Irish Examiner view: Unabomber set the pattern

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Theodore 'Ted' Kaczynski was found dead over the weekend in his prison cell in the US. He was 81 years old. Picture: AP Photo/John Youngbear, File

It is a staple of modern drama: The renegade who goes ‘off grid’ to wreak vengeance on society, usually with some form of agitprop manifesto and a list of unreasonable demands. In the 21st century, when acts of domestic terror can be observed and followed through social media, it can be strange to recall that such perpetrators were once a novelty.

The US had the Weathermen, a clandestine group of radical students who drew their title from a line in Bob Dylan’s ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’: “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” 

Europe had the even more murderous Baader-Meinhoff Gang, or the Red Army Faction. 

And then there was the Unabomber, Theodore ‘Ted’ Kaczynski, who was found dead in his cell in a North Carolina prison on Saturday morning, aged 81.

Kaczynski, a mathematician educated at Harvard, waged a 17-year parcel-bomb campaign from a cabin in the depths of Montana. He killed three people and injured 23. He targeted universities, academics, and airlines. 

His threat to blow up a Los Angeles jet on the July 4 weekend threw air travel and the postal system into chaos and was a foretaste of al-Qaeda.

After the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, Kaczynski forced the Washington Post and the New York Times to publish a 35,000-word treatise, Industrial Society and Its Future, which claimed modern society and technology produced powerlessness and alienation. 

Its opening line said: “The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.” It was his undoing. His style and rhetoric were recognised by his brother and sister-in-law, who tipped off the FBI. He never spoke to his brother again. His views about the damaging impact of capitalism are espoused by many.