SEDITION SUBVERSION AND SABOTAGE FIELD MANUAL: Part 3, Sections 4 and 5
Part 3 ETHICS BASED SELECTIVE IRREGULAR WARFARE
Sections 2 and 3
4. COMMITTEES OF VIGILANCE
(4-1) Vigilante Justice
Few things have been systematically demonized more than "vigilante justice," and leading that witch hunt has been the Hollywood entertainment industry. At the height of Hollywood cowboy movies during the mid-twentieth century, the American entertainment industry was almost incapable of producing anything referencing the "Old West" that didn't feature either a demonization of stateless wild Indians on a murderous rampage with the helpless settlers saved by the military, or a lynch mob attempting to hang some innocent man with a brave sheriff saving the day. This "Wild West" narrative permeated not only motion pictures and television, but almost every work of fiction about the West written during the twentieth century.
This simple fact should cause any free-thinking person to ask why there would be such uniform condemnation of anything. Any person who owns their own mind should immediately suspect any narrative that is so one-sided, so dramatically portrayed, and pushed so heavily by the same people who support the State at every turn by justifying and glorifying the horrors of war. Consider the twentieth century Hollywood version of any portrayal of any historical event, and consider their amazing propensity to get almost every detail wrong, and you begin to see that something is rotten in Hollywood's universal condemnation of vigilantism.
When a free-thinking person recognizes propaganda on such a grand scale, that person should immediately ask why so much effort has been expended on that one topic. But of course, we know the reason. Vigilante justice is the single most dangerous thing the State faces. To start with, the State claims a monopoly on justice, but vigilante justice is the only way to achieve true justice. The alternative to vigilante justice is the perverted version the State supplies, and we know what that kind of distorted justice is, and what kind of a sick and twisted society it produces. This is the reason that every time the State has expanded and engulfed stateless societies such as pre-Cromwell Ireland, pre-English-invasion Scotland, pre-English Australia, native North America, pre-1800 Scot-Irish Appalachia, the American West prior to the post-Civil War expansion of the State, and the Zomia of upland southeast Asia, the very first thing the State does is to outlaw vigilante justice and inflict its monopoly of State justice.
This is the situation in which we find ourselves today. The State has systematically denied justice while demonizing aspects of true justice. It has, through its puppets in the media, the schools, and the clergy, taught that revenge is uncivilized and barbaric or even sinful. Justice is redefined as whatever the current government decides in each individual case. Recompense is paid to the government and almost never to the victim. The government, not the victim, dictates the punishment and then the government imprisons and punishes the accused perpetrator behind closed doors and out of public sight. The government, through immoral taxation, forces victims and innocent bystanders to pay for the incarceration process, all the time making false assurances of safety and security. Then it arbitrarily releases criminals back into society that are often more violent and dangerous than when they were first incarcerated. And finally in desperation, as its failures become more and more obvious, governments begins redefining crime so that almost any normal peaceful activity can be criminalized and punished. And yet people fear vigilante justice. It would be comical if it weren't so tragic.
If we understand that everything we've been taught about vigilante justice is false, and we know the State is incapable of producing justice. If it attempts to enforce its monopoly control to prevent vigilante justice, logically we should know that we need to revisit what we believe about justice.
True justice has a number of components. Among these are:
- Assurance – Knowing that this perpetrator will never do this crime to this victim again.
- Recompense – A return of, or a monetary compensation for what was stolen or damaged.
- Revenge – Personally inflicting or witnessing the infliction of suffering upon the perpetrator, above and beyond the original damages, for the purpose of easing the trauma of the victim and to show the perpetrator and the community that this behavior is unacceptable.
Scholars who study this topic have endlessly discussed how these systems have functioned for extended periods without government interference. They've also shown that stateless societies very quickly develop systems to ensure true justice, but until now one thing has been missing from the conversation. That is the failure of non-state justice systems to defend people from the crime gangs that operate governments. When stateless people are invaded by a government those people respond in several ways, but the one thing we don't see is vigilante groups treating government employees and State actors as the crime gangs that they are. This is something we can address. We simply begin forming committees of vigilance and, one at a time on local levels, we begin prosecuting those who act on behalf of the international crime gang known as the State. We start with the ones we can reach. We touch those who can be touched. We get better each time we act, and we weaken the State with every small strike. Eventually we can touch those who were out of reach before, and at some point we reach the untouchables.
