Encouraging nothing but vigilance, who is more dangerous, the person who identifies themselves as a commander of a known organization in a video and acts macho and makes threats or the person that only appears in unremarkable clothes in grainy footage before a devastating attack?

There are of course limits to the power of the clandestine. Sometimes showing your face can garner more popular support like in eviction or land struggles tied to tribes or families. Anti-repression cases can get a boost putting a face and a name to them. Everything is situational.

We’ve had the honor of being put on some wingnat’s report list do to our critical outlook on the ruling order. We have some words we’d like to share on this occasion.

The regime of the censor always fails in the end. It is pitifully weak compared to joy-affected eruptions. Reactionaries are the embodiment of the regime par excellence. They are spectacular failures in this regard. Of course certain activist milieus have adopted this as well. But what eruptions have we seen recent and what have been the result? Who is still chugging along? Who spread like wildfire and even across national boundaries? The reaction’s tantrums are their swan songs.

That’s not to say we shouldn’t take them seriously, that we shouldn’t stop them from operating effectively, but that we should realize we have a strength they don’t in our biopower. The reaction is an obstacle we must render inert on our way to more powerful goals. They can’t play the jazz of insurrection as well as a radically liberatory movement can. It is only in the creative chaos of anonymous collective image boards that they managed to make anything of worth in the contemporary. In the end they don’t have the same potential thriving contagiousness across differences even in their most viral forms. They are trapped by their exclusive identitarianism even though they have excelled at coalition building in certain cases, need we say more than Unite the Right?

All the benefits of having formal and informal institutions of domination on their side weren’t remotely enough in the face of last Summer’s insurrection.

Spring is coming and neither the reaction nor the state can stop it.

“Do you have the patience to wait
till your mud settles and the water is clear? Can you remain unmoving
till the right action arises by itself?” —Lao Tzu

There is much to praise in those who see an opening and rush into the chaos to strike and it has been said that waiting only teaches how to wait. But what of the patience of the hunter?

“The West, stable in its decline, constant in its apocalypse, is not a uniform surface. It is a surface riddled with holes, strewn with exposed depths, despite all the efforts to cover them over. These holes are blocs of primitivity, of vital possibilities, ‘nuclei of virulent affect’...” — Julien Coupat

“While they were under tyrannical rulers, the Athenians were no better in war than any of their neighbors, yet once they got free, they were by far the best.” (Herodotus, Histories, V, 78)

Listen to what people say but pay more attention to what they do. Even if you think their words and signaling are earnest, what are the affects of their actions beyond signaling? There’s a reason declared preference and revealed preference are not the same thing. There’s a reason why politicians lie so much.

Police operating a lethal overwatch in Bellingham WA with a kill zone over an encampment facing eviction.

Overwhelming force used by police may seem disproportionate to the, often invented, ‘threat,’ however, overwhelming force is fundamental to their approach as they have surprisingly conventional military mindset.

This is why the police also hate 1:1 confrontations, they much prefer 10:1 and have no shame about thinking like this because it’s a tested operational mindset. Some even say military can be boiled down to to, “getting their first with the most people.” That is of course an overly reductive summary, but it does trace a a common emphasis.

One move in dealing with overwhelming threats historically has been trying to simply outnumber them, another is turning their numbers into a weakness.

“Here’s how it works: Fascist groups promote racist, sexist, and nationalist violence. Individual bigots carry it out—attacking people in the streets, shooting people in churches, stabbing
people on trains. The authorities use these attacks as an excuse to increase control, promising to protect a fearful population. But the greatest threat is not individual fascists: it is the state itself. It is the state that deports and imprisons millions, that suppresses dissent. When a more reactionary government takes power, it will use all the resources and legitimacy that the previous one obtained to carry out even more violence. Only grassroots resistance can stop the rise of fascism.” — Crimethinc

OSS Simple Sabotage Manual

The most interesting section of this OSS sabotage manual to us is not the material how-tos, but the section that deals with conferences and organizations, which can be used as a tool for recognizing when something may be interfering with the effectiveness of a group whether intentionally or not. This behavior may seem pretty familiar to those with experience in activist spaces.

It is also clear that these are the same kinds of things touched on in the OODA loop.

Physical terrain is an often neglected area of analysis for those engaged in low-intensity struggle particularly in cities and towns. Not only can terrain analysis help avoid kettles and exhaustion from too many hills, but it can also help you outmaneuver repressive forces. If you’re opponent needs to hold a strong line like a shield-wall there’s terrain that can break up their forces. Terrain can also hide your forces from view. Having a lay of the land and picking more suitable terrain to engage in can allow you to more easily out maneuver your enemy. The benefits of terrain analysis are near limitless. Remember the map is not the territory, who knows what tactics may reveal themselves to you after a scouting trip.

Historically; guerrillas, maroon communities of escaped slaves, bandits, and state-hating hill people of have been well-versed in terrain analysis. Likewise modern fully escalated insurgents have turned cities into nightmare zones for occupiers using terrain analysis causing some military theorists to go back to the drawing board to work on a new theory of warfare that they call 4th Generational Warfare.

Mountains, jungles, swamps, etc are all thick-space where the state has trouble making incursions and have been friends to rebels for all of recorded time.

The counterpart to thick-space is smooth-space where, instead of terrain blocking repressive forces, terrain lends itself to increased maneuverability which enables anti-state war-machines to outpace the forces of the ruling order. For examples of this think of the pirates and the open sea, nomads and their steppe, bedouin and the desert, etc. Historically these smooth-space operators have been very good at warfare, but have also settled down to either be overcome by new smooth-spacers or to become some of the most powerful empires on earth.

Sadly since the advent of aerial warfare states have become very good at maneuvering over smooth-space, but their dominance is not total. Here lies the importance of becoming the terrain as well as operating within it; if you become distinct you will be obliterated via death from above.

In review; outmaneuver, avoid becoming distinct to your enemies, and set up apparatuses to ward off becoming states.

One interesting tactical choice by the MAGAist on J6 was to do a sort of pincer attack on the capitol giving the security forces at least two concentrated fronts. This seemingly split the security forces even more than bottlenecks and barriers could compensate for. The Capitol Police were just generally out-numbered on top of this, but an interesting tactic none the less.

“”fun fact”” the US Military has their own “Direct Action”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_action_(military)

Emergency Services also have their own “Mutual Aid”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_aid_(emergency_services)