From "What Do You Say to a Young Person Who Admires the Unabomber?" by Maxim Loskutoff, who wrote a novel about Ted Kaczynski, "Old King."
In the future, evildoers will be able to use A.I. to produce a carefully-constructed-looking manifesto that organizes their chaotic facts into what seems to be a coherent philosophy.
The answer to the question in the column title is tell these students...
"that Mr. Kaczynski was cruel, that he tortured dogs and took pleasure in imagining the suffering of others; to read not only his manifesto, which he polished for public consumption, but also his diaries. There they would see what kind of man he was... [T]he Unabomber’s philosophy was taken from thinkers like Jacques Ellul and Lewis Mumford, who never killed anyone.... [Teach] students about their work."
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34 comments:
What do you say to a young person who admires Che? Or worse, Mao? Lenin? Stalin? Hitler?
What do you say to a college professor who admires Stalin? Or a White House Communications Director who admires Mao? Praise for a man who killed millions.
As it turns out, our young people learn not only from books, but from the adults around them.
What do you say to a US Senator who admired the Soviet Union?
Our culture is based on the heroic self. Every self needs guardrails and brakes. Luigi and Ted needed a thing inside them saying "slow down fella". . How do we install that thing? We start by punishing people who don't have it by putting them in cages.
I had the same thought about Che Guevara t-shirts.
He wanted society to be better. Everyone wants society to be better. but what does 'better' mean, and what methods should be employed to get there?
A lot of people today believe those on the right are Nazis and should be eradicated. Our societal framework is painted with inconsequential comments as physical atrocities and murder, violence and destruction as justifiable actions.
How does society get better?
It's quite impossible to see the article as anything but "don't you kids dare applaud killing the CEOs we need for advertising dollars!" The Republican Party is going to have some trouble over the next decade, but that's nothing compared to the Democrats.
I didn’t know this about the Unabomber. Always assumed he was an oddball who got too far into the eco-terrorist world then took things way too far. At the risk of oversimplifying, it seems he was already a terrorist of sorts, just looking for a cause.
The unspoken question is: What do you say to a young person who admires Luigi?
What gets lost is the United States government's CREATION of Ted Kaczynski during the MKULTRA experiments done on unwitting college students inside the United States.
Government scientists created the Unabomber during a highly unethical medical experiment straight out of Nazi Germany (and very similar to what they're doing with these so-called "trans" children), and not a single government official has been prosecuted for that crime.
We are the baddies. And we simply cannot accept that fact.
We are throwing off our leftist fantasies, little by little. "Lived experience" is doing it. We are 35 years later than the USSR. The lure of the fantastic is still strong -- fantastic as in utopian fantasia -- but the realities are becoming clearer every day. The detransitionings are awful, while the "weird" absurdists like Tim Walz are revealed as garden-variety liars, albeit ambitious egoists as in the Wizard of Oz. The AOCs may never change, but for the majority of us, all the logical, philosophical, and historical errors are rising up and showing us their truths. And it will continue, I'm sure. So many are there, and have been there for a long while (like many commenters on this site).
How about China? Who knows. But their market values keep dropping. Facts about their "reality" are creeping in to their population as well.
Iran needs its own solution.
Oops. How can errors show us their truths? Hope it's clear what I meant!
Yes, of course, the slippery slope from poaching, cutting down trees, mocking environmentalists, and littering to mailing out bombs. What Loskutoff needs to examine is first of all the connection between personal malice and activism. Eric Hoffer wrote about that. Love of mankind in general is often combined with misanthropy when it comes to actual people.
He also needs to look into left-wing sectarianism. Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin were positively vicious about people who outsiders might assume were on their side politically. To be a true believer means having heretics and backsliders to condemn, and useful idiots to mock and exploit. I'm not saying Loskutoff is totally wrong about Kaczynski, but he's isolating Kaczynski from other activists in an effort to make him an unattractive figure to the young and misses the similarities between Kaczynski and other violent activists.
what do you say to a person admires the Unibomber? What about "have you seen a good psychiatrist?"
Ted K, not only was an evil person, he was a coward. Its extremely sad that he lived after his arrest. He should have been "shot while trying to escape".
It's the same for societies. People decide to fight and kill, then look for reasons. History is a mine for grievance. Revenge is always the cause for everything horrible in history. Victims are assholes.
"...it seems he was already a terrorist of sorts, just looking for a cause."
TwoAndAHalfCents has something like a two-fisted grip on reality until that clause. Pleasure derived from the suffering of others comes first, long before the political or religious zealotry of the so-called terrorist expresses itself. Whether the subject is Jean-Paul Marat, Pol Pot, Osama bin Laden, Ted Kaczynski, or Luigi Mangione, we're talking about slavering murders with a dopamine cycle wired to the agony of others. Althouse applied her "sadism" tag for a reason.
