flight from Chicago to Washington, D.C., forced the plane to make an emergency landing. Twelve passengers were treated for smoke inhalation.

The FBI ramped up its investigation, noting similarities in the components of the three bombs. The bureau formed a special task force called UNABOM, so named because the early targets were a university and an airline. The media dubbed the unknown suspect the “Unabomber.”

Over the next 15 years, he unleashed 13 more bombs, killing three people and injuring nine — including the president of United Airlines, three professors and a geneticist — with increasingly sophisticated wiring, detonators and explosive materials. He also began leaving a unique signature, the letters “FC” imprinted on bomb parts found by investigators at blast scenes.

A six-year lull in the bombings occurred after a witness spotted a man in a hooded jacket and aviator glasses leaving a suspicious package outside a computer store in Salt Lake City in February 1987. When the package exploded, severely injuring the store owner, authorities circulated a flier nationwide depicting the suspect. Investigators speculated that the move spooked the Unabomber, causing him to lie low before resuming activities in 1993.

In September 1995, he sent his manifesto, titled “Industrial Society and Its Future,” to The Post and the Times. He also disclosed that “FC” stood for Freedom Club, suggesting vaguely it was an anarchist group helping him.

The rambling prose seemed eerily familiar to David Kaczynski, a social worker at an Albany, N.Y., shelter for runaway youths. He began to suspect, reluctantly, that his brother was the Unabomber. Pushed by his wife, Linda, through “thick layers of dread and denial,” he saw similarities between the manifesto and some of Ted’s earlier writings, according to David’s 2016 memoir, “Every Last Tie.”

David took his suspicions to the FBI, and analysts quickly spotted close parallels in phraseology, even misspellings. Directed by David, agents massed at the cabin in the Montana woods on April 3, 1996, and took Ted into custody. Inside the cabin, they found a cache of bombmaking components. David received the FBI’s $1 million reward and said he would use it to aid families who suffered because of his brother’s actions.

On Jan. 22, 1998, after extensive legal jockeying to avoid both the death penalty and an insanity defense, Mr. Kaczynski pleaded guilty and acknowledged all 16 bombings and the deaths and injuries they caused. Unrepentant, he was sentenced to four consecutive life terms plus 30 years by U.S. District Judge Garland E. Burrell Jr. in Sacramento. Information on survivors was not immediately available.

Wanda Kaczynski, pondering the fate of her son, wondered in her later years how his life could have been different. “What could I have done to keep him out of the wilderness?” she asked in an interview with The Post in June 1996. “What could I have done to give him a happier life? … I just don't know."

There are 66 Comments

Goodbye, Uncle Ted
Though I never knew you at all
You had the grace to hold yourself
While those around you crawled
They crawled out of the CIA
And they whispered into your brain
They set you on the treadmill
And they made you change your name

And it seems to me you lived your life
Like a hermit in the woods
Never knowing who to blow up
When the rain set in
And I would've liked to know you
But I was just a kid
Your brainworms burned out long before
Your nail bomb ever did

on anarchist news:

“Science marches on blindly, without regard to the real welfare of the human race,”

Science is always done in the name of protecting the human race, it's nice that murdering people gives you the privilege to lie all the time.

From the 'Guardian' (UK) today:

Even in his own journals, Kaczynski came across as not a committed revolutionary, but a vengeful hermit driven by petty grievances.

“I certainly don’t claim to be an altruist or to be acting for the ‘good’ (whatever that is) of the human race,” he wrote on 6 April 1971. “I act merely from a desire for revenge.”

Revenge is a double edged sword, karma is consequential, umm, one must control one's seething ressentiment to avoid prison, umm, nasty people sometimes get life without parole,,,,,

Waging personal war on civilization over decades, spending the time to write elaborate essays about it, and sending mail bombs to a dozen targets... yet it's still "petty grievances", lol.

State lapdogs someday gotta have to realize how such dumb, poorly-informed arrogance is not serving their cause. Or won't!

He disagreed with most green anarchists’ utopian view of primitive society. He said that it was full of violence and oppression and that that was perfectly fine. Also, obviously, a product of mk ultra. “Fun” fact: taught math to a young Jeff Epstein.

He was not exactly a style model of a life well lived for the impressionable young 'uns.

He seems like an MK Ultra bent unit gone off the reservation.

Uh -- yes.

No. We need an anti-wage labor social movement of the wage-earning class and of enlisted people in the armed forces -- not an individualist, I-am-psychologically-owned-by-the-alienated-individualist-pathology-of-the-United-States-of-'Murika trip.

