The Weather Underground was far from the only group that had difficulty implementing necessary tactics. The story of abolitionists prior to the Civil War gives us one of the best examples of this, in part because of the length and breadth of their struggle. Starting from a marginalized position in society, the struggle over slavery eventually inflamed an entire culture and provoked the bloodiest war in American history.
We’ll begin the story in the 1830s when several different currents of antislavery activism were growing rapidly. One of these currents was the Underground Railroad, run by both black and white people. Another current consisted of what you might call liberal abolitionists, predominantly white with a few black participants as well.
The general story of the Underground Railroad has become well-known, but there are many common misconceptions. Black slave escapes date back to the 1500s (when escapes south to Spanish Florida were rather more common), although some aspects of the nineteenth century Railroad were more systematically organized. One common but incorrect belief about the Underground Railroad is that it was run by magnanimous whites in order to aid black people otherwise unable to help themselves. In fact, this revisionist mythology is quite far from the truth.32 Until the 1840s, it was primarily run by and for black people who distrusted the involvement of whites. Escaped blacks were always in much greater danger than whites, and had to possess a great deal of skill, knowledge, and bravery in order to escape. The great majority of escapes were orchestrated by the slaves themselves, who spent months or years planning and reconnoitering escape routes and hiding places. Indeed, some historians have calculated that by the 1850s about 95 percent of escaping slaves were alone or with one or two companions.33
Furthermore, although the Underground Railroad is now recognized as a heroic and important part of the history of slave resistance, not all abolitionists of the time participated. In fact, some actually opposed the Underground Railroad. According to one history, “Abolitionists were divided over strategy and tactics, but they were very active and very visible. Many of them were part of the organized Underground Railroad that flourished between 1830 and 1861. Not all abolitionists favored aiding fugitive slaves, and some believed that money and energy should go to political action.”34
There’s no question that those who participated in the Underground Railroad were very brave, regardless of the color of their skin, and the importance of the Railroad to escaped slaves and their families cannot be overstated. The problem was that the Railroad just wasn’t enough to pose a threat to the institution of slavery itself. In 1830, there were around two million slaves in the United States. But at its peak, the Underground Railroad freed fewer than 2,000 slaves each year, less than one in one thousand. This escape rate was much lower than the rate of increase of the enslaved population through birth. Of course, many fugitive slaves worked to save money and buy their families out of slavery, which meant that the Railroad freed more people than just those who physically travelled it.
Tactical Development: From Moral Suasion to Political Confrontation35
While the Underground Railroad was growing in the 1830s, another antislavery current was growing as well. This one consisted mostly of white abolitionists, driven by Christian principles and a desire to convince slave owners to stop sinning and release their slaves. These early white Christian abolitionists recognized the horrors of slavery, but adopted an approach of pacifist moral exhortation. Historian James Brewer Stewart discusses their approach: “Calling this strategy ‘moral suasion,’ these neophyte abolitionists believed that theirs was a message of healing and reconciliation best delivered by Christian peacemakers, not by divisive insurgents.… They appealed directly to the (presumably) guilty and therefore receptive consciences of slaveholders with cries for immediate emancipation.” They believed, as liberals usually do, that the oppressive horrors perpetrated by those in power were mostly a misunderstanding (rather than an interlocking system of power that rewarded the oppressors for evil). So, of course, they believed that they could correct the mistake by politely arguing their case.
Stewart continues: “This would inspire masters to release their slaves voluntarily and thereby lead the nation into a redemptive new era of Christian reconciliation and moral harmony.… immediate abolitionists saw themselves as harmonizers, not insurgents, because the vast majority of them forswore violent resistance.… ‘Immediatists,’ in short, saw themselves not as resisting slavery by responding to it reactively, but instead as uprooting it by spiritually revolutionizing the corrupted values of its practitioners and supporters.” In other words, they fell prey to four of the strategic failings we’ve discussed so far. They didn’t use asymmetric strategic principles, largely because they weren’t using a resistance strategy at all. They were essentially lobbying, and their “morally superior” approach meant that, as a minority faction, they had no political force to bring to bear on those whom they lobbied. Furthermore, they were hopelessly naïve (or to state the problem more precisely, they were hopefully naïve) about the nature of power and the slave economy. As a result, they were unable to concoct a reasonable A to B strategy. Their so-called strategy, though well-meaning and moral, was more akin to a collective fantasy that overlooked the nature and extent of violence that slave culture would bring to bear on its adversaries.
Stewart recognizes this problem as well. “By adopting Christian pacifism and regarding themselves as revolutionary peacemakers, these earliest white immediatists woefully underestimated the power of the forces opposing them. Well before they launched their crusade, slavery had secured formidable dominance in the nation’s economy and political culture. To challenge so deeply entrenched and powerful an institution meant adopting postures of intransigence for which these abolitionists were, initially, wholly unprepared.”36
Need I spell out the parallels to our current situation? Pick any liberal or mainstream environmental or social justice movement. Mainstream environmentalism has been particularly naïve in this regard, largely ignoring the deeply entrenched nature of ecocidal activities in the capitalist economy, in industry, in daily life, and in the psychology of the civilized. Furthermore, mainstream environmentalists—who often do not come out of a long tradition of resistance—utterly ignore the force that those in power will bring to bear on any threat to that power. By assuming that society will adopt a sustainable way of life if only individual people can be persuaded, mainstream environmentalists ignore the rewards offered for unsustainability, and too often ignore those who pay the costs for such rewards.
Of course, mainstream environmentalism is hardly unique in this. Indeed, this basic trajectory is so common that it is nearly archetypal. Again and again, whenever privileged people have tried to ally themselves with oppressed people, we have seen this phenomenon at work. Seemingly ignorant of the daily violence perpetrated by the dominant culture, many people of privilege have wandered off into a strategic and tactical Neverland, which is based on their own personal wishes about how resistance ought to be, rather than a hard strategy that is designed to be effective and that draws on the experience of oppressed peoples and their long history of resistance. Sometimes the people of privilege listen and learn, and sometimes they don’t.
