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Title: Unabomber cops a plea Author: Coatixnundi Date: Summer, 1998 Language: en Topics: unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, trial, Fifth Estate, criticism Source: Fifth Estate Vol. 33, #1 (351) Summer, 1998, page 2 Notes: Scanned from original.
Whatever one thought of Ted Kaczynski before his trial, by January, when
he admitted he was the Unabomber, thus avoiding a death penalty by
pleading guilty to an 18-year bombing campaign, one had to feel a
certain sympathy for him. After several weeks of struggling with a
defense team apparently determined to portray him as severely mentally
ill in order to save him from execution (even over his own objections
and desire to represent himself), and with a federal judge who committed
a number of egregious procedural errors that would have almost certainly
led to successful appeals, Kaczynski apparently took the only option he
thought he had to avoid a trial that would present him as an incompetent
madman, and copped a plea.
An article by William Finnegan in the March 16, 1998 issue of The New
Yorker magazine, “Defending the Unabomber,” does a good job of reporting
the Orwellian aspects of a trial in which clinical psychology was
employed against the recalcitrant Kaczynski to paint him as mentally
incompetent. Even though Kaczynski was found to be legally sane enough
to represent himself, experts labeled him “paranoid schizophrenic”
merely on the basis of his anti-technology ideas. Finnegan, who is
surprisingly sympathetic to the defendant, considering that his article
appears in a respectable bourgeois weekly, notes the irony in
Kaczynski’s treatment. The Unabomber manifesto had declared with
remarkable foresight, “The concept of ‘mental health’ in our society is
defined largely by the extent to which an individual behaves in accord
with the needs of the system and does so without showing signs of
stress.” Even Kaczynski’s denial that he was mentally ill and his
refusal to be treated as such by his defense team in the trial process
were portrayed as proof of his insanity. When his keepers discovered he
was considering suicide as a way out of this endgame, in the manner of
Huxley’s Savage in Brave New World, they began to monitor him
continually.
One didn’t have to be a thoroughly conditioned megamachine clone to see
Kaczynski’s gratuitous grudge bombings as proof that he was not entirely
sane. But as Finnegan shrewdly comments, the self-evident madness of
sending bombs through the mail, or leaving them in public places, or
planting them on airplanes (in the latter case, apparently, because
their noise outraged him) cannot be used as evidence of insanity since
those acts are the crimes themselves. Of course, we must also always
remind ourselves, “sane” compared to whom? Designers of “smart bombs,”
or military scientists who willfully spread nuclear radiation in secret
weapons tests, or researchers trying to map the genetic code to harness
it for science, or industry flacks paid to disprove global warming?
Articles on the trial in The New York Times were frequently positioned
on the page with a dark irony. For example, below the continuation of
its December 9, 1997 article on the trial was a small item reporting
that increased ultraviolet rays caused by atmospheric ozone loss may be
causing the worldwide disappearance of amphibians; and next to a
continuation of an article on the sanity controversy in the January 8
issue was a photo story on a fatal explosion and fire at an explosives
factory.
If we can now say with assurance that Kaczynski was the Unabomber, his
career as an anti-tech guerrilla is even more questionable than it
seemed before his identity was known. To give one example: some time
after his attempt to get into a grad program was humiliatingly rebuffed
by an arrogant professor at the Chicago Circle campus of the University
of Illinois, he planted his first bomb there. Kaczynski then recklessly
bombed universities for a while, with a swipe at an airliner and at
Boeing Corporation, but he managed to injure mostly secretaries and
students. His first fatality killed a computer retail store owner (a
powerful director of the megatechnic pyramid, to be sure).
Kaczynski’s handful of supporters and his defense committee (who spent
his initial incarceration arguing that it was physically impossible for
him to carry out the bombings), will now surely justify his acts by
declaring all of us guilty, from imperial administrators down to the
fellow at the hot dog stand. Others will naturally be troubled by poor
Kaczynski’s admitted lifelong lack of affect, his rage and resentment,
and his notable ability to conflate and confuse his undeniable personal
calamities with a far larger and more serious social crisis. This seems
indeed to be how the warped contemporary version of the idea that the
“personal is political” now works-a noxious failure of both reasoning
and feeling now plaguing an ostensibly radical milieu that under other
circumstances might have become truly, and in a life-affirming way,
revolutionary. Contrary to the ingenuous (if callous) notion that the
Unabomber has initiated crucial and heretofore nonexistent discussions
about the nature of mass technics, “TK” only managed to contribute to
such a discussion’s marginalization and trivialization by the very media
that made the hated Unabomber figure a kind of darkly comic culture
anti-hero.
At some point recently I noticed that the shorthand of my notes on
Theodore Kaczynski referred to him simply as “K,” thus bringing Kafka’s
protagonist in The Trial to mind along with the dystopian novels of
Orwell and Huxley.
This sad and angry man’s motives remain obscure, and one shudders to
think what kind of theories he will offer to his coterie, but his danse
macabre with the U.S. injustice system, another travesty in a long and
sordid history, has earned him our human sympathy as a victim of the
technobureaucratic machinery toward which he focussed some legitimate
insight and rage. Nevertheless, long before Mr. K’s misguided terror
campaign, the dire threat posed to humanity and global life-webs by
industrial capitalism was becoming clear to growing numbers of people.
It remains the historic obligation of this and coming generations to
reorient human societies toward life. But doing so requires minimally
that we recognize the difference between mere symptoms of crisis and
those subjective and objective conditions that might lead to authentic
transformation. The Unabomber’s campaign and his cheerleaders are sad
indications of how much remains to be done.