If only he had found a partner during his incarceration and overcome his raging homophobia. I suppose we will never know,

may those forests of darkness and wildness keep you soul in peace

r.i.p. tk

He literally wrote he was an anarchist in Industrial Society and Its Future

Do you think he was, if you take his actions and other ideas into consideration? The former mayor of Reykvavík also called himself an anarchist.

his actions and most (i said most, so don't dig up the exceptions here) of his ideas were anarchist, and lots of people call themselves anarchists these days, most are not, ted was. stupid comparison.

He literally wrote he was an anarchist in Industrial Society and Its Future

Akin, perhaps, to Mussolini saying, "fascism has always been anti-capitalist and anti-plutocratic." Or that this brand of anarchism is not worth a shit.

Because he has had a large influence on eco-anarchist milieus all over the world.
I think you know that though and are just being a disingenuous cunt.

I did not know that and do not know if it's true. Please avoid the personal attacks.

He corresponded with, and wrote for, Live Wild or Die!, Green Anarchist magazine, Green Anarchy magazine, Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed, and the Earth First! journal. His correspondence with Jensen, Zerzan and Tucker is no secret either.

not sure why you are here, Ted was an anarchist. Not sure why the post is taken from Their media though.

If he was an anarchist he was an extreme right-wing one. He was an extraordinarily alienated individual and people who draw inspiration from him are barking up the wrong tree.

'He was an extraordinarily alienated individual'

You say that as if it's a bad thing. Do you prefer good little well-adjusted citizens?

"right wing", you fuckin' leftist. he was not "right wing" for fuck's sake is that how all you people see anyone who doesn't think like you. fuckin' programed robots.

it's extremely easy to prove ted had a fuckton of reactionary politics, do better. you're just chirping away with your own "programming"

If "reactionary" = "right wing" then what does that make all you fucking woke millenials?

Winning ;-)

*face palm for 2 whole minutes*

"If"?

If it means right wing? .... have you looked the fukin word up yet? i'm old as shit, you knuckle draggin waste of fukin oxygen. use the computer for something besides porn and look up the word. jfc ...

I said this earlier and the authoritarian moderators deleted it :-( I demand recognition!
Well said, lumpy. You are the only anews named account with a damn.

if it's any consolation, anon is still the best anarchist writer of all time

Best anon writer here. TK was, by ideological definitions, though these are all too broad and negate unique individualist qualities, but to keep you happy lumpy he was a NEO-LUDDITE. You understand don't you, machinery wrecking, violent uprising, idealistic (possibly math-logic elitism).

Thanks!
uwu

Thanks, much appreciated, I am a philologist, thus, I've read Neech,,

just call him a homophobic sexist fuckhead.

signed,
committee for precise name-calling

that's what right wing means tho? what else? "fiscal responsibility"? ha!

no, it' snot what right wing means. right wing means a part of the state. like left wing does. both words come with lots of associations that are no longer helpful to informed conversation, especially not for anarchists.

right wing used to mean anti-russian, small government, pro-business, fiscal responsibility, etc--(whether or not right wingers were consistent is a different topic). "conservative" doesn't mean that any more, not even rhetorically (de santis, for example).

also, the more specific the words used, the more likely online anons won't just talk past each other.

signed,
continuing the committee's work

the committee might want to consider definitions outside the american context then ...?

traditional use of "leftist" includes at least some anti-state positions, originally anti-monarchist ones when it was still the crown versus everyone else and later, most anti-capitalist positions could be broadly defined that way, including most of the anarchists throughout history. that's an admittedly euro-centric history but nonetheless, it's how the word was used in the english language context. i'm personally more of an anti-civ, anti-state position but since i'm not a millionaire, being a leftist sympathizer is how you can tell I understand some basic math and economics.

only "right wing" has ever consistently meant a pro-state position, with only one qualifier needed, when the far right attempts to seize power from the centre, which is when they pretend to be a force of opposition, steve bannon style.

oh! and just to piss everyone off at the funeral, the other common trajectory for an isolated, closeted, far right old crank: a cabin in the woods, mailing "revenge" bombs to people he's never met, confusing murderous egomania for a political position.

that's a much less common fate for a reactionary but it happens! or you could look at mishima, there's another ridiculous, self aggrandizing way to be a closeted asshole. capture a military base and then kill yourself inside it when the rest of the far right betrays you. so many options to choose from when you're a self-hating queer reactionary!

but gotta be very dramatic tho, so everyone knows how important you are and you get all that validation you totally always deserved but people just didn't get how cool and important you were but you'll show them! you'll show them all!

