6mo ago

Declassified CIA Guide to Sabotaging Fascism Is Suddenly Viral

www.404media.co

9 comments

Insist on doing everything through ‘channels.’ Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.”
“Make ‘speeches.’ Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your ‘points’ by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences. Never hesitate to make a few appropriate ‘patriotic’ comments.”
“Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.”
“Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.”
“>‘Misunderstand’ orders. Ask endless questions or engage in long correspondence about such orders. Quibble over them when you can.”
“In making work assignments, always sign out the unimportant jobs first. See that the important jobs are assigned to inefficient workers of poor machines.”
“To lower morale and with it, production, be pleasant to inefficient workers; give them undeserved promotions. Discriminate against efficient workers; complain unjustly about their work.”
“Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done.”
“Multiply paperwork in plausible ways.”
“Make mistakes in quantities of material when you are copying orders. Confuse similar names. Use wrong addresses.”
“Work slowly. Think out ways to increase the number of movements necessary on your job”
“Pretend that instructions are hard to understand, and ask to have them repeated more than once. Or pretend that you are particularly anxious to do your work, and pester the foreman with unnecessary questions.”
“Snarl up administration in every possible way. Fill out forms illegibly so that they will have to be done over; make mistakes or omit requested information in forms.
TLDR: be your typical middle manager
Also note archive.org has multiple uploads of it in various formats including a more readable PDF (the linked article has a rather dense Gutenberg HTML version)
https://archive.org/details/simple-sabotage-field-manual
Eh, I dunno what the big deal is. There's a bit in there about organizational sabotage which is useful, but most of it is about how to subtly break machines from the 40s. It's designed to fight the fascist military industry in occupied Europe 80 years ago, not a corporatized political takeover at home in the 21st century. Still, it's symbolic I guess, but it seems like the sort of thing people download without actually reading so they can act like part of the resistance.
- What's a better resource?
  
  Personally, I'd rather see the relevant information extracted and put into a shorter document and circulate that.
I like how the list of cross posts includes this very community from 4 days ago.
- The guide suddenly went viral... again!
I didn't see a peertube version, so here's the youtube link to some ideas from the Serbian resistance:
https://youtu.be/V91IgKpcTZk
It's a good read. Short and insightful. I read it to some friends on a discord call the other day and it really got us thinking lol.

9 comments