Of course, these early white abolitionists were on the right side, and, of course, their response to slavery was, morally speaking, far above that of the majority of white people’s. But, writes Stewart: “With the nation’s most powerful institutions so tightly aligned in support of slavery and white supremacy, it is clear that young white abolitionists were profoundly self-deceived when they characterized their work as ‘the destruction of error by the potency of truth—the overthrow of prejudice by the power of love—the abolition of slavery by the spirit of repentance.’ When so contending, they were deeply sincere and grievously wrong. To crusade for slavery’s rapid obliteration was, in truth, to stimulate not ‘the power of love’ and ‘repentance,’ but instead to promote the opposition of not only an overwhelming number of powerful enemies—the entire political system—but also the nation’s most potent economic interests—society’s most influential elites—and a popular political culture in the North that was more deeply suffused with racial bigotry than at previous times in the nation’s history.” This is a lesson we must remember.
They were highly optimistic about their chances. After increasing racial tensions and a series of violent uprisings in the early 1830s, one immediatist predicted that “the whole system of slavery will fall to pieces with a rapidity that will astonish.”37 This attitude is again reminiscent of the excess of hope we discussed earlier.
We should note that it was not just white abolitionists who were opposed to serious resistance at this stage, but some people of color as well. Historian Lois E. Horton writes that one black editor of a newspaper “penned an article addressed ‘To the Thoughtless part of our Colored Citizens,’ in which he admonished readers to act with more dignity and self-restraint when fugitive slaves were captured. [The editor] urged African Americans to leave the defense of fugitives to the lawyers … Public protest, even public assembly, [he] warned, would risk the loss of support from respectable allies. He was especially shocked by the involvement of Black women in this protest, singling them out for ‘everlasting shame’ and charging that they ‘degraded’ themselves by their participation.”38
But more militant abolitionists continued to gain prominence. Former fugitive slave Henry Highland Garnet rejected the pacifism of both white and black abolitionists, saying “There is not much hope of Redemption without the shedding of blood.”
Many white abolitionists retained their pacifist beliefs and practices, but as the abolition movement grew, it was increasingly perceived as a threat by slaveholders and those in power. An escalating wave of violent repression occurred, in which abolitionists and their allies were attacked, and their mailings and offices were burned. Many white abolitionists abandoned pacifism after white newspaper editor and abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy was gunned down in his office by proslavery thugs. William Lloyd Garrison, publisher of the foundational abolitionist paper the Liberator, wrote: “When we first unfurled the banner of the Liberator … we did not anticipate that, in order to protect southern slavery, the free states would voluntarily trample under foot all law and order, and government, or brand the advocates of universal liberty as incendiaries and outlaws.… It did not occur to us that almost every religious sect, and every political party would side with the oppressor.”39 Of course, they did not consider and dismiss the idea—it simply didn’t occur to them. This repression did, however, induce increasing numbers of Northerners to join with the abolitionists out of concern for the violations of law by the government and antiabolitionists.
The good news was that by the 1850s, more and more abolitionists were defying fugitive slave laws and even taking up arms to aid escaped slaves inside and outside of the Underground Railroad. Violent confrontations began to occur in a scattershot fashion or, to be more precise, defensive violence carried out by abolitionists became more common, since slavery had been based on violent confrontations since the beginning, and none of that was new to black people. It was soon not unheard of in the North for slaveholders or slave catchers to be shot—on one occasion in Boston in 1854, a crowd even stormed a courthouse where a fugitive slave was being held and overpowered the guards. Writes Stewart, “And even when physical violence did not result … oratorical militants increasingly urged their audiences to resort to physical destruction if more peaceable methods failed to stop federal slave catchers. On several occasions well-organized groups of abolitionists overwhelmed the marshals and spirited fugitives to safety. At other times they stored weapons, planned harassing manoeuvres, and massed as intimidating mobs.”40 Though only a decade earlier they were taking oaths never to use force, white abolitionists came to agree that use of lethal force against slave catchers, in self-defense, was morally justified. Armed defiance of slave catchers was a long tradition for black activists at that time, but a considerable change for white abolitionists. Many Christian abolitionists changed their tactics, arguing that not only was pacifism not required by God, but that it was a Christian’s duty and the “Law of God” to shoot a slave catcher.
On Friday, September 7th, Deep Green Resistance member Max Wilbert was contacted by the FBI in regards to his political organizing.
The agent, who identified himself as “Special Agent Michael” from the Seattle Field Office of the FBI, said he was calling “about something [Wilbert] wrote online” in response to “tips submitted to a public tip line.” The same agent also left a card at a family member’s house over the weekend.
Wilbert followed established security culture protocols, a set of best-practices for activists and revolutionaries, by refusing to answer any questions and referring the agent to contact a lawyer.
This is the third time Wilbert has been contacted by the FBI in regards to his organizing. In prior instances in 2014 and 2016, he also declined to answer any questions.
The earlier phone calls were part of a coordinated operation targeting DGR members across multiple US states, in which more than a dozen DGR members and presumed associates were called on the phone or visited at their home or work. FBI agents also intimidated family members and followed activists in cars during this sweep.
As Wilbert said in 2016, “This government uses intimidation and violence because these tactics are brutally effective. For me and the people I work with, we expect pushback. That doesn’t make it easy, but in a way, this sort of attention validates the fact that our strategy represents a real threat to the system of power in this country. They’re scared of us because we have a plan to hit them where it hurts.”
Deep Green Resistance advocates a revolutionary environmentalism and calls for forcefully dismantling global capitalism. The organization is well known to the FBI. In fact, members have been told that the book the movement is based on is on the bookshelves at FBI training academy near Quantico, Virginia.
The organization based on the book was created in 2011 and has members located around the world. Their website is available in more than 20 languages and members have been involved in a wide range of protest, resistance, and ecology movements.
The FBI has a long history of surveillance and disruption of organizations working against capitalism and racism. From intimidation and assassination (MLK, Fred Hampton) to more subtle interventions (see COINTELPRO) to destroy the social glue of resistance communities, the FBI has engaged in illegal and undemocratic activity for decades. This is a global trend as well. State security forces from South Africa to China have worked to undermine movements for justice consistently for decades.
DGR expects further state repression against itself and other groups that advocate threatening strategies, but refuses to be intimidated. In fact, they see state repression as a validation. “When she heard I had been called by the FBI, my aunt told me that my grandfather would have said, ‘He must be doing something right,’” Wilbert says.
The key problem with identifying successful strategies is that the context of historical resistance is different from the present. Their goals were often different as well. There’s a difference between destroying or expelling a foreign power, and forcing a power to negotiate or offer concessions, and dismantling a domestic system of power or economics. Such differences are the reason we’ve used relatively few anticolonial movements as case studies; their context and strategy are too different.
