Theresa Kintzs' Interview with Ted Kaczynski

Synopsis

[Ted] wrote to and offered Theresa Kintz, an Earth First! editor at the time, an exclusive interview, because he had been impressed by an editorial she had written for the journal defending ELF activists who had torched a ski lodge under construction in Vail, Colorado. She agreed with the rationale of the arsonists that the action was justifiable because the construction project destroyed critical habitat for an endangered Lynx species.

The publication of this editorial was protested vehemently by many activists who rejected arson as a tactic and thought embracing it was dangerous to activists and politically counterproductive. But Kintz had her own supporters, including for the idea of conducting and publishing an interview with Kaczynski. She conducted interviews during the summer of 1999 but at a large movement gathering that summer a consensus was reached that the journal ought not publish it. Consequently, Kintz left the journal staff and published the interview in the UK-based tabloid, the Green Anarchist.) Like Kintz, the editors of LWOD supported and felt affinity with Kaczynski, agreeing with his anti-technology ideology and at the very least that violent tactics are sometimes warranted.

Introduction

THERESA (PS): The interview I did with Kaczynski was the first interview he allowed, three years after he was arrested, and it was a historical opportunity. ... I remember the guards brought Kaczynski in and he was in shackles, and he was wearing a white jumpsuit. And he looked very small and... I was, I was nervous.

THERESA: Okay, so... I guess I should say something like ‘this is the interview with Dr. Theodore Kaczynski and we’re going to begin the interview now.

Ted's Philosophical Development

TED: You can’t live as a free person as a member of a large-scale system. There is another way to live and you don’t have to live the way we do in this system. I’ve been anti-technology ever since 1962. My last year at Harvard was the year when I definitely decided I was against technology.

THERESA: Does your commitment to undermining the techno-industrial system come from a sense of duty, a sense of obligation, or is it more personal?

TED: A lot more personal.

TED: I hate the system, not because of some abstract humanitarian principle, but because I hated living in the system. And I got out of it by getting into the mountains, but the system wouldn’t let me alone.

TED: There are computer experts now that are quite seriously, in all seriousness, thinking of getting rid of the human race and replacing us with computers. They think that in 50 years from now we can download our brains into computers. And in this way attain immortality as machines. And I think a lot of people, other than activists, will be upset by that kind of thing.

TED: I read Edward Abbey in mid-eighties and that was one of the things that gave me the idea that, ‘yeah, there are other people out there that have the same attitudes that I do.’ I read The Monkeywrench Gang, I think it was. But what first motivated me wasn’t anything I read. I just got mad seeing the machines ripping up the woods and so forth...

TED: Back in the sixties there had been some critiques of technology, but as far as I knew there weren’t people who were against the technological system as-such... It wasn’t until 1971 or 72, shortly after I moved to Montana, that I read Jaques Ellul’s book, The Technological Society. The book is a masterpiece. I was very enthusiastic when I read it. I thought, ‘look, this guy is saying things I have been wanting to say all along.’

TED: But, I had never heard of anyone who had come right out against the technological system as a whole until I read Ellul. So, I was enthusiastic about it when I read Ellul because I figured, fuck, this guy’s been saying things that I’d been wanting to say all along.

TED: Back about 1972, I wrote sort of a preliminary essay on the subject of technology, and that was one of the things that made me most hopeless because I assumed that the power of technology would just keep increasing and closing everything down.

THERESA (PS): Why, I asked, did he personally come to be against technology?

TED: Why do you think? It reduces people to gears in a machine, it takes away our autonomy and our freedom.

TED: The honest truth is that I am not really politically oriented. I would have really rather just be living out in the woods. If nobody had started cutting roads through there and cutting the trees down and come buzzing around in helicopters and snowmobiles I would still just be living there and the rest of the world could just take care of itself. I got involved in political issues because I was driven to it, so to speak. I’m not really inclined in that direction.

TED: Unquestionably there is no doubt that the reason I dropped out of the technological system is because I had read about other ways of life, in particular that of primitive peoples. When I was about eleven I remember going to the little local library in Evergreen Park, Illinois. They had a series of books published by the Smithsonian Institute that addressed various areas of science. Among other things, I read about anthropology in a book on human prehistory. I found it fascinating. After reading a few more books on the subject of Neanderthal man and so forth, I had this itch to read more. I started asking myself why and I came to the realization that what I really wanted was not to read another book, but that I just wanted to live that way.

