During the process of writing the book The Ultimate Ted Kaczynski Research Document, myself and others helped to find and catalogue a vast array of texts on the life and ideas of Ted Kaczynski. An anonymous person has now added to that catalogue and turned it into a website called The Ted K Archive.
Ted Kaczynski has terminal skin cancer, so I imagine journalists will be looking for new research revelations on his life and the impact he’s had, in order to write stories about him after news of his death breaks. So, on the off chance that’s you, feel free to contact me and I can help answer any questions you have for a small fee: theosladehome@gmail.com
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For anyone curious, I’m definitely not a fan of Kaczynski. My interest in his life is an unironic attempt to try and call him out, for the few people who need to hear it, so that fewer otherwise productive radicals fall down the purist anarchist pipeline. However, I’m not against platforming his writing alongside critiques.
I just hope more anarchists will be willing to actually get organised, opportunistically engage with an incrementalist approach, form solely anarchist organisations and pursue a mix of anarchist and big-tent leftist aligned tactics.
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Finally, here’s a timeline of key events that I think led to Ted Kaczynski becoming violent & events in which he could have been stopped with either a compassionate ear for his guilty feelings or a better police investigation:
- Separated from parents as a baby or his parents’ inability to cope when their child misbehaved, so to blame his behavior on this experience.
- Moved forward a year at school whilst failing to make sure he maintained friendships, rather than taking a year off to travel with family.
- Parents/teachers/counselors failing to talk through his desire for escape in primitive life as a desire to escape bullying, plus a lack of classes offered in politics.
- Attending Harvard a year early without taking the time to travel and explore the world.
- Unwittingly joining psych experiments which would later be used to validate that torture works by the CIA, where ideally people would have voted in parties outlawing these practices before they ever happened.
- Projected his feelings of inadequacy onto women for not knowing how to start a relationship with them.
- Inability to discuss his sexual fantasies of becoming a woman in order to get to be intimate with a woman to a councilor. Coming away with stronger suicidal ideation, as well as now the first desire to kill through a murder suicide, due to his shame at not being able to find a relationship turning into hatred at society for regimenting his life and making him this way.
- Kaczynski showed a letter to his brother, parents and romantic interest that he planned ‘violence of a serious nature’ against this romantic interest who had broken off their romance, but no steps were taken to either get him help or report him. And journal entries later revealed that he brought with him a knife in a paper bag to disfigure her face.
- Kaczynski proposed founding an organization dedicated to stopping federal aid to scientific research, thereby preventing the “ceaseless extension of society’s powers. He sent this essay, similar to the manifesto he’d later write to a few politicians and would often write anti-technology essays to newspapers and favorite authors. If the FBI had put more focused callouts for information, then one of these people may have tipped off the FBI sooner.
- Felt guilty later about his sadism towards animals.
- Briefly felt bad about having crippled the arm of a man who was an airline pilot.
- Felt guilty later about the innocent people he would have killed on an airliner he attempted to blow up, as well as the secretary of a computer scientist.
- Regret about being careless in selecting targets at the beginning.
Activist Journeys 