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Leaderless Resistance

[original article: 2004/06/08; last updated 2006/09/14]

Leaderless Resistance is a way to organize a large number of individuals struggling against an enemy, usually an entrenched power.

A leaderless resistance is organized as independent individual persons or small groups called cells. A particular group might have a leader within it, but there are no leaders directing more than one group.

Conventional organizations, such as most armies, governments, political parties, and corporations, have a very different structure. It is a hierarchical structure. Most of the people in it, the ones that do most of the work, are at the bottom. The funding, instruction, and commands, come from a few leaders near the top. Because of it's centralized command and control, the conventional organization can be manipulated, or destroyed, by controlling only a few resources near the top.

But in a leaderless resistance, it's individual groups are self funded, self trained, and they decide for themselves how to help the resistance. Their decisions are based on their well understood common goal of the resistance, and whatever Intelligence that they can collect.

A lot of false information has been written about leaderless resistance. From the results from a Google search (Live Web Page: here) that I did on 2004 Jun 06, I saw only one page, an essay by Louis Beam (Live Web Page: here Cached Web Page: here), that did not seem distorted. The others falsely characterized leaderless resistance as being:

• Secretive;
• used by Evil groups doing acts of sabotage and violence;
• used mostly by terrorists;
• a last resort after failure as a conventional organization.

But NONE of this is true

Leaderless resistance is not necessarilly bad. Leaderless resistance can be used for either good or Evil, as any other tool, such as cars, knives, guns, or words.

A leaderless resistance might not be Secret at all.

• If it does unpopular things, such as the terrorist killing and maiming of innocent people, then it needs to keep itself Secret from most people.
• But if it does popular things, such as resisting an oppressive government, then it does not need to be Secret, and in fact can gain members and become stronger by acting openly.

And most terrorist acts are NOT committed by leaderless resistances. Most terrorist acts are committed by conventional hierarchical organizations. The funding, training, and commands, come from the top. For example, if you believe the news reports and an FBI Live Web Page here, "Bin Laden is the leader of a terrorist organization known as Al-Qaeda", a conventional hierarchical organization. Though Al-Qaeda was supposedly responsible for various terrorist acts, including the Attack On America 2001 Sep 11, the Bin Laden page makes no specific mentin of that attack.

[Note, terrorism changed in 2005, if you believed the "experts" appearing in the mainstream media, or the Live Web Page here in the increasingly political Wikipedia.

The new terrorists, such as the ones that were caught trying to use liquid explosives to destroy airliners from Great Britain, did not get orders from leaders. They were said to be "home-grown" terrorists, and "self-starters". They sympathized with the causes of earlier terrorists, and they decided to act on their own.

In fact, by the 5th anniversary of 9-11, Al-Qaeda itself had changed from a hierarchical organization to a leaderless resistance. Bin Laden was no longer its leader who gave specific orders, but only a figurehead who made pronouncements and gave general guidance. That is, if you believed the "experts". ]

And leaderless resistance is not necessarilly a strategy of last resort. For example, the struggle of colonists against the British during America's revolutionary era (Live Web Page: here) contained leaderless resistance components from the beginning. When it started, that's all that there was, when the resistance consisted of two types of groups:

• Committees of Correspondence (Live Web Pages here and here) collected and distributed Intelligence by letter to other groups in the resistance. This Intelligence consisted of information about British activities, including laws passed in England that affected the colonies, and ideas and news about resistance activities.

• Sons of Liberty groups (Live Web Page here) used this information to plan and execute various acts of resistance, including protests and sabotage. A well known example of this is the Boston Tea Party.

The resistance grew in size and strength. Eventually it was strong enough to support conventional hierarchical components, including an army with General George Washington as it's leader.

The main advantage of a leaderless resistance is that it is very difficult for an enemy to use COINTELPRO-style methods to infiltrate and control it. It can be orders of magnitude more expensive to stop a leaderless resistance than to stop a conventional hierarchical resistance with the same number of people. This is because:

• A conventional organization can be controlled by controlling only a few people near the top who give the orders and distribute the funding. Infiltration, assassination, bribery, blackmale, and other methods of control, applied to a few key people, can neutralize most of the organization.

• But in a leaderless resistance, it's individual groups are self funded, self trained, and they decide for themselves how to help the resistance. So stopping a leaderless resistance means stopping most of the individuals or groups, of which there can be a very large number.

Leaderless resistance has vulnerabilities. The main one is communication. The members of an effective leaderless resistance need to communicate information about their activities and about enemy activities. They need to communicate with each other and with prospective new resistance members. A modern leaderless resistance might try to do this with Internet Web sites, e-mail, telephones, postal mail, and coverage by the news media.

But the opponent's Counterintelligence services can cause these communication systems to fail, using Internet Censorship, tampering with telephone calls and postal mail, and control of the news media. These communication failures can easilly go unnoticed or be incorrectly interpreted as bad luck, especially when combined with other distractions.

Project Media Matrix's Truth Distribution Network (TDN) and Freenet are some of the many attempts to provide communications methods that are secure and effective for both leaderless resistances and conventional hierarchical organiztions.

In 2003 a large quasi-leaderless resistance formed that became known briefly as the "Second Superpower" It was united by the idea that plans by the US and it's allies to start a War Against Iraq were wrong and had to be stopped. It produced antiwar protests of hundreds of thousands of people (Live Web Page: here), larger than the protests during the US war in Vietnam.

But the media ignored the protests. Iraq was invaded. The "Second Superpower" was Googlewashed from the Internet, divided in it's goal, and eventually neutralized (Live Web Page: here).

The next big leaderless resistance might be the "9-11 truth movement" (Live Web Page: here). 9-11, the Attack On America 2001 Sep 11, has been shown to have been an inside job. It and other staged terrorist attacks are being used to justify the so-called "war on terror".

Because this unnecessary "war on terror" is affecting so many people's lives negatively, the 9-11 truth movement has the potential to draw millions of people into its ranks. One of the components of this movement, the rather successful group "Scholars for 9/11 Truth" (Live Web Page: here), already operates as a leaderless resistance.

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