I believe that you have previously related to me that he has expressed such thoughts.
sitetest
Bishop Williamson's Letters
June 6, 1996,
Feast of Corpus Christi.
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
A fascinating document was published recently in the United States in two easily available books written about the case of a serial killer - the famous or notorious "Unabomber", hunted by the US police over the last 16 years for his killing by postal bomb of three men and injuring of several others, and perhaps at last tracked down this April in the State of Montana.
The document is his Manifesto, nearly 100 closely printed paper back pages, laying out in 232 numbered paragraphs and 16 notes a closely argued attack upon our industrial-technological society. It was, he says in paragraph #96, to get this message before the public "with some chance of making a lasting impression" that he resorted to bombs and killing.
Now Catholics know that the end can never justify the means. However important the Unabomber's message, nothing gave him the right to maim and kill innocent victims in order to get it before the public. So this letter may discredit itself by apparently crowning his terrorist means with success if it considers seriously his message, totally mocked and discounted on the contrary throughout the rest of one, probably both, of the paperbacks.
But I reply, firstly - again - principles are more important than personalities, and the message is, strictly, for good or ill, independent of the messenger. The author of the Unabornber's Manifesto might have since become a Saint without its contents being changed by one word. Secondly, if one stops and listens to some of the delinquents, real or supposed, protesting against modern society, like the Unabomber, film-director Oliver Stone, or many rock musicians, e.g. Pink Floyd, then without accepting that their ends justify all their means, one cannot help having a measure of understanding for their resorting to such desperate means. Modern man is in the more deadly trouble for having his ears blocked by a seemingly impenetrable complacency!
"Yes, but Catholic bishops have no business to be rummaging in such gutters!" Dear Madam, do you wish to save your rebellious teenagers' souls? I am sure you are well aware that if you talk to them of St. Ignatius of Loyola or St. Theresa of Lisieux, you do not even get to first base. But just breathe the name of Pink Floyd, and see how their ears prick up! This is our world, and there is no other in which we have to save our souls! If only the honorable professors and respectable bishops were tackling the questions tackled by the Unabombers and the Oliver Stones, then your children might look up instead of down, but since nobody "decent" seeems to address their concerns, who can be surprised if they feed from the gutter? Rock music is one long, unheard, scream for help!
Then let us firstly consider the problem raised by the Unabomber which paperbackers and all similar technophiliacs would rather.run a mile than face, because they have no solution (Pink Floyd has no solution either, but at least he faces the problem). And secondly let us indicate the Catholic solution, because if a problem is human and serious, the true Church of the true God cannot not have the solution. W e begin with the Unabomber's argument, here cruelly condensed from the 232 paragraphs which he says are already too brief for the subject (my own section numbering):
1) Modern society is destroying human dignity and freedom by its industrial technology. A symptom of this destruction is the modern left-winger, or "Leftist", a type of man recurring in numerous protest movements today. Often himself belonging to no minority group, yet in the name of a variety of such groups he attacks Western civilization with a hostility betraying his lack of real compassion for the supposed victims. Nor can his revolt be so real against society when he wishes to integrate them into it!
2) In truth, the industrial-technological system, I.-T. or IT for short, makes it so easy for men to satisfy their basic needs of food, clothing and shelter that man's equally natural need to attain some goal by serious effort on his own part remains widely frustrated. Also family, or any such small-scale loyalty natural to man, is necessarily disrupted by the large-scale commitment required for IT to function. So IT destroys family values. Similarly the host of rules and regulations imposed by IT's functioning stifle man's acting on his own part to attain real goals, which is his real freedom.
3) Nor can any minor adjustment or compromise reconcile IT with freedom, both because IT has to regulate human behavior closely in order to function at all, and because all parts of IT are interdependent Moreover men's desire for IT and IT's benefits has for a long time been proving stronger than their desire for freedom, for a variety of reasons, so that the advance of IT seems to many people to be irreversible. For instance, the use of a motor car was originally optional, but it so changed the lay-out of cities that now it is obligatory. Therefore IT will be stopped by no small-scale reform but only by wholesale revolution.
4) The clash between IT and human freedom is highlighted by IT's present pursuit of ways to tame "wild" behavior: control of schooling, control of parenting, drugs, psychotherapy, neurology, genetics, eventually brain-engineering, etc., are all forms of manipulation by which IT will (if it can) re-engineer the very nature of man to fit IT. Presently more and more humans are rising up in revolt against IT, but if IT prevails, not even IT's rulers will have much freedom to move, whereas if IT is smashed, there maybe chaos, but at least humanity has another chance, and the chaos may cause less suffering than IT's continuance will.
5) For if IT survives, then the future looks grim: either, for the sake of efficiency, machines will be in total control and no man will be free. Or an elite will run the master machines, either so as to eliminate the masses so that a few are in control while the rest are dead, or so as to domesticate the masses so that the few are chained to the machine while the rest have no freedom or meaning in their lives. If IT survives, whichever way, man will have had to be re-engineered beyond all recognition!
6) However, IT is not unstoppable. The positive alternative we need is WILD NATURE, free of men, or with wild men. Wild nature is non-technological, it is beautiful, it takes care of itself, it permits survival living (One may have tooth-aches, but rather tooth-aches than IT!). The means of IT's overthrow are a revolution not merely political, but economic, technological and world-wide, for IT cannot be overthrown piecemeal. Above all, let our revolutionaries have the one clear goal: IT must go! All means to achieve that goal can then be pragmatically adjusted.
7) Finally, let our revolutionaries not mix with leftists who are as anti-individualist as IT is, and so will only oppose IT in order then to use it against everybody else. Also, leftists habitually collaborate in revolutions with non-leftists only to double-cross them later. Leftism is totalitarian by nature, in fact it is a substitute religion, the need to believe in which will make even decent follower's condone the most indecent crimes from their leaders.
I hope the brevity of this summary does not prevent readers from discerning a sharp mind tackling a real problem. Say what one will about the advantages of the present industrial-technological system of living, it is doomed as long as it rides roughshod over the deepest needs of human nature. This the Unabomber senses very clearly (sec. 2), as he sees very clearly the falsity of the solution by leftism (secs.1 and 7), which is why the leftist media have no love for him as they would have if he were one of theirs.
On the other hand as a child of the IT society and a product no doubt of an IT education (or rather, non-education), the Unabomber has an inadequate grasp of human nature, which prevents him from getting its crushing by IT correctly in focus, in two ways. Firstly, he centers the problem on man's loss of freedom (secs. 2 to 5), which is why the only positive solution he can come up with is a return to wild nature with no, or wild, men (sec. 6)! Shades of baby-seals, hug-a-tree and ozone! He is falling back into leftism's pathetic conclusion that the only pollution is men ("I can keep the kitchen wonderfully clean - just let nobody have any more meals"). Archbishop Lefebvre said to go back to the country, not to the wilds. (The man picked up in Montana had gone back to the wilds. That is not a solution.)
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This nonsense goes on and on; just do a Google with "Williamson and Unabomber" and you can find this white boy's rantings.
Pink Floyd? Williamson has a Jones for Pink Floyd?
What a nutburger!