Declassified CIA Guide to Sabotaging Fascism Is Suddenly Viral
Declassified CIA Guide to Sabotaging Fascism Is Suddenly Viral
The World War II-era "Simple Sabotage Field Manual" is full of steps that office workers can take to resist leadership.
Over the last week, the guide has surged to become the 5th-most-accessed book on Project Gutenberg, an open source repository of free and public domain ebooks. It is also the fifth most popular ebook on the site over the last 30 days, having been accessed nearly 60,000 times over the last month (just behind Romeo and Juliet).
Direct link to the book (without the backref):
- “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.”
But ... but we're already doing every single one of them 🥺
- “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.”
Holy shit, my workplace must be trying to sabotage fascism...
Bruh this is my leadership team at work!
Same... Lol
Isn't this like the whole SCRUM framework
So, civ v was right, the only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy, is its inefficiency.
Please tell me that's not actually what they tell you to do.
Where's the bombs and general strikes?
The point of the book is not to blow shit up, but to gum the system up with small actions that have a minimal risk. Then organize more people around doing the same.
The first half
I get how all parts of this are effective to sabotage an economy and hurt the ambitions of those at the top. But, as a regular person working within the system, I choose not to discriminate against or complain about other individual workers just trying to get through their day.
That seems counter productive. The best way to resist the oligarchs can’t be to fuck with the other poor people we’re trying to help.
I don’t spot the difference between this and how most modern day corporations are operated:
- “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.”
This sounds like how the federal government is operating from the top down as of this year.
Yeah. They want to destroy government.
Maybe America DOES fight Facism
Man, I think my company is running on this manual...
“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.”
So is this why DEI exists?
Non-white, non-males must be less efficient. Surely thats why they have been paid less and gotten less promotions.
Nice try, Mr. Cultural Marxism.
Was thinking the same thing. It sounds exactly like inclusion due to irrelevant factors.
I might be coming off a bit too ideological, but i dont think race, gender, sexuality should matter in a profession. Therefore i think DEI is inherently unfair.
But i also see how the tactic applies to anybody that sucks at their job, DEI not included.
I was expecting something subtle, some sort of resistance from within type stuff.
Warehouses, barracks, offices, hotels, and factory buildings are outstanding targets for simple sabotage. They are extremely susceptible to damage, especially by fire.
Not so much.
Proof that CIA knows what the cure for fascism is, and yet chooses not to ever since Reagan.
So many countries ended up with fascist autocrats with the help of the CIA. Way before Reagan.
Why stop fascists when you can enable them worldwide and locally that helps secure funding and work for you?
Why would you not want to have more threats to encourage congress to fund your habits and slowly erode the rights of the Americans you claim to defend?
The CIA started hating fascists due to the war effort but learned they had the same idea just different strategies.
Can this be applied to ICE? Where are they staying in your city? Where are they keeping their trucks and gear? Where does it come from? Where is their dispatch? When ICE arrests someone, what’s the logistics chain to get the person away from your city?
Remember when reading this that it was written for a time long past. There are cameras and other electronic tracking everywhere now. Even if you can avoid detection, much of the methodology described here just doesn't apply to modern machines, telecommunications, and other systems.
But read it all anyway. (It's not that long.) The mindset you will need to employ is plainly communicated and remains valid today. Be observant, be creative, be careful, and [email protected].
The modern approach for grinding everything to a halt is to push for migration to M365 in your workplace.
You jest, but you're not wrong.
Pushing to "improve processes and efficiency" for as many people as possible, where that requires changes to what people do - and especially changes to the applications they use - means a whole lot of retraining and mistakes. Office workers are hardly different than factory line workers. They do the same thing over and over every day, and if anything changes, they're flummoxed.
This also serves to reveal more clearly which workers are more and less adaptable, so that you can focus any of your efforts. Either get more in the way of the more productive people, or take advantage of less productive people to effect a larger error.
Edit: And if your "improved processes" are complicated enough, this gives other people who want to resist more opportunities to employ malicious compliance.
Bankrupt them through AWS.
Microsoft Teams is the only communication platform allowed
Oopsie, accidentally crowdstriked 😉
(Yes the crowd is gonna go on strike too)
Lift and shift to Azure!
For a more modern take, there are other repositories in a similar vein: https://specificsuggestions.com/share/EN/9836.html
Some are very simple and excusable for the average office worker
Use manual page numbers, so they have to be readjusted when page order changes
Crimp (damage by bending) the Ethernet cables
Send email content as images rather than as text
Crimp (damage by bending) the Ethernet cables.
I'm siding with the fascists on this one.
It only worked back then because after Germans followed the manual to weaken the Nazis, other countries came in and destroyed them.
If the equivalent happens in the USA we're all fucked.
Milton was the best: playing music that distracts your coworkers and reduces productivity, engaging management and taking up their time about quibbles, muttering incoherently leading to lost time due to miscommunication, stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars, and setting the fucking building on fire.
