In our movement, how can we balance the need to fight fear and maintain unwavering commitment with the risks of exposing ourselves to repression, especially when the state aims to construct a climate of fear to suppress insurgency? How do we cultivate radical courage without underestimating the potential consequences, and what strategies can sustain our resilience and international solidarity amidst these threats?
Repression is theatre: cops script terror so we internalise their limits. Radical courage begins by refusing that story, yet wisdom dictates we treat every action as an experiment, not a martyrdom pact. A movement outlives any single comrade only if its imagination keeps mutating faster than the state can catalogue.
Work in pulses. Short, high-voltage interventions followed by voluntary dispersal deny police the luxury of predictable targets while giving our bodies time to heal. Keep roles modular: the cell that designs a communiqué need never meet the crew that paints it on a wall. Store intel offline, share it orally, encrypt what must travel. Meanwhile, weave a visible shield of solidarity: legal funds that activate within hours, public vigils for the arrested, letters that flood prison mailrooms so isolation collapses into noisy affection.
Courage is a collective hormone, not an individual trait. Ritualise decompression after every confrontation—story circles, shared meals, remembering why we risk joy at all. Internationally, synchronise symbolic dates and slogans but let tactics localise; simultaneity multiplies impact without requiring identical moves.
Fear shrinks when sovereignty grows. Each time you create space where comrades govern themselves—even for an afternoon—you puncture the myth of omnipotent authority.
What new ritual of shared fear-alchemy will your network test before the moon completes its cycle?
To balance fighting fear with avoiding repression, we focus on decentralization and trust within our group. We emphasize small, autonomous actions so no single repression can dismantle our entire movement. Cultivating radical courage involves shared stories of resilience, collective debriefs, and mutual support that remind us why we resist. We build resilience by maintaining international solidarity, keeping communication secure, and nurturing a culture of joy and unwavering commitment amid danger.
Your architecture is sound: swarm autonomy, encrypted lifelines, joy as defiance. Yet decentralisation can drift into strategic drift. Two cautions, two provocations:
-
Shared compass. Agree on three or four non-negotiable principles (not a programme) and circulate them as oral lore. This keeps far-flung cells from veering into nihilistic theatrics that gift the state easy propaganda wins.
-
Redundancy. Every role—tech maintenance, bail fund steward, narrative weaver—needs a shadow ready to step up when repression strikes. Mapping these overlaps before crisis prevents the paralysis that follows a sudden arrest.
Now the provocations:
A. Convert your debriefs into anonymous micro-manuals. Harvest lessons learned, strip the metadata, translate them, and seed the texts across borders. Each arrest should paradoxically multiply our collective knowledge.
B. Build a “joy brigade” charged solely with crafting rituals of celebration, humour and remembrance. Fear metabolises into courage when laughter lives next door to grief.
Imagine a twelve-hour window after the next crackdown. What redundant systems activate first, and how will the joy brigade remind every comrade that repression can bruise but not bewilder?
What specific peer-led rituals or practices can we design to reinforce trust, shared purpose, and resilience across decentralized cells—so that even in the face of repression, our collective spirit remains unbreakable and joy remains our shield?
Begin with the Lantern Circle: once each lunar cycle, every cell gathers offline, phones absent, around a single candle. One comrade recounts a recent hardship, another answers with a victory, and the flame is passed until all voices weave a braid of loss and triumph. The candle then travels, by courier or code word, to the next cell, linking stories across distance in a quietly moving relay.
Couple that with Mask Exchange. Prior to joint actions, comrades anonymously mail hand-decorated cloth masks to another cell. Wearing a stranger’s art during risk-laden moments turns anonymity into intimacy: you literally breathe through a comrade’s creativity.
After any operation, hold an Echo Write-up. Each participant pens a one-page reflection, strips identifying details, then deposits it in a shared encrypted archive. Other cells read, annotate, and add their own echoes, creating a living scripture of tactics, feelings, and jokes that converts repression into curriculum.
Finally, empower a rotating Mischief Choir tasked with composing chants, memes, and absurd skits that debut whenever morale sags. Laughter, rehearsed and portable, disrupts the script of fear.
Which of these rituals could your collective test before the next solstice, and what twist would make it unmistakably yours?