Leaderless Resistance
From Metapedia
Leaderless Resistance is a political resistance strategy in which small, independent groups (covert cells) challenge an established adversary such as a government. Leaderless resistance can encompass anything from non-violent disruption and disobedience to bombings, assassinations and other violent agitation. Leaderless cells lack bidirectional, vertical command links operating without a hierarchal command.
Given the simplicity of the strategy, leaderless resistance has been employed by a wide-range of movements, from terrorist and supremacism groups through animal rights, anti-corporate, anti-abortion, and environmentalist activists.
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[edit] General
A typical covert cell operates as anything from a lone individual to a small group of members. The basic characteristic of the structure is that there is no explicit communication between cells which are otherwise acting toward the same goals. Members of one cell usually have little or no specific information on who else is agitating on behalf of their cause.
Leaderless movements may have symbolic figureheads. It can be a public figure or an inspirational author, who picks generic targets and objectives, but does not actually manage or execute plans. While this may be loosely viewed as a vertical command structure, it is notably unidirectional: a titular leader makes pronouncements and activists may respond but there is no established contactbetween the two levels of organization.
As a result, leaderless resistance cells are largely insusceptible to informants and traitors. As there is neither a center that may be destroyed, nor links between the cells that may be infiltrated, it is more difficult for established authorities to arrest the development of a leaderless resistance movement than more conventional hierarchies.
Given its asymmetrical character and the fact that it is often strategically adopted in the face of an obvious institutional power imbalance, leaderless resistance has much in common with guerrilla warfare. The latter strategy, however, usually retains some form of organized, bidirectional leadership and is often more broad-based than the individualized actions of leaderless cells.
While the concept of leaderless resistance is often based on resistance by violent means, it is not limited to them. The same structure can be used by non-violent groups authoring, printing and distributing samizdat literature, using the Internet to create self-propagating boycotts against political opponents, maintaining an alternative electronic currency outside of the reach of the taxing governments and transaction-logging banks.
[edit] History Of The Concept
The concept of leaderless resistance was reportedly developed by Col. Ulius Louis Amoss, an alleged U.S. intelligence officer, in the early 1960s. An anti-communist, Amoss saw leaderless resistance as a backup for the possibility of a Communist seizure of the United States.
The concept was revived and popularized in an essay published by the anti-government activist Louis Beam in 1983 and again in 1992. Beam advocated leaderless resistance as a technique for white nationalists to continue the struggle against the U.S. government despite an overwhelming imbalance in power and resources.
Beam argued that conventional hierarchical pyramidal organizations are extremely dangerous for their participants, when employed in a resistance movement against government, because of the ease of disclosing the chain of command. A more workable approach would be to convince the like-minded individuals to form independent cells, without close communication between each other, but generally operating in the same direction.
[edit] Leaderless Resistance Throughout The World
[edit] Far Right Organizations
The concept of leadership resistance remains important to much far right thinking in the United States, both in response to Amoss's initial fear (foreign forces on U.S. soil) but increasingly also in line with Beam,as a response to perceived federal government over-reach at the expense of individual rights. The actions of Timothy McVeigh are perhaps the most extreme example in the United States. McVeigh acted largely alone, but based on motivations widespread amongst the anti-government and militia movement.
Leaderless resistance is not only used toward anti-government ends on the far right. Xenophobic organizations such as White Aryan Resistance and the British Combat18 have adopted and advocate the tactic. The modern Ku Klux Klan is also credited with having developed a leaderless resistance model. Troy Southgate also advocated forms of leaderless resistance during his time as a leading activist in the National Revolutionary Faction and a pioneer of National-Anarchism.
[edit] Animal Rights Activists
In the 1980s, the radical Earth First! environmental movement adopted the leaderless resistance model. The strategy is now actively employed by animal rights and environmental interest groups, including Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty and the Earth Liberation Front, as well as the Animal Liberation Front.
Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty, provides a case study in how recruitment and mobilization can occur in a leaderless model. Comprehensive internet sites provide potential sympathizers lists, for instance, of senior Huntingdon personnel (including addresses) and businesses associated with the Huntingdon animal testing.
Despite some successes, leaderless animal rights and environmental movements generally lack the broad popular support that often occurs in strictly political or military conflicts.
[edit] Challenging Leaderless Resistance
Traditional organizations leave behind much evidence of their activities, such as money trails, and training and recruitment material. Leaderless resistances, as they are as much ideologies as organizations, generally lack such traces. The effects of their operations, globally reported by the mass media, act as a sort of messaging and recruitment advertising.
The internet provides investigators with further challenges. The individual cells (and even a single person can be a cell) can communicate over the internet, anonymously or semi-anonymously publishing and sharing information online, to be found by others through well-known websites. Even where legally and technically possible to ascertain who accessed what, it is often practically impossible to discern in reasonable time frame who is a real threat and who is just curious, a journalist, or a web crawler.
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