The Anarchist Cookbook

Creation The Anarchist Cookbook was written by William Powell as a teenager and first published in 1971 at the apex of the counterculture era to protest against the United States' involvement in the Vietnam War. Powell gained inspiration for his text from his experiences with Vietnam veterans while living in New York City, during which time the pacifist movements of the 1960s began to take a more violent turn. Powell began plans to become a writer but decided upon a political course when he was drafted into the Vietnam war, which inspired him to write "recipes" and later compile them into a "cookbook". The initial vision of The Anarchist Cookbook was to post instructional flyers in New York City, including how to properly throw a Molotov cocktail and how to make LSD. These "recipes" were eventually adapted to make up an entire book. From 1968 to 1970, Powell began researching in the "U.S. Combat Bookshelf" at the New York Public Library, including mainstream external texts such as The Boy Scout Handbook, and anarchist texts like Fuck the System by Abbie Hoffman. The initial manuscript was sent to Lyle Stuart in 1970. Powell had difficulty finding employment throughout his life, having described the book as "a youthful indiscretion or mistake that can haunt someone during their early years or even longer." In 2011, Powell and his wife, Ochan Kusuma-Powell, founded Next Frontier: Inclusion, a non-profit organization for children with developmental disabilities and learning disabilities; he described it as a means to atone for writing the text. Publication status Powell originally sent the manuscript to over 30 publishers until Lyle Stuart bought the book and its copyright. Powell received royalties for the book, approximately $35,000 until he split with the company in 1976. Despite Powell's protest against the continued publication of the text, the copyright of the book never belonged to its author, but to its publisher, Lyle Stuart Inc. Stuart kept publishing the book until the company was bought in 1991 by Steven Schragis, who decided to drop it. Out of the 2,000 books published by the company, it was the only one that Schragis decided to stop publishing. Schragis said publishers have a responsibility to the public, and the book had no positive social purpose that could justify keeping it in print. The copyright was bought in 2002 by Delta Press (a.k.a. Ozark Press), an Arkansas-based publisher that specializes in controversial books, where the title is their "most-asked-for volume". As of 2016, over two million copies of the book have been sold. == Content summary ==

Foreword The Anarchist Cookbook begins with a Foreword section, detailing the author's intentions for the text. At the time of writing, Powell believed that the United States was slowly declining towards communism, thus he found it necessary to write a book that guided people on revolution against this transition. He championed the idea of "bringing America back to where she was two hundred years ago", believing his revolutionary ideals to be reactive, rather than proactive. Powell begins with his vision for the book in how it is intended to educate and galvanize the public to make tangible change in their home countries. Powell states that fringe political organizations, such The Minutemen and The Weathermen, are not the intended audience, rather it is written for "the silent majority". Powell envisioned the people of the United States rebelling against what he deemed to be oppressive capitalistic ideals, and to a lesser extent, against fascist and communist movements. Content Powell begins the content of his book by discussing anarchy and anarchist theory. Anarchy, by his definition, is a wide-scale mass uprising by the people, similar to that of civil disobedience through violence. He believed that anarchy was the innate state of all individuals, and therefore human nature would drive people to participate in such practices. Powell believed that current expressions of politics, arts, music, and education all contained innate principles of anarchist ideals, thereby equating anarchism to individualism. This principle drives Powell's argumentation as he believed that the current political climate and the Vietnam war had undermined human values, therefore revolution based upon his perception of human dignity and freedom was what drove him to write the piece. He ends his introduction by warning of the seriousness that these recipes may have deadly consequences if used improperly. The chapters of The Anarchist Cookbook include descriptions and detailed instructions in hand-to-hand combat, explosives, booby traps, drugs, tear gas, sabotage and demolition, surveillance, improvised weapons, and other topics related to anarchism. == Reception ==

Legal reviews At the time of its publication, one FBI memo described The Anarchist Cookbook as "one of the crudest, low-brow, paranoiac writing efforts ever attempted". The book was reviewed by the Department of Justice, the White House, the FBI, and by both John Dean and Mark Felt, Richard Nixon's lawyer, and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's associate director respectively. While having concerns about the text, the FBI concluded that it could not be regulated as it was published through mass media. == Media presence ==

Internet/media Much of the publication was copied and made available as text documents online through Usenet and FTP sites hosted in academic institutions in the early 1990s, and has been made available via web browsers from their inception in the mid-1990s to the present day. The name varies slightly from Anarchist Cookbook to Anarchy Cookbook and the topics have expanded vastly in the intervening decades. Many of the articles were attributed to an anonymous author called "The Jolly Roger". Knowledge of the book, or copied online publications of it, increased along with the increase in public access to the Internet throughout the mid-1990s. Newspapers ran stories about how easy the text was to get hold of, and the influence it may have had with terrorists, criminals, and experimenting teenagers. Repercussions from the book's publication, and the author's subsequent disavowal of its content, were the subject of the 2016 documentary film American Anarchist by Charlie Siskel. In the film, William Powell explains in depth his thoughts on the book and the consequences it had in his life. It further explores the themes of responsibility and repercussions that decision can have on one's life. Powell's death in 2016 received little media coverage until the release of American Anarchist, which was released a few months after his death. ==Legality==

United Kingdom Possession of The Anarchist Cookbook without reasonable excuse has been successfully prosecuted as the offence of possessing information of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism, contrary to Section 58 of the Terrorism Act 2000. Australia The book was refused classification in 1985 thus making it banned in Australia under the National Classification Code Table 1.(c) for publications that could "promote, incite or instruct in matters of crime or violence" It was classified RC again on 31 October 2016. Canada In 2002, the Canadian government permitted the book to be imported from the United States. Canada Customs and Revenue Agency concluded the book does not violate either hate or obscenity laws, therefore the previous ban on the text was resolved. United States In 2015, U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein unsuccessfully pushed to have the book removed from online databases. • 1976: Police linked the bombing of Grand Central Terminal and hijacking of a TWA flight to Croatian radicals who used instructions from The Anarchist Cookbook. • 2005: The London public-transport bombers were linked to the book. This led to a London judge and police campaigning to have the book banned in the UK. • 2013: The author advocated for discontinuing the book after it was found in the possession of perpetrators of a school shooting in Arapahoe, Colorado and the 2013 Santa Monica shootings. He was cleared of all charges in October 2008, after arguing that he was a prankster who just wanted to research fireworks and smoke bombs. • 2017: Joshua Walker, a 27-year-old arrested on return from fighting for the YPG in Syria, was prosecuted under section 58 solely for the possession of the book. He was found not guilty as he had a reasonable excuse: he had downloaded it for an academic purpose and forgot to destroy it afterwards. • 2021: Oliver Bel, a 23-year-old mathematics graduate of the University of Cambridge, was convicted in the UK of an offence under section 58 for possessing the book, receiving a sentence of 3 years' imprisonment. The book was found by police in a search of Bel's home following a series of racist and anti-Semitic comments online; Bel had also been in contact with the banned far-right group National Action. == See also ==