There is a great deal of discontent these days among Americans who no longer believe that the government has their interests at heart. This is hardly news, though to anyone paying attention, it must seem that there is not only a great deal of discontent, but also a great number of discontented Americans. The product of this multiplication of disgruntlement is, I think, the enduring popularity of Donald Trump. Say what you will about him (and many do), he remains popular despite the best efforts of the media, the government, the Democratic Party and the establishment wing of the Republicans. How can this be? Can all of these organizations be wrong about him? If you think not, then Trump’s political survival and impervious popularity must baffle you. It’s not baffling, though, if you think of a vote for Trump as a vote against the government, an act of sabotage against an incompetent managerial state. A candidate deeply embedded in government and working in its interests cannot offer you such a toolbox full of wrenches to throw into its machinery, (certainly not Biden or Haley), and therein, I think, lies Trump’s greatest appeal. So he will receive many votes.
A little light reading for saboteurs.
Source: Archive.org
But is voting enough in a system of omnibus bills, log-rolling and the trading of political favors among politicians and bureaucrats whose actions dilute any solutions to our present difficulties? To take just two examples, can you vote to close the border if you believe that it is good for the country? Can you vote to end DEI, racial preferences or other Woke policies if you think they divide Americans and set them against each other? No, you can’t. You can only hope to vote for someone who says he’ll do these things and hope that he’ll try to follow through in the face of tremendous pressure from political opponents and the entrenched bureaucracy to compromise or abandon his efforts. It seems that voting leads at best to a little trimming around the edges of serious problems, if even that.
Is there an alternative? And I don’t mean violent revolution or civil war. People who advocate those don’t know enough history to appreciate the horrors of their suggestion; they simply haven’t thought things through. Direct action in small ways, though, may be a different story. The idea is seductive, and its attractions were brought home to me recently when I read a fascinating booklet put out during the Second World War by the United States Government. The booklet? It’s The Simple Sabotage Field Manual, issued by the Office of Special Services, the forerunner of the CIA. This handy little work gives advice on how to commit sly acts of sabotage against institutions, such as governments of occupation and the industries that support them.
The idea behind the manual is that citizens of occupied territories, or dissidents living in tyrannical regimes, could help the Allies by damaging the Axis war efforts not through direct military action but through small, often subtle, acts of sabotage or non-cooperation masked as accidents or stupidity. It makes wonderful reading.
It doesn’t have to be this dangerous.
Picture Source: www.listal.com/viewimage/170840h
Among its many tips, you’ll find out how much water to add to the gas tank of an automobile (one pint per 20 gallons will do), how to fix a flat tire so that it will go flat again very soon, and how to put a coin into a light socket at the end of the day so that, when the lights are switched on the morning, the fuses in a building blow. You are advised to switch the tags on enemy luggage to disrupt travel. Would this discourage Sam Brinton? Hard to say. These are just samples; there’s much, much more. Let’s put it this way: the manual would be a treasure-trove of endless fun for juvenile delinquents and should be kept away from them. Perhaps some of them were consulted as part of the research behind it.
I find a particular passage rather striking, though, one that doesn’t focus on the destruction of property. It reads:
“A second type of simple sabotage requires no destructive tools whatsoever and produces physical damage, if any, by highly indirect means. It is based on universal opportunities to make faulty decisions, to adopt a noncooperative attitude, and to induce others to follow suit. Making a faulty decision may be simply a matter of placing tools in one spot instead of another. A non-cooperative attitude may involve nothing more than creating an unpleasant situation among one's fellow workers, engaging in bickerings [sic], or displaying surliness and stupidity” [p. 1, emphasis added].
Now, let’s look again at the furor over the Claudine Gay matter and assertions that only affirmative action—that is, reverse discrimination—could lie behind her promotion to the presidency of Harvard. Her case is a lightning rod not because hers is an isolated case, but because it’s the most prominent among many. The government, and the institutions that are influenced by it and support it (academia, for example), are saturated with DEI schemes and therefore need to know your race or sex in order to carry them out. Think how many times you have been asked your race or your sex in connection with jobs or grants or some such thing, where the question has no relevance. What about zip codes that the federal government fears are too white and should therefore be targeted for Section 8 housing? Differential rates of admission to universities on the basis of race or sex? What about industries that announce publicly that they will hire by race and sex? United Airlines, anyone?
Now, institutions doubtless have their reasons for favoring certain races over others, though polls show that the American public opposes the practice. Perhaps it remembers the Equal Protection Clause, which is supposed to guarantee citizens equal protection under the law. But the point here is not argue the merits or demerits of the practice. The point is that, despite general opposition to the practice (and its unconstitutionality where government and its allies are concerned), it seems almost impossible to eradicate through the ballot box or even by court decision. So, naturally, the question arises whether there might be a simpler and more direct solution to the problem of race-based preferences. There is, and it’s suggested by the Simple Sabotage Field Manual. Remember that it mentions “… universal opportunities to make faulty decisions …” Later in the manual the reader is given more specific guidance: “When the enemy asks for directions, give him wrong information” [Id at 22].
Now here’s a thought. Every time the government or another institution asks your race, simply give a race to which you don’t belong. If every white person claimed to be African-American, the race problem would disappear overnight. Disparate impact would be a thing of the past. Underrepresentation would be nothing but a memory. African-Americans might claim to be Hispanic or Pacific-Islanders, and so on. In a flash all the government’s racial categories would be transmogrified. Note that the next U.S. Census will be in 2030.
If most everyone indicated a different race on census and other forms, think of the effect on government and academia. The justification behind their actions would disappear as the new racial statistics emerged. As the DEI bureaucrats struggled with the new figures, they would have to completely revamp the entire system or even toss it away because there would be nothing for them to fix. After all, who should be favored if the country were suddenly 70% “African-American?” The figure might go even higher if African-Americans claimed that status and everyone else shifted.
I hear two objections, one practical and one moral. Let’s take the practical one: you can generally tell a person’s race by looking at them, so it won’t work. To this, I would say, are you sure? Ask Elizabeth Warren. And in a world where men can become women by claiming to be so, how can this not be extended to race? Entirely analogous, perhaps, is the progressives’ claim that race is a social construct and, therefore, doesn’t really exist. So, take the enemy at his word and use it against him. That’s Saul Alinsky’s Rule 4— a very helpful precept. But you don’t even have to go that far. If you’re caught, just say it was a mistake and employ Rule 12(c) found on page 35 of the Simple Sabotage Field Manual: “Act stupid.”
The moral question is the more difficult. Is it ever moral to use deceit in the furtherance of a moral goal? Or, more precisely in this case, is it moral to use deceit to snarl up a pernicious policy? It’s tempting to give a glib answer, but where sabotage is involved, we should be careful. You might reasonably say that government and its allied institutions have imposed these practices without the consent of the people (the voting problem again!) and therefore the people who are subject to them should have recourse to simple sabotage to undo these practices where they are premised on nonsense. Thus, if race is a social construct (and logically, therefore, a choice), and if that social construct is used to disfavor a person, then that person may justifiably make a different choice about his race and expect to be treated better because of it. In other words, the whole thing is a game, and to lose the game is simply a choice that one need not make. The immorality is fundamentally on the part of the game-maker who sets the rules, not on the player who must play.
The lesson of the Simple Sabotage Field Manual is itself simple: thousands of small uncooperative acts can seriously damage an organization or bureaucracy that relies entirely on the cooperation of its members, and that damage demoralizes their administrators. Amusing as it is to read the Manual, though, it’s disturbing to think that we may be approaching a time when its approach appears more effective and, therefore more appealing, than elections.
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