Although I am a military historian concentrating on the mass conflicts of the 20th Century, it’s occurred to me recently that everything I know about resistance movements (specifically those in Nazi-occupied Europe) starts when they were already operational. I don’t know spit about how the various networks were formed; how people who’d had their country invaded, their lives turned upside down and their economies shattered shifted from thinking like law-abiding citizens of a reasonable (ish) government to thinking like clandestine law-breaking rebels who needed to build networks of people they could trust who also had the skills to do the necessary—like print and distribute pamphlets, finance covert operations, amass and use a variety of weapons and all the rest of it.
Resistance cells do not spring
fully-formed and armed from the brow of a god, and there was no YouTube back in
the 1940s to show you how to plant explosives on the struts of a railroad
bridge or set up a radio receiver in your back bedroom. (Or where to find or
manufacture the explosives or build a receiver.)
And when you’re living in an authoritarian
state, you have to sneak everything you do that could be considered subversive.
How do you know that your neighbor Dave is really trustworthy, in the
engaging-in-illegal-activities-for-the-good-of-the-country sense of the term?
How much are you willing to bet that Dave’s wife won’t inform on you, or get
Dave to do it, because she’s terrified that your activities can place her
entire family in serious danger? Where can you meet without being seen or
overheard, in a region where more than two people having a conversation is
suspect? How do you go about forging documents if you’re actually a shopkeeper?
Which of your acquaintances have the strength of character and quick-wittedness
to push anti-propaganda fliers through mail slots and talk German patrols out
of looking in their bicycle basket that’s full of fliers?
And—once you’ve got that cell sorted, how
do you connect securely to other groups trying to do the same thing in other
villages and towns?
(Interestingly, in the WWII scenario,
communists had the advantage in this respect: they already had their cells and
networks set up, they had communication capability and they weren’t strangers
to organized violence. As long as the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact was in force,
they stood down, but after 22 June 1941, they hit the ground running. The
problem was integrating their activities with those of resistance units of
other political persuasions, and that’s another issue we face: uniting in a
community of noncompliance when there are so many passionate opinions about
what should be prioritized.)
The thing about authoritarian regimes is they’re built on terror. The current US administration is no different. For White people, we’re at the intimidation stage. Only this week, the Kleptocrat issued EOs directing his Bimbo General Pam Bondi to “investigate” Chris Krebs, head of CISA during the first term, and Miles Taylor, chief of staff at DHS during same. (The investigations extend to anyone who’s worked with Taylor and Krebs, so—colleagues, companies, possibly even their old fraternity brothers.) Their crimes? Krebs certified that the 2020 election was secure and therefore accurate; Taylor wrote an anonymous NYT op-ed in 2018 criticizing the legality of the policies the president wanted to implement. We are waist-deep in retribution and revenge, and it’s not even three months since inauguration. People who are not White are definitely in the fear and even terror stages.
Intimidation,
fear and terror militate against speaking out, standing out, attracting
attention. So the challenge is the same as it was in 1940: building a secure community
of trust aligned against the very loud, very bellicose oppressors. Creating a
center of mass that counters the mechanisms of structural power and gathering
numbers and momentum. It starts, necessarily, one by one.
All that being said, our National Poetry
Month entry today is “Lean on Me”, by Bill Withers. Here are Stevie Wonder and John Legend, honoring Withers at his induction into the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame in 2015.
Volume up.
©2025 Bas Bleu
No comments:
Post a Comment