My Review Of "The Secret Freedom Fighter"

(First thoughts here, full book link here)

I have to say it's a really empowering book! The author has a thorough understanding of where tyranny is vulnerable, and the personal experience to back it up.

This is certainly not a 'politically correct' book, and the reader is encouraged to be creative with many different ways to assassinate the enforcers of tyranny and make it look like an accident, distribute underground propaganda, or simply engage in demoralising practical jokes and acts of sabotage, for example:

"The idea is to do as much as you can to make life miserable for the oppressors without getting caught...Smear smelly substances on door handles or other places that government officials will touch. Squirt liquid solder into locks. Practical jokes are never funny to the people on the receiving end. They get mad, and they can stay mad for hours or days. Mad people never do their job well." (p31)

The best bits are the real stories from the author, mixed in alongside his vision of a future in which Americans are occupied by a brutal Soviet military dictatorship. Though, and this of course is the purpose of the book, the lessons it contains are applicable to any totalitarian society.

Particuarly entertaining is the section describing a rather unfortunate 24 hours in the life of an occupying Soviet Colonel, entitled Ivan's Terrible Day. In a sometimes humorous but still deadly serious way, the effect a handful of people acting on their own initiative can have against a mighty military machine is shown.

This should be required reading for everyone in the times we are living, not least those who are a part of 'the system'. It pulls no punches, isn't afraid to describe, sometimes in gritty detail, ways to disrupt a totalitatrian regime - yet at the same time is morally straight and true to the ethics of its subtitle: Fighting Tyranny Without Terrorising The Innocent.

Perhaps the final line of the book is the most telling:
"If you are not free, it's your fault, no matter what country you are living in."
________________________________________________________________

"This record here's about twelve years old. Parliament buried it and it stayed buried until River here dug it up. This is what they were afraid she knew. And they were right to fear. There's a universe of folk who're gonna know it, too. Someone *has to* speak for these people...Y'all got on this boat for different reasons, but y'all come to the same place. So now I'm asking more of you than I have before. Maybe all. Sure as I know anything, I know this - they will try again. Maybe on another world, maybe on this very ground swept clean. A year from now, ten? They'll swing back to the belief that they can make people... better. And I do not hold to that. So no more runnin'. I aim to misbehave."

- Captain Malcolm "Mal" Reynolds, Serenity (2005) [never seen the film, but this book made me think of that quote. If government gets bad, become a 'bad citizen'!]