The Anarchist’s Cookbook was written by a 19 year old William Powell in the height of the counterculture era and the concern for the Vietnam war. He saw himself and others like him as a part of the ‘silent majority’, being the group of people not in power but wanted societal/political change. He took it upon himself to expedite change for the silent majority and began to educate himself more and more after there was a rise in violence in the pacifist movements of the 60s, and over four years finished writing The Anarchist’s Cookbook.
The contents of the book cover his original intentions of the information, which includes drugs, electronics, and weapons. The foreword goes into Powell’s thoughts on why this text might be useful to the people which is a result of his view of the US declining into communism at the time period, so he saw the text as a necessary step needed to guide the people to their revolution, and to bring America back to where she was 200 years ago.
One of the most interesting things about the book for me has to be the legal battles it has been through. At the time of publication an FBI memo described it as “one of the crudest, low-brow, paranoiac writing efforts ever attempted”, but later concluded it couldn’t be regulated due to an issue with limiting free speech and publication. However they do keep tabs on the book, in 2010 they released the information they had under the Freedom of Information Act, although it was mostly complaints as well as crimes that could have possibly been committed after reading but not even proven.
