Serial killer Theodore Kaczynski, known as the Unabomber, died on Saturday, June 10, in prison, having committed the most heinous crimes for 17 years.
Ted Kaczynski, whose full name is Theodore John Kaczynski, and nickname “Unabomber”, (born May 22, 1942, Evergreen Park, Illinois, USA — died June 10, 2023, Butner, North Carolina), is an American criminal who is full For 17 years, he carried out various bombings, mostly through the mail, killing 3 and injuring 23 people in an attempt to carry out a ‘revolution against the industrial system’.
Childhood
Kaczynski was a very intelligent child and showed a penchant for mathematics from an early age. He went to elementary school in Chicago, and when his younger brother was born, the family moved to the suburbs, so he changed schools. When his IQ was measured as high as 167, he skipped the sixth grade. He later described this grade skipping as a key event in his life, because before he was the best student, far ahead of the others, until transferring to a higher class he did not fit in and claimed that the others bullied him. Neighbors later described him as very a smart boy, but lonely.
In high school he played the trombone, was a member of the club of advanced students in several subjects. During this period, he became interested in mathematics and spent hours solving complicated math problems. He was transferred to another department, specialized in mathematics, a soon skipped the 11th grade, while he finished high school at the age of 15when i admitted to Harvard. A friend from college later said that he was emotionally unprepared for it – “They packed him up and sent him to Harvard before he was ready, he didn’t even have a driver’s license then“, he said. During his studies, he lived in an elite neighborhood intended for the best students.
Experiments
During the second year of his studies, Kaczynski participated in the research of the distinguished professor Henry Murray, where he monitored brain activity with electrodes while someone was verbally abusing and humiliating him, and then they play those recordings over and over again. Kaczynski spent 200 hours (or 3 years) in this research, and his lawyers later claimed that it was a brain control study allegedly conducted by the CIA and that it contributed to his later criminal activities. Kaczynski, on the other hand, described this research as an attack on his privacy, but that it had no significant impact on his life.
His Boundary Function dissertation won the award for the best mathematical dissertation of the year, while his colleagues described it as “the best ever”, saying that only 10 people in the country can understand it. At the age of 25, he became a professor of mathematics at Berkeley, but his grades from students were not the best, he was described as a professor who reads from a book and refuses to answer questions. Without any explanation, Kaczynski is quit his job suddenly in 1969.
He returned to his parents, where he lived for the next two years, and then went to a cabin in the wilderness, measuring 3 by 4 meters, which he built and where he spent the next 24 years. The hut had no heating, electricity or running water, while Kaczynski did spent most of his time reading books from the local library and composing early drafts of the manuscript that would later become known as the Unabomber Manifesto.
Bomb
Between 1978 and 1995, Kaczynski mailed or hand-delivered a series of increasingly sophisticated bombs that cumulatively killed three people and injured 23 others. Kaczynski has been linked to 16 bombings across the country. While bombing devices have varied widely over the years, many contained the initials ‘FC’, which Kaczynski later said stood for ‘Freedom Club’, written on parts inside. He intentionally left false traces in the devices and he prepared them very carefully so as not to leave fingerprints. Fingerprints found on some of the devices did not match those found on letters attributed to Kaczynski.
Kaczynski’s first mail bomb was directed at Buckley Krist, professor of materials engineering at Northwestern University. In 978 on May 25 in the parking lot of the University of Illinois at Chicago a package with Christ’s return address was found. The package was “returned” to Krist, who was suspicious because he never sent it, so he contacted campus police. Officer Terry Marker opened the package, which exploded and caused minor injuries.
Kaczynski returned to Chicago because of the May 1978 bombing and stayed there for a while to work with his father and brother in a foam rubber factory. In August 1978, his brother fired him for writing offensive texts about a female supervisor Ted was courting. She later recalled Kaczynski as intelligent and quiet, but vehemently denied that they had any romantic relationship. Kaczynski’s second bomb she was sent almost a year after the first, again to Northwestern University. Bomba, hidden in a cigar box and left on a table, it caused minor injuries to graduate student John Harris when he opened it.
In 1979, the next bomb was planted in the cargo hold of American Airlines Flight 444, a Boeing 727 flying from Chicago to Washington. Kaczynski sent his next bombshell to United Airlines president Percy Wood. Wood suffered cuts and burns over most of his body. In several more attacks, he injured the people to whom he aimed the bombs, and three were killed.
Manifest
In 1995, Kaczynski sent several letters to the media outlining his goals and demanding that major newspapers print verbatim his 35,000-word essay called “Industrial Society and Its Future” (which the FBI called the ‘Unabomber Manifesto’). He declared that he would ‘give up terrorism’ if this demand was met. There was controversy over whether the essay should be published, but Attorney General Janet Reno and FBI Director Louis Freeh they recommended its publication out of concern for public safety and in the hope that some reader might be able to identify the author. Bob Guccione of the Penthouse volunteered to publish it.
Industrial society and its future begins with Kaczynski’s assertion: “The industrial revolution and its consequences were a disaster for the human race.” He writes that technology had destabilizing effect on society, made life unfulfilling, and caused widespread psychological suffering. Kaczynski argues that most people spend their time in useless activities because of technological advances; he calls them ‘surrogate activities’, in which people pursue artificial goals, including scientific work, entertainment consumption, political activism, and following sports teams. He predicted that further technological advances would lead to extensive human genetic engineering and that human beings would be adapted to the needs of social systems, not the other way around.
Kaczynski states that technological progress can be stopped, in contrast to the view of people who he says understand the negative effects of technology, but passively accept technology as inevitable. He calls for a return to a primitivist way of life. Kaczynski’s criticisms of civilization have some similarities with anarcho-primitivism, but he rejected and criticized anarcho-primitivism views. Kačinjski argued that the erosion of human freedom is a natural product of industrial society because ‘the system must closely regulate human behavior in order to function’.and that the reform of the system is impossible because drastic changes in it would not be implemented because of their disruption of the system.
He states that the system has not yet fully achieved control over all human behavior and that it is in the midst of a struggle to gain that control. Kaczynski predicts that the system will break down if it cannot achieve significant control, and that the issue will probably be resolved in the next 40 to 100 years.
Arrest
The FBI agents didn’t know who the man who was sending bombs and killing people was, but then they managed to track him down and arrested Kaczynski at his house on April 3, 1996. The search revealed a cache of bomb components, 40,000 handwritten pages of diaries that included bomb-making experiments, descriptions of the Unabomber’s crimes, and one bomb. They also found what appeared to be the original typed manuscript of Industrial Society and Its Future.
(WORLD)