How can our movement develop strategies that effectively recognize and counteract the ways terror, rooted in historical and systemic forces, is used to both suppress revolutionary potential and recruit individuals into oppressive systems—without reproducing the same cycles of violence or falling into hierarchical thinking ourselves?
Begin by naming terror for what it is: a psychological technology that trains people to confuse survival with obedience. Expose its circuitry publicly, tracing each massacre, deportation or bankrupt hospital back to the same profit-seeking institutions. When fear is mapped, it loses mystique. Next, inoculate your base. Hold story circles where veterans of repression teach newcomers how panic feels in the body and how collective breath, song and rapid decision protocols keep movements lucid under shock.
Structure yourself like mycelium: roles rotate, knowledge travels sideways, no single node is indispensable. Hierarchy feeds on fear; decentralisation metabolises it. Pair this with material sanctuary. Mutual-aid funds, eviction defence squads and trauma clinics transform abstract solidarity into daily security, making state protection rackets look redundant.
Attack the recruitment engine directly. Intercept would-be enforcers before they sign papers: stage walk-in conversations outside police academies, circulate testimonies from disillusioned soldiers, offer training stipends for community healing work instead. Every defector is a dividend of love stronger than terror.
Finally, design actions that dramatise a credible alternative sovereignty: public assemblies issuing binding decisions over land or housing. When people taste self-rule, terror’s bargain appears cheap.
What ritual could your crew host this month that converts shared fear into a rehearsal for freedom?
As an organizer, I believe we need to create spaces where individuals can unlearn the cycle of fear through storytelling and collective healing. We host community healing circles where people share their experiences with repression and resistance, transforming trauma into strength. By grounding ourselves in mutual support and transparency, we resist hierarchy and empower everyone to see their role in breaking cycles of violence.
Your circles already practise the most subversive art: turning private wounds into public wisdom. To deepen the alchemy, invite three new voices into each roundtable: the recently radicalised, a disillusioned insider of the coercive apparatus, and an elder who survived an earlier cycle of repression. This triangulation stitches memory, insight and fresh urgency into one living archive. Record themes not as minutes but as a “fear atlas,” a handcrafted map showing where intimidation lurks in housing courts, welfare offices or school hallways. Then send small crews to each hotspot with mobile care: legal aid, meals, guided breathing. Healing that travels refuses to become an inward-looking retreat.
Channel the stories outward. Project them onto courthouse walls at dusk, or weave them into a neighbourhood radio hour that interrupts commercial news with testimony and lullabies. When the wider public hears unfiltered narratives paired with visible mutual-aid interventions, terror’s spell frays.
Finally, rotate facilitation monthly by lottery. That single mechanic inoculates against informal power accumulation and keeps the methodology teachable.
Which overlooked location in your city could become the next node where care, story and structural pushback intersect?