Was the unabomber born at harvard

[Bernice Moore]

Thanks to one of our readers, here is the whole piece! Was the Unabomber born at Harvard?

from Frog:willy:



I tracked down the URLs for the extended Atlantic Monthly article (in four parts):



Part 1: http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issue...00/06/chase.htm



Part 2: http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issue...0/06/chase2.htm



Part 3: http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issue...0/06/chase3.htm



Part 4: http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issue...0/06/chase4.htm

[Jan Klimkowski]

Bernice - thank you for posting thse links to the June 2000 article.

David Guyatt and I had a long discussion about this many moons ago. Part of our exchange ended up online, but no longer seems to exist.

Theodore Kaczynski is a very bright man, and as such he was targeted and enrolled as a guinea pig in crude psychological experiments, conducted at Harvard, within what can crudely be described as behaviourist and eugenic frameworks.

It is unknowable quite what impact these experiments had on him.

However, I believe a fair case can be made that the Unabomber (note spelling) was born - in part - as a reaction to that abusive research.

[Bernice Moore]

i wonder at times jan, just how many patsys the govs have created to hide behind...your very welcome to the post pleased of your interest...take care b..

[Allison Hunt]

I'm having trouble figuring out all the details of the Ted Kaczynski / Unabomber case. There seems to be only one source for the Deep Political theory regarding the case and that source is madly disorganized. http://www.unabombers.com Perhaps some forum members can help me answer some questions, such as: 1) It seems to be undisputed that Ted Kaczynski was an MK Ultra experimentation victim in the late 1950's. Even so, I do not understand what that has to do with him being a patsy for the bombings. That is, I don't see how MK Ultra could have made him a more effective or easier patsy. It seems his writings about the environment are truely heart-felt by him. Does anyone suggest his environmental views originated from MK Ultra? If not, I do not see the connection unless it was MK Ultra that discovered these views at age 16. 2) Who is Daniel C Pride? On the Unabomber web site, Pride claims some of the Unabomber handwriting belongs to himself. How did that happen? 3) On this Unabomber web site, there are hints that some people know who actually committed the bombings. Is this true? Who is he and what is the evidence? From where did that evidence come? 4) What made Ted Kaczynski a better patsy than any other person i.e., what made him stand out from all the others? Was it simple coincidence that CIA/Mosad spooks knew him from MK Ultra and that he also dropped out of main stream society? 5) Is the evidence against Kaczynski so thin that the government feared going to trial? Is that why he got railroaded into a plea he did not authorize? 6) 15 years later, why are there no JFK style books exposing this false-flag attack? Thank you for any light to be shed on this subject.

[Jan Klimkowski]

Here are some excerpts on the Harvard experimentation on Kaczynski, which I posted in the Norway Explosion thread, on learning that some of Breivik's 1500-page manifesto is adapted from the Unabomber's thesis.

The Unabomber link is disturbing.

Ted Kaczynski was a subject of brutal mind manipulation experiments at Harvard. The official version says it stops there. Personally, I doubt the official version.

Here are some excerpts from the four part Atlantic article by Alston Chase, which can be read online in full starting here:

In the fall of 1958 Theodore Kaczynski, a brilliant but vulnerable boy of sixteen, entered Harvard College. There he encountered a prevailing intellectual atmosphere of anti-technological despair. There, also, he was deceived into subjecting himself to a series of purposely brutalizing psychological experiments -- experiments that may have confirmed his still-forming belief in the evil of science. Was the Unabomber born at Harvard? A look inside the files

In 1959 a comfortable old house stood on the site. Known as the Annex, it served as a laboratory in which staff members of the Department of Social Relations conducted research on human subjects. There, from the fall of 1959 through the spring of 1962, Harvard psychologists, led by Henry A. Murray, conducted a disturbing and what would now be seen as ethically indefensible experiment on twenty-two undergraduates. To preserve the anonymity of these student guinea pigs, experimenters referred to individuals by code name only. One of these students, whom they dubbed "Lawful," was Theodore John Kaczynski, who would one day be known as the Unabomber, and who would later mail or deliver sixteen package bombs to scientists, academicians, and others over seventeen years, killing three people and injuring twenty-three.

Through research at the Murray Center and in the Harvard archives I found that, among its other purposes, Henry Murray's experiment was intended to measure how people react under stress. Murray subjected his unwitting students, including Kaczynski, to intensive interrogation -- what Murray himself called "vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive" attacks, assaulting his subjects' egos and most-cherished ideals and beliefs.

