The Washington Post prints the Unabomber’s “manifesto” in an eight-page supplement. It is a 35,000-word document manually typed on 56 single-spaced pages (not including 11 pages of footnotes), largely about the dangers and ills of technology. [BBC, 11/12/1987; WASHINGTON POST, 4/13/1996; WASHINGTON POST, 1998;NEWSEUM, 2011] It is published in cooperation with the New York Times. According to the Post, the document rails against modern society and technology, and explains something of the bomber’s rationale for his 17-year bombing spree. “In order to get our message before the public with some chance of making a lasting impression, we’ve had to kill people,” the author writes. He also admits to killing advertising executive Thomas Mosser (see December 10, 1994), and blames the firm Mosser worked for, Burson-Marstellar, for working with Exxon to minimize the public criticism the corporation received after the Exxon Valdez spill: “We blew up Thomas Mosser last December because he was a Burston-Marsteller executive,” the letter reads. The author represents himself as one of a group of anarchists he calls “FC,” and also misspells the name of the firm. [WASHINGTON POST, 4/13/1996] “FC” will later be found to stand for “Freedom Club.” [WASHINGTON POST, 1/23/1998]
Publish Manifesto or Suffer More Bombings, Unabomber Writes - The Post is following the directive made months before to the New York Times that the bomber, or the group he claims to represent, will stop his bombing spree if a national publication prints his article (see April 24, 1995). The manifesto will lead to the identification of the Unabomber as former college professor Theodore “Ted” Kaczynski (see April 3, 1996). Kaczynski’s sister-in-law Linda Patrik reads the manifesto in the International Herald Tribune and tells her husband David Kaczynski that she believes the manifesto could have been written by his brother. David Kaczynski reads the manifesto and agrees; he will, reluctantly, inform the FBI that it should consider his brother a suspect. [KSPR-TV, 2011]
Manifesto: Industry and Technology Must Be Destroyed to Save Humanity - Kaczynski’s manuscript is entitled “Industrial Society and Its Future.” (Throughout the manuscript, Kaczynski maintains the fiction that a group of people—“we”—are responsible for the document.) He calls industry and technology “a disaster for the human race,” claiming that they have “destabilized society… made life unfulfilling… subjected human beings to indignities… led to widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and… inflicted severe damage on the natural world.” The only way to save humanity, he writes, is for industry and technology to “break down.” He advocates “a revolution against the industrial system,” which “may or may not make use of violence.” He says he does not advocate a political revolution, and does not advocate the overthrow of governments, but instead “the economic and technological basis of the present society.”
'Leftists' 'Hate America,' 'Western Civilization,' and 'White Males' - Kaczynski bemoans the “feelings of inferiority” and “oversocialization” he attributes to the people he calls “leftists,” and says the “minority” of left-leaning “activists” and “feminists… hate anything that has an image of being strong, good, and successful. They hate America, they hate Western civilization, they hate white males, they hate rationality. The reasons that leftists give for hating the West, etc. clearly do not correspond with their real motives. They SAY they hate the West because it is warlike, imperialistic, sexist, ethnocentric, and so forth, but where these same faults appear in socialist countries or in primitive cultures, the leftist finds excuses for them, or at best he GRUDGINGLY admits that they exist; whereas he ENTHUSIASTICALLY points out (and often greatly exaggerates) these faults where they appear in Western civilization. Thus it is clear that these faults are not the leftist’s real motive for hating America and the West. He hates America and the West because they are strong and successful.… The leftist is anti-individualistic, pro-collectivist. He wants society to solve everyone’s problems for them, satisfy everyone’s needs for them, take care of them. He is not the sort of person who has an inner sense of confidence in his ability to solve his own problems and satisfy his own needs. The leftist is antagonistic to the concept of competition because, deep inside, he feels like a loser.” “Leftists” prefer “sordid” art forms that celebrate either “defeat and despair” or debauchery and depravity, Kaczynski writes. Ultimately, they are masochistic and self-hating, he claims. They are ruled by moral relativism, and have no real ethical or moral stance, though they pretend to such. “If our society had no social problems at all,” Kaczynski writes, “the leftists would have to INVENT problems in order to provide themselves with an excuse for making a fuss.”
Conservatives 'Fools' for Embracing Technology as Well as 'Traditional Values' - Kaczynski says that industry and technology do not cause society’s problems, but they exacerbate and intensify those problems. In a technological society, people are forced to live in ways nature and evolution never intended. In this section, he turns from lambasting “leftists” to calling conservatives “fools,” writing: “They whine about the decay of traditional values, yet they enthusiastically support technological progress and economic growth. Apparently it never occurs to them that you can’t make rapid, drastic changes in the technology and the economy of a society without causing rapid changes in all other aspects of the society as well, and that such rapid changes inevitably break down traditional values.”
Revolution 'Easier than Reform' - After a long analysis of a variety of social ills and behaviors, Kaczynski writes that modern industrial/technological society as we know it cannot be reformed, only destroyed and rebuilt. It is specious, he maintains, to believe that “bad” parts of technology can be eliminated while retaining the “good” parts. Moreover, he claims, technology is a more powerful social force than humanity’s aspirations for freedom. “The only way out,” he concludes, “is to dispense with the industrial-technological system altogether. This implies revolution, not necessarily an armed uprising, but certainly a radical and fundamental change in the nature of society.” Leftists, he writes, must not be part of any such revolution, because of their tendencies towards collectivization and totalitarianism, their love of technology, and their lust for power. Only anarchists, who desire to exist on an individual or small-group basis, can effectively carry out this level of social change. [KACZYNSKI, 1995]

Entity Tags: Thomas J. Mosser, Linda Patrik, ExxonMobil, New York Times, Burson-Marstellar, David Kaczynski, Theodore J. (“Ted”) Kaczynski, Washington Post

T J Mosser