“If you find murderers scary, try murder groupies.”1
Alex Skopic recently wrote a obituary reflection on Ted Kaczynski (1942-2023), better known as the Unabomber, who passed away in June, titled “The Tragedy of the Unabomber.“2 Kaczynski was a militant eco-terrorist, who largely operated as a lone anarchist of sorts. The biographical entry in Britannica describes him as an “American criminal who conducted a 17-year bombing campaign that killed 3 and wounded 23 in an attempt to bring about ‘a revolution against the industrial system’.”3
Gene Lyons recently wrote about the perpetrator of the Oklahoma City bombing, Timothy McVeigh, noting that many of the insurrectionists in the Republican Party are acting with fanaticism that owes a lot to McVeigh:
So, have a substantial proportion of Republicans simply gone around the bend and abandoned reason altogether? Alas, many have, yes. And whether they acknowledge it or not, their movement’s patron saint is Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber.4
Ted Kaczynski was also one of the star terrorists of the 1990s. But unlike McVeigh, who was part of the Christian-nationalist militia movement and heavily influenced by violent anti-abortion ideology, it would be hard to find a contemporary political trend in the US that resembles the outlook of Ted Kaczynski, which was a brand of hyper-libertarian eco-fascism.
A CNN obituary for Kaczynski5:
Though it’s questionable to what extent Kaczynski’s notion of “revolution” had much of anything “social” about it, Skopic’s article is a good description of how constructive social causes are not well served by individual acts of violent terrorism. (Always keeping in mind that guerilla warfare, which includes the “partisan warfare” that the Allies waged in the Second World War all over Europe, is routinely denounced as “terrorism” by those targeted.)
“Terrorism” of the 19th and early-20th century sorts Skopic cites here almost always meant individual assassinations or bombings aimed at political or anti-labor targets. The notion of “terrorism” as the deliberate killing of non-combatant civilians is largely a product of the post-9/11 political vocabulary. Skopic writes:
Historically, terrorism has always been the politics of the desperate and the isolated, and people have turned to individual acts of violence to express all kinds of social and antisocial agendas. For parallels, we can look to the Nihilists of pre-revolutionary Russia, who (unlike the later Bolsheviks) saw little hope in mass politics, and opted for bomb-throwing and assassination attempts as their tactics of choice. Or there are the anarchist assassins, such as Leon Czolgosz, who successfully killed President William McKinley in 1901, and Alexander Berkman, who almost did the same to the steel magnate Henry Clay Frick in 1892. Most of these figures were more discriminating than Kaczynski, both in their choice of targets and their stated goals: anarchism and nihilism, for all their flaws, are at least coherent and historically-rooted ideologies, rather than the quixotic creation of one man. They’re more realistic than simply trying to get rid of technology as such via pipe bomb [as with ] Kaczynski. But radical terrorism of every stripe shares a similar whiff of futility. Even when its practitioners succeed in their plots, they rarely change the world in the way they’d hoped. After McKinley’s death, he was simply replaced with Roosevelt, and Tsar Alexander II with Alexander III. The underlying society rolled on, relatively unbothered.
None of this should be taken to mean that assassinations have no political effects. To take just one example, when Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth murdered Abraham Lincoln, it left Andrew Johnson, a Tennessee Democrat who supported the Union but also felt strong sympathy for the Southern planter class, as President during the critical early years of Reconstruction. To the extent such hypotheticals can be reasonably judged, that assassination had a significantly detrimental effect on the development of American democracy.
But Skopic also recalls the fact that the Unabomber’s concerns were shared to some degree by many people who were not in the habit of sending letter bombs. He quotes one of Kaczynski’s seriously wounded victims, Gary Wright, who observed after Kacyznski’s recent death:
[T]hrow away the murders, right? Throw away the meaning and everything else. It was the wrong method, but if you apply where we are today, it’s kind of prophetic in a way, that here we are today, we’re debating A.I., we’re debating all kinds of things. You got [sic] mental health issues due to social media. He [Kaczynski] did see some elements early on that maybe others weren’t recognizing.
And, at the time, though very few if any people praised his tactics, Kaczynski did have a bit of a “Robin Hood” reputation, particularly before he was caught in 1995. The 1990s were the heyday of talk radio, and quirky kooks were much in demand. He was living off the grid, Jesse James fashion. Or so it could seem from a comfortable distance. But Kaczynski really was a stereotypical “loner” in the sense that he was acting on his own, not as part of some political movement or even much of a coherent political ideology.
That may be part of what is meant by the “tragedy” in the title of the article. But as Skopic puts it:
The really tragic part, though, is that it was all for nothing. To this day, it’s unclear how Kaczynski thought mailing bombs to random people, who happened to be loosely connected with technology, would in any way alleviate the problems he’d identified within advanced industrial societies. His manifesto is full of bombastic talk about “revolution against the industrial-technological system,” speculating that “under suitable conditions large numbers of people may devote themselves passionately” to such a cause, but there’s no indication that he ever attempted to rally anyone to his side. Instead, he simply retreated from the world, hiding away in his cabin and lashing out with haphazard violence. There’s a distinct element of sociopathy to his crimes … . [my emphasis]
But to the extent he had any coherent ideology besides thinking the world was going to hell in a handbasket, it was apparently closer to eco-fascism than to any left or mainstream activists or ideologies.
Throughout Industrial Society and its Future, he complains almost as bitterly about “leftists” and “leftism” as he does about technology itself. Leftists tend to be “oversocialized types who try to satisfy their drive for power by imposing their morality on everyone,” he writes, and they “tend to hate anything that has an image of being strong, good and successful” on principle. Their stated concern for social and environmental issues is only “an excuse for them to express their own hostility and frustrated need for power.” (No projection here, of course.) As a result, “a movement that exalts nature and opposes technology must take a resolutely anti-leftist stance and must avoid all collaboration with leftists,” because “leftism is in the long run inconsistent with wild nature, with human freedom and with the elimination of modern technology.”
Skopic returns to the tragedy theme at the end:
He killed not only three innocent people, but an entire alternate self—Ted Kaczynski as he should have been, Ted Kaczynski the world-renowned activist and advocate. We are left with only Ted Kaczynski the murderer, and he leaves only pointless misery in his wake.
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Scheck, Frank (2023): Red Rooms’ Review: Icily Effective Chiller Makes the Murderer Less Scary Than His Groupies. Hollywood Reporter 07/05/2023. <https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-reviews/red-rooms-review-pascal-plante-1235526902/> (Accessed: 07-06-2023).
Skopic Alex (2023): The Tragedy of the Unabomber. Current Affairs 06/22/2023. <https://www.currentaffairs.org/2023/06/the-tragedy-of-the-unabomber> (Accessed: 06-07-2023).
Ray, Michael, Ray (2023): Ted Kaczynski. Encyclopedia Britannica 06/11/2023. <https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ted-Kaczynski> (Accessed 06-07-2023).
Lyons, Gene (2023): Roots of right-wing poison trace back to Timothy McVeigh. Chicago Sun-Times 07/14/2023. <https://chicago.suntimes.com/columnists/2023/7/14/23793965/right-wing-extremism-timothy-mcveigh-jeffrey-toobin-book-gene-lyons> (Accessed: 2023-15-07).
'Unabomber' Ted Kaczynski dies in prison. Ex-FBI official describes how he was caught. CNN YouTube channel 06/10/2023. (Accessed: 06-07-2023).
Excellent points. Terrorism almost always increases the power of the state, and in this case encouraged surveillance.