The legacy of the Anarchist Cookbook
At 50 years old, this book has caused more uproar than any other of its kind.
“This book is for the people of the United States of America”
The foreword starts.
I remember this book from my youth. Raised pretty decent in a city called Utrecht in the Netherlands. I really had no need for such writing. I believe I could not have been older than 12, maybe 13.
While messing around on BBS’s or Bulletin Board Services, the Internet of its day, I came across a copy of The Anarchist Cookbook. Edited by the Jolly Roger. (His real name: William Powell)
Now, this was way before the World Wide Web, right? We did have FTP servers, but I only knew how to connect to Bulletin Boards. We are talking late 80’s early 90’s. So my vehicle to drive on the information superhighway was a narrow 14k4Baud dial-up connection on a phone line that was, of course, shared with the rest of the family.
Anyway.
Text files were easy to download. It usually didn’t take too long, so it was the first thing you would look for. And the biggest that you could find was a text copy of “The Anarchist Cookbook” The title, of course, left nothing to the imagination of a 14-year-old boy, and for such a young inquiring mind, its content did not disappoint.
Before continuing, I would like to add a disclaimer.
I do not in any way support any activity set out to cause harm or cause any danger to people, animals, and property or support the intent of its writer. The contents of this book should be read for purely entertainment purposes only and never ever be performed in real life. Much of its descriptions are inaccurate and extremely dangerous. In these times, owning even a copy of this book in any form, digital or otherwise, can get you in more trouble than you realize.
I know this will probably trigger some people the wrong way (yay, danger!). But there.
Origins
The book's author is William Powell, a manager of a bookstore in Greenwich Village. Powell quit his job at the bookstore to write the Anarchist Cookbook. “My motivation at the time was quite simple,” said Powell in an article for The Guardian. “I was actively pursued by the US military, who seemed single-mindedly determined to send me to fight, and possibly die, in Vietnam.”
Its counter-cultural messages proved popular to this day as it has sold more than 2 million copies.
Although Powell said that he had written The Anarchist Cookbook in protest of the Vietnam War, it found a home with all kinds of rebellions and political persuasions. It became a broad symbol of armed resistance and anomic rebellion, even though it was rarely proven to have led to any actual crimes. (See below ‘Notable owners’) However, just the mention of The Anarchist Cookbook, either by police investigators or the news media, was enough to conjure instant criminality.
The FBI gets involved.
Even though to this day, the Anarchist cookbook remains a legal document, the FBI was highly against it and sought to ban the book actively. The FBI wrote, “this has to be one of the crudest, low-brow, paranoiac writing efforts ever attempted.” People in and outside of the FBI pleaded with J. Edgar Hoover to ban the publication. Only to be told, “the FBI has no control over material published through the mass media.”
Another reason people argued that the publications should be banned because much of its content was awfully written, dangerous, and, well, outright false. Powell wrote the Anarchist Cookbook when he was just 19, and much of its information is highly inaccurate. For example, the cookbook provides instructions for extracting a chemical called bananadine — “a mild, short-lasting psychedelic” — from banana peels. Bananadine does not exist; it was a fabrication written in the underground newspaper the Berkeley Barb to get authorities to ban bananas. Powell, however, believed it to be true.
The bomb recipes are particularly dangerous because much of them were highly inaccurate. It was very likely if you followed one of the recipes, you would blow yourself and others up.
Notable owners
I am not exaggerating when I say that even owning the book could put you in more trouble than you realize.
- 2017: A 27-year-old was prosecuted in the UK solely for the possession of the book. He was found not guilty.[32]
- 2020: A 23-year old mathematics graduate of the University of Cambridge was convicted of ‘collecting information useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism, based on his possession of the book, despite claiming to have bought the book from Amazon out of academic interest.[33][34]
There are other more notorious owners of the book, but those were never verified.
The biggest opponent of the book turned out to be the author himself. Powell converted in his later years to Anglicanism and became a teacher to students in developing countries in Asia and Africa. He has been trying to get the book pulled from shelves for many years, but he no longer holds the copyright to the work. In one article, he wrote:
Over the years, I have come to understand that the basic premise behind the Cookbook is profoundly flawed. The anger that motivated the writing of the Cookbook blinded me to the illogical notion that violence can be used to prevent violence. I had fallen for the same irrational pattern of thought that led to US military involvement in both Vietnam and Iraq. The irony is not lost on me. […] The continued publication of the Cookbook serves no purpose other than a commercial one for the publisher. It should quickly and quietly go out of print.
I am not going to link to the cookbook. It is straightforward to find either at Amazon, Goodreads and even as pdf’s to download. It has been archived at the Internet Archive as well. So- it is not hard to find at all.
For me, the things that proved invaluable were the technological chapters, for instance, how to phone phreak. (Exploring the telephone systems of the day) or hack into BBS’s. Exchange scanning and wardialing. It had references to issues of old hacking magazines like Phrack and explained what a UNIX system was. It is a nice peek into the systems of the day, the early days of being connected by the phone lines themselves.
I think it is surprising that a publication like the Anarchist Cookbook continues to exist and is readily available online at Amazon. Should it be pulled? No absolutely not. Is it relevant still? I don’t know. Maybe that opinion is best left to the reader.
