"The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race." Continuing the modern industrial age will "subject human beings to greater indignities and inflict greater damage on the natural world, it will probably lead to greater social disruption and psychological suffering, and it may lead to increased physical suffering even in "advanced' countries."
Here's his analysis of individual freedom in America:
"Constitutional rights are useful up to a point, but they do not serve to guarantee much more than what could be called the bourgeois conception of freedom. According to the bourgeois conception, a "free' man is essentially an element of a social machine and has only a certain set of prescribed and delimited freedoms; freedoms that are designed to serve the needs of the social machine more than those of the individual."
Kaczynski was quite critical of what he called "modern leftism" and sometimes sounded like Ann Coulter:
"Leftists tend to 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. ... If our society had no social problems at all, the leftists would have to INVENT problems in order to provide themselves with an excuse for making a fuss."
But then he said this about the right:
"The conservatives are fools: 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."
The entire 34,000 word manifesto was run in The New York Times and The Washington Post on September 19, 1995, at the request of the FBI. Ted's younger brother David, thus, recognized his brother's ravings and called the FBI. Kaczynski is now doing life-without-parole at a federal supermax prison in Florence, Colorado.
Kaczynski was right; there are real, serious problems associated with advanced industrialized capitalist society. Consider the inexorable rise of global warming and the polluting of Earth, for one. These problems are systemic and chronic, and for the most part they go unaddressed. From his forest shack, Kaczynski saw our "social machine" cruising along blithely as if its technological advances and mythic sense of exceptionalism would save it from the disaster he saw coming down the road. Sometimes I feel that way too.
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Ruslan Tsarni, top, and Tamerlan, left, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev
As I listened on 4/19 to the Tsarnaev brothers' uncle, Ruslan Tsarni, speak to the media outside his home in Maryland, he seemed to be tip-toeing through this same kind of minefield. He was furious with his nephews for the cruel and stupid thing they had apparently done. He stressed over and over that their act had nothing to do with ideology or religion; they did it because "they are losers ... not being able to settle themselves, and thereby just hating everyone who did."
While it's not what our demagogues want to hear, there would seem to be a lot of truth in the idea these men had alienation issues -- especially Tamerlan. Where they learned to make a pot bomb seems not the most relevant detail to motivation for anonymous murder. Dzhokhar has apparently told investigators he and his brother were angry over US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. I'm also angry at these invasions and know many others who are as well.
Brian Fishman studies "terrorism" at the New American Foundation, and he suggested to The New York Times that the brothers faced "divided loyalties." In the violent and demagogic climate of 2013, he suggested the question that haunted them was: were they Americans first or Muslims first? This kind of question too often, especially for healthy young males, he said, comes down to "proving yourself as a man of action." This mindset, of course, applies to young, militarily recruitable US males as well. All parties in the madness that is war rely for cannon fodder on frustrated young males fearful of being "losers."
(It's interesting that in the area of Chechnya and the Russian Caucuses, Tamerlan -- or Tamerlane -- is the legendary name for Emir Timur, a 14th century ruler based in Samarkand, a city now in Uzbekistan. Tamerlane's empire reached from Egypt to India and ended short of China, which he failed to conquer before he died. Edgar Allen Poe wrote a romantic narrative poem called "Tamerlane," which includes these lines: "Aye I did inherit / That hated portion, with the fame, / The worldly glory, which has shown / A demon-light around my throne.")
The bombers' uncle was furious because his stupid nephews had undermined the underdog identity of Chechnya in its long struggle for independence against the Russian empire. With one stupid act, his nephews had branded Chechnyan liberators for TV-addled, middle-brow Americans as "terrorists." (Like in Syria, the Chechnyan insurgent movement is currently conflicted between radical Muslims and non-sectarian, pro-western elements.)
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