TED: I discovered Earth First! Like in the late ‘80s. I said, “hell, hey these people are saying very much the same things that I’ve been thinking all along.” So, I was not inspired by ‘Earth First!’ But I just happened to agree with them a great deal.

TED: Up until the mid 80’s I thought the situation was hopeless, I thought there was nothing that could be done to stop the technological system from going the way it was. All my monkeywrenching activities were simply… It was simple anger and revenge, I’ll tell you frankly. To me, I felt that I was almost completely alone in this respect.

TED: I started to realize, hey, wait a minute, there’s some other people out there that are having a very dim view of technology too, and maybe, just maybe, it might eventually be possible to do something about this.

School & Math

THERESA: You studied math, right? Why?

TED: I just got a kick out of it. I enjoyed it.

THERESA: Really? How interesting.

TED: Pure mathematics is useless from a practical point of view and that’s what I studied (laughs). I mean, a lot of people don’t understand what mathematicians really do, you know? They think they sit there adding up columns of figures or something like that. But that isn’t what it is. It’s more like puzzle solving.

TED: So, this dumb guidance councellor in school said I should skip a grade and it was a disaster, because I was not accepted by the older kids, and this generated a great deal of resentment I remember and the relentless quality of these people, I wanted to revenge myself on them.

Michigan

TED: There was a certain point at which I reached a crisis and I just felt so desolate. I was so empty that I just got depressed and also desperate that I thought that no one cared about me.

Teaching at Berkeley

TED: The good part about teaching was teaching the few students who were really interested in the subject and the bad part was teaching the rest (laughing).

TED: Mathematics was just a game and I wasn’t satisfied spending my life playing a game. Second place, I wanted to get out of the system and out into the wilderness.

The Move to Montana

TED: I wanted physical freedom, I wanted to get away from the cities and civilization because I just wanted to be a hermit. There’s no doubt about the actual reason that I dropped out of the technological system.. I mean it reduces people to gears in a giant machine. It takes away our autonomy and our freedom.

TED: So I went up to Montana and when I went through Lincoln there was a little sign saying ‘Real Estate’ outside. I said, “What do you have around here that’s really secluded?”

TED: It was not as secluded as I would have liked, but it’s a beautiful little piece of land. It was in the mountains, and so I bought it. And so it’s been part of my life for 25 years now.

Money

TED: My parents had a lot of… They were frugal people and they had a lot of money accumulated in savings and loan associations, and they were getting quite a bit of money from the interest. So from about 1980 to 1991 they used to send a yearly stipend to me and my brother.

TED: Remember that I was isolated there in Lincoln. I had this little dinky little library to go to. Once, in a great while, I’d go to Missoula and visit the university library there.

Chicago

TED: I would periodically leave for periods of a couple of weeks, to a few months, to get a job somewhere and earn some money to get by. The last time I had a job on just a… I spent a year, approximately a year in the Chicago area working.

Break with Brother

TED: My brother’s attitudes radically changed when he married. After he got married, his wife completely converted him to a conventional middle-class point of view.

Daily Life

THERESA (PS): Kaczynski says he began an intensive study of how to identify wild edible plants, track animals and replicate primitive technologies, approaching the task like the scholar he was.

TED: Many years ago I used to read books like, for example, Ernest Thompson Seton’s “Lives of Game Animals” to learn about animal behavior. But after a certain point, after living in the woods for a while, I developed an aversion to reading any scientific accounts. In some sense reading what the professional biologists said about wildlife ruined or contaminated it for me. What began to matter to me was the knowledge I acquired about wildlife through personal experience.

THERESA (PS): Kaczynski spoke at length about the life he led in his small cabin with no electricity and no running water. ... We spoke about the particulars of his daily routine.

TED: I have quite a bit of experience identifying wild edible plants, ... it’s certainly one of the most fulfilling activities that I know of, going out in the woods and looking for things that are good to eat. But the trouble with a place like Montana, how it differs from the Eastern forests, is that starchy plant foods are much less available. There are edible roots but they are generally very small ones and the distribution is limited. The best ones usually grow down in the lower areas which are agricultural areas, actually ranches, and the ranchers presumably don’t want you digging up their meadows, so starchy foods were civilized foods. I bought flour, rice, corn meal, rolled oats, powdered milk and cooking oil.

THERESA (PS): Kaczynski lamented never being able to accomplish three things to his satisfaction: building a crossbow that he could use for hunting, making a good pair of deerhide moccasins that would withstand the daily hikes he took on the rocky hillsides, and learning how to make fire consistently without using matches. He says he kept very busy and was happy with his solitary life.