Be like Milton.
I believe you have my stapler...
Just a coincidence. President Musk would never allow fascism to take hold in the U.S.
He will raise his hand to nearly the hight of the stop sign to clearly communicate his intent.
Hell yeah! This is great! I'm glad I'm not the only one sharing it around to friends and neighbors. True resistance is not the flashy stuff; it's a whole of society approach to stop fascists in their tracks. True resistance is the sum total of small acts to inconvenience and impede a fascist.
What do you mean friend? You aren't distributing anything at all. I didn't see anything. Everything is Minecraft.
The thing is that these techniques were intended to be used in hostile opponent countries, not your own.
“Shut down America” isn’t a goal any American should have - instead, work to make a positive difference.
TIL half the people at my workplace have been reading this book for the last 2 decades.
Explains why the item substitutions on my Walmart orders are so fucking nutty (like I wanted blueberries, but they didn't have a specific brand I clicked on, so they give me raspberries but of the same brand, instead of another brand of blueberries).
"I hate the Waltons, which is why I am working to bring Walmart down from the inside."
Perhaps not always consciously, but yeah, I'm sure they're pressured for speed and paid as little as legally possible.
Did a Walmart pickup order around Thanksgiving because I didn't want to fight the crowds, they substituted Lemon Jell-O for vanilla pudding, because the boxes are kinda the same color?
Anyway, that was the last time I did a pickup order, so I guess they won?
Ignore this document. It's a plant.
It suggests filing metal containers that contain gasoline. They just want to see who shows up in ERs or local police dept with specific injuries or vandalism charges.
Edit: the anarchist cookbook that circulated in the 90s and 2000s was a false flag that was intended to remove fingers, hands, and entire faces. It was a funded attempt to get 'smart people' to blow their hands off. The doc posted by OP has the same hallmark copy-paste from reputable sources mixed with advice from chaos agents.
It's eighty years old. It's a different world. That doesn't make this bullshit at the time.
The physics of combustion and gas phases has not changed appreciably on planet earth until atmosphere arrived. Gasoline vapor will ignite if you grind metal on metal nearby.
Real chads flush tiny screw bits down their landlords toilet
What's the chemistry there?
Grinding metal can create large voltage potentials which can create arcs which can ignite gasoline vapor which can cause an explosion.
More to the point, i'm commenting on semi competent text followed by suicide advice. I stopped reading to make my previous post. I'll pick back up to see if there are any more obvious points.
I'm pretty sure that the people at the companies I've worked at for the last 15 years have been following this playbook the whole time.
I think that's kind of the point - because this behavior is fairly common, malicious use of it is extremely hard to root out, and can cause a wonderful amount of friction in an organization.
I wonder what the purge at our intelligence agencies will be like. They were never good agencies, they did a lot of shitty stuff, but they did it because "America". Now that the Chief Cheeto is in charge, who has insulted the USIC on many occasions, and cozies up to dictators and Nazis, there have to be a not insignificant number of USIC people that want nothing to with Combover in Chief, so they'll get the boot to be replaced with some jackbooted NKVD Commissariat trump sycophants.
It's relatively easy to envision.
Assume each agency (not just the 3-letter ones, any) had X% of fascists and fascist-friendly people. The other 100%-X% will be fired. So just the X% remain.
On the one hand, the agency is now severly crippled as it lacks key personell, and probably the firings aren't evenly spread through departments and key positions, meaning some aspects don't work at all any more (separating air traffic is one, for a simple example), while others still mostly work. On the other hand, all remaining aspects are now 100% fascist in their nature, and will always take the fascist option if one presents itself as anyone who would not do so has been removed.
Reminds me a bit of Edward Abbey's Fieldguide to Monkeywrenching.
Albeit aimed at a different target and different reader.
Just an interesting observation Im making using the title of a not so well known text but potentially interesting read for many (academically of course).
For anyone interested, it is freely available online if you want to read it. I would suggest using a VPN or other security program to protect yourself. I suggest this purely because its best practice to use one, lest certain groups take an interest in your reading choices. By this I of course mean cybercriminals.
Haha, yes... sabotaging checks notes Fascism. That's what the CIA is historically very good at.
This was when they were the OSS and our enemy was literally fascists
Yeah, it's called taking out the competition. If you wanna win a race you gotta know where to throw the banana peels.
Lol that was my first immediate thought too.
The book on sabotaging socialism and democratic rule is longer and more heavily cited than the OED
I wouldn't go that far. It's pretty simple we are Our Own Worst enemies. They just have to get us in fighting amongst ourselves and that's pretty much it.
They're not pro-fascism any more than they're anti-fascism. They're extremely pro-doing-what-we-fucking-tell-you, and anti-not-furthering-US-interests.