I think the most important thing to remember about Ted Kaczynski is he had a huge dork and got all the tail he could handle.
How does society get better? I'd suggest a Christian revival. Bring God back into daily life.
Kaczynski, Ayers, Cecile, Reno, Fauci etcetera etcetera are a Democratic pride parade.
You folks need to read up on Japan in the 1920s-1930s when assassination of leaders was in the vogue. And what happened after that... thinking it is ok to murder 'for the greater good' is a way to ruin. For then it is easy to justify murder for a cause... ANY CAUSE.
Paul: ref the Japanese interwar assassinations:
Same thing happened in Central Europe between the wars. Part of the reason people believed Hitler on the Reichstag fire cause there had been so many acts of political violence on both sides. Hitler jumped on that to promise order.
So that’s why the left disapproves of political violence - someone could use it as an excuse for weaponizing the instruments of public order……ummm…checks notes…oh…nevermind….
JSM
There is a wonderful book called Columbine, about the school shootings. It’s by Dave Cullen. He genes and interviews many people and finds that the killers ere actually not shunned, somewhat popular actually. There were family problems. The alpha killer (there is almost away an alpha killer or rapist) demonstrated psychopathic traits early and was on pharmaceutical drugs.
This is real journalism. It accepts evil. It doesn’t blame the innocent. It destroys the narrative. It’s a great and important read.
Another book on the same topic as Cullen’s is The Antelope’s Strategy, by Jen Hatzfeld, about the post-massacre Rwandan “Truth and Reconciliation” process. It’s also clear-eyed journalism. Read them together. I hope that Althouse will indulge me to link to an article I wrote about both books. If it violates the rules, I accept that. But it speaks directly to Kazinski and the recent CEO murderer and why we make the killers into victims and heroes, while projecting blame onto their victims and society. Also instead of realizing they are killers seeking justifications to kill. It’s at: https://tinatrent.com/rwanda-and-columbine-the-politics-of-forced-reconciliation/.
(I don’t know where “genes and” came from — I wrote no such thing and also spelled “were” right—I don’t get it)
Society can only get better when we start shipping people back to where we got them from when they prove themselves to be a danger to our society.
"[T]he Unabomber’s philosophy was taken from thinkers like Jacques Ellul and Lewis Mumford, who never killed anyone...."
That we KNOW of...
I've begun to think that there are people amongst us who are Proud Bigots. They don't listen; they know they don't listen and they know they don't have to listen because an inferior is speaking. It's a point of pride with them that they belong to a group that doesn't have to listen. Certainly they don't have answer anything said by others or search for answers to new questions raised by Republicans or Christians or patriots or Jews or such. And I believe The Backshooter has had his narrative composed to make him a hero to Proud Bigots, wherever they are. His tiny manifesto indicates that he'll never bother answering or discussing the moral issues his actions raise. He just smiles that fixed smile you can see on faces at lynchings in the South in the old days. "He had it coming," the smile said. " "They had it coming," laughed the people of Gaza as they watched women being raped. "He had it coming," says the Backshooter to the Proud Bigots, the dried-up husks of liberalism, swaying in unison in an evil wind.
Here's video of a debate at Oxford University on the topic: Israel is conmitting genocide in Gaza. An English Jewish-Arab is defending Israel. The camera angle also shows two women in the front row laughing away at the good times as members of the audienc scream out hatred. They are interesting to watch; I never saw anyone at a university debate behave like that before
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKdJE72j4fk
Ted was seeing a Shrink while at U of M about gender dysphoria. He also came from an abusive family.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/1998/09/12/unabombers-psychiatric-profile-reveals-gender-identity-struggle/
Same old same old romance of the revolutionaries. "It'll be fine" until it isn't fine.
"Free Mumia Abu-Jamal" (a convicted black murderer) was a common leftist goal a generation ago. He killed a white policeman and was "an eloquent writer" so that surely made it okay. It was every bit as okay as Gaza's Oct 7 attack on the Jewish music festival.
Tell them that Che died crying for his mommy
Yes, his diaries will swiftly dissuade anyone who thinks he might just have been a misguided loner with a righteous cause. The diaries evince a total lack of empathy.
And yet, he doesn't seem to have been that sort of person before college. Thanks, Harvard.
I’ve been a huge fan of David Gelernter since long before Ted Kaczynski attempted to murder him. Fortunately Gelernter survived, though with the loss of one hand and an eye. It would take the intellects of several million Ted Kaczynskis to match one David Gelernter.
The Unabomber was a subject in the cia’s lsd trials while at Harvard.
Being able to write well is assumed by too many to cover a multitude of sins. Recall Norman Mailer’s infatuation with Jack(?) Abbott who “ In the Belly of the Beast.” Mailer talked the authorities into a parole and he wasn’t out of prison a week before he stabbed a convenience store clerk to death.
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