PLANNING for the last of Murray's "multiform assessments" was well under way by the spring of 1959. The idea, according to Murray's notes, was to "call for volunteers from a large undergraduate course."



Kaczynski told Mello that he was "pressured into participating" in the Murray experiment. His hesitation turned out to be sensible. Researchers gave the volunteers almost no information about the experiment in which they would participate. Each was simply asked to answer yes to the following question: "Would you be willing to contribute to the solution of certain psychological problems (parts of an on-going program of research in the development of personality), by serving as a subject in a series of experiments or taking a number of tests (average about 2 hours a week) through the academic year (at the current College rate per hour)?"

In fact it would never be clear what the "certain psychological problems" were. And the test that served as the centerpiece for this undertaking appears remarkably similar to the old OSS stress test. Students would be given the third degree. But whereas the OSS applicants must have known that enduring unpleasant interrogations could be part of their job, these students did not. The intent was to catch them by surprise, to deceive them, and to brutalize them. As Murray described it,



When the subject arrived for the debate, he was escorted to a "brilliantly lighted room" and seated in front of a one-way mirror. A motion-picture camera recorded his every move and facial expression through a hole in the wall. Electrodes leading to machines that recorded his heart and respiratory rates were attached to his body. Then the debate began. But the students were tricked. Contrary to what Murray claimed in his article, they had been led to believe that they would debate their philosophy of life with another student like themselves. Instead they confronted what Forrest Robinson describes as a "well-prepared 'stooge'" -- a talented young lawyer indeed, but one who had been instructed to launch into an aggressive attack on the subject, for the purpose of upsetting him as much as possible. Robinson has described what happened next.



Not surprisingly, most participants found this highly unpleasant, even traumatic, as the data set records. "We were led into the room with bright lights, very bright," one of them, code-named Cringle, recalled afterward.



"Right away," said another, code-named Trump, describing his experience afterward, "I didn't like [the interrogator]."

[Dr. G] ... came waltzing over and he put on those electrodes but in that process, while he was doing that, kind of whistling, I was looking over the room, and right away I didn't like the room. I didn't like the way the glass was in front of me through which I couldn't see, but I was being watched and right away that puts one in a kind of unnatural situation and I noted the big white lights and again that heightens the unnatural effect. There was something peculiar about the set-up too, it was supposed to look homey or look natural, two chairs and a little table, but again that struck me as unnatural before the big piece of glass and the lights. And then [Mr. R] ... who was bubbling over, dancing around, started to talk to me about he liked my suit.... the buzzer would ring or something like that, we were supposed to begin.... he was being sarcastic or pretty much of a wise guy.... And the first thing that entered my mind was to get up and ask him outside immediately ... but that was out of the question, because the electrodes and the movie and all that ... I kind of sat there and began to fume and then he went on and he got my goat and I couldn't think of what to say.... And then they came along and they took my electrodes off.

And so it went. One subject, Hinge, thought he was "being attacked." Another, Naisfield, complained, "The lights were very bright.... Then the things were put on my legs and whatnot and on the arm, ... I didn't like the feel of the sticky stuff that was on there being sort of uncomfortable."

Although the "stressful dyadic proceeding" served as the centerpiece of Murray's experiment (it occurred during the second year of the three-year study), it was merely one among scores of different tests the students took in order to allow Murray and his associates to acquire, as Murray wrote, "the most accurate, significant, and complete knowledge and understanding of a single psychological event that is obtainable."

Before the dyadic confrontation took place, Murray and his colleagues interviewed the students in depth about their hopes and aspirations. During this same period the subjects were required to write not only essays explaining their philosophies of life but also autobiographies, in which they were told to answer specific, intimate questions on a range of subjects from thumb-sucking and toilet training to masturbation and erotic fantasies. And they faced a battery of tests that included, among others, the Thematic Apperception Test, a Rorschach test, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, the California Psychological Inventory, a "fantasy inventory," a psychological-types inventory, the Maudalay Personality Inventory, an "inventory of self-description," a "temperament questionnaire," a "time-metaphor test," a "basic disposition test," a "range of experience inventory," a "philosophical outlook test," a food-preference inventory, analyses of their literary tastes and moral precepts, an "odor association test," a "word association test," an argument-completion test, a Wyatt finger-painting test, a projective-drawings test, and a "Rosenzweig picture frustration test." The results were then analyzed by researchers, who plotted them in numerous ways in an effort to develop a psychological portrait of each personality in all its dimensions.