Resistance groups often fall prey to several major strategic failures. We’ll discuss five big ones here:
A failure to adhere to the principles of asymmetric struggle.
A failure to devise a consistent strategy and goal.
An inappropriate excess of hope; ignoring the scope of the problem.
A failure to adequately negotiate the relationship between aboveground and underground operations.
An unwillingness or inability to use the required tactics.
The first of these is a failure to adhere to the principles of asymmetric struggle. Yes, most resisters want to fight the good fight, and an out-and-out fight can be tempting. But that can only happen where resisters have superior forces on their side, which is almost never. The original IRA engaged in and lost pitched battles on more than one occasion.
In occupied Europe, writes M. R. D. Foot, “whenever there was a prospect that a large partisan force could be set up, people started asking for heavy weapons” instead of the submachine guns they were usually delivered. But artillery was always short on the front lines of conventional conflict, its presence drastically cut the mobility of a resistance group, and ammunition was hard to come by. “Bodies of resisters who clamoured for artillery were victims of the fallacy of the national redoubt … and of the old-fashioned idea that a soldier should stand and fight. The irregular soldier is usually much more use to his cause if he runs away, and fights in some other time and place of his own choosing.”16
Former Black Panthers have identified a similar problem with BPP strategy, specifically with their habit of equipping offices and houses to use as pseudofortresses. Explains Curtis Austin, “Using offices inside the ghetto as bases of operations was also a mistake. As a paramilitary organization, it should not have made defending clearly vulnerable offices a matter of policy. Sundiata Acoli echoed these sentiments when he noted this policy ‘sucked the BPP into taking the unwinnable position of making stationary defenses of BPP offices.… small military forces should never adopt as a general action the position of making stationary defences of offices, homes, buildings, etc.’ The frequency and quickness with which they were surrounded and attacked should have led them to develop a policy that would have allowed them to move from one headquarters to another with speed and stealth. Instead, the fledgling group constantly found itself defending sandbagged and otherwise well-fortified offices until their limited supplies of ammunition expired.”17
Early Weather Underground and SDS strategy similarly ignored the importance of surprise in planning actions by advertising and promoting open conflicts with the state and police in advance. This was criticized by other groups at the time. Writes Ron Jacobs, “From the Yippies’ vantage point, the idea of setting a date for a battle with the state was ridiculous: it provided the police with a greater capacity to counter-attack, and it also took away the element of surprise, the activists’ only advantage.… Pointing out the differences between the planned, offensive violence of Weatherman and Yippie’s spontaneous, defensive version, Abbie Hoffman termed Weatherman’s confrontations ‘Gandhian violence for the element of purging guilt through moral witness.’ ”18 (This analysis is interesting, if perhaps surprising and a little ironic, given the Yippies’ propensity for symbolic and theatrical actions.)
A most notable example of this problem was the “Days of Rage” gathering in Chicago in 1969. According to Weatherman John Jacobs, the intent of the Days of Rage was to confront the forces of the state and “shove the war down their dumb, fascist throats and show them, while we were at it, how much better we were than them, both tactically and strategically, as a people.”19 Jacobs told the Black Panthers that 25,000 protesters would be present.20 However, only about 200 showed up, met by more than a 1,000 trained and well-equipped police. In a speech the day of the event, Jacobs changed tack and argued for the importance of fighting for righteous and moral (rather than tactical or strategic) reasons: “We’ll probably lose people today … We don’t really have to win here … just the fact that we are willing to fight the police is a political victory.”21 The protesters then started something of a riot, smashing some police cars and luxury businesses, but also miscellaneous cars, a barbershop, and the windows of lower- and middle-class homes22—not a great argument for superior strategy and tactics. The police quickly dispatched the protesters with tear gas, batons, and bullets. In the following days, almost 300 people were arrested, including most of the Weather Underground and SDS leadership. The Black Panthers—who were not afraid of political violence or of fighting the police—denounced the action as foolish and counterproductive. The Weather Underground, at least, did seem to learn from this when they went underground and used tactics better suited to an asymmetric conflict. (How effective their tactics were while underground is another question.)
All of this brings us to the second common strategic problem of resistance groups. Although their drive and values may be laudable—and although their revolutionary commitment is not in question—many resistance groups have simply failed to devise a consistent strategy and goal. In order for a strategy to be verifiably feasible, it has to have an endpoint that can be described as well as a clear and reasonable path or steps that connect the implementation of the strategy to the endpoint.
Some people call this the “A to B” factor. Does a proposed strategy actually lay out a reasonable path between point A and point B? If you can’t explain how the strategy might work or how you can implement it, you certainly can’t evaluate the strategy effectively.
It seems dead obvious when put in these terms, but a real A to B strategy is often missing in resistance groups. The problems may seem so insurmountable, the risk of group schisms so concerning, that many movements just stagger along, driven by a deep desire for justice and in some cases a need to fight back. But this leads to short-term, small-scale thinking, and soon the resisters can’t see the strategic forest for the tactical trees.
This problem is not a new one. M. R. D. Foot describes it in his writings about resistance against the Nazis in Occupied Europe. “Less well-trained clandestines were more liable to lose sight of their goal in the turmoil of subversive work, and to pursue whatever was most easy to do, and obviously exasperating to the enemy, without making sure where that most easy course would lead them.”23
It’s good and courageous to want to fight injustice, but resisters who only fight back on a piecemeal basis without a long-term strategy will lose. Often the question of real strategy doesn’t even enter into discussion. Jeremy Varon wrote in his book on the Weather Underground and the German Red Army Faction that “1960s radicals were driven by an apocalyptic impulse resting on a chain of assumptions: that the existing order was thoroughly corrupt and had to be destroyed; that its destruction would give birth to something radically new and better; and that the transcendent nature of this leap rendered the future a largely blank or unrepresentable utopia.”24 Certainly they were correct that the existing order was (and still is) thoroughly corrupt and deeply destructive. The idea that destroying it would inevitably lead to something better by conventional human standards is more slippery. But the main problem is the profound gap in terms of their strategy and objective. They had virtually no plan beyond their choice of tactics which, in the case of the Weather Underground, became largely symbolic in nature despite their use of explosives. Their uncritical “apocalyptic” beliefs about the nature of revolution—something shared by many other militant groups—almost guaranteed that they would fail to develop an effective long-term strategy, a problem to which we’ll return later on.
