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Cake day: June 27th, 2023

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  • Yeah, I’m guessing THEY™ took one look at the Anarchist’s Cookbook and said, “yeah, we don’t need to bother.”

    I think the person on this page puts it well:

    Some people claim that the CIA/FBI/author/whoever sabotaged the Anarchist Cookbook to blow up would-be anarchists or to make the recipes fail. However, there is little evidence to support this theory. I find it much more likely that the errors are just due to incompetence. Note that many of the above errors (e.g. wrong symbol for arsenic, wrong formula for alcohol) don’t sabotage anything but are just stupid errors. I would expect that if it were deliberately sabotaged, it wouldn’t have errors like these.

    http://files.righto.com/anarchy/index.html

    On top of that, the author thinks the book should no longer be in print because of what it’s been used for.

    In 2000, Powell posted a message on the book’s Amazon page. He wrote the Cookbook, he said, when he was 19 “and the Vietnam war and the so-called ‘counter culture movement’ were at their height. I was involved in the anti-war movement and attended numerous peace rallies and demonstrations. The book, in many respects, was a misguided product of my adolescent anger at the prospect of being drafted and sent to Vietnam to fight in a war that I did not believe in … The central idea to the book was that violence is an acceptable means to bring about political change. I no longer agree with this.” That teenage action clearly haunts him, and has had bigger consequences than he could ever have foreseen.

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2013/dec/18/why-anarchist-cookbook-author-william-powell-off-shelves

    He wrote it when he was 19. Of course it’s full of errors.