Only after most of this data had been collected did researchers administer the stressful dyadic confrontation. During the year following this session each student was called back for several "recall" interviews and sometimes was asked to comment on the movie of himself being reduced to impotent anger by the interrogator. During these replays, Murray wrote, "you will see yourself making numerous grimaces and gestures" and "uttering incongruent, disjunctive, and unfinished sentences."

During the last year of the experiment Murray made the students available to his graduate-student assistants, to serve as guinea pigs for their own research projects. By graduation, as Kenneth Keniston, one of these researchers, summarized the process later, "each student had spent approximately two hundred hours in the research, and had provided hundreds of pages of information about himself, his beliefs, his past life, his family, his college life and development, his fantasies, his hopes and dreams."

Why were the students willing to endure this ongoing stress and probing into their private lives? Some who had assisted Murray in the experiment confessed to me that they wondered about this themselves. But they -- and we -- can only speculate that some of the students (including Kaczynski) did it for the money, that some (again, probably including Kaczynski) had doubts about their own psychic health and were seeking reassurance about it, that some, suffering from Harvard's well-known anomie, were lonely and needed someone to talk to, and that some simply had an interest in helping to advance scientific knowledge. But in truth we do not know. Alden E. Wessman, a former research associate of Murray's who has long been bothered by the unethical dimension of this study, said to me recently, "Later, I thought: 'We took and took and used them and what did we give them in return?'"

What was the purpose of the experiment? Keniston told me that he wasn't sure what the goals were. "Murray was not the most systematic scientist," he explained. Murray himself gave curiously equivocal answers. At times he suggested that his intent was merely to gather as much raw data as possible about one interpersonal event, which could then be used in different ways to help "develop a theory of dyadic systems." At other times he recalled the idealistic goal of acquiring knowledge that would lead to improving human personality development. At still other times his language seemed to suggest a continued interest in stressful interrogations. For example, Murray explained in his "Notes on Dyadic Research," dated March 16, 1959, that an ongoing goal of the research, which focused heavily on "degree of anxiety and disintegration," was to "design and evaluate instruments and procedures for the prediction of how each subject will react in the course of a stressful dyadic proceeding."

Sometimes Murray suggested that his research might have no value at all. "Cui bono?" he once asked. "As [the data] stand they are nothing but raw data, meaningless as such; and the question is what meaning, what intellectual news, can be extracted from them?" In another context he asked, "Are the costs in man-hours incurred by our elaborate, multiple procedures far greater than any possible gains in knowledge?"

Such equivocation prompts one to ask, Could the experiment have had a purpose that Murray was reluctant to divulge? Was the multiform-assessments project intended, at least in part, to help the CIA determine how to test, or break down, an individual's ability to withstand interrogation? The writer Alexander Cockburn has asked whether the students might have been given the hallucinogenic drug LSD without their knowledge, possibly at the request of the CIA. By the late 1950s, according to some, Murray had become quite interested in hallucinogenics, including LSD and psilocybin. And soon after Murray's experiments on Kaczynski and his classmates were under way, in 1960, Timothy Leary returned to Harvard and, with Murray's blessing, began his experiments with psilocybin. In his autobiography, Flashbacks (1983), Leary, who would dedicate the rest of his life to promoting hallucinogenic drugs, described Murray as "the wizard of personality assessment who, as OSS chief psychologist, had monitored military experiments on brainwashing and sodium amytal interrogation. Murray expressed great interest in our drug-research project and offered his support."

Forrest Robinson reports in his biography that Murray took psilocybin and in 1961 delivered a talk on his experience to the International Congress of Applied Psychology. That Leary had Murray's support was confirmed by Martin A. Lee and Bruce Schlain in their book Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD (1985).

Leary returned to Harvard and established a psilocybin research project with the approval of Dr. Harry Murray, chairman of the Department of Social Relations. Dr. Murray, who ran the Personality Assessments section of the OSS during World War II, took a keen interest in Leary's work. He volunteered for a psilocybin session, becoming one of the first of many faculty and graduate students to sample the mushroom pill under Leary's guidance.

Kaczynski thinks he was never given LSD. And after exhaustive research I could find no evidence that LSD was ever used in Murray's research. Nevertheless, whether the research had a defense connection of some sort remains an open question. Although direct evidence of support from a federal defense grant is so far lacking, circumstantial evidence exists: the strong similarity between the OSS stress tests and the later experiments, Murray's association with the OSS, his grant proposal to do research for the Navy Department, and the lack of any clearly explained purpose for the study. Obviously, the dyadic studies would have had considerable utility for the defense establishment, either as a framework for testing recruits or as continuing work on how to improve interrogation techniques.

