Ted Kaczynski, anti-technological fundamentalist or savior prophet?

Ted Kaczynski went straight from college to graduate school at Michigan. Ted’s faculty would learn of his new work unannounced by discovering his articles published in peer-reviewed journals. Joel Shapiro“It was like he could write poetry while the rest of us were trying to learn grammar,” one student later told The New York Times.

Ted Kaczynski entered Berkeley in 1967. He lectured from the textbook and did not answer questions. However, he continued to publish outstanding works and was promoted in the Faculty of Mathematics.

Two years later, he resigned without explaining his decision to his colleagues.

The Kaczynski brothers split the cost of the property in Montana. Then, when David got engaged in 1989, they fell out. After Ted’s arrest, New York Times reporters tracked down friends in seven states where he was known to have lived or visited. Reporters did not find anyone. Some of his graduate students said they were surprised to find they didn’t remember him at all. It is widely reported that she has never been in a romantic relationship.

During his years in Montana, Ted Kaczynski asked the librarian in Lincoln, the town closest to his cabin, to obtain for him unknown journals of science and literature, sometimes in the original German or Spanish. In an interview after his arrest with the British publication Green Anarchist, he said that he had invented gods for himself; Including “Grandfather Rabbit” who was responsible for the presence of snowshoe hares, which were his main source of meat in winter.

In the same interview, Kaczynski explained how he became violent. His favorite part of the wilderness was the two-day hike from his cabin, which included crossing a plateau with steep canyons and waterfalls. In 1983, Ted found a paved road. “You can’t imagine how upset I was,” he said. It was from that point on that I decided to work on getting back into the system instead of trying to get more skills in the wild. Revenge.”

This was his own story. Some details of Ted’s life indicated a tendency to violence and alienation from the surrounding world, which may be the reason for his behavior. According to the Atlantic, Kaczynski began to imagine murder at the age of 27. In his diary, he described his bombs as catharsis. Although he severed ties with his brother, he said he would open David’s letters if it was under the emergency seal. David wrote to say that their father was dying and underlined.

“Ted responded, and his response was rather strange,” David told The New York Times. Basically, I did a good job. It was something worth communicating.” His brother was his only immediate survivor.

In a maximum security prison in Colorado, Kaczynski befriended inmates in neighboring cells: Ramzi Ahmed Yusuf who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993 and Timothy J. McVeighThe Oklahoma City Bomber. Yahoo News reported in 2016 that Kaczynski shared his books with inmates, talked to them about political issues and learned their dates of birth.

Norwegian news media reported that Anders Berwick, who in 2011 killed dozens of people in government buildings and at a youth summer camp, incorporated parts of Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto into his manifesto. Stranger still was how many law-abiding Americans took interest in this line of thinking.

In 2017, Eliot Milko, deputy editor of the conservative magazine First Things, credited Ted Kaczynski with “smart, even prophetic insights.” In 2021, Tucker Carlson During the interview with Andrew YoungAmerican businessman and politician mentioned Kaczynski’s thinking in detail and without any motivation.

On the Internet, young people with a variety of party allegiances or no affiliation at all have devised elaborate semi-sarcastic vocabularies in support of Unabomber. They introduce themselves with the hashtags “anti-social” or “addicted” and refer to Kaczynski as “Uncle Ted”. According to a 2021 article in Buffler magazine, Yunabamber’s song, voice, and dance videos on TikTok have garnered millions of views.

Ted Kaczynski was no longer the mysterious killer who had belatedly offered a strange justification for violence. Now he was the originator of one of many styles of law-breaking. Ted’s crimes were in the distant past, and he was long in prison and no longer an active threat to society.

Online support for Kaczynski does not indicate how many new pro-environmental terrorists have been created; But it measures the prevalence of pessimism, boredom, dissatisfaction with modern life and gloom about the prospects for change.

During his time in prison, Mr. Kaczynski copied his correspondence by hand and sent it to the Joseph Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan; An archive dedicated to fundamentalist protests that has collected dozens of boxes of Kaczynski’s writings.

According to New York Magazine, Ted Kaczynski’s articles have become one of the most popular offerings in this collection. Julie HerradaIn an interview with the magazine, the curator of the collection declined to describe the people who were overly fascinated by Mr. Kaczynski and who visited the library to examine his archives. He only said one thing: “Nobody looks crazy.”