“Simple Sabotage Field Manual” by United States. Office of Strategic Services is a historical publication written during the early 1940s, amid World War II. This manual acts as a guide for ordinary civilians to conduct simple acts of sabotage against enemy operations without the need for specialized training or equipment. Its main topic revolves around promoting small, accessible forms of resistance that could collectively disrupt the enemy’s war effort. The manual outlines various strategies and techniques for citizens to engage in sabotage that could be executed discreetly and with minimal risk. It provides specific suggestions for targeting transportation, communication, and industrial facilities to create delays and inefficiencies in enemy operations. The manual emphasizes the power of many individuals acting independently to contribute to a larger campaign of disruption, encouraging simple acts such as misplacing tools, delaying communication, or damaging equipment with household items. Overall, the “Simple Sabotage Field Manual” serves as a unique historical artifact that illustrates grassroots resistance efforts and the belief in the collective power of ordinary people during wartime.
This video from Some More News has some good suggestions about what how to resist a fascist takeover. One little suggestion I want to bring up is that the video recommends a pamphlet, the Simple Sabotage Field Manual, a book published by the US government during WWII to provide ideas for the citizens living under the Nazi regime. Suddenly, the old is new again!
The book first talks about how to motivate citizens to become subtle saboteurs. Spread the news around!
To incite the citizen to the active practice of simple sabotage and to keep him practicing that sabotage over sustained periods is a special problem.
Simple sabotage is often an act which the citizen performs according to his own initiative and inclination. Acts of destruction do not bring him any personal gain and may be completely foreign to his habitually conservationist attitude toward materials and tools. Purposeful stupidity is contrary to human nature. He frequently needs pressure, stimulation or assurance, and information and suggestions regarding feasible methods of simple sabotage.
(1) Personal Motives
(a) The ordinary citizen very probably has no immediate personal motive for committing simple sabotage. Instead, he must be made to anticipate indirect personal gain, such as might come with enemy evacuation or destruction of the ruling government group. Gains should be stated as specifically as possible for the area addressed: simple sabotage will hasten the day when Commissioner X and his deputies Y and Z will be thrown out, when particularly obnoxious decrees and restrictions will be abolished, when food will arrive, and so on. Abstract verbalizations about personal liberty, freedom of the press, and so on, will not be convincing in most parts of the world. In many areas they will not even be comprehensible.
(b) Since the effect of his own acts is limited, the saboteur may become discouraged unless he feels that he is a member of a large, though unseen, group of saboteurs operating against the enemy or the government of his own country and elsewhere. This can be conveyed indirectly: suggestions which he reads and hears can include observations that a particular technique has been successful in this or that district. Even if the technique is not applicable to his surroundings, another’s success will encourage him to attempt similar acts. It also can be conveyed directly: statements praising the effectiveness of simple sabotage can be contrived which will be published by white radio, freedom stations, and the subversive press. Estimates of the proportion of the population engaged in sabotage can be disseminated. Instances of successful sabotage already are being broadcast by white radio and freedom stations, and this should be continued and expanded where compatible with security.
(c) More important than (a) or (b) would be to create a situation in which the citizen-saboteur acquires a sense of responsibility and begins to educate others in simple sabotage.
Then the fun stuff. There are many little ideas about how to screw up the smooth operation of factories, but reading it first made me think of annoying high school pranks. One of the unfortunate side-effects of disseminating this information is you can expect to see more exploding plumbing in the toilets of your local public schools.
(1) Ruin warehouse stock by setting the automatic sprinkler system to work. You can do this by tapping the sprinkler heads sharply with a hammer or by holding a match under them.
(2) Forget to provide paper in toilets; put tightly rolled paper, hair, and other obstructions in the W. C. Saturate a sponge with a thick starch or sugar solution. Squeeze it tightly into a ball, wrap it with string, and dry. Remove the string when fully dried. The sponge will be in the form of a tight hard ball. Flush down a
W. C. or otherwise introduce into a sewer line. The sponge will gradually expand to its normal size and plug the sewage system.
(3) Put a coin beneath a bulb in a public building during the daytime, so that fuses will blow out when lights are turned on at night. The fuses themselves may be rendered ineffective by putting a coin behind them or loading them with heavy wire. Then a short-circuit may either start a fire, damage transformers, or blow out a central fuse which will interrupt distribution of electricity to a large area.
(4) Jam paper, bits of wood, hairpins, and anything else that will fit, into the locks of all unguarded entrances to public buildings.
Somebody needs to print out copies of this manual and hand them out at the protests at Tesla factories and sales rooms. We need to understand that Tesla and Elon Musk are the enemy. Likewise, Trump’s hotels need to be brought down. I notice that the manual has had 77,604 downlads in the last 30 days. Get yours before the government shuts it down!
I can’t really use it, though. I’m at one of the institutions targeted for destruction by the MAGA regime, and what I need is information on how to reinforce the spines of our administrators, and how to support a university under siege.