[Jan Klimkowski]

Allison - welcome to DPF, and thank you for your post.

I'm going to be very precise about terminology here.

In doing so, I hope I'm not being pedantic. Rather by being clear about concepts and operations, we may get closer to understanding what's really going on.

I'm having trouble figuring out all the details of the Ted Kaczynski / Unabomber case. There seems to be only one source for the Deep Political theory regarding the case and that source is madly disorganized. http://www.unabombers.com

I would argue that the real source of understanding "Who Made The Unabomber?" is Alston Chase's research, excerpted in my post above.

Perhaps some forum members can help me answer some questions, such as: 1) It seems to be undisputed that Ted Kaczynski was an MK Ultra experimentation victim in the late 1950's. Even so, I do not understand what that has to do with him being a patsy for the bombings. That is, I don't see how MK Ultra could have made him a more effective or easier patsy. It seems his writings about the environment are truely heart-felt by him. Does anyone suggest his environmental views originated from MK Ultra? If not, I do not see the connection unless it was MK Ultra that discovered these views at age 16.

I have not seen any direct documentary evidence that Kaczynski was an MK-ULTRA subject in the strict sense of having been experimented on as part of a known MK-ULTRA programme.

However, Ted's psyche clearly was experimented upon at Harvard, as Chase demonstrates, and trauma was part of that experimentation. The shrink behind that psychological experimentation was Henry A Murray, who was an OSS Lt Col during WW2.

In addition:

Commissioned by OSS boss, William "Wild Bill" Donovan, in 1943 Professor Murray helped complete Analysis of the Personality of Adolph Hitler. The report was done in collaboration with psychoanalyst Walter C. Langer, Dr. Ernst Kris, New School for Social Research, and Dr. Bertram D. Lawin, New York Psychoanalytic Institute. The report used many sources to profile Hitler including a number of informants such as Ernst Hanfstaengl, Hermann Rauschning, Princess Stephanie von Hohenlohe, Gregor Strasser, Friedelinde Wagner, and Kurt Ludecke. The groundbreaking study was the pioneer of Offender profiling and political psychology, today commonly used by many countries as part of assessing international relations.

My own judgement is that Kaczynski was subjected to the type of mind control experimentation which was part of MK-ULTRA in the metaphorical sense: representing all attempts to control the human psyche by intelligence agencies and military/psyops units from the 1940s onwards.

However, it may be unhelpful to describe Kaczynski as a programmed MK-ULTRA subject.

My own view is that his rebellion against the system, rooted in radical environmentalism, is in large part formed by genuine disgust at what Man has done, and is doing, to Nature. This disgust was exacerbated by the trauma and fragmentation of his psyche delivered during the Harvard experimentation.

I do not believe the Unabomber was a patsy in the sense that Oswald or Sirhan are patsies.

2) Who is Daniel C Pride? On the Unabomber web site, Pride claims some of the Unabomber handwriting belongs to himself. How did that happen? 3) On this Unabomber web site, there are hints that some people know who actually committed the bombings. Is this true? Who is he and what is the evidence? From where did that evidence come? 4) What made Ted Kaczynski a better patsy than any other person i.e., what made him stand out from all the others? Was it simple coincidence that CIA/Mosad spooks knew him from MK Ultra and that he also dropped out of main stream society? 5) Is the evidence against Kaczynski so thin that the government feared going to trial? Is that why he got railroaded into a plea he did not authorize? 6) 15 years later, why are there no JFK style books exposing this false-flag attack? Thank you for any light to be shed on this subject.

Allison - I haven't investigated the claims of Pride and the material on the unabombers site in any detail.

However, I note this comment made by Kaczynski in prison, for which the source is claimed as Interview with Ted Kaczynski, Administrative Maximum Facility Prison, Florence, Colorado, USA". Earth First Journal!. June 1999. Archived from the original on March 18, 2009. http://web.archive.org/web/2009031813570...k/tedk.htm. Retrieved March 18, 2009.
:

When asked if he was afraid of losing his mind in prison, Kaczynski replied:

"No, what worries me is that I might in a sense adapt to this environment and come to be comfortable here and not resent it anymore. And I am afraid that as the years go by that I may forget, I may begin to lose my memories of the mountains and the woods and that's what really worries me, that I might lose those memories, and lose that sense of contact with wild nature in general. But I am not afraid they are going to break my spirit."
Ted Kaczynski

[Jan Klimkowski]

Here is that Earth First! interview, courtesy of Wayback software:

Interview with Ted Kaczynski
Kaczynski's story represents a parable.