It’s very interesting—and hopefully illuminating—that a group like the Weather Underground did so many things right but completely fell down strategically. We keep coming back to them and criticizing them not because their actions were necessarily wrong, but because they were on the right track in so many ways. The internal organization of the Weather Underground as a clandestine group was highly developed and effective, for example. And their desire to bring the war home, their commitment to action, far surpassed that of most leftists agitating against the Vietnam War.
But as Varon observed, “The optimism of American and West German radicals about revolution was based in part on their reading of events, which seemed to portend dramatic change. They debated revolutionary strategy, and their activism in a general way suggested the nature of the liberated society to come. But they never specified how turmoil would lead to radical change, how they would actually seize power, or how they would reorganize politics, culture, and the economy after a revolution. Instead, they mostly rode a strong sense of outrage and an unelaborated faith that chaos bred crisis, and that from crisis a new society would emerge. In this way, they translated their belief that revolution was politically and morally necessary into the mistaken sense that revolution was therefore likely or even inevitable.”25
All of this brings us to a third common flaw in resistance strategy—an excess of hope. Obviously, we now know that a 1960s American revolution was far from inevitable. So why did the Weather Underground and others believe that it was? To some degree, this sort of anchorless optimism is a coping mechanism. Resistance groups are up against powerful foes, and believing that your desired victory is somehow inevitable can help morale. It can also be wrong. We should remember former prisoner of war James Stockdale’s “very important lesson”: “You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”26
Another factor is what you might call the bubble or silo effect. People tend to self-sort into groups of people they have something in common with. This can lead to activists being surrounded by people with similar beliefs, and even becoming socially isolated from those who don’t share their ideas. Eventually, groupthink occurs, and people start to believe that far more people share their perspective than actually do. It’s only a short step to feeling that vast change is imminent. This is especially true if the goal is nebulous and difficult to evaluate.
The false belief that “the revolution is nigh” is hardly limited to ’60s or leftist groups, of course. Even World War II German dissidents like Carl Friedrich Goerdeler, a conservative but anti-Nazi politician, fell prey to the same misapprehension. Writes Allen Dulles: “Despite Goerdeler’s realization of the Nazi peril, he greatly overestimated the strength of the relatively feeble forces in Germany which were opposing it. Optimistic by temperament, he was often led to believe that plans were realities, that good intentions were hard facts. As a revolutionary he was possibly naïve in putting too much confidence in the ability of others to act.”27
Significantly, but perhaps not surprisingly, his naïveté extended not just to potential resisters but even to Hitler. Prior to the July 20 plot, he firmly believed that if only he could sit down and meet with Hitler, he could rationally convince him to admit the error of his ways and to resign. His friends were barely able to stop him from trying on more than one occasion, which would have obviously been foolish and dangerous to the resistance because of their planned assassination.28 Of course, Nazi Germany was not just a big misunderstanding, and after the failed putsch, Goerdeler was arrested, tortured for months by the Gestapo, and then executed.
The fourth common strategic flaw is a failure to adequately negotiate the relationship between aboveground and underground operations. We touched on this on a number of occasions in the organization section. Many groups—notably the Black Panthers—failed to implement an adequate firewall between the aboveground and underground. But we aren’t just talking about organizational partitions and separation; the history of resistance has showed again and again the larger strategic challenge of coordinating cooperative aboveground and underground action.
This has a lot to do with building mutual support and solidarity. The Weather Undeground in its early years was notably abysmal at this. Their attitude and rhetoric was aggressively militant. The organization, in the words of its own members (written after the fact), had a “tendency to consider only bombings or picking up the gun as revolutionary, with the glorification of the heavier the better,” an attitude which even alienated other armed revolutionary organizations like the BPP.29 Indeed, the Weather Underground would deliberately seek confrontation for the sake of confrontation even with people with whom it professed alignment. For example, in one action during the Vietnam War, Weather Underground members went to a working-class beach in Boston and erected a Vietcong flag, knowing that many on the beach had family in the US armed forces. When encircled, instead of discussing the war, they aggressively ratcheted up the tension, idealistically believing that after a brawl both sides could head over to the bar for a serious chat. Instead, the Weather Underground got their asses kicked.30
Now, there’s something to be said for pushing the limits of “legitimate” resistance. There’s something to be said for giving hesitant resisters a kick in the pants—or at least a good example—when they should be doing better. But that’s not what the Weather Underground did. In part the problem was their lack of a clear and articulable strategy. In his memoir, anarchist Michael Albert relates a story about being asked to attend an early Weather Underground action so that he could see what they do. “About ten of us, or thereabouts, piled into a subway car heading for the stop nearest a large dorm at Boston University. While in the subway, trundling along underground, one of the Weathermen, according to prearranged agreement, stood up on his seat to give a speech to his captive audience of other subway riders. He nervously yelled out ‘Country Sucks, Kick Ass,’ and promptly sat down. That was their entire case. It was their whole damn enchilada.”31 What are people supposed to get from that? By contrast, no one reading the Black Panther Party’s Ten Point Plan would be confused about their strategy and goals.
But the Weather Underground’s most ineffective actions in the aboveground vs. underground department were those that actually harmed aboveground organizations. Their actions in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) are a prime example. SDS was a broad-based organization with wide support, which focused on participatory democracy, direct action, and nonviolent civil disobedience for civil rights and against the war. Before the formation of the Weather Underground, a group called the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM), led by Bernardine Dohrn, later a leader of the Weather Underground, essentially hijacked SDS. They gained power at a 1969 national SDS convention and expelled members of a rival faction (the Progressive Labor Party and Worker Student Alliance). They hoped to push the entire organization into more militant action, but their coup caused a split in the organization, which rapidly disintegrated in the following years. In the decades since, no leftist student organization has managed to even approach the scale of SDS.
The bottom line is that RYM took a highly functional aboveground group and destroyed it. The Weather Underground’s exaltation of militancy got in the way of radical change and caused a permanent setback in popular leftist organizing. What the Weather Underground members failed to realize is that not everyone is going to participate in underground or armed resistance, and that everyone does not need to participate in those things. The civil rights and antiwar movements were appropriate places for actionists to try to build nonviolent mass movements, where very important work was being done, and SDS was a crucial group doing that work. Aboveground and underground groups need each other, and they must work in tandem, both organizationally and strategically. It’s a major strategic error for any faction—aboveground or underground—to dismiss the other half of their movement. To arrogantly destroy a functioning organization is even worse.
