Welcome to another installment of Liberal Agenda, where we explore potential alternatives to current political or economic systems, and hopefully get a conversation started. This post is a little different to normal, as today I’d like to discuss The Anarchist Cookbook by William Powell, a book I’m sure many of you are familiar with in one of its many guises.
WARNING! Read this book, but keep in mind that the topics written about here are illegal and constitute a threat. Also, more importantly, almost all the recipes are dangerous, especially to the individual who plays around with them without knowing what he is doing. Use care, caution, and common sense. This book is not for children or morons.
William Powell’s warning on the book
In 1971 a book was published by Lyle Stuart, a known publisher of controversial books, that seemed to advocate the violent overthrow of the American government. It was written by William Powell at the apex of the counterculture era, a time full of hippy love and violent war. Powell wrote it as a protest of the United States involvement in the Vietnam war, a war seen by many to be unjust, cruel and spurred on by greed. In his own words; “I was very fed up with the government… but it wasn’t a call to action, there’s no call to action in the book itself.” Many would disagree with this statement, and since it’s initial publication, the book has been directly linked to individuals such as the Columbine killers and the Unabomber. In the many decades it’s been around, the book has gone on to sell over two million copies worldwide.
Before we discuss the book though, I’d like to talk about it’s author, a man who by all accounts felt a great deal of remorse for his creation. Most of the information on William himself is from an excellent documentary called American Anarchist which came out in 2016, and is the story of this controversial publication from his perspective. It explores his reasoning for writing the book, and why he decide to renounce it.
William Powell
Early Life
In 1967, at around the age of 17, Powell began hitchhiking towards New York City. It was the summer and the height of counterculture, a hot psychedelic time. People were becoming increasingly socially aware, with activists from the Civil Rights Movement, Feminism and Gay Pride. Powell lived in a small apartment, so small his bathtub was in his kitchen, and he worked at a bookstore called Book Masters, a chain of stores that prided itself on having its finger on the pulse of what was in and hip.
At this time, Powell was in the process of forming opinions on topics like politics, social issues and himself. He took part in a handful of the marches on Washington, and liked the feeling of “being a part of something larger than myself”. There was a feeling that a power change was coming, that society was about to become a fairer, more equitable place to be for all, rather than being run by “a few old white men”. In the documentary, Powell explains how he was becoming increasingly angry about the war and the increasing fatalities on both sides which he felt was a waste of human life. He observed what should have been peaceful demonstrations becoming more and more violent, with in his own words “the days of putting flowers in rifles was coming to an end”. Protestors were increasingly coming to demonstrations armed and ready for violence, turning peaceful movements into angry mobs.
For Powell, all of this came to a head at a sit-in (or yip-in) at Grand Central Station, where one of the largest gatherings to celebrate life turned violent around midnight. After two men removed the clock hands from the clock above the information desk, police swooped in and began beating participants with batons indiscriminately. This both angered and scared Powell, and he “felt very strongly that change needed to happen”, and so he began to write.
Writing the Cookbook
Once he decided to write The Anarchist Cookbook, Powell would spend much of his time focused on this project, becoming very insular. He didn’t discuss the project with anyone, keeping it his secret. He started off by going into the New York Public Library and finding the section containing the military manuals. These potentially dangerous documents weren’t kept behind lock and key, he didn’t have to mount some Mission Impossible style maneuvers to obtain this information. He merely walked up to the shelfs, selected the materials he wanted, and began writing. There was no need to ask a curator to observe you while reading this material in a special space, it was in the public space.
The section on explosives came primarily from a couple of Army field manuals; Explosives and Demolitions, Boobytraps and Evasion and Escape. Many of the diagrams were drawn by Powell himself, either copied from manuals and textbooks or just freehand. In American Anarchist, Powell explains that his goal was;
“To take what the military had, and what other radical groups had, and put it into the common domain, so that it was accessible to everyone.”
Personally, I can definitely agree with his sentiment here. If certain groups, including the government, have access to this information, then why shouldn’t everyone be able to. In this modern age, with mass communication and information sharing, it can be something we take for granted, but at the time when Powell was writing this book it wasn’t so easy for everyone to access it.
“I still sort of question that, that paradox. Who controls the information? Whose hands should it be in?”
When asked what he was advocating with this book, Powell’s response was “I think I was advocating for people to think for themselves”.
The book took him about four months to write, written completely in solitude. The first person to read it was the books publisher, Lyle Stuart.
William's Remorse
“I can see that people might read portions of this book and find justification for doing very destructive and evil things… and that fills me with remorse.”
