I’ve been reading WW2 spy novels by Alan Furst since Barringer recommended them a while back. The ones I’ve been reading mostly take place before the US entered the war and it’s a different perspective on WW2 than anything we usually learn about here. It’s not hometown sons off to bravely rescue the world for ~freedom, it’s people with lives and jobs just living and trying to survive as fascism looms on the horizon, slowly subsuming every aspect of their lives as the Nazis make their way through Poland and France, until suddenly everywhere is the front line. There’s no sign that the Americans, or anyone, is going to save them. There’s no waiting until things somehow get better. There’s only getting through another day.
The books convey a sense of fascism as this thing that happens slowly and then all at once. A thing people talk about until it’s a thing they’re being suffocated by. Feels relevant! Familiar.
Here’s what I like best about these books: ordinary people suddenly find themselves radicalized. One day they uncover, or are handed, examples of the small, concrete things people can/need to do to push back, to disrupt, to resist.
Resist is such an abstract, foreign word to me the past few years. A bumper sticker on a Tesla. I’m staying alive, is that resisting.
In Night Soldiers, resistance is described as “Knowledge that turns plain men and women into sharp weapons against the Occupation infrastructure.”
Resistance takes the form of:
- A single wall socket short-circuited to disrupt all the power in a particular building
- Knocking out phone lines and rail signals
- A cube of sugar in a gas tank to kill the engine
- A potato in a tailpipe to blow the muffler or fill the car with carbon monoxide
- Sharpened jacks thrown across a road to blow out convoy tires
- A soup tureen buried upside down, poorly, so it looks like a land mine and halts columns of tanks while a mine disposal unit is called
“For want of a nail, dear boy, and all that sort of thing,” someone says.
Phone lines are invisible and cars don’t have tailpipes anymore, but surely there are similar ideas that could be applied in similar situations today. Just thinking out loud.