One of the big news stories in the UK at the moment is Anders Behring Breivik, who decided to protect Norway from foreigners and Muslims by killing dozens of predominantly native-born non-Muslim Norwegians. He is a rich source of black, black comedy. He claims to be the point man of a legion of international nationalists but appears to have spent most of the last few years sitting at home playing Call of Duty and World of Warcraft (“for up to 16 hours a day”). He also has too-neat hair and a silly beard. If I was a frothing-at-the-mouth neo-Nazi I would probably wince every time he appears on television.*
Inevitably he has a manifesto, which I haven’t read. Apparently it lifts big chunks from the Unabomber’s manifesto, mention of which sent me on a nostalgic trip back to the 1990s. Remember the Unabomber? He was like the Scorpio killer, but with bombs and an ideology, and they caught him, and he wasn’t in San Francisco. But otherwise the similarities are… there aren’t any, I admit it was a bad example. The Unabomber was an undeniably intelligent man, at least in the field of mathematics. He was very eager to have his manifesto published. Industrial Society and Its Future, it was called. He thought it had substance, and I’m genuinely curious to know what kind of lasting impact it had.
None at all, I suspect. I’ve skimmed it, but not read it in detail, and I get the impression that I’m not alone in having done so. Wikipedia suggests that it was a pot-pourri of themes that had been fashionable many decades before, but were old-hat in the 1990s; I would have expected an intellectual treatise on industrialisation and society circa the mid-1990s to bang on about cyberspace a lot, but the Unabomber presumably had no internet access in his cabin. I surmise that ultimately his lack of a forceful public persona, his continued incarceration, and his inability to work a crowd meant that his manifesto died a death. But did it inspire novelists, poets? Do people remember it today? Is it at the very least an entertaining read?
In contrast, Martin Luther remained free to nail copies of his 95 Theses to things, Adolf Hitler was released from prison and allowed to continue agitating, individual religious preachers were killed but enough followers remained to spread the word, whereas the Unabomber seems to have been an island of a man who barely knew his own brother. Breivik is the same.
Now, there’s a tradition of awkward, intense young men going off into the wilderness, coming back with secret knowledge, and leading a movement without necessarily being great mates with his followers. Jesus didn’t exactly hang out with his disciples. But the Unabomber, Breivik - did the Columbine killers have a manifesto? - et al just come across as weird loners without much to positively inspire people with.
There’s a certain irony at work. Adolf Hitler opened Mein Kampf - which is absolutely turgid - by writing that “fewer people are won over by the written word than by the spoken word and … every great movement on this earth owes its growth to great speakers and not to great writers”. He was essentially right - a movement needs fire-and-brimstone preachers, not bloggers, “nobody listens to Radio Four!” - and he went on to be an extraordinarily successful politician and mass-murderer, without actually killing anyone himself. In contrast the Unabomber wrote a readable manifesto and tried to spread his word by actually killing people himself , and ended up an old man slowly dying in prison, forgotten by the world, which carried on without him.
Here’s a joke:
Q: What did a young Martin Luther say after spotting a small piece of wood on the ground in front of him?
A: I’ve had 95 feces, but a twig ain’t one.