There is a fifth common strategic failure, which in some ways is the most important of them all: the unwillingness or inability to apply appropriate tactics to carry out the strategy. Is your resistance movement using its entire tool chest? A resistance movement that is fighting to win considers every operation and every tactic it can possibly employ. That doesn’t mean that it actually uses every tool or tactic. But nothing is simply dismissed without consideration.
The Weather Underground, to return again to their example, was a group which began with an earnest desire to fight back, to “bring the war home,” and express genuine solidarity with the people of Vietnam and other countries under American attack by taking up arms. Initially, this was meant to include attacks on human beings in key positions in the military-industrial complex. Indeed, before they went underground, as we’ve already discussed, the Weather Underground was eager to attack even low-level representatives of the state hierarchy, specifically police. Shortly after going underground, they changed their strategy.
The turning point in the Weather Underground’s strategy of violence versus nonviolence was the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion. In the spring of 1970, an underground cell there was building bombs in preparation for a planned attack on a social event for noncommissioned officers at a nearby army base. However, a bomb detonated prematurely in the basement, killing three people, injuring two others (who fled), and destroying the house. After the explosion, the Weather Underground took what you could call a nonviolent approach to bombings—they attacked symbols of power like the Pentagon and the Capitol building, but went out of their way to case the scenes before detonation to ensure that there were no human casualties.
Rather ironically, their post–Greenwich Village tactical approach again became largely symbolic and nonviolent, much like the aboveground groups they criticized. Lacking connections to other movements and organizations, and lacking a clear strategic goal, the Weather Underground’s efforts were doomed to be ineffective.
I need to come clean. When I joined Colorado River Ecosystem v. Colorado, the first-ever federal lawsuit to seek personhood and the rights of nature for a major ecosystem, my intentions were not completely sincere. The truth is, I never thought we had a chance in hell. I saw the lawsuit as an opportunity to guide concerned people through a process that would shatter their false hopes, replace them with experiential knowledge of the vast difficulties inherent in working for change within the legal system and catalyze more effective action.
The lawsuit failed, of course. The Colorado Attorney General privately threatened the attorney representing us, Jason Flores-Williams, with sanctions if he did not withdraw the case. When he refused, the Attorney General formally filed a request for sanctions with the court and a motion to dismiss in the same afternoon. Flores-Williams, afraid that he could not respond adequately to both the sanctions and the motion to dismiss, voluntarily withdrew the case.
When filing a lawsuit, however, it’s best not to proclaim publicly that you expect the case to fail. Judges jealously guard their calendars from anything they perceive to be a waste of time. Corporate and government lawyers vigilantly monitor individuals involved in cases filed against them for any opportunity to argue that novel legal theories like the rights of nature are frivolous, to label them as attempts to harass corporations or government, and to demand that they be punished with sanctions. Media pundits search for audio clips and social media posts to take out of context while accusing grassroots groups of filing lawsuits as a backhanded fundraising ploy.
At the same time, and in order to shatter as many hopes as possible, it was necessary to attract attention. No one likes a loser. If our supporters caught so much as a whiff of my true disbeliefs, when the case failed, they could mistake the failure as the result of the half-assed efforts of activists who weren’t truly committed, instead of the result of a legal system designed to protect exploitation of the natural world.
So I suspended my disbelief and dove zealously into the work. For four months, the lawsuit was my full-time job. I sifted through case law for opinions supporting our position. I wrote a portion of the document, called the “complaint,” that signaled the official filing of the lawsuit. I wrote a series of articles describing the need for the rights of nature. I gave interviews to journalists, radio hosts and members of Comedy Central’s The Opposition production team.
And I bit my tongue over and over again.
In the five weeks before the case was dismissed, I put 4,000 miles on my 2004 Jeep Grand Cherokee traveling with photographer Michelle McCarron around the Colorado River Basin. After all that stress, my poor Jeep’s transmission blew up yesterday, so I have nowhere to go and nothing to do but reflect. With time so short and the need for effective action so great, I wonder if I wasted my time appealing to a legal system that exists to protect those destroying the natural world. I wonder if I betrayed the trust of the good people rooting so hard for the lawsuit to succeed. Worst of all, I wonder if I betrayed the river.
***
I bit my tongue on the steps of the Alfred A. Arraj Federal Courthouse in Denver, for example. I stood before a crowd gathered to hear me speak about the lawsuit. We were supposed to have a hearing, but the court had postponed it at the last minute. With so many of us traveling to Denver from across the Colorado River Basin, we decided to proceed with the press conference anyway.
It wasn’t the anxiety that public speaking can induce that produced the tremor in my hand, the acid in my gut and the quiver in my voice. It was a simple question, unresolved: Is it dishonest to speak of hope when you feel none?
I began my speech explaining that I had arrived there after spending three weeks with the river. I recounted the violence I witnessed in La Poudre Pass, where the Grand Ditch lies in wait to steal the Colorado River’s water moments after the union of snowpack, sunshine and gravity gives her birth. I reported the energy expended in pumping the river’s water uphill from Lake Granby reservoir to Shadow Mountain reservoir and then into Grand Lake before the Alva B. Adams tunnel drags the water 13 miles across the Continental Divide and beneath Rocky Mountain National Park to meet Front Range demands. I described the view from Palisade, Colorado, where peaches are grown in the middle of the desert and crisscrossing canals, seen from the mountains, appear as vast, mechanical tattoos sewn into the flesh of the land.
I paused at this point, knowing that after presenting my audience with this series of distressing images, I was supposed to leave them with a positive message. While I reflected on what I had seen and said, however, I felt the river’s truth spill over me.
For weeks, I thought I had been listening to the Colorado River. But she isn’t a river anymore. Not truly. She has been so diverted and dammed, experienced so much extraction and exploitation, that the best way to describe her is not as a river, but as an industrial project, as a series of tunnels, concrete channels and canals, as another tortured corpse stretched across civilization’s rack.
While this realization washed over me, I considered our lawsuit and the rights of nature. I wondered if it is possible to grant rights to a ghost. I questioned whether the Colorado River could ever recover from what’s been done to her. Grief threatened to overwhelm me, to silence me in despair. If I had been by myself, caught in the flow of these emotions in private, or if I was simply being honest, I would have fallen to the concrete and wept. I steadied myself and as the despair trickled away, rage rushed in to take its place. That rage burned with the heat of the desert sun reflected in the Colorado’s face and I knew that, ghost or not, she who haunts is not dead.