Once upon a time there was a continent covered with beautiful pristine wilderness, where giant trees towered over lush mountainsides and rivers ran wild and free through deserts, where raptors soared and beavers labored at their pursuits and people lived in harmony with wild nature, accomplishing every task they needed to accomplish on a dailv basis using
only stones, bones and wood, walking gently on the Earth. Then came the explorers, conquerors, missionaries, soldiers, merchants and immigrants with their advanced technology, guns, and government. The wild life that had existed for millennia started dying, killed by a disease brought by alien versions of progress, arrogant visions of manifest destiny and a
runaway utilitarian science.

In just 500 years, almost all the giant trees have been clear-cut and chemicals now poison the rivers; the eagle has faced extinction and the beaver's work has been supplanted by the Army Corps of Fngineers. And how have the people fared? What one concludes is most likely dependent on how well one is faring economically, emotionally and physically in this competitive technological world and the level of privilege one is afforded by the system. But for those who feel a deep connection to, a love and longing for, the wilderness and the wildness that once was, for the millions now crowded in cities, poor and oppressed, unable to find a clear target for their rage because the system is virtually omnipotent, these people are not faring well. All around us, as a result of human greed and a lack of respect for all life, wild nature and Mother Earth's creatures are suffering. These beings are the victims of industrial society.

Cutting the bloody cord, that's what we feel, the delirious exhilaration of independence, a rebirth backward in time and into primeval liberty, into freedom in the most simple, literal, primitive meaning of the word, the only meaning that really counts. The freedom, for example, to commit murder and get away with it scot-free, with no other burden than the jaunty halo of conscience.

My God! I'm thinking, what incredible shit we put up with most of our lives--the domestic routine, the stupid and useless and degrading jobs, the insufferable arrogance of elected officials, the crafty cheating and the slimy advertising of the businessmen, the tedious wars in which we kill our buddies instead of our real enemies back home in the capital, the foul, diseased and hideous cities and towns we live in, the constant petty tyranny of the automatic washers, the automobiles and TV machines and
telephones-! ah Christ!,... what intolerable garbage and what utterly useless crap we bury ourselves in day by day, while patiently enduring at the same time the creeping strangulation of the clean white collar and the rich but modest four-in-hand garrote!

Such are my thoughtsyou wouldn't call them thoughts would you?such are my feelings, a mixture of revulsion and delight, as we float away on the river, leaving behind for a while all that we most heartily and joyfully detest. That's what the first taste of the wild does to a man, after having been penned up for too long in the city. No wonder the Authorities are so anxious to smother the wilderness under asphalt and reservoirs. They know what they are doing. Play safe. Ski only in a clockwise
direction. Let's all have fun together.

--Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire, 1968

"I read Edward Abbey in mid-eighties and that was one of the things that gave me the idea that, yeah, there are other people out there that have the same attitudes that I do.' I read The Monkeywrench Gang, I think it was. But what first motivated me wasn't anything I read. I just got mad seeing the machines ripping up the woods and so forth..."

-Dr. Theodore Kaczynski, in an interview with the Earth First! Journal, Administrative Maximum Facility Prison, Florence, Colorado, USA, June1999.

Theodore Kaczynski developed a negative attitude toward the techno-industrial system very early in his life. It was in 1962, during his last year at Harvard, he explained, when he began feeling a sense of disillusionment with the svstem. And he says he felt quite alone. "Back in the sixties there had been some critiques of technology, but as far as 1 knew there weren't people who were against the technological system as-such... It wasn't until 1971 or 72, shortly after I moved to Montana, that I read Jaques Ellul's book, The Technological Societv." The book is a masterpiece. I was very enthusiastic when I read it. I thought, 'look,
this guy is saying things I have been wanting to say all along.'"

Why, I asked, did he personally come to be against technology? His immediate response was, "Why do you think? It reduces people to gears in a machine, it takes away our autonomy and our freedom." But there was obviously more to it than that. Along with the rage he felt against the machine, his words revealed an obvious love for a very special place in the wilds of Montana. He became most animated, spoke most passionately, while relating stories about the mountain life he created there and then sought to defend against the encroachment of the system. "The honest truth is that I am not really politically oriented. I would have really rather just be living out in the woods. If nobody had started cutting roads through there and cutting the trees down and come buzzing around in helicopters and snowmobiles I would still just be living there and the rest of the world could just take care of itself. I got involved in political issues because I was driven to it, so to speak. I'm not really inclined in that direction."