Fascists are typically good at doing what someone stronger than them orders, so they're easy to work with. Anyone who's willing to ignore what needs to be done in favor of someone else's agenda and their own personal ends is viable though.
I had that manual for a while. Time to really pay attention...
I was all set to get it when I realized I already downloaded it last week.
As someone who’s been spreading this since my Fark days I’m glad the kids found it.
Hello fellow Farker.
It’s too outdated to be really useful. This just makes life hell for people, not stopping fascism. What we need is the field manual on how to make fascists fear for their lives enough that they crush themselves.
A lot of this would be good for fucking up capitalism, but we are way past that being an option.
Unfortunately, "making life hell for people" is part of how you stop any government from working. Reduce efficiency, increase disorder and confusion, and make people angry enough to actually want to tear down the system.
Governments where everyone is chipper and basically have their needs met don't collapse, and people don't fight to collapse them.
It's like the people who say that protests shouldn't inconvenience anyone. The inconvenience is the point.
Happy people don't kneel cops in the Dunkin donuts parking lot.
If people are dumb enough to think inflation was 100% Bidens fault and electing a 2016 President will bring back 2016 prices then they'll blame empty napkin dispensers and clogged toilets on Trump.
People are too dumb to associate protesters in the street to a problem that can be fixed by the government. The rulers want you to think that protesting works, because it makes the fight between the people. They want you inconveniencing on your level, so that they can make us fight each other.
You will never convince people to tear down the system by screaming in a street.
I started reading but i'm pretty sure this book is illegal in my country
Well I found this for sale in my country: https://www.bokklubben.no/andre-verdenskrig/manual-of-guerilla-tactics-anon/produkt.do?produktId=108933357
This will be declared a terrorist document create by a evil government as soon as trump hears about it. Its not like he can read well enough understand it.
Some speculate that he cannot read at all. I do not think this is the case, as it is very difficult to finish university without some kind of reading and writing (even with grades as horrific as his).
But I strongly believe that Trump is dyslexic. Which would explain his aversion to reading at all costs and his desire to have things done in picture form and not written form. I am not the only one who suspects this.
I feel like shit now that I know all these annoying ass people were actually fighting fascism.
Sorry, Greg, you were right. You are an American hero and we should all be thankful you make everything as difficult as possible.
I should have read this years ago ... some of the tips and tricks are reminders of how to take better care of your things
one of the first things i did on 11/6/24 was download this, along with other resistance/rebellion/fuckdapolice type shit
Recommendations?
i haven't read them all but the titles that were recommended to me:
partisans and guerrillas
extreme privacy
mini manual of the urban guerrilla
resistance rebellion and death
perfect crime and how to commit it
on guerrilla warfare
street rebellion
pragmatic guide to subersionall should be available on anna's archive
edit: i'll also add propaganda by eddie bernays, since we're in for nothing but propaganda from here on out
first thing to focus on is don't draw attention to yourself and delete all social media
Does anyone know if there is a Spanish version?
Feed it to an LLM perhaps (if you can't find anything)
Mhmm
People to Democrats: "What should we be doing to resist Trump?"
Democrats: "Making campaign contributions to us? Idk, here is a 100 year old book."
Bro the CIA is so based. They're bazinga based.
Report imaginary spies
Sounds like a good way to get your buddy Bob taken out and shot.
When fascists starts suspecting everyone as spies, good people die.
I thought the idea was to invent reports about fictional people not to create fake reports about real people.
That's why you report other fascists as being spies, or imaginary people like it says.
Just report Elon Musk 50 times.
Declassified in 2008... Anyone have any evidence when stop lights started going red at each intersection where traffic is present? Wasn't it about 2008? We need to unite as one country and take back our streets! We need to demand stop lights be timed so you hit greens when going in a straight line! An we need it now!
People seriously need to chill the fuck out with the Nazi comparisons.
Trump won popular vote, that’s literally a democracy.
I wish the Republicans had more class in dealing with political opponents, or in getting their point across about some issues, but they don’t. Their lack of finesse just makes people overreact. These overreactions are reminding me of the J6ers, though.
These overreactions are reminding me of the J6ers, though.
Ah, yes. Truly a classic. "The people angry about the blanket pardoning of all the violent insurrectionists are just as bad as the violent insurrectionists!"
Lol.
Good point, I should clarify that’s not what I was saying. I was saying that it reminds me of the same online reactions prior to it happening.
He's already trying to purge the government of anyone who will disobey his illegal orders. And one week in, anyway has plans to ship 10s of thousands of people to a military prison which only exists as a fake way to get around violating US laws on imprisonment... So, a fucking concentration camp.
Wake the fuck up
He won due to the most concentrated voter suppression campaign in decades. This is probably not including other shit.
He got the same amount of votes as last time he lost the popular vote. Trump is far from the desired elected official. The reason he won is because the US isnt a democracy.