TED: One thing I found when living in the woods was that you get so that you don’t worry about the future, you don’t worry about dying, if things are good right now you think, ‘well, if I die next week, so what, things are good right now.’ I think it was Jane Austen who wrote in one of her novels that happiness is always something that you are anticipating in the future, not something that you have right now. This isn’t always true. Perhaps it is true in civilization, but when you get out of the system and become re-adapted to a different way of life, happiness is often something that you have right now.

TED: Living in the woods, once you get adapted to that way of life, there’s almost no such thing as boredom. You can sit for a while, and just for hours, you can just sit and do nothing and be at peace.

Animism

TED: This is kind of personal...

THERESA (PS): I ask if he wants me to turn off the tape.

TED: [N]o, I can tell you about it. While I was living in the woods I sort of invented some gods for myself [he laughs]. Not that I believed in these things intellectually, but they were ideas that sort of corresponded with some of the feelings I had. I think the first one I invented was Grandfather Rabbit. You know the snowshoe rabbits were my main source of meat during the winters. I had spent a lot of time learning what they do and following their tracks all around before I could get close enough to shoot them. Sometimes you would track a rabbit around and around and then the tracks disappear. You can’t figure out where that rabbit went and lose the trail. I invented a myth for myself, that this was the Grandfather Rabbit, the grandfather who was responsible for the existence of all other rabbits. He was able to disappear, that is why you couldn’t catch him and why you would never see him... Every time I shot a snowshoe rabbit, I would always say ‘thank you Grandfather Rabbit.’ After a while I acquired an urge to draw snowshoe rabbits. I sort of got involved with them to the extent that they would occupy a great deal of my thought. I actually did have a wooden object that, among other things, I carved a snowshoe rabbit in. I planned to do a better one, just for the snowshoe rabbits, but I never did get it done. There was another one that I sometimes called the Will ‘o the Wisp, or the wings of the morning. That’s when you go out in to the hills in the morning and you just feel drawn to go on and on and on and on, then you are following the wisp. That was another god that I invented for myself.

Preserving his privacy

TED: I almost always succeeded in avoiding meeting people in the woods. I would keep off the trails and keep toward the.. Keep to the most isolated parts.

TED: So, I have these old dirty, ragged clothes on… and I had a… I took a baseball cap and I put a neck cloth on it, so that I could take the neckcloth and button it over to the side. So it would cover the lower part of my face. So here I was walking down this trail, I had a bedroll slung over my shoulder, and I had a canteen hanging here and a bottle of cooking oil hanging here and I had a rifle slung in the crook of my arm, you know? And I’m striding down this trail. And all of a sudden, I meet ‘em coming in the opposite direction, a couple of kids that looked like college kids, you know, out on a field trip or something like that. And there I am with a rifle over my arm, my face covered, and so these kids wouldn’t think I was a bandit or something, you know, I pulled the thing down, so it would not cover my face anymore. And I said, “hi.” And they sort of looked at me and said, “hi.” (Laughs)

Direct Action

TED: I was practically alone in the world, it’s just that I was mad.

TED: I was going to work at getting back at the system... Revenge.

TED: No. It was simply anger and revenge, and I was gonna strike back. Try not to get blown up. (Laughs)

TED: My motives are certainly not altruistic, I just don’t like living in this damn system.

TED: If you use any kind of practical common sense at all, your chances of getting caught are practically zero. If there’s nobody there to see you. The only danger is if you talk to somebody else, and tell them what you’re doing and they don’t keep their mouth shut.

THERESA (PS): He readily admits he committed quite a few acts of monkeywrenching during the seventies, but there came a time when he decided to devote more energy into fighting against the system. He describes the catalyst:

TED: The best place, to me, was the largest remnant of this plateau that dates from the tertiary age. It’s kind of rolling country, not flat, and when you get to the edge of it you find these ravines that cut very steeply in to cliff-like drop-offs and there was even a waterfall there. It was about a two days hike from my cabin. That was the best spot until the summer of 1983. That summer there were too many people around my cabin so I decided I needed some peace. I went back to the plateau and when I got there I found they had put a road right through the middle of it... [His voice trails off; he pauses, then continues,] You just can’t imagine how upset I was. It was from that point on I decided that, rather than trying to acquire further wilderness skills, I would work on getting back at the system. Revenge. That wasn’t the first time I ever did any monkeywrenching, but at that point, that sort of thing became a priority for me... I made a conscious effort to read things that were relevant to social issues, specifically the technological problem. For one thing, my concern was to understand how societies change, and for that purpose I read anthropology, history, a little bit of sociology and psychology, but mostly anthropology and history.