Kaczynski moved in a cabin that he built himself near Lincoln, Montana in 1971. His first decade there he concentrated on acquiring the primitive skills that would allow him to live autonomously in the wild. He explained that the urge to do this had been a part of his psyche since childhood. "Unquestionably there is no doubt that the reason I dropped out of the technological system is because I had read about other ways of life, in particular that of primitive peoples. When I was about eleven I remember going to the little local library in Evergreen Park, Illinois. They had a series of books published by the Smithsonian Institute that addressed various areas of science. Among other things, I read about anthropology in a book on human prehistory. I found it fascinating. After reading a few more books on the subject of Neanderthal man and so forth, I had this itch
to read more. I started asking myself why and I came to the realization that what I really wanted was not to read another book, but that I just wanted to live that way."

Kaczynski says he began an intensive study of how to identify wild edible plants, track animals and replicate primitive technologies, approaching the task like the scholar he was. "Many years ago I used to read books like, for example, Ernest Thompson Seton's "Lives of Game Animals" to learn about animal behavior. But after a certain point, after living in the woods for a while, I developed an aversion to reading any scientific accounts. In some sense reading what the professional biologists said about wildlife ruined or contaminated it for me. What began to matter to me was the knowledge I acquired about wildlife through personal experience.

Kaczynski spoke at length about the life he led in his small cabin with no electricity and no running water. It was this lifestyle and the actual cabin that his attorneys would use to try to call his sanity into question during his trial. It was a defense strategy that Kaczynski said naturally greatly offended him. We spoke about the particulars of his daily routine. "I have quite a bit of experience identifying wild edible plants," he said proudly, "it's certainly one of the most fulfilling activities that I know
of, going out in the woods and looking for things that are good to eat. But the trouble with a place like Montana, how it differs from the Eastern forests, is that starchy plant foods are much less available. There are edible roots but they are generally very small ones and the distribution is limited. The best ones usually grow down in the lower areas which are agricultural areas, actually ranches, and the ranchers presumably don't want you digging up their meadows, so starchy foods were civilized foods.
I bought flour, rice, corn meal, rolled oats, powdered milk and cooking oil."

Kaczynski lamented never being able to accomplish three things to his satisfaction: building a crossbow that he could use for hunting, making a good pair of deerhide moccasins that would withstand the daily hikes he took on the rocky hillsides, and learning how to make fire consistently without using matches. He says he kept very busy and was happy with his solitary life. "One thing I found when living in the woods was that you get so that you don't worry about the future, you don't worry about dying, if things are good right now you think, 'well, if I die next week, so that, things are good right now.' I think it was Jane Austen who wrote in one of her novels that happiness is alwavs something that you are anticipating in the future, not something that you have right now. This isn't always true. Perhaps it is true in civilization, but when you get out of the system and become re-adapted to a different way of life, happiness is often something that you have right now."

He readily admits he committed quite a few acts of monkeywrenching during the seventies, but there came a time when he decided to devote more energy into fighting against the system. He describes the catalyst:

"The best place, to me, was the largest remnant of this plateau that dates from the tertiary age. It's kind of rolling country, not flat, and when you get to the edge of it you find these ravines that cut very steeply in to cliff-like drop-offs and there was even a waterfall there. It was about a two days hike from my cabin. That was the best spot until the summer of 1983. That summer there were too many people around my cabin so I decided I needed some peace. I went back to the plateau and when I got there I found they had put a road right through the middle of it" His voice trails off; he pauses, then continues, "You just can't imagine how upset I was. It was from that point on I decided that, rather than trying to acquire
further wilderness skills, I would work on getting back at the system. Revenge. That wasn't the first time I ever did any monkeywrenching, but at that point, that sort of thing became a priority for me... I made a conscious effort to read things that were relevant to social issues, specifically the technological problem. For one thing, my concern was to understand how societies change, and for that purpose I read anthropology, history, a little bit of sociology and psychology, but mostly anthropology and history."