But, again, I said nothing of her rage, of her attempts to knock down dams, of her furious floods. I said nothing to acknowledge her ghost. Instead, in calm, reasonably legal tones, I urged the crowd to support the rights of nature.
***
The case is now finished. I can stop biting my tongue and spit the blood out. I can be honest. If I betrayed you, I am sorry. If I betrayed the river, I beg forgiveness. As an act of penance, I offer the stories that follow. These stories are what I really think. These stories are what I wish I said when the journalists were scribbling down my words, when I sat, live and on air, at the radio microphones, and when the cameras were recording. These stories are the truth.
We listed the river as the only plaintiff, so it could be properly said that the Colorado River herselfwas suing the State of Colorado. Major ecosystems are not currently considered capable of bearing rights or filing their own lawsuits under American law, so I agreed, with four others, to serve as a “next friend” of the Colorado River. Similar to guardians ad litem, next friends represent the interests of those deemed legally incompetent, such as children, the mentally disabled and rivers.
Simply put, next friends speak for those who can’t speak for themselves.
On a general level, it’s not difficult to understand the Colorado River’s interests. A simple Google search will tell you that pollution kills the river’s inhabitants, climate change threatens the snowpack that provides much of the river’s water, and dams prevent the river from flowing to the sea in the Gulf of California. But, friendship, even legal “next friendship,” entails an intimate and personal relationship. To best represent the Colorado River’s interests, to be her friend, I wanted to build this intimate, personal relationship with her. To build a relationship with someone is to speak with her, to spend time with her, to listen to her. And that’s what I did.
My trip with Michelle around the Colorado River Basin was guided by two questions. Everywhere we went, I asked the Colorado River: “Who are you? And, what do you need?” I asked these questions out loud, so she could hear them. I will not apologize for talking with a river.
The Colorado River speaks, but apparently not in a language many humans understand. Water is one of life’s original vernaculars, and the Colorado River speaks an ancient dialect. Snowpack murmurs in the melting sun. Rare desert rain drops off willow branches to ring across lazy pools. Streams, running over dappled stones, sing treble while distant falls take the bass.
I am human, so I am an animal. Even though the colonization of generations of my ancestors, personal trauma and cultural conditioning threaten to deafen me, I am still capable, through my animal body, of hearing the languages of life. And I believe you are capable, too. If you’ll only try.
Though the lawsuit failed, I made a friend. When your friend is in grave danger, you do everything in your power to protect her. If you don’t, you cannot call yourself her friend. The Colorado River is in grave danger and as her friend, I know I must do everything I can to protect her. If my animality gives me the ears to listen, friendship requires that I find the tongue to translate the languages of life.
Human, animal, friend…these three existences combine and compel me to translate her voice from the languages of life into English.
***
To truly understand someone, you must begin at her birth. So, Michelle and I spent two days looking for the Colorado River’s headwaters in the cold and snow above La Poudre Pass on the north edge of Rocky Mountain National Park. The pass was accessible by an unpaved, winding, pot-holed trek named Long Draw Road. It took us fourteen miles through pine and fir forests and past the frigid Long Draw Reservoir before ending abruptly in a flat where the red trunks and brown branches of winter willows braced themselves against the breeze.
The road was covered in an inch of frosty mud that required slow speeds to avoid sliding into roadside ditches. The road’s ruggedness and incessant bumps combined with sub-freezing temperatures to ask us if we were serious about seeing the river’s headwaters. I was worried that Michelle’s ’91 Toyota Previa might struggle up the pass, but the van continued to live up to the Previa model’s cult status.
Long Draw Road foreshadowed the violence we would find at the river’s headwaters. Swathes of clearcut forests escorted us along the road to the pass. The Forest Service must have been too lazy to remove any single trees that fell on the road because their employees had simply chainsawed every tree within fifty yards of the road. About three miles from the road’s end, we ran into a long, low dam trapping mountain runoff into Long Draw Reservoir. We had been expecting to find wilderness in La Poudre Pass, so encountering the dam felt like running into a wall in the dark.
The clearcuts, dam and reservoir were grievous wounds, but none of them were as bad as the Grand Ditch. We walked a quarter-mile from the end of Long Draw Road and found a sign marking the location of the river’s headwaters. On our way to the sign, we crossed over a 30-foot deep and 30-foot wide ditch pushing water from west to east. We were on the west side of the Continental Divide, where water naturally flows west, so we contemplated what black magic engineers had employed to achieve this feat. The ditch was as conspicuous in La Poudre Pass as a scarred-over gouge on a child’s face.
The Grand Ditch was begun in the late 1880s, dug by exploited crews armed with hand tools and risky dynamite. It was built to carry water, diverted from the Colorado River’s headwaters, east to growing cities on Colorado’s Front Range. About two feet of swift water ran through the ditch. Even before melting snowpack forms the tiny mountain streams identifiable as the Colorado River’s origins, water is stolen from her. Pausing in a half-foot of powder, I wondered whether the water stored here would end up on a Fort Collins golf course or stirred by the fins of a vaquita porpoise in the Gulf of California.
I asked theColorado Riverfor the tale of her nativity. She described her birth from a wild womb formed by the oceans, the sun’s consistency, heavy winter clouds, tall mountain peaks and snowpack. She rues that heremergence from this womb led immediately to her exploitation. And the young Colorado River hates the violence that will follow her the rest of her life.
***
In most places, life protects themodern human’s fragile sense of self-importance by veiling the weight of time in the soft accumulation of soil, by disguising the vastness of the universe in the reassuring consistency of an undisturbed horizon and by salving existential angst with a diversity of nonhuman companions. There are places, however, where life refuses to disguise herself and human self-importance disintegrates.
The red rock deserts and canyon lands of southeastern Utah, where we followed the Colorado River, are some of these places. The reality of time, frozen and piled where the land was rent into mesas and plateaus, crashes down on human consciousness where human bones shiver in the shadows and foreshadows are whispered by stones, boulders and the bones of the land.
She beckoned us south through these lands. She fled through the sheer red rock walls that she sculpted as monuments to her power. She paused, at times, in warm pools, to let the colors of stone reflect from her face and to rejoice in her own beauty. To interpret her work as vanity is to misunderstand; only her creations are worthy of her celebration. The waters flowing through our bodies coursed against our skin and tugged on our veins, yearning to mingle with their kin. We ached with regret for the moment life would necessarily drag us from her banks.