Five years after the publication of his first book, Powell converted to Anglican Christianity and started the fight to get the book pulled from circulation. He was unsuccessful in this mission however, as the copyright was owned by the books publisher, Lyle Stuart. The copyright was later purchased by another publisher of controversial books in 1991, and again in 2002 by Arkansas-based publisher Delta Press.
Powell would later publicly renounce his book twice, first in 2000 and later in a piece for the Guardian in 2013. The book is still in print to this day, and can be purchased from many online retailers.
Powell spent most of his adult life teaching in Africa and Asia, working with schools to support children with learning difficulties. He and his wife founded the Next Frontier organisation, setup to help children with special needs including dyslexia, ADHD and autism.
The Anarchist Cookbook
The Anarchist Cookbook covers many topics, from explosives and demolition, to arms and ammo and even drugs recipes, including probably most notoriously a recipe for LSD. Powell’s version is often seen as the definitive edition, the one true copy. As I’ve already mentioned, you can still buy copies online with ease or there are many pdf copies floating around the darker corners of the web. However, it isn’t the only version with many clones and copies springing up over the year. One of the most popular and well-known modern variants is the one published by an anonymous author who many refer to as The Jolly Roger.
It was The Jolly Roger’s version that I skimmed through as a teenager, a poorly spaced text document that I’d stumbled across on Limewire, the digital equivalent of giving yourself gonorrhea. It featured more modern variants on some of the popular recipes, plus other material that the author had gathered from across the early internet.
One recipe that I still remember well involved dismantling a floppy disk, covering the disk itself in the flammable material from match heads, reassembling it and popping it into your victims drive. The theory was the heat from the disk’s write/read head would cause the phosphorus material to catch fire and burn the computer down. I have no idea whether this would actually work and I need to move on because I’m becoming really, really tempted to try it out.
Legality
The legal status of this book has been challenged many times over the year, most notably by the FBI who ended up releasing all their material on the book in 2010. Nevertheless, there are still court cases to this day where individuals are accused of all manner of crimes just for possession of the book. A recent trial in the UK was thrown out of court and accused of being a waste of public resources.
There’s no denying that having this book in your possession if you do “moronic” things probably isn’t the best idea, but you are perfectly entitled to own a copy for your own research in most countries (but not all). I don’t yet have my own copy, but it is on my Amazon wishlist. I think it’ll make the perfect addition to my collection of the unusual.
Legacy
At the time of its publication, the FBI described the book as “one of the crudest, low-brow, paranoiac writing efforts ever attempted”. Powell himself would later go on to describe the sections of his book called for blood as “...over the top, exaggerated rhetoric.”
Many anarchist groups also renounced the book, saying it was “not composed or released by anarchists, not derived from anarchist practice, not intended to promote freedom and autonomy or challenge repressive power – and was barely a cookbook, as most of the recipes in it are notoriously unreliable”.
The unreliability of the recipes contained in this book has been brought into question many times, including by VICE and YouTuber Myles Power. Powell replaced the lab grade equipment in the original manuals for household materials that people can easily find, which can have unreliable or dangerous consequences if the user does not know what they are doing, or as Powell would describe them; “morons”.
The book still stands as a relic of it’s time, when the people were finally waking up to the moral failings of those in power. A movement that still grows with each passing generation. Maybe now we finally have the tools to address the issues of equity and morality, but books like this still have a place and shouldn’t be forgotten.
William Powell died while on holiday in Nova Scotia of cardiac arrest on 11th July 2016, aged 66. The news of his death wasn’t widely reported until the release of American Anarchist by Charlie Siskel, roughly six months after his death.
What did you think of this post? Are you familiar with this book? Or, do you think it should be removed from stores like the author did? I'm really curious to hear what you think about this topic, so make sure to leave your thoughts down in the comment section. As always, make sure to follow me for the latest Technology, Internet and Pop Culture updates and until we meet again, take it easy!
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Sources:
American Anarchist (2016) by Charlie Siskel
The Anarchist Cookbook on Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anarchist_Cookbook)
Anarchist Cookbook author William Powell dies aged 66 from The Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/30/anarchist-cookbook-author-william-powell-dies-aged-66)
Anarchist Cookbook Image from Wikimedia Commons (
Young Powell Image (https://www.afr.com/news/policy/defence/william-powell-author-of-the-anarchist-cookbook-lived-to-regret-it-20170403-gvc9r9)
Cookbook and Pipebomb Image by Adrian Gaut, taken from Wired (https://www.wired.com/2011/01/pl-print-anarchistcookbook/)
Jolly Roger Floppy Disk Image (http://www.hack247.co.uk/blogpost/jolly-rogers-cookbook-a-brief-history/)