I don’t have access to a copy but from what I’ve seen it looks very like the equivalent written by General Colin Gubbins of SOE. He’d had first hand experience of that sort of thing in the Thirties. They also supplied special lubricants with very fine grit and according one source a loo paper that you’d very much regret using.
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-tesla-gigafactory-hit-by-far-left-sabotage/a-68440976
Good info. Need to find a similar document about how to thwart detection/recognition by modern cameras and drones that increasingly use face-recognition technology. The combination might prove very useful.
Good info. Need to find a similar document about how to thwart detection/recognition by modern cameras and drones that increasingly use face-recognition technology. The combination might prove very useful.
There are a lot of effective things we can do.
We are after all, the majority by now.
Trump never even won a majority of the vote and his support has been dropping lately.
.1. Primary the old white guy Deer in the Headlights Democratic party leaders like Chuck Schurmer. Especially Chuck Schurmer, the Senate Democratic leader.
He is out of touch with what is happening in the USA and is giving us a good imitation of a fossilized tree stump.
The Democratic party needs to find their brains, gonads, spines, and leaders.
If someone primaries Schumer, I’m donating to them even though I live on the opposite coast.
.2. Get out in the streets and peacefully protest.
Governments fear people in the streets for good reasons. It means the people are fed up and it means the government is losing control.
We aren’t afraid of them.
People in the streets have taken down a lot of governments such as the old USSR, the old Ukraine government, and the Arab spring governments.
It did a lot to end the Vietnam war.
Boycott some of the most obvious and notorious companies supporting the fascists.
The big one is Tesla.
Tesla car sales are collapsing every where.
A recent poll showed that 67% of the US population would never own a Tesla.
Facebook.
Zuckerberg and Meta are toxic companies and very vulnerable.
The internet gets bored easily and is always moving on the latest things.
Amazon.com.
The Mainstream Media and law firms that immediately caved to GOP threats and so on.
All they care about is money and power and this hits them head on.
There was never any question whether I would buy Tesla. I left Facebook long ago. I recently unsubscribed from the Washington Post.
I’d really like to abandon Amazon, too, but unfortunately I live in a very rural area, and if I want to pick up a stereocamera for my raspberry pi, there ain’t no local source. I’ve been limiting my amazon purchases to just stuff I can’t get nearby.
Funny you should mention the OSS. I’ve been reviewing some of their techniques and methods, and if it becomes obvious that we’re using updated versions of the same tactics used to thwart the Nazis it would send a clear message.
But surely there are other online retailers who offer delivery, either via the postal service or other couriers? Or has Amazon achieved a total monopoly on online sales in your area?
My usual approach is that if I know what I want to buy and who makes or sells it, I buy direct, and if not, I start looking on eBay.
Yes, we downloaded it and are looking for ways to legally destroy the mump cult. I don’t want to end up in an el salvadorian gulag.
We have not, and will not, support AMAZ0N, Malwart, G00GLE, etc. They are abusive parasites destroying all the decent small businesses in this decaying country. One interesting thing we recently observed was an AMAZ0N driver urinating in an alleyway in a residential neighborhood. That is obviously symptomatic and symbolic of the deterioration of this society.
@6 raven wrote: Boycott some of the most obvious and notorious companies supporting the fascists. The big one is Tesla.
I reply: Very good point. How could I have missed that? The felonious muskrate is (to use the Oppenheimer quote) ‘a destroyer of worlds’. The mump fcc is pushing his crap starlink over fiber broadband. Starlink dumps tons of polluting dead satellites onto earth, is WAY TOO expensive, is not reliable, is not portable and the muskrat has used it as a weapon against Ukraine.
There are so many other real electric vehicles that are more reasonable and still quite competent. However, the big car makers are focused on sales of high end, high profit cars. So, the EVs are often not as inexpensive or as reliable as they should be. The nissan leaf has been good, but is being reworked and the price may jump up a lot. The fiats are not good quality. And, even though fairly reliable, hybrids are not viable, since they still use gasoline and oil changes and require a lot more maintenance that pure EVs. Even with improvements, range anxiety is still a problem. I suggest that an inexpensive EV would be great for daily use (100 miles a day or less). And, if you can afford it, get another high-mileage gas powered car for long trips. The ultimate in responsible and economic systems is if you can charge your EV at home from rooftop photovoltaics.
Its too late. The Trump maladministration is using it as its operating manual.
Suitable target: Amazon. Make Bezos regret arm-twisting WaPo into rolling over. “Democracy Dies in Darkness” indeed. Would have to be performed by employees.
Suitable target: Trump hotels and other properties; any office HQ of a Trump-supporting business, including all those that have dropped DEI initiatives or have always been bigoted troglodytes (coughHobby Lobbycoughand that wedding cake placecough). Also would mostly have to be employees, but it might be possible to walk into some of the hotels and access a washroom there without giving Trump your business and without working there.