Mesmerized and seeking the confluence of the Green and Colorado Rivers, we got lost in Canyonlands National Park. We failed to reach the confluence, and thus failed to speak with the two rivers. At first, we were angry with ourselves. We ended up hiking close to fourteen miles in seven hours, up canyon walls abruptly rising six or seven hundred feet, through a rainstorm and across canyon floors covered in several inches of loose sand using muscles we forgot we had. We thought we had done it all for nothing. Worst of all, feeling a responsibility to tell the Colorado River’s story, we thought that we had let the river down.
But the deeper I think about it, the clearer an image of the river, waving through the orange sunshine of a desert dusk, becomes. She seems to smile with the compassionate gleam of a wise elder. “You should have known,” she says. And now I do: We did not simply miss the cairns, lose the trail, and end up five miles south of the confluence and six miles from our cars after sunset. No, we lost more than the trail. We lost our self-importance. And only humility remained.
***
Water is life. But water is also death. Water brings a pleasant taste to the parched tongue, but water also brings stinging numbness to the warm-blooded. Water taken through the esophagus brings hydration. Water taken through the lungs brings suffocation. Water may be disrespected for a time, but the longer the passage of water is hampered, the angrier water becomes. Water has a long memory and, where others forget, water carries pollutants and poisons for decades.
When I think about what it would mean to fully recognize the rights of the Colorado River to exist, flourish, regenerate and naturally evolve, I know the river will demand a reckoning. I know this lyrically and I know this ecologically. Lyrically, the river is full of righteous rage. Ecologically, too many humans have come to depend on the exploitation of the river and the rest of the natural world. The balance that must be achieved will come with profound pain. Humans will die, their lifestyles will be dramatically changed and those who require the gifts of civilization will see those gifts taken.
The black waters of the dammed Blue and Colorado Rivers stroked the Dillon Reservoir walls with their dark thoughts and taught me these lessons. It was several hours after sunset and well below freezing. A certain morbidity rose from the artificial lake and crystallized to hang in the air. Somewhere out of sight, but perilously near, I could feel the stirrings of anger. I sensed that the anger was slow to swell, but irresistible when fully aroused. I was mesmerized by the stars spilling over ripples and by the crescent moon’s silver threads, two nights from new, dancing across the water. In the town of Dillon below, harsh electric lights sparked and crackled with a troubled tension.
The images came unbidden. The first faint crevice appeared in the earth-filled wall. Water hissed as it pushed through. Rivulets appeared as tears rolling down the dam’s face. Then, a series of sharp cracks rang out like the reports of heavy ordnance announcing the onset of battle. Earth and stone blasted away to fall into the valley. Water rushed into Dillon. Poles holding power lines snapped like toothpicks. Chunks of asphalt were ripped up. Automobiles flipped and tumbled like pebbles on a creek bed. Factory outlet stores, gas stations and multistory hotels were washed away.
The white torrents that cascaded from the broken dam were flecked with joy. The waters retook the Blue River’s original path. The waters from the Colorado, knowing they would never rejoin their mother, were gladly adopted by the Blue. It was all over in a matter of minutes. This sudden demonstration of natural power passed and a quiet peace settled where Dillon once stood. The peace wasn’t without pain. Human bodies floated facedown among the wreckage. The water regretted the deaths, but knew the human bodies would be broken down and used to heal the wounds humanity had created.
As the vividness of the images faded, I was left with the echo of a warning. I recalled all the dams in the Colorado River Basin, all dams everywhere, and I prayed that a peace could be made with the dammed waters of the world.
I have seen the silver sparks of minnows playing under brown stones. I have watched the wind shower gray pools with gold cottonwood leaves. I have been washed away in the vertigo caused by the river’s speed conflicting with the primordial stillness of canyon walls. Arundhati Roy wrote, “Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And once you’ve seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out. There’s no innocence. Either way, you’re accountable.”
I’ll never be able to drive past a dam in the Colorado River Basin and ignore the highly endangered bonytail chub who can no longer visit most of their traditional spawning beds. I’ll never be able to read the billboards praising the peaches of Palisade, Colorado, or the melons of Green River, Utah, without remembering dried up willow forests where the songs of nimble southwestern willow flycatchers have fallen silent. And whenever I close my eyes to recall the Colorado River, that blue ribbon twisting through rocky mountains and red rock canyons, I won’t be able to unsee her suffering.
As I process the last four months, I’m left with Roy’s brilliant words: I am no longer innocent and it is time to be accountable. Disbeliefs may only be suspended for so long before they slither through slits in the veil separating consciousness and subconsciousness as anxieties. Anxieties, similarly, may only be silenced for so long before they push through lips and teeth as words.
Disbeliefs, anxieties and words, when true, spawn in reality. The reality is that the loss of life on Earth currently outpaces our various resistance movements’ responses. Those in power enforce infinite growth on a finite planet. The planet’s life-support systems are resilient, but they can be pushed beyond their ability to recover. This means there is a deadline. While it is unclear when that deadline will pass, the deadline exists. If we do not stop the assaults on the planet’s life-support systems like the Colorado River, life on Earth may be impossible for a very long time, if not forever. We have little time to waste on ineffective tactics.
Hear the white crash of her torrents on the boulders she drags through the desert, feel the unyielding red rock she pushes through, lose your balance in the impatience of her swift streams, and you’ll know: The Colorado River needs to provide her waters and yearns for her home in the sea.
In all my time spent listening, I did not hear her speak of a judge’s gavel, of evidentiary proceedings or of the State of Colorado’s motion to dismiss. She cited no precedent, no binding legal authority and no argument made by silver-tongued attorneys. She did not fear questions of jurisdiction or the threat of sanctions.
No, her fears are physical and real. She fears poisonous mercury and too much selenium. She fears climate change causing less and less snow to fall and depriving her of replenishment. She fears dams.
If I could start the lawsuit all over again, maybe I would refuse the interviews, refuse to write the complaint, refuse to write anything at all. Instead, I would insist that you sit on the river’s banks, listening. And if you hear the Colorado River’s rage as she slaps the face of a dam, you’ll know that court orders aren’t the only way dams fall.
This article originally appeared at Voices For Biodiversity. VFB is grateful to the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) for introducing us to Will Falk and Michelle McCarron. CELDF is doing excellent work helping communities fight for nature’s rights and we are honored to collaborate with their team.