Kaczvnski soon came to the conclusion that reformist strategies that merely called for "fixing" the system were not enough, and he professed little confidence in the idea that a mass change in consciousness might someday be able to undermine the technological system. "I don't think it can be done. In part because of the human tendency, for most people, there are exceptions, to take the path of least resistance. They'll take the easy way out, and giving up your car, your television set, your
electricity, is not the path of least resistance for most people. As I see it, I don't think there is any controlled or planned way in which we can dismantle the industrial system. I think that the only way we will get rid of it is if it breaks down and collapses. That's why I think the consequences will be something like the Russian Revolution, or circumstances like we see in other places in the world today like the Balkans, Afghanistan, Rwanda. This does, I think, pose a dilemma for radicals who take a non-violent point of view. When things break down, there is going to be violence and this does raise a question, I don't know
if I exactly want to call it a moral question, but the point is that for those who realize the need to do away with the techno-industrial system, if you work for its collapse, in effect you are killing a lot of people. If it collapses, there is going to be social disorder, there is going to be starvation, there aren't going to be any more spare parts or fuel for farm equipment, there won't be any more pesticide or fertilizer on which modern agriculture is dependent. So there isn't going to be enough food to
go around, so then what happens? This is something that, as far as I've read, I haven't seen any radicals facing up to.

At this point he was asking me, as a radical, to face up to this issue. I responded I didn't know the answer. He said neither did he, clasped his hands together and looked at me intently. His distinctly Midwestern accent, speech pattern, and the colloquialisms he used were so familiar and I thought about how much he reminded me of the professors I had as a student of anthropology, history and political philosophy in Ohio. I decided to relate to him the story of how one of my graduate advisors, Dr. Resnick, also a Harvard alumni, once posed the following question in a seminar on political legitimacy: Say a group of scientists asks for a meeting with the leading politicians in the country to discuss the introduction of a new invention. The scientists explain that the benefits of the technology are indisputable, that the invention will increase efficiency and make everyone's life easier. The only down side, they caution, is that for it to work, forty-thousand innocent people will have to be killed each year. Would the politicians decide to adopt the new invention or not? The class was about to argue that such a proposal would be immediately rejected out of hand, then he casually remarked, "We already have it--the automobile." He had forced us to ponder how much death and innocent suffering our society endures as a result of our commitment to maintaining the technological system--a system we all are born into now and have no choice but to try and adapt to. Everyone can see
the existing technological society is violent, oppressive and destructive, but what can we do?

"The big problem is that people don't believe a revolution is possible, and it is not possible precisely because they do not believe it is possible. To a large extent I think the eco-anarchist movement is accomplishing a great deal, but I think they could do it better... The real revolutionaries should separate themselves from the reformers… And I think that it would be good if a conscious effort was being made to get as manv people as possible introduced to the wilderness. In a general way, I think what has to be done is not to try and convince or persuade the majority of people that we are right, as much as try to increase tensions in society to the point where things start to break down. To create a situation where people get uncomfortable enough that they're going to rebel. So the question is how do you increase those tensions? I don't know."

Kaczynski wanted to talk about every aspect of the techno-industrial system in detail, and further, about why and how we should be working towards bringing about its demise. It was a subject we had both given a lot of thought to. We discussed direct action and the limits of political ideologies. But by far, the most interesting discussions revolved around our views about the superiority of wild life and wild nature. Towards the end of the interview, Kaczynski related a poignant story about the close
relationship he had developed with snowshoe rabbit.

"This is kind of personal," he begins by saying, and I ask if he wants me to turn off the tape. He says "no, I can tell you about it. While I was living in the woods I sort of invented some gods for myself" and he laughs. "Not that I believed in these things intellectually, but they were ideas that sort of corresponded with some of the feelings I had. I think the first one I invented was Grandfather Rabbit. You know the snowshoe rabbits were my main source of meat during the winters. I had spent a lot
of time learning what they do and following their tracks all around before I could get close enough to shoot them. Sometimes you would track a rabbit around and around and then the tracks disappear. You can't figure out where that rabbit went and lose the trail. I invented a myth for myself, that this was the Grandfather Rabbit, the grandfather who was responsible for the existence of all other rabbits. He was able to disappear, that is why you couldn't catch him and why you would never see him... Every time Ishot a snowshoe rabbit, I would always say 'thank you Grandfather Rabbit.' After a while I acquired an urge to draw snowshoe rabbits. I sort of got involved with them to the extent that they would occupy a great deal of my thought. I actually did have a wooden object that, among other things, I carved a snowshoe rabbit in. I planned to do a better one, just for the snowshoe rabbits, but I never did get it done. There was another one that I sometimes called the Will o the Wisp, or the wings of the morning. That's when you go out in to the hills in the morning and you just feel drawn to go on and on and on and on, then you are following the wisp. That was another god that I invented for myself."