Terrorism

TED: I mean, if you’re going to choose an enemy, the head of a corporation is a much bigger enemy than scientists who are developing genetic engineering and that sort of thing. And I think it’s important not to forget that it’s really the core of the system that we have to worry about most.

Sabotage

TED: You know, up above my cabin, there used to be old-growth trees, trees hundreds of years old, and there is… a guy who’s a neighbour of mine. Butch Gehring, and this guy is a… he’s a real bastard. He runs a sawmill and just spews this filthy pollution into the air. Not to mention the noise pollution from his engine. And the guy’s not only a logger and a sawmill operator, but he’s a particularly irresponsible one.

TED: My intention was to put him out of business once and for all.

TED: They would ride their motorcycles on a road that was supposed to be closed, that sort of thing, and they just didn’t give a damn. And after I figured I’d had just about as much as I could take of that, I picked a nice rainy day when no one would be around and I went over and took an axe to their cabin. I did them quite a bit of damage.

TED: Normally when I did monkeywrenching, I made sure to do it far from home so that, you know, I wouldn’t be a suspect. So then about a week later, two sheriff’s deputies and a game warden came to my cabin and knocked on the door and they asked me “Ted, you cover quite a bit of the territory on foot around here, don’t you?” And I said “Yeah, I do.” And they said, “Have you ever seen anybody doing any damage to any buildings around here?” And I said “No.”

Reform vs. Revolution

THERESA (PS): Kaczynski soon came to the conclusion that reformist strategies that merely called for “fixing” the system were not enough, and he professed little confidence in the idea that a mass change in consciousness might someday be able to undermine the technological system.

TED: I don’t think it can be done. In part because of the human tendency, for most people, there are exceptions, to take the path of least resistance. They’ll take the easy way out, and giving up your car, your television set, your electricity, is not the path of least resistance for most people. As I see it, I don’t think there is any controlled or planned way in which we can dismantle the industrial system. I think that the only way we will get rid of it is if it breaks down and collapses. That’s why I think the consequences will be something like the Russian Revolution, or circumstances like we see in other places in the world today like the Balkans, Afghanistan, Rwanda. This does, I think, pose a dilemma for radicals who take a non-violent point of view. When things break down, there is going to be violence and this does raise a question, I don’t know if I exactly want to call it a moral question, but the point is that for those who realize the need to do away with the techno-industrial system, if you work for its collapse, in effect you are killing a lot of people. If it collapses, there is going to be social disorder, there is going to be starvation, there aren’t going to be any more spare parts or fuel for farm equipment, there won’t be any more pesticide or fertilizer on which modern agriculture is dependent. So there isn’t going to be enough food to go around, so then what happens? This is something that, as far as I’ve read, I haven’t seen any radicals facing up to.

TED: People today are excessively afraid of pain and death. If the system does break down, with or without the help of revolutionaries, there’s going to be a lot of violence and what sort of dilemma does this pose for nonviolent radicals?

THERESA (PS): At this point he was asking me, as a radical, to face up to this issue. I responded I didn’t know the answer. He said neither did he, clasped his hands together and looked at me intently. His distinctly Midwestern accent, speech pattern, and the colloquialisms he used were so familiar and I thought about how much he reminded me of the professors I had as a student of anthropology, history and political philosophy in Ohio. I decided to relate to him the story of how one of my graduate advisors, Dr. Resnick, also a Harvard alumni, once posed the following question in a seminar on political legitimacy: Say a group of scientists asks for a meeting with the leading politicians in the country to discuss the introduction of a new invention. The scientists explain that the benefits of the technology are indisputable, that the invention will increase efficiency and make everyone’s life easier. The only down side, they caution, is that for it to work, forty-thousand innocent people will have to be killed each year. Would the politicians decide to adopt the new invention or not? The class was about to argue that such a proposal would be immediately rejected out of hand, then he casually remarked, “We already have it — the automobile.” He had forced us to ponder how much death and innocent suffering our society endures as a result of our commitment to maintaining the technological system — a system we all are born into now and have no choice but to try and adapt to. Everyone can see the existing technological society is violent, oppressive and destructive, but what can we do?

