How to fight a fascist state – what I learned from a second world war briefing for secret agents | Zoe Williams

R.SOE Syllabus was a series of lectures that were given the potential secret agents in Britain during World War II. These “lessons in an unfamiliar war” were released from the upper part of the High Office of the Public Records Office (now known as the National Archive) and published as a historic guard in 2001, when my respectable colleague John Kras chose the bright parts in One of his reading is a digestion Reviews. There was a complete lecture on how to formulate a camouflage, as people with sticky ears were notified using glue to install them.

But now, after 24 years, I picked up the book with the goal of Graver-only on the charges that if we end up resisting a fascist state, the past may have something to advance. They will not know everything, these unlawful gentlemen, because they did not have the Internet. But they know nothing.

Many of them are completely historian – struggling to understand the code system known as “Playfair Cipher”, I realized that the code breaking technology has probably moved in 80 years, and I suffer my mind for nothing. Divide the political language, and how it should be always tangible – for example, do not say “hunger”, say “empty stomachs” – I felt reasonable in principle but wrong in the details.

Some tips only emphasize the complexity of the world now – in information, in monitoring, in every way. There is a section on advertising that describes the “Jetsam” distribution method – dropping a brochure or a provocative discourse, which contains “Libels, Ursors and Calumnies” in a place that people will find. It is more effective to drop part of the whole matter, it seems, because it makes it feel like an endeavor. It is better to drop it somewhere as it will be alone, so in the train car at the beginning of a trip, or a cabin from the public reference. Realistically, who would have captured and read Calumny these days, when they have a phone? There should be some online equivalent to transport the empty railway at the beginning of a journey (Reddit thread empty?), But the printed leaflet was at that time.

However, there are some wide broad lines that have not changed, and they are completely clear, but it is forgotten quite easily: such, no use in propaganda unless this leads to a procedure. The procedure also pushes home home and makes it real, so it creates a ring of power and the clinic around the Messenger. The opposite is also correct: Italy’s anti -Gobls propaganda was in July 1934, I read, worse than a waste of time because no action was taken. It made him look weak, and his point of view is competing.

All of this carries non-governmental procedures-there is no benefit in a narration that does not result from anything tangible, and there is no point in disrupted protest, and there is no point in turmoil without a plan. More than useless, it actually undermines the reason, whatever.

Environmental demonstrators of each generation are exactly on the right track, then. they He should Throwing the soup and paste on the road, because everything they do does not contain a clear work that reduces their message.

While I was reading all this, there were six members of the “non -violent civil resistance campaign” (describing them) asking the youth He was arrested while holding a general meeting. The stunning thing immediately was that the authorities entered the Kwaker meeting house to make arrests, which did not occur in the living memory, but, to play clean to the Metropolitan police, which occurred a lot in the 1960s, albeit without tasers. But with the stability of the event, the most surprising point was: this is a very strange thing for an inception country to do it. It seems as if democracy is heading to the opposite just because there is tyranny in the air.

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