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Featured image: power line sabotaged by the African National Congress Editor’s note: The following is from the chapter “ Tactics and Targets” of the book Deep Green Resistance: A Strategy to Save the Planet . This book is now available for free online. by Aric McBay Some tactics can be carried out underground—like general liberation organizing and propaganda—but are more effective aboveground. Where open speech is dangerous, these types of tactics may move underground to adapt to circumstances. The African National Congress, in its struggle for basic human rights, should have been allowed to work aboveground, but that simply wasn’t possible in repressive apartheid South Africa. ...

Featured image: the 1774 burning of the cargo ship Peggy Stewart , an escalation of the Boston Tea Party. Editor’s note: The following is from the chapter “ Tactics and Targets" of the book Deep Green Resistance: A Strategy to Save the Planet . This book is now available for free online. by Aric McBay For me, nonviolence was not a moral principle but a strategy; there is no moral goodness in using an ineffective weapon. ...

Editor’s note: The following is from the chapter “ Introduction to Strategy” of the book Deep Green Resistance: A Strategy to Save the Planet . This book is now available for free online. by Aric McBay Resistance is not one-sided. For any strategy resisters can come up with, those in power will do whatever they can to disrupt and undermine it. Any strategic process—for either side—will change the context of the strategy. A strategic objective is a moving target, and there is an intrinsic delay in implementing any strategy. The way to hit a moving target is by “leading” it—by looking slightly ahead of the target. Don’t aim for where the target is; aim for where it’s going to be. ...

Editor’s note: The following is from the chapter “ Introduction to Strategy” of the book Deep Green Resistance: A Strategy to Save the Planet . This book is now available for free online. by Aric McBay This shift toward more militant defiance of slavery was all wonderful, of course. And it certainly increased the success of the Underground Railroad if a slave catcher knew that a trip into strongly abolitionist areas might end with a bullet in his chest. But, again, there was a problem. Even this rapidly growing and increasingly defiant abolitionist movement had not been able to successfully challenge the institution of slavery itself. The situation continued to get worse. Writes Stewart, “More than two decades of peacefully preaching against the sin of slavery had yielded not emancipation but several new slave states and an increase of over half a million held in bondage, trends that seemingly secured a death grip by the ‘slave power’ on American life.” 41 Cotton agriculture in the South often destroyed the landbase, and that, combined with a growing slave population, meant that it was profitable—according to some historians, even imperative—that slaveholders expand westward in order to maintain the slave economy. Each new slave state shifted the balance of political power in the Union even more toward slavery. ...

Featured image: Struggle for freedom in a Maryland barn. Engraving from William Still’s The Underground Rail Road Editor’s note: The following is from the chapter “ Introduction to Strategy” of the book Deep Green Resistance: A Strategy to Save the Planet . This book is now available for free online. by Aric McBay 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. ...

Featured image: Weather Underground, 1969 Editor’s note: The following is from the chapter “ Introduction to Strategy” of the book Deep Green Resistance: A Strategy to Save the Planet . This book is now available for free online. by Aric McBay 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. ...

Editor’s note: The following is from the chapter “ Introduction to Strategy” of the book Deep Green Resistance: A Strategy to Save the Planet . This book is now available for free online. by Aric McBay 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. ...

Editor’s note: The following is from the chapter “ Introduction to Strategy” of the book Deep Green Resistance: A Strategy to Save the Planet . This book is now available for free online. by Aric McBay It’s also worth looking at the principles that guide strategic nonviolence. Effective nonviolent organizing is not a pacifist attempt to convince the state of the error of its ways, but a vigorous, aggressive application of force that uses a subset of tactics different from those of military engagements. ...

Editor’s note: The following is from the chapter “ Introduction to Strategy” of the book Deep Green Resistance: A Strategy to Save the Planet . This book is now available for free online. by Aric McBay Despite the limitations created by their smaller numbers, resistance movements do have real strategic choices, from the loftiest overarching strategy to the most detailed tactical level. Let’s explore beyond the default palette of actions. Resisters can and must do far better than the strategy of the status quo. ...

Editor’s note: The following is from the chapter “ Introduction to Strategy” of the book Deep Green Resistance: A Strategy to Save the Planet . This book is now available for free online. by Aric McBay I do not wish to kill nor to be killed, but I can foresee circumstances in which both these things would be by me unavoidable. We preserve the so-called peace of our community by deeds of petty violence every day. Look at the policeman’s billy and handcuffs! Look at the jail! Look at the gallows! Look at the chaplain of the regiment! We are hoping only to live safely on the outskirts of this provisional army. So we defend ourselves and our hen-roosts, and maintain slavery. ...