I would not recommend this, as fires and power outages will mainly impact us peons and the fires especially may kill. (Outages, too, during heat waves or in northern states in the winter.) Perhaps at factories supplying munitions to be used in Gaza, or Yemen, or to law enforcement — think cuffs, truncheons, tear gas etc. factories. Would likely then have to be done by employees.
Use on corporate HQs and places of business that have gone hostile, e.g. Hobby Lobby, Washington Post, any company that’s gone anti-DEI … less workable at the Trump hotels, since modern hotels all seem to eschew normal keyhole locks in favor of swipe cards.
There are some major new obstacles and opportunities since the 1930s, though. The primary obstacle is: surveillance. For item 2 above that’s not an issue, since the toilets are exempt for obvious reasons and whatever foreign objects are introduced will generally be untraceable. For the other three it’s a major problem, with an easy solution: COVID masks. Cap with a bill. Combine those and it’s unlikely they can ID you from camera footage. Modern camera systems can usually be blinded by infrared light, without humans noticing anything unusual. The LEDs from a TV remote can be incorporated into something (bracelet, pendant, etc. easily worn) and hooked up to a lantern battery (in a backpack or etc.). The little glassy baubles won’t look very anomalous to human eyes, but every surveillance camera built since the 1990s will see nothing but a dazzling glare when aiming your way. This can be built with maybe $70 worth of parts from Radio Shack, or an old remote from a TV you’ve replaced (dismantle it and snip away the leads to the LEDs to free them) plus $20 maybe of parts.
As for the opportunities, besides the secondary sabotage of temporarily blinding surveillance cameras, you can (if no human is around) make it less temporary with spray paint; and if you work in IT or at an office cubicle at an org doing bad things (e.g. aiding cops, aiding the Yemen and Israel genocides, or aligned with Trump) you will have endless opportunities to “forget” your cybersecurity training and (oops!) open that dodgy email attachment that will infect the whole place with ransomware. If dirty secrets of the org end up leaked because of the infection, so much the better.
More generally, if you are privy to things that make your conscience twinge, there are various options for anonymously leaking documents online. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. Make corrupt and distasteful backroom deals known. Surreptitiously recording “locker room talk” by bad actors is perilous (a felony in most states) but could catch them talking about disfavored groups with slurs and vermin-comparisons and other Nazi-esque stuff, morally incriminating them, and may even catch them legally incriminating themselves in some instances. Again be sure to leak the audio files anonymously. Anywhere they’ll let you carry a smartphone is a place you can make surreptitious recordings; or if you’re concerned about the trustworthiness of the phone, get an old analog dictaphone or similar device if you can still find them. (eBay is likely your best bet there.)
Besides “accidentally” clicking a malicious email there are other bits of IT sabotage possible. Some require some expertise (and maybe bringing a hostile USB key or even a hostile WiFi router into the place) while many are simple and accessible (misplacing cables, inducing printer jams, spilling something on a keyboard, blocking the ventilation so machines overheat, and so forth). Loosening the screws holding the heatsink/fan assembly over the CPU could be interesting. So could accidentally introducing foreign objects or substances into cable sockets, disk slots, and similar openings (e.g. ketchup or other stuff that will congeal; superglue; metal objects like paperclips; used chewing gum). A lot of head scratching and searching can even result from unplugging a cable nobody would initially think to check, then introducing a nonconducting thin object and plugging it back in. A bit of paper between the contacts in a socket and those on a male Cat5 end, say, at a hub or router.
If causing more expensive and lasting damage fits your acceptable-risk profile, there are a variety of “killer cables” out there, e.g. cat5-to-110v, HDMI-to-110v, USB-to-110v, etc. for which there are online instructions (requires a bit of engineering equipment and know-how). These would probably need to be combined with blinding surveillance cameras and avoidance of human witnesses. If an employee: pop into the loo, switch on IR LED jewelry, emerge and use killer cables on some IT gear that’s unattended, back to the loo, hide everything again and turn off LED jewelry, make sure the loo is busy but the site of the IT gear isn’t (so they can’t easily tell which person was blinding the cameras for a while, as it could have been anyone who had gone into the loo but not come out again yet when you did, and that set will hopefully be larger than just you. (Of course if there’s a badge access door between the loo and the gear there’s no point in blinding the cameras and yeah, you’re going to get fired or worse. Unless you can tailgate someone else through that door, but then there’s probably a human eyewitness.)
Of course, with enough popular support there is an even simpler bit of sabotage that is also much harder to punish:
General.
Strike.
@Bekenstein Bound, # 13: I like your mind. : )
Can we as a group design an alternative to facebook? Start by laying down what do and don’t want this alternative to do. Lay out how it would be a people driven, not corporate driven, service. Do a huge open source development.