TED: The big problem is that people don’t believe a revolution is possible, and it is not possible precisely because they do not believe it is possible. To a large extent I think the eco-anarchist movement is accomplishing a great deal, but I think they could do it better... The real revolutionaries should separate themselves from the reformers... And I think that it would be good if a conscious effort was being made to get as many people as possible introduced to the wilderness. In a general way, I think what has to be done is not to try and convince or persuade the majority of people that we are right, as much as try to increase tensions in society to the point where things start to break down. To create a situation where people get uncomfortable enough that they’re going to rebel. So the question is how do you increase those tensions? I don’t know.

THERESA (PS): Kaczynski wanted to talk about every aspect of the techno-industrial system in detail, and further, about why and how we should be working towards bringing about its demise. It was a subject we had both given a lot of thought to. We discussed direct action and the limits of political ideologies.

TED: I think especially useful targets would be things like computer centers, or let’s say, for example, genetic engineering laboratories because these are sort of the cutting edge of the system’s progress. … Because I think a lot of people are threatened by things like genetic engineering or super-intelligent computers.

TED: People don’t believe a revolution is possible and one of the most important things you can do is convince people that it is possible. If you work for the collapse of industrial civilization, you don’t really have to convince the majority of the population that you’re right. What you have to do is get a very large and very strongly committed minority.

TED: I think what has to be done is not try to persuade the majority of people that we’re right, so much as to increase tensions in society to the point where things start to break down, when people get uncomfortable enough so that they’re going to rebel. Now the question is, how do you increase those tensions?

TED: Well, the problem of the revolutionary should be, it seems to me, is unequivocally, simply to get rid of the industrial system, and that’s the key point. That’s my take on the situation.

TED: I think we have to build a strong and cohesive revolutionary movement so that when the right moment comes we will be prepared to do what we have to do.

On the FBI

TED: The FBI is just incompetent. I mean you wouldn’t believe it. I wouldn’t have believed it, before I saw my case from the inside, how incompetent these people are.

TED: If you look at these minute traces they get at a crime scene it’s much less effective than they pretend. And add to that, the fact that the FBI lab’s incompetent.

TED: According to the witness’ description, the Unabomber had reddish blond hair, and this was massive. This description was massively publicized, according to which the Unabomber had reddish blond hair. It’s obviously inconvenient that my hair is brown instead of blond.

TED: In my case, they had DNA results that were called the DQ alpha reading, and this was from postage stamps that were on Unabomb devices, and this supposedly would narrow it down to three percent of the population. In other words three percent of the population would have the same DQ alpha reading. You know, that doesn’t prove very much, three percent of the population, because there are millions of people who would fit into that. You know, one thing I’ve learned to my surprise is that all this stuff is a lot less effective than people think. I mean technology is useful, if it’s used intelligently, but if it’s used by people who are incompetent, then it’s not very effective.

Arrest

TED: Here’s exactly what happened. I was in my cabin about the middle of the day on April 3rd and I heard a voice up the hillside calling “is anybody home?” There were three guys walking down the hill toward my cabin. They certainly did not look like the kind of people that I would have thought FBI agents would have been. Two of them were old guys and one of ‘em was, you know, fat with a big paunch, you know? I always thought FBI agents would be youngish men in business suits with ties, and all that stuff and these guys were dressed like people who were doing a geological survey for mining purposes. They said, “we’re from the Nordic Drilling Company,” and then as I started to back off from the door to put my shoes on, this one guy sort of stepped toward me and he sort of had a funny look on his face.

TED: And then suddenly he reached out and grabbed me and pulled me out of the cabin. One guy pulled out a gun and pointed it at me and then they put handcuffs on me. The three guys were the only three that I saw at first because there were a whole bunch of FBI agents around there that came swarming around after they took me.

TED: Well, they let me know what the investigation was about very soon after they… I mean, even before I was formally arrested, but they didn’t ask me any questions about the case. And of course, if he had asked me anything that was, you know, about the Unabomb case, I wouldn’t have answered it.

TED: I was told by the attorney who represented me in Montana that FBI agents were taking items of alleged evidence from the cabin and they were taking it and showing it to reporters, journalists and saying, “This is such and such a piece of evidence.” And this of course is a flagrant violation of the Justice Department’s own rules.

Trial

TED: I didn’t want to be represented as a lunatic, which is what my attorneys were doing.

TED: If you look back to pictures that were taken when I was just being brought in by the FBI, you know, I had these old, dirty, ragged clothes… Well, that’s how I dressed in the woods, you know because there’s nobody to see me anyway.

