>Date: Fri, 28 Apr 1995 23:09:08 EDT
>
>thought some listers [on the Invent-List] might be interested since the Unabomber
>and the letter were mentioned in previous posts...Michael
>Forwarded message:
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
>
> Wednesday, April 26, 1995
>
> Following is the letter from the Unabomber that the New York Times
reported it had received on Monday. Spelling and punctuation have not
been corrected. The paper said three passages, including one at the
beginning, were deleted at the request of the FBI; the other two gaps
are noted in the text.
>
> THIS IS A MESSAGE from the terrorist group FC.
>
> We blew up Thomas Mosser last December because he was a
Burston-Marsteller executive. Among other misdeeds,
Burston-Marsteller helped Exxon clean up its public image after the
Exxon Valdez incident. But we attacked Burston-Marsteller less for
its specific misdeeds than on general principles. Burston-Marsteller
is about the biggest organization in the public relations field. This
means that its business is the development of techniques for
manipulating people's attitudes. It was for this more than for its
actions in specific cases that we sent a bomb to an executive of this company.
Some news reports have made the misleading statement that we have
been attacking universities or scholars. We have nothing against
universities or scholars as such. All the university people whom we
have attacked have been specialists in technical fields. (We consider
certain areas of applied psychology, such as behavior modification, to
be technical fields.) We would not want anyone to think that we have
any desire to hurt professors who study archaeology, history,
literature or harmless stuff like that. The people we are out to get
are the scientists and engineers, especially in critical fields like
computers and genetics. As for the bomb planted in the Business
School at the U. of Utah, that was a botched operation. We won't say
how or why it was botched because we don't want to give the FBI any
clues. No one was hurt by that bomb.
>
> In our previous letter to you we called ourselves anarchists. Since
"anarchist" is a vague word that has been applied to a variety of
attitudes, further explanation is needed. We call ourselves
anarchists because we would like, ideally, to break down all society
into very small, completely autonomous units. Regrettably, we don't
see any clear road to this goal, so we leave it to the indefinite
future. Our more immediate goal, which we think may be attainable at
some time during the next several decades, is the destruction of the
worldwide industrial system. Through our bombings we hope to promote
social instability in industrial society, propagate anti-industrial
ideas and give encouragement to those who hate the industrial system.
>
> The FBI has tried to portray these bombings as the work of an
isolated nut. We won't waste our time arguing about whether we are
nuts, but we certainly are not isolated. For security reasons we
won't reveal the number of members of our group, but anyone who will
read the anarchist and radical environmentalist journals will see
that opposition to the industrial-technological system is widespread
and growing.
>
> Why do we announce our goals only now, though we made our first bomb
some seventeen years ago? Our early bombs were too ineffectual to
attract much public attention or give encouragement to those who hate
the system. We found by experience that gunpowder bombs, if small
enough to be carried inconspicuously, were too feeble to do much
damage, so we took a couple of years off to do some experimenting. We
learned how to make pipe bombs that were powerful enough, and we used
these in a couple of successful bombings as well as in some unsuccessful ones.
>
> (Passage deleted at the request of the FBI.)
>
> Since we no longer have to confine the explosive in a pipe, we are
now free of limitations on the size and shape of our bombs. We are
pretty sure we know how to increase the power of our explosives and
reduce the number of batteries needed to set them off. And, as we've
just indicated, we think we now have more effective fragmentation
material. So we expect to be able to pack deadly bombs into ever
smaller, lighter and more harmless looking packages. On the other
hand, we believe we will be able to make bombs much bigger than any
we've made before. With a briefcase-full or a suitcase-full of
explosives we should be able to blow out the walls of substantial
buildings.
>
> Clearly we are in a position to do a great deal of damage. And it
doesn't appear that the FBI is going to catch us any time soon. The
FBI is a joke.
>
> The people who are pushing all this growth and progress garbage
deserve to be severely punished. But our goal is less to punish them
than to propagate ideas. Anyhow we are getting tired of making bombs.
It's no fun having to spend all your evenings and weekends preparing
dangerous mixtures, filing trigger mechanisms out of scraps of metal
or searching the sierras for a place isolated enough to test a bomb.
So we offer a bargain.
>
> We have a long article, between 29,000 and 37,000 words, that we want
to have published. If you can get it published according to our
requirements we will permanently desist from terrorist activities. It
must be published in the New York Times, Time or Newsweek, or in some
other widely read, nationally distributed periodical. Because of its
length we suppose it will have to be serialized. Alternatively, it
can be published as a small book, but the book must be well
publicized and made available at a moderate price in bookstores
nationwide and in at least some places abroad. Whoever agrees to
publish the material will have exclusive rights to reproduce it for a
period of six months and will be welcome to any profits they may make
from it. After six months from the first appearance of the article or
book it must become public property, so that anyone can reproduce or
publish it. (If material is serialized, first installment become
public property six months after appearance of first installment,
second installment etc.) We must have the right to publish in the New
York Times, Time or Newsweek, each year for three years after the
appearance of our article or book, three thousand words expanding or
clarifying our material or rebutting criticisms of it.
>
> The article will not explicitly advocate violence. There will be an
unavoidable implication that we favor violence to the extent that it
may be necessary, since we advocate eliminating industrial society
and we ourselves have been using violence to that end.
>
> But the article will not advocate violence explicitly, nor will it
propose the overthrow of the United States Government, nor will it
contain obscenity or anything else that you would be likely to regard
as unacceptable for publication.
>
> How do you know that we will keep our promise to desist from
terrorism if our conditions are met? It will be to our advantage to
keep our promise. We want to win acceptance for certain ideas. If we
break our promise people will lose respect for us and so will be less
likely to accept the ideas.
>
> Our offer to desist from terrorism is subject to three
qualifications. First: Our promise to desist will not take effect
until all parts of our article or book have appeared in print.
Second: If the authorities should succeed in tracking us down and an
attempt is made to arrest any of us, or even to question us in
connection with the bombings, we reserve the right to use violence.
Third: We distinguish between terrorism and sabotage. By terrorism we
mean actions motivated by a desire to influence the development of a
society and intended to cause injury or death to human beings. By
sabotage we mean similarly motivated actions intended to destroy
property without injuring human beings. The promise we offer is to
desist from terrorism. We reserve the right to engage in sabotage.
>
> It may be just as well that failure of our early bombs discouraged us
from making any public statements at that time. We were very young
then and our thinking was crude.
>
> Over the years we have given as much attention to the development of
our ideas as to the development of bombs, and we now have something
serious to say. And we feel that just now the time is ripe for the
presentation of anti-industrial ideas.
>
> Please see to it that the answer to our offer is well publicized in
the media so that we won't miss it. Be sure to tell us where and how
our material will be published and how long it will take to appear in
print once we have sent in the manuscript. If the answer is
satisfactory, we will finish typing the manuscript and send it to
you. If the answer is unsatisfactory, we will start building our next
bomb.
>
> We encourage you to print this letter.
>
> FC
>
> (Passage deleted at the request of the FBI)
>
> 04/26/95 12:04 PST
>From: Michael Hoover
>Subject: Text of the Unabomber's letter (fwd)
> Date: Fri, 28 Apr 1995 01:04:45 -0400 (EDT)
> From: Alex Trotter
> Subject: Text of the Unabomber's letter (fwd)
> Reply-To: marxism@jefferson.village.virginia.edu
> Date: Wed, 26 Apr 1995 14:22:22 -0800
> To: anarchy-list@cwi.nl