The Anarchist Cookbook by William Powell
(Barricade Books, 1971)
A modern day alchemist’s manual to work evil only it’s not with horse dicks mixed with ewe ovaries sprinkled over with crushed wolf nads soaked with hemlock. The potions to be mixed and applied in this Black Manual will kill, maim and disfigure—guaranteed. Within its unholy pages are instructions on how to build bombs, how to make a garrote, how to booby-trap anything from a ballpoint pen to a smoker’s pipe to a policeman’s whistle (the last two will blow the person’s head off), how to make a blackjack, how to make poison darts, how to convert a shotgun into a grenade launcher, how to sabotage a moving vehicle without firearms or explosives (but with results every bit as messy), how to mix chemicals for explosives or hallucinogens, how to make weapons out of hat pins, beer cans or a pair of gloves, how to conduct electronic surveillance, how to jam electronic signals, how to broadcast free radio, how to place explosives to take down buildings, how to make and dispense poison gas, how to make silencers and what types of firearms to procure to conduct guerilla warfare.
A dangerous book? Certainly. An evil book? It could certainly be employed for evil purposes. The Cookbook definitely has been read by evil people although I do not know if they concocted any of the explosives, bombs or booby-traps shown therein. These people include Tim McVeigh, Jared Loughner, the Boston Marathon bombers, the London railway bombers, the Columbine killers, the anti-abortion radicals and a host of other imbeciles.
Powell wrote the book when he was 19 and filled with revolutionary fervor. It was published in 1971. My copy was published by Barricade Books but, in 2002, Billy Blann bought the copyrights of the book and sells it online through his publishing house, Delta Press, along with a host of other books that detail things like how to build a dirty bomb to how to build homemade hand grenades with butane lighters. But, Blann admits that The Anarchist Cookbook is his biggest seller. Delta Press’s catalog has earned Blann a $3 million-a-year business and netted him a nice income on which he lives comfortably in semi-retirement. Since Blann owns the book now, Powell gets no say in whether the book will continue to see publication. Blann states that he has no intention of stopping. Nor have Amazon nor Barnes & Noble stopped selling the book (I bought my copy some 20 or more years ago at Border’s—with cash).
Of his book today, Powell states, “The Anarchist Cookbook should go quietly and immediately out of print.” Blann, in turn, states, “You know, we don’t ban books in America.” To be precise, Powell is not calling for an outright ban. The book would still be available but there would be no new copies being printed up. Eventually, there won’t be any more copies around. This is more a banning by attrition or what I call “soft-banning.”
I must say that I find Powell to be a disappointment. His position today looks disingenuous—washing his hands of a book he knows is not ever going to go out of print. He wants to have his cake and eat it too. His attitude is, “Yeah, I wrote it and it changed the world but since I don’t own the copyrights, I can distance myself from it so I don’t have to answer for anything. But it will still and almost certainly always will be available to anyone who wants it.” The young revolutionary has turned into the world’s biggest old hypocrite.
His opening paragraph in the book’s original published form laid a perfectly valid rationale for making such a book available to the public:
“This book is written for the people of the United States of America. It is not written for the fringe political groups, such as the Weathermen, or The Minutemen. Those radical groups don’t need this book. They already know everything that’s in here. If the real people of America, the silent majority, are going to survive, they must educate themselves. That is the purpose of this book.”
I have talked with a few different types of people to get a range of views on this. One man I spoke with felt that the book should be banned because it made killers of people with kooky views. “But didn’t they always have the ability to commit mass murder in them to begin with?” I asked. After all, I read the book as have some two million others and the vast majority of us didn’t become crazed guerilla assassins. He agreed with that but said the book nevertheless helped them formulate this loose assemblage of ideas they had into something coherent that could be and eventually was acted upon.
Others said that if we ban this book, we are opening a door to banning other material because some group or other finds the content objectionable. There are parents who want Huckleberry Finn banned from schools because of its liberal use of the word “n-igger.” As it is, many school districts now issue a censored version where the word “n-igger” is now replaced with “slave.” Some groups think The Communist Manifesto should be banned while others want Mein Kampf banned. This is upsetting to me because in a free society, YOU have the right to read this stuff if you so desire. If you decide to act on anything you read, YOU take the responsibility for your own actions. That’s the deal and that’s always been the deal from the day this nation was founded. Some people are acting like they only just figured this out and don’t agree with it on top of that.
The bottom line is, who gets to decide what gets banned and what doesn’t? Not the government as the First Amendment makes clear:
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
The people, then? Which people? If you ask me which books should be banned, my answer is “None of them.” Others would disagree. So NOBODY gets to make that decision. No books should be banned by default. It is no one’s decision. Anyone who detonates a bomb they learned to make from reading Powell’s book is responsible for that bomb and whatever damages it caused not Powell and not his book. With freedom comes responsibility. But then we always have to be watching what people are doing. As Thomas Jefferson once said, “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.” NSA snooping notwithstanding.