TED: I knew they were bringing the cabin down to Sacramento, but I didn’t know what for. This was my lawyer's idea. They did it without my knowledge. And I only found out afterwards they intended to use it to portray me as mentally ill. ‘Anybody who would live this way is nuts.’

TED: The chief investigator on my defense team, she is said to have pioneered what is called “mitigation investigation.” In other words she goes around and interviews people who knew this person in the past and she gets all this background information on people and in some cases she’s able to use this to get people off the death penalty.

TED: The trouble was that my attorneys had put me in a position where either I had to let them go and represent me as a madman to the world, or else I had to accept a plea bargain.

Coping with life imprisonment

TED: What worries me is that I might, in a sense, adapt to this environment, in the sense that I’ll actually become comfortable here and not resent it anymore and I’m afraid that as the years go by, I might lose my memories of the mountains and the woods, and that’s what really worries me. I’ll tell you a good story, I was camping in my favorite spot. It was the best place there was in that country. While I was picking huckleberry’s I could hear ravens kicking up a big fuss and I was wondering what these ravens were making such a big fuss about. And all of a sudden, I heard this tremendous whooshing sound. I thought, my god, am I being buzzed by an airplane? And I looked up and there’s a golden eagle that goes diving past me, within like ten feet or so of my head with the four ravens chasing it. And the golden eagle, it landed next to some bushes further up the gulch, and it sort of put it’s back to the bushes, so it could face off the ravens that were harassing it. And I kept walking up the gulch, closer to the eagle, and finally it took off and it flew past me, it must’ve been within six feet of my head, it flew so close and these four ravens are still after it. I don’t get to see outside at all. My window just looks down on this concrete and steel recreation area.

THERESA: Don’t you think that’s going to drive you crazy?

TED: No, it won’t drive me crazy. . . . I’m not worried that they’re going to break my spirit and I don’t think they’ll ever convert me as far as attitudes and opinions are concerned.

TED: No, what worries me is that I might in a sense adapt to this environment and come to be comfortable here and not resent it anymore. And I am afraid that as the years go by that I may forget, I may begin to lose my memories of the mountains and the woods and that’s what really worries me, that I might lose those memories, and lose that sense of contact with wild nature in general. But I am not afraid they are going to break my spirit.

Letters

TED: There are women who write to me just because they.. There are women who just think that high profile prisoners are attractive and they want a personal relationship with them. And they send me pictures of themselves and tell me about their, you know, personal feelings and things like that.

Leader

TED: This is being recorded alright?

THERESA: Yup.

TED: Alright. I don’t think…

THERESA: Do you want to talk off the record?

TED: No, no, this is fine. This can be on the record. I get letters from kooks who think that I’m in cahoots with space aliens… (laughs) really… I’ve had a few letters from people… who do regard me as some kind of cult figure. And my personal preference is to be depicted truthfully. If I could be used as a symbol for promoting revolutionary activity, that’s fine with me, because the main thing in my opinion, to me, the main thing is to get rid of the industrial system by whatever means may be necessary.

THERESA: Did you ever think of yourself as an ‘Earth Firster’?

TED: Not really. As a sort of a satellite, sympathizer’s too weak a word, but sort of… ‘Earth Firster Satellite’?

TED: I didn’t want to subscribe to the earth first journal because I didn’t want to call attention to myself. If something happened to some logging equipment, I didn’t want them to know who to look for. But, I did pick up a copy of the journal and I saw a lot that I liked.

TED: One reason why I think actions like the Vail arson are useful: An action like that tends to increase the sense that something is going on, the sense that there is a tension in society, and it gives the activists themselves a sense of purpose. It’s important.

TED: It seems to me that there are discontented groups that could be very useful if we could, so to speak, recruit them.

TED: Then when the right moment comes, they will be in a position to strike. The thing is that people will tend to be attracted to a movement not only on the basis of agreeing with its ideas, but if they see it as effective, having a clear-cut agenda, cohesive, purposeful and active.

TED: In certain quarters, there is a rejection of modernity, among muslim militants, and I’m wondering what extent it might be useful to our movement to carry on discussions with the Muslim militants and see whether there is sufficient common ground there for any sort of alliance.

THERESA (PS): [H]e offered the following advice to green anarchists who share his critique of the technological system and want to hasten the collapse of, as Edward Abbey put it, “the destroying juggernaut of industrial civilization”:

TED: Never lose hope, be persistent and stubborn and never give up. There are many instances in history where apparent losers suddenly turn out to be winners unexpectedly, so you should never conclude all hope is lost.