through h4x0r3d's eyes

Deep Green Resistance: Will you join us?

Website.

Book [from which is excerpted].

FAQ

Security.

Action.

Documentary.

Initial Actions and Entry Points:

Aboveground:

Read or watch inspiring and informative media about resistance. Organize a movie night or series of movie nights to watch films with others, and to discuss them and how they apply to action in the here and now.

Make a list of the skills you want to learn. Once you have a list, make a plan for how to learn the skills and where you can get them from.

Engage in prisoner support and general solidarity work. Writing to political prisoners is a good way of getting started, and there’s certainly no shortage of them. General solidarity work with various struggles is a good way of getting experience, building alliances, and seeing different perspectives and methods of struggle.

Be a distributor of propaganda. Pass on your favorite political books, movies, and other media to receptive friends and acquaintances.

Start or join a radical community sufficiency group in your area.

Start or join an affinity group for political action and mutual support. Meet on a regular basis to assess political activism in your area, to identify actions you can undertake that would improve that situation, and to develop long-term goals and strategies. An affinity group can help you keep focused and accountable. (A word of caution from experience: it’s not necessarily a good idea to live with and/or polyamorously date everyone in your affinity group.)

Practice being interrogated. Take turns playing “police” and “activist” in an arrest situation. Remember that the police threaten, manipulate, and lie.

Role play breaches of security culture. Pretend someone in your social circle has bad security behaviors like asking if Jane is an agent or if Jorge is involved in the underground. How do you confront and educate this person?

Go back to the lists of aboveground tactics in the previous chapter (check out the book). Pick something you want to do, plan it, and do it.

Get your household prepared for when the grid crashes.

Get to know your landbase and the other creatures who live on it. One of the easiest ways to do this is to pack a field guide on edible plants, a pair of binoculars, and a water bottle, and just go and spend some time in a relatively wild area near you.

Build community sufficiency in your area.

Mobilize people to undertake civil disobedience or related tactics for current struggles in your area. This will help build aboveground movements and train people in how to fight power. You want as many allies as possible in your area for collapse.

Underground:

Read the histories of successful and unsuccessful underground groups from the past century, including the Underground Railroad, the ANC, escape lines in Occupied Europe, dissident groups in the Baltics and other Soviet-occupied countries, and the student movement that led to Tiananmen Square. Think about why they succeeded or failed, and what can be learned from them.

As part of the above, study the challenging realities of life as part of an underground resistance cell (which can often be tedious, anxiety-inducing, or dangerous) and consider whether it is something that you have the deep commitment and constitution to undertake.

Practice keeping a low profile, and take measures to make yourself an inconspicuous candidate for underground activity. This also means disguising your social networks, not using Facebook, Myspace, etc.

Read over the section on recruitment and screening in the first part of the book. Consider ways to screen others and engage in mutual recruitment in your life. Consider (without writing it down) who in your life would be candidates for forming an underground group and how you might approach them. If you don’t have enough candidates, figure out where you would meet them.

Form a “precautionary group,” a group of trusted friends without a name or a mission statement who meet on a discreet basis to discuss, in general terms, the pros and cons of potential underground action. This group would not exist to undertake action, but exists to provide a safe space for discussion; however, it should engage in basic security culture and have explicit limits on what (if anything) the group can be mentioned to nonmembers.

Study skills that would be relevant to underground groups but are perfectly normal and legal to learn in general society. This might include computer encryption and codes, mechanics, first aid, and firearms safety.

Practice being interrogated. Take turns playing “police” and “activist” in an arrest situation. Remember that the police threaten, manipulate, and lie.

Role play breaches of security culture. Pretend someone in your social circle has bad security behaviors like asking if Jane is an agent or if Jorge is involved in the underground. How do you confront and educate this person?

Practice self-discipline in general. Underground cadres and combatants need very high levels of self-discipline and self-control. Establishing regular routines for general training and exercise can be part of this - even a regular jogging routine. Abstaining from drugs and alcohol would be another means of practicing self-discipline. Other acts of omission are also candidates.

Learn basic survival skills and learn how to cope and improvise under difficult circumstances. Here’s an example: plan a weekend camping trip, and pack two bags that contain everything you need and nothing more. Then, just before you leave, flip a coin and leave one of them behind.