There have been numerous lone wolves with diverse unpredictable politics and positions. Ted came out of left wing movements not right wing ones. Nothing about his trajectory or adjacent positions make him reactionary. He may ATTRACT reactionaries for various reasons(the left currently having more institutional power as opposed to the right wing dominated Fordist and early post-Fordist era where T-Bomb attracted more leftists and post leftist.) but that does not make him reactionary.

fuck off ziggles, you and I haven't bothered with a discussion about definitions in a long time. you ain't sincere, fuck right off the edge of the world you chattering dumbass. your arguments by empty assertion are beyond boring

do you even know what stochastic means? nobody can force you to make connections in your thinking

I’m plenty sincere Lumpy, that tends to be a trait of sperg brains like me:) You pinched a turd of a take and I called it for what it was(not the first time probably not the last).

In regards to stochastic, how on earth does that demonstrate that K-Bomb was reactionary? Like lone wolf violence there is nothing that is ideologically specific. If this is all you have in regards to connections then you have all but confirmed to me that you have nothing.

Your point was retarded. Take the L Lumpy.

Since SirEinzige and Lumpy are both Canadians can we put together a collection so they can meet up in person and have a face-to-face debate and/or clumsily make love?
Better yet why doesn't Anews pay for it from their riches? Also they might as well just get a .ca domain name.
Just sayin'!

Another poster here, wtf don't you understand about Neo-Luddites and their opposition to the oppression of the working-class as being a totally Marxist goal because machinery gave an elite ruling class the control of the means of production. TK was a leftist seething in ressentiment!

Alot of vertical mind thinkers look upon the left/right as a binary when infact it is a dichotomy of the same origin, power and control. It's only the form of its organisational methodology which gives either faction its distinct style, but in the end the same gaol is in mind, hierarchical authoritarian structured nation state, a modern hyper-tribal violent warmongering order.
Woke are inverted fascists and vice versa.

Insisting that anarcho-capitalists, national anarchists and other right-wing anti-statists aren’t “real” anarchists doesn’t make them go away in reality.

it's not that they're not "real", it's that gibberish arguments don't define what words mean.

lots of people exist but make no sense when they talk, should they get to define words? no.

Lumpy is correct here... we got gazillion of confused dumbasses and self-absorbed assholes out there who'll just pretend being whatever suits them and their business. Have you forgot this is the same shit country where TV preachers been getting rich?

Anarchism as position just cannot include paradoxical positions such as nationalism or capitalism, regardless of the Youtuber trash out there. We've been there WAY BEFORE them and we'll still be around when everyone will have forgot them.

This should be obvious. The caps represent old age capitalism being turfed by scientific management capitalism and the nazis represent no more white normativity or supremacy. They're not anarchists.

no one is talking to those people here. they are not anarchists. it' snotabout them going away, its about them being irrelevant to conversations here.

What he was about was bullshit and bad news - and it appeals to a certain kind of vicarious living USA type. There is nothing useful in it.

Dang, if Alicia Keys and Woody Harrelson keel over quick, maybe Chomsky will get to enjoy a quick moment actually being the most famous living "anarchist" in his twilight years.

Good to hear. It's a relief.

“Science marches on blindly, without regard to the real welfare of the human race,” he wrote in the manifesto, tapped out on a battered typewriter in his mountain cabin and then sent to The Washington Post and New York Times with a demand to print it or risk further attacks. "

No, the use of science is always best excused by "the human race".

TK has honestly had a pretty huge influence on the way I think about politics and anarchism.

My opinion: he was honestly a casualty of the educational/academic institutions in the U.S. Overall, his home life was pretty standard, his brother wrote a really shitty book about it. He realized how fucked up civilization was during his adolescence and young adult hood...and he winded up giving into his arrogance about being a "smart person", which unfortunately deprived him of some of the finer methods for escapism and indulgence of anarchist hate.

R.I.P. Ted Kaczinsky, your publicity stunt was very effective but there's no chance that humans will ever have an "anti-tech" revolution, maybe we will have the luxury of seeing a new dark age like SE rants about, but who knows? Maybe space age communism is where we are and headed...

He lived a life of grungey rebellion and dirt... you will be missed by some...excuse my bad manners. At least you knew the stupidity of the victimhood politics.

Thanks, brow!

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