On Sabotage

The art of nonviolent noncompliance.

In DC’s recent Army birthday parade, the marching was… off. Sloppy, uneven, almost cartoonishly bad. Was it poor training? A rushed rehearsal? Or a subtle act of dissent from inside the ranks?

No one knows. And that’s exactly the point. 😶

The most effective acts of resistance are often invisible—silent, strategic, deniable. They look like errors. They leave no fingerprints. They do the job without calling attention.

The word sabotage comes from sabot, a wooden shoe worn by 19th-century French factory workers. If management pushed too hard, someone’s shoe might just happen to fall into the machinery. Production would grind to a halt. Total accident, of course.

In authoritarian regimes around the world, this kind of low-key, deliberate disruption has often done more to bring down power than protest alone.

In South Africa, boycotts of white-owned businesses, labor strikes, and international divestment helped dismantle apartheid.
In Communist Poland, general strikes laid the groundwork for a peaceful democratic transition.
In Colonial India, Gandhi’s campaigns of non-cooperation paralyzed British rule without a single bullet fired.
And in Nazi-occupied Denmark, resistance became a way of life. The trains stopped running. Teachers stayed home to “garden.” Factory workers stalled. Jewish neighbors vanished into fishing boats and slipped into neutral territory, saving thousands of lives.

🗽 America has its own long history of disobedience. 🛠️📜

Before the Revolutionary War, colonists refused to buy British goods, rejected royal courts, and built their own alternative institutions. The Boston Tea Party was a direct refusal to import, consume, or pay taxes on crown-controlled goods. John Adams noted that the real revolution wasn’t the war—it was the mindset of the people who simply stopped complying.

We saw this again in the Civil Rights era: the Montgomery bus boycott, the Little Rock Nine, sit-ins, strikes, walkouts, and targeted economic pressure campaigns—all acts of refusal that helped dismantle segregation alongside the marches and legal victories we remember best.

And today, Americans are rediscovering the non-violent power of grassroots subversion.

Court cases are mounting. Movements are growing. And in kitchens, classrooms, and city halls, ordinary people are learning how to say “no” in ways that work. Organized resistance is alive in 2025! And it’s savvier and more strategic than ever.

When public protest is too dangerous, when the press can’t be trusted, when there’s no safe outlet for dissent – make like an old-school saboteur: lay low and jam the gears.

📜 Ten Commandments of Quiet Defiance
Published in Prague newspapers during the Soviet invasion of 1968. Still relevant today.

If asked, YOU:

1. 1. 1. Don’t know
      2. Don’t care
      3. Don’t tell
      4. Don’t have
      5. Don’t know how to
      6. Don’t give
      7. Can’t do
      8. Don’t sell
      9. Don’t show
      10. <Do nothing>

These habits of refusal—nurtured over decades through outlawed schools, books, art, and journalism—eventually helped pave the way for the fall of the Iron Curtain. ✊⛓️‍💥⚡

See how many you can practice every day!

What do you think? Click the links in this post to dive deeper into the history and tactics of underground insurgency. Please leave your questions and comments below.