(4-2) Forming Committees of Vigilance
A committee of vigilance should be a secret unit made up of whatever combination of dedicated underground activists you have available. The committee should concern itself with one thing: justice. What sports teams are doing or how the weather has been can be discussed anywhere with anyone, but when a committee of vigilance meets they should do so with one purpose and one purpose only; to seek and deliver justice. When individual members of a vigilance committee are found to constantly bring up outside issues or distractions, that member should be excluded from the meetings. Natural leaders will likely develop but anyone who begins to shift the focus of the committee to self-glorification should be excluded from the meetings. If possible, the committee should be made up of individual warriors and trusted non-combatant members of the underground, with the individual warriors acting as the enforcement wing. A committee doesn't have to include an enforcement wing, but without one it becomes an exercise in academics. That's not necessarily a bad thing, if the committee can eventually develop an enforcement wing. In that way, a committee can be a teaching opportunity for activists who feel the need to move into the individual warrior classification. Once the local committee connects with a network of vigilance committees, members of the enforcement wing or wings can be shared, as their specialties may be unique.
A committee of vigilance shouldn't include every underground activist in an area, unless you have a serious shortage of activists. The committee should be very selective of who is allowed in, and who they communicate with on committee business outside of the committee. Whenever possible a committee should seek to interact with other committees, forming a distributed network, ideally spreading globally. It shouldn't be a hard rule to exclude aboveground activists, but everyone involved in a committee of vigilance should clearly understand the risks involved. Authoritarians on every level of the State will, as soon as they are aware of us, begin referring to us as terrorists. This is the reason such an emphasis on secrecy should be employed.
The primary purpose of a committee of vigilance should be to develop target lists, hold target review hearings, do target risk/benefit analysis, and make final decisions on the fate of the target, then communicate that decision to the enforcement wing. The secondary purpose of a committee of vigilance should be to discuss potential new members of the underground, develop trust lists and contact lists (both to be kept encrypted and secured) and expand network connections. Additionally every member of a committee of vigilance should have a clear understanding of the concept of mission creep and the committee should be constantly self-examining to assure that mission creep doesn't slip into their activities.
5. FUNDING
Compared to funding a State based justice system, vigilante justice is practically free and usually funds itself. Again, stateless societies tend to solve problems like funding on their own very quickly. But getting a committee of vigilance started and functional under the current circumstance will cost a small amount of money. That fact should not prevent us from moving ahead in the process. Local groups can move as slow as they need to, so long as they are moving in the right direction. Always remember, we must keep our goal as winning the long fight, not solving an immediate issue. Moving slowly but directly towards a goal is better than moving rapidly in the wrong direction. So a lack of funding should never be an excuse to sit idly by doing nothing. Be creative and do what you can do with the resources you have.
That said, since we know that war is paid for through the stolen money that governments extract from the working masses, we then know that the profits of war are filthy lucre and are not the rightful property of those corporations, bankers, executives, politicians, and Trumanites who possess them. The filthy lucre of the State lies in abundance for those brave enough to walk into the Dragon's lair and take it, but walking out of that lair with the gold requires more than bravery.
(5-1) Filthy Lucre
That's the simple, accurate definition of filthy lucre. The money itself takes on no magical residue of its ill-gotten past. Money is inanimate and is not to blame for human actions. It carries with it no guilt of past deeds. Stolen money in the possession of thieves, robbers, crony corporations, crony executives, crony bankers, politicians, and other such scum is unowned property and available for rightful homesteading. Additionally, since these crime gang members are routinely guilty of either direct aggression on the innocent, or are guilty of aggression through proxy, none of the property they have come to possess under any circumstances is protected by natural rights theory and is therefore rightfully unowned. It's part of the duty of a properly functioning justice system to acquire such funds and utilize those funds to accomplish the three aspects of justice listed above, namely; assurance, recompense, and revenge. We cannot assure victims that the robbery won't continue so long as the crime gang known as the State continues to function. So one of our priorities in dealing with filthy lucre should be to safely extract as much as possible from the criminals and repurpose it for our cause of ending the State.
Methods of liberating the filthy lucre of the State will vary widely, according to the skill levels of activists and the opportunities presented in our interaction with State actors. It is imperative that we maintain our principles. We cannot terrorize the innocent, and the families of State actors are not guilty by default. We must be surgical and precise in our handling of State actors, and whenever possible we should stay anonymous and keep the purpose of our cause hidden for as long as possible.
Part 1:
Section 3
Section 4
Sections 5 and 6
Part 2:
Section 2
Section 3
Section 4
Section 5
This post has been edited and abridged from the original SEDITION SUBVERSION AND SABOTAGE FIELD MANUAL by Ben Stone.
