Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Document Notes
A small look at colonialism, a small look at socialism/anarchy vs pointless actions, and an interesting extremist character
Highlights
id558164767
It’s a simple historical fact that the Industrial Revolution (and its consequences) went hand-in-hand with European imperialism, and that its raw materials were furnished by the ravaging of entire continents. To pick just one example, much of the rubber in Europe was once supplied by the so-called Congo Free State, where Belgian overseers systematically whipped and mutilated their African subjects for failing to meet production quotas.
✏️ Colonialism of old 🔗 View Highlight
id558164792
Today, only the materials involved have changed. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, as it’s now known, thousands of workers are still forced into functional slavery in cobalt mines, where they scrape at the earth with pickaxes, breathe toxic dust, and often die in tunnel collapses—all to feed the demand for rechargeable batteries for the latest high-tech devices. In all likelihood, the laptop I’m typing this on contains metals mined by enslaved people, and so does whatever device you’re using to read it.
✏️ Colonialism of new 🔗 View Highlight
id558165374
His manifesto is full of bombastic talk about “revolution against the industrial-technological system,” speculating that “under suitable conditions large numbers of people may devote themselves passionately” to such a cause, but there’s no indication that he ever attempted to rally anyone to his side.
✏️ Keeping in mind that he was paranoid, sociopathic and not exactly a martyred revolutionary. 🔗 View Highlight
id558165387
hiding away in his cabin and lashing out with haphazard violence.
id558165396
Experiment 97. Dec. 11, 1985. I planted a bomb disguised to look like a scrap of lumber behind Rentech Computer Store in Sacramento. According to the San Francisco Examiner, Dec. 20, the “operator” (owner? manager?) of the store was killed, “blown to bits,” on Dec. 12. Excellent. Humane way to eliminate somebody. He probably never felt a thing. 25,000 reward offered. Rather flattering.
id558165489
He simply took satisfaction in the act of killing itself, and the notoriety it brought.
id558165535
“I hate the system not because of some abstract humanitarian principle but because I hated living in the system,” and that “It was simply anger and revenge, and I was going to strike back.”
id558166046
For him, the plan wasn’t necessarily to create a better or more just society; it was simply to destroy the existing one, and let “human freedom” take over from there. What kind of world would result, and whether or not anyone actually wanted it, was beside the point.
id558166556
[F]oul means, far from being justified by distant ends, merely provide a guarantee that the ends achieved will be horrible. You can’t blow up a social relationship. The total collapse of this society would provide no guarantee about what replaced it. Unless a majority of people had the ideas and organization sufficient for the creation of an alternative society, we would see the old world reassert itself because it is what people would be used to, what they believed in, what existed unchallenged in their own personalities.
✏️ A rebuttal to being anarchic without purpose. If you hate the system and blow it up, it’ll just rebuild itself because that’s what people were used to, and nothing was truly challenged. 🔗 View Highlight
id558166719
such eruptions of violence are not only futile in themselves, but they stigmatize whatever cause they’re committed to by associating it with bloodshed and terror, and they provide a pretext for greater repression of that cause’s adherents by the state.