Spin Control: Rants and screeds by terrorist don’t make a ‘manifesto’

After the killing of three people at a San Diego mosque last week, documents allegedly written by the two suspected shooters who later took their own lives were described as “a manifesto.”

This has become common in public officials’ statements and news accounts involving notorious cases in which some kind of document is traced back to the alleged perpetrator.

Cole Tomas Allen, the alleged White House Correspondents Dinner shooter, was said to have left a manifesto. A Kennewick teen who was planning a shooting at his high school was arrested after posting what was described as a manifesto on social media. A Tacoma man who was arrested before he could make good on a plan to blow himself up in a courthouse was arrested after his wife found his bomb making plans in what law enforcement called a manifesto.

Calling these statements “manifestos” seems to give the writers, and their writings, more credit than they deserve. The term used to be reserved for well thought out and documented plans for social or political change.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels spent more than a month writing and rewriting “The Communist Manifesto” back in 1848, and laid out in about 70 pages – different translations and printings vary – a vision of a world in which workers overthrew their masters and made the world better for themselves. One can debate how practical the path to that world was, since it’s been around for more than 175 years but never really been followed to the letter.

Although Marx and Engels predicted revolution, they themselves weren’t setting out to kill anyone to make their point.

Ted Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber, wrote a manifesto titled “Industrialized Society and Its Future” which covered about 45 single-spaced typed pages. It laid out a dark vision for the modern world – as one might assume from a person who’d been blowing up other people for nearly 20 years – and was complete with footnotes and references. Kaczynski was later arrested at a remote cabin outside of Lincoln, Montana, but his manifesto is available on Amazon.

By comparison, the alleged manifestos of some recent shooters and would-be bombers are sorely lacking in thought and content.

The San Diego shooters, who styled themselves the “Sons of Tarrant” in homage to New Zealand mass murderer Brendon Tarrant, left a pair of documents that can be read online, although I wouldn’t recommend it. While they may have considered their efforts manifestos, the writings might best be described as anti-Semitic, racist, misogynist screeds by a couple of guys who were upset about being unable to find a girl willing to date them.

They seemed to have a fondness for “Mein Kampf” and “The Turner Diaries,” a novel about a revolution that leads to a white America that’s a favorite of white supremacists. It’s possible they would have fit in just fine, and maybe even found female companionship, at the Aryan Nations compound if they’d been around before it was forfeited by the neo -Nazis and dismantled.

Some parts of their plan to spark a revolution of oppressed white guys were left blank, and neither seemed to care much about correcting errors. Manifestos should, at a minimum, be complete and proofread.

Anyone looking for a line as memorable as “Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains” – the ending of the Communist Manifesto – will be sadly disappointed.

Before embarking on his attack at the Washington, D.C., Hilton, Allen did leave a message for his family, but it’s unlikely he considered it a manifesto. It starts with several paragraphs of apologies to family, friends, and just about anyone with whom he’s come in contact, then explains his planned rules of engagement and the people he would and wouldn’t try to shoot. It does contain a rant against President Trump and other government officials, but it hardly rises to the level of a manifesto.

The would-be Kennewick bomber posted his message on Tik Tok, which seems to make it more of a cry for help than a serious manifesto.

The would-be Tacoma bomber sent messages to his wife and others about his plans to build bombs and the people he planned to target, and his anger over a previous conviction and the death of his father. A series of angry rants and threats do not a manifesto make.

Perhaps law enforcement officials could be more judicious in throwing out the term manifesto, lest someone decide to write an anti-manifesto manifesto.