this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2023
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The original Anarchist Cookbook was incredibly scary to the feds. It was filled with mostly useless and dangerous (mostly to the "Anarchist"), but the name and the feelings at the end of the Vietnam war captured the public's attention.
It was passed around mostly by Xerox machine or fax copies. By the time I saw a version in the late 80's the one I ran into was a blurry and unreadable mess. The original author is on record saying that he had no idea what he was doing when he wrote it and that no one should follow any of the bomb making bits because he'd never made one himself.
Even with all of that, it holds a serious impact on our communal memory and social ideas. The name alone is going to live forever, even if the original text is lost to time.
It's a neat idea, and the name is so good. I even saw on an .onion site that had it told in plain text, and the visuals were ASCII recreations.
There is a (conspiracy) theory that the writer was actually working for a government since a lot of the instructions don't work, or would potentially kill the person making it. Thus anyone who tried to follow it would not get results or die from making a project at home.
Seeing as it was published in 1971, and the FBI's COINTELPRO ended that year, it's not impossible. They hated anarchists and anyone too "un-american".
That said, zero proof. Hence the conspiracy in conspiracy theory.
Conspiracies are real, and they happen all the time. A conspiracy is just a group of people colluding in secret. It has nothing to do with proof.
The problem I have with the term "conspiracy theory" isn't the word "conspiracy"; it's the word "theory". These aren't theories. They're bullshit. "Conspiracy bullshit" sounds much better.
Well put.