There’s one nagging thought that always returns to me when I’m studying WWII resistance strategy: resisters in Occupied Europe were brave, even heroic, but their actions alone did not bring down the Nazis. Resisters weakened the Nazis, hampered their actions, disrupted their logistics, and destroyed materiel. But they lacked the resources and organization to decisively engage and defeat Hitler’s forces. It took a conventional military assault by the Allies to finish the job. And the overwhelming majority of this was done by the Russians, with their large army relying heavily on infantry tactics. We can speculate about whether guerrilla uprisings in occupied countries would have eventually developed and ended Nazi rule, but that’s not what happened during the actual years of occupation.
For those of us who want to stop this culture from killing the planet, there are no capital “A” Allies with vast resources and armies. That’s the nature of our predicament. We may be able to ally ourselves with powers of lesser evil, the way that Spanish Anarchists allied themselves with Spanish Republicans and Soviets in Spain, or the way antebellum abolitionists allied themselves with Union Republicans against the Confederate South. But that will only get us so far, and joining the lesser evil can be dangerous.
How, then, would a successful resistance movement expand its actions beyond resistance that merely hampers to that which decisively dismantles civilization’s centralized systems of power, those that are allowing it to steal from the poor and destroy the planet? We’ll return to this in the Core Strategy chapter, but there are three main answers in terms of any theoretical deep green resistance movement’s “allies.” One is that the depletion of finite resources, along with the dead-ending of that pyramid scheme called industrial capitalism, will provoke a cascading industrial and economic collapse. Indeed, just during the time we’ve been writing this book, we’ve seen a banking crisis turn into a major credit crisis, which has cascaded into a recession and simmering global economic crisis. That disruption will undermine the ability of those in power to exercise their influence and concentrate wealth, and generally throw industrial civilization into a state of disarray.
A second answer is ecological and climate collapse. Cheap oil has so far insulated urban industrial people from most effects of increasing and catastrophic damage to the biosphere. But industrial collapse will mean the end of that insulation, and will mean that thousands of years of civilization’s “ecological debt” will come due. Furthermore, the earth is not just a passive battlefield—it’s alive, and it’s fighting on the side of the living.
A third, more tentative answer is that as all of this transpires, less overtly militant aboveground forces may fight against those in power out of self-interest. Once those in power no longer have the “energy slaves” offered by cheap oil and industry, they will (once again) increasingly try to extract that labor from human beings, from literal slaves. Hopefully people in the minority world, where the rich and powerful minority live, will have the good sense to see that and fight back against this enslavement, as so many people in the majority world, where the impoverished minority live, have already been doing for so long. But this is a more tenuous proposition. Popular resentment may be quick to build against a particular head of state or particular political party. Developing a mass culture of resistance against an entire economic or political system, however, can take decades. People who are privileged and entitled take a long time to change, if they change at all. More likely they will side with someone who makes big but ultimately empty promises.
Good strategy is part planning and part opportunity, and success depends on the effective use of both. In his book Guerrilla Strategies: An Historical Anthology, Gérard Chaliand suggests that the lessons of revolutionary warfare in the mid-twentieth century boil down to two key points. First, he writes, “The conditions for the insurrection must be as ripe as possible, the most favorable situation being one in which foreign domination or aggression makes it possible to mobilize broad support for a goal that is both social and national. Failing this, the ruling stratum should be in the middle of an acute political crisis and popular discontent should be both intense and wide ranging.” Second, he suggests, “The most important element in a guerrilla campaign is the underground political infrastructure, rooted in the population itself and coordinated by middle-ranking cadres. Such a structure is a prerequisite for growth and will provide the necessary recruits, information, and local logistics.”15
We’re clearly heading into a period of prolonged emergency, although the crisis will vary between chronic and acute over time. That increases the prospects for revolutionary—or rather, devolutionary—struggle, especially if radical organizations are able to anticipate and effectively seize opportunities offered by particular crises. It’s unlikely that mass support will be rallied for anticivilizational causes in the foreseeable future, because most people are happy to get the material benefits of this culture and ignore the consequences. However, an increase in political discontent can be beneficial even if it doesn’t create a majority.
Chaliand’s second conclusion is key, and even I find it a bit surprising that he would rank underground development so highly. But it makes sense; aboveground organizational infrastructure, though it may be hard work, is comparatively easy to expand. Underground infrastructure seems troublesome or irrelevant in times where resistance movements are too marginal or inactive to pose a threat. But as soon as they become successful enough to provoke significant repression, the underground becomes indispensible, and creating it at that point is extremely difficult.
The use of a crisis as an opportunity isn’t a new idea, but it has played a key role in strategic theory. Napoleon Bonaparte said that “the whole art of war consists of a well-reasoned and extremely circumspect defensive followed by rapid and audacious attack.” A similar opinion was shared by British strategist Basil Liddell Hart. As a foot soldier in World War I, Liddell Hart was injured in a gas attack and became horrified by the needless bloodshed. After the war he tried to develop strategy that would avoid the kind of carnage he’d been part of. In his book Strategy: The Indirect Approach (first published in 1941), he argued for a military strategy that has a lot in common with asymmetric strategy. Rather than attempting to carry out a direct assault on enemy military forces, he recommended making an indirect and unexpected attack on the adversary’s support systems, to decisively end the war and avoid prolonged and bloody battles.
Resisters can learn from this kind of approach. Often, because of the disorganized nature of many resistance movements, initial offensive actions are tentative and poorly coordinated. Sometimes these are celebrated because, well, at least they’re something. But they are rarely effective in and of themselves, and they may tip the hand of the resistance and allow those in power to seize the initiative.
When I’m looking for an analogy for civilization, I often think of the Borg from Star Trek. Relentlessly expansionist and essentially colonial, they insist that every indigenous culture they encounter “adapt to service” them—that every individual either assimilate to their basic imperative or die. Like any coercive hegemony, they insist that resistance is futile. They’re fundamentally industrial. They have overwhelming military force, and they’re very good at adapting to resistance. The good guys only get a few shots with their phasers before the Borg adapt, making the weapons virtually useless. Then the good guys have to rejig their tactics or run away until they have a better chance.
That’s basically what happens when a resistance group makes a token attack at the wrong time. If, instead of being “rapid and audacious,” an operation is slow and timid, the effect may be to point out the enemy’s weakness and allow them to shore it up. It removes the element of surprise. And that applies whether the resistance movement is using armed tactics, sabotage, or nonviolence.