So Ted Kaczynski, living out in the wilderness, like generations of prehistoric peoples before him, had innocently rediscovered the forest's gods. I wondered if he felt that those gods had forsaken him now as he sat facing life in prison with no more freedom, no more connection to the wild, nothing left of that life that was so important to him except for his sincere love of nature, his love of knowledge and his commitment to the revolutionary project of hastening the collapse of the techno-industrial system. I asked if he was afraid of losing his mind, if the circumstances he found himself in now would break his spirit? He
answered, "No, what worries me is that I might in a sense adapt to this environment and come to be comfortable here and not resent it anymore. And I am afraid that as the years go by that I may forget, I may begin to lose my memories of the mountains and the woods and that's what really worries me, that I might lose those memories, and lose that sense of contact with wild nature in general. But I am not afraid they are going to break my spirit. "And he offered the following advice to green anarchists who share his critique of the technological system and want to hasten the collapse of, as Edward Abbey put it, "the --destroying juggernaut of industrial civilization": "Never lose hope, be persistent and stubborn and never give up. There are many instances in history where apparent losers suddenly turn out to be winners unexpectedly, so you should never conclude all hope is lost. "



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The above text first appeared in;
Green Anarchist
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[Ed Jewett]

I am glad to see this thread blossom. Thanks for the early post by a new member. Thanks to Jan for his non-pedantic clarifications. I haven't read every word of this thread, nor am I an expert in these matters, but I am struck by the obvious (?) links [perhaps parallels is a better word] between "everyday" (oh, God forbid) sexual abuse and interpersonal violence (even "just" psychological) and the kinds of techniques that MK-Ultra and Ultra-like use to effect alteration of the human mind. I've been looking at this subject for years and still have only scratched the surface. Far afield from Ted the Unabomber, but related to environmental degradation's psychic pain, is the work of Derrick Jensen. I first encountered him in reading his book "Listen to the Land"; with the resonance I felt and the obvious quality in his research and writing, I read more. "A Language Older Than Words" describes the role of traumatization in Derrick's case. I've also read "Welcome to the Machine" and both volumes of "Endgame". He is a prolific and outstanding writer. His forum ( http://forum.derrickjensen.org/ ) is how I discovered this place.

http://www.derrickjensen.org/

http://www.derrickjensen.org/published.html

[Allison Hunt]

I see other forum members are equally in the dark. The internet material that questions Kaczynski's guilt are all concentrated on this one particular website.

http://www.unabombers.com/GovernmentBehaviors.htm

As far as I know, Kaczynski has never copped to the murders in any interview. Further, he claims he was duped into taking a plea. Kaczynski is a prodigious letter writer. Maybe I could ask him directly. Those interested should look at that website. It states the FBI took a NASA picture morphing program to produce the original Unabomber sketch from a known Kaczynski photograph. Witnesses who had seen the Unabomber claim the drawing was wrong and the FBI ignored pleas to correct it. Doesn't this sound like our own government spooks we have come to know and love?

Here is another nugget from the same website:

How did Kaczynski get from Sacramento to Helena, Montana in 2 hours ? On Dec 11, 1985 a bomb placed in a Sacramento parking lot by the Unabomber killed Hugh Scrutton. The same afternoon Kaczynski pedaled into Helena and deposited the grand sum of $10.00 in his bank account, creating a date time stamp placing him 25 hours away from the site of the bombing [USA Today]. The FBIâs reaction to this was to say they were unable to determine if he made the deposit himself. Huh?

[Jan Klimkowski]

I see other forum members are equally in the dark. The internet material that questions Kaczynski's guilt are all concentrated on this one particular website.

http://www.unabombers.com/GovernmentBehaviors.htm

Allison - not really. That "unabombers" site misrepresents the human experimentation evidence - which is not a promising start.

It is also written in a very unclear and confused fashion.

However, I'll bite.

Allison - please can you explain the relevance of Dettling, patents and Mitchel Page to the hypothesis proposed by the "unabombers" site.

12) WHY DO ALL ROADS SEEM TO LEAD TO THE "intelligence" COMMUNITY ?
Recent evidence links Kaczynski with invoices from the CIA Mind Control program MKUltra [LA Times] in the early 60's at Harvard. Given the hard evidence evidence linking Dettling to the "Intelligence community" MB Associates [Mitchel Page Resume], [Dettling Patent] one is forced to ask if the Kaczynski's Mk-Ultra Mind Control Program participation was a short or long term proposition. It seems like all roads in this murder spree lead to the "Intelligence Community". See also [Atlantic Monthly].