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40 years of the anarchist cookbook (or the regretful cook) yolanda pividal   If you write “Anarchist Cookbook free download” in Google Search, after a couple of seconds you’re taken to a website with an A in the middle of a circle. And this is what you can read there: “Sorry, after much debate we’re not prepared to provide the anarchist cookbook for download any more (…) In Britain there are a number of cases of pretty regular but curious people getting on the wrong side of the law from simply possessing a copy!”

“Sorry. After a lot of discussions, we’ve decided not to make the Anarchist Cookbook available via a free download (...) There are still legal problems in Britain for anyone who has a single copy of the book¨.

The Anarchist Cookbook, a best-selling “illegal” recipe book and an urban legend, has just turned 40. In spite of the title, it doesn’t have much to do with the anarchist movement. In 1968, a young man brought up in a Manhattan Lower East Side “revolutionary” middle class family got the call up to go to Viet Nam. He didn’t have any connections with political parties or movements. In his own words, being made to take part in a war he didn’t believe in made him angry. That’s why he wrote this handbook which, in some people’s opinion, made violence available to everyone and created the “everyman bomber”. For other people, he’s a symbol of civil opposition to war and, nowadays, thanks to the “Wikileaks Era”, he’s a symbol of one of the most used amendments to the US constitution, the freedom of speech.

Amongst other things, making bombs, cutting a man’s head off with piano wire, sabotaging telecommunications and other, easier things, too, using banana skins’ psycho-active properties (something that really disturbed the anti-drugs lobby in the States at one time)... all of this is to be found in this “insurgency” hand book. Powell didn’t get his information from forbidden books or secret archives, he got it from books about military training and Boy Scouts guides he found in New York bookshops and then explained it in anti-system pamphlet language and with his own literary skills. Without intermediaries, changes or corrections, daring editor Lyle Stuart raised the flag of the first amendment in 1971 when he published the first edition of the manuscript. He sold more than two million copies world-wide.

After a period of success, the book almost disappeared during the Reagan-Thatcher neoliberal era, when society was controlled by their axis. Only federal agents seemed to have the book. They tried to make the connection between the book and many violent actions, such as the 1976 bomb placed in Manhattan Central Station by a Croatian independence group.

The author had become an Anglican and “conflict resolver” and the book was no more than a distant memory when the Internet made the book famous once more. On the motorway of communications, the Anarchist Cookbook was adapted and new versions were made available. At the end of the 80’s and the start of the 90’s, groups of teenagers all over the world started to get hold of Anarchist Cookbook II (ASCII). That was the time when The Temple of the Screaming Electron ode The pirates Hollow newsletters were influential. A little later, the film Anarchist Cookbook 2000, which won’t go down in history, was released by an anonymous film maker.

That “Cookbook” craze made the original author break his silence and appear in public again. But he was no longer a revolutionary anarchist, he was now repentant: “The central idea to the book was that violence is an acceptable means to bring about political change. I don’t agree with that any more (...) I consider it to be a misguided and potentially dangerous publication which should be taken out of print”). (“. I no longer agree with this (…) I consider it to be a misguided and potentially dangerous publication which should be taken out of print”). That’s what he said in dozens of blogs and websites. But his repentance was worthless as he had given the rights to the editor and he, Lyle Stuart, sold the rights to the current editor thirty years after the first edition came out. “We’d like to apologise to people who read the book out of curiosity or to have a laugh - which is why we published the book - but nowadays it’s not worth it for the potential problems it can bring you”. Those are the words you can read on the free download site. But apparently those problems are of no importance for the mainstream book sellers are Amazon and Borders. At the click of your mouse, and after paying 20 dollars, you can have this 160 page anarchist cook book in your house in time for lunch and find out how to make a Molotov cocktail.