PRIMAL GUERILLA WARFARE:
nomadic gathering and hunting as a tactic
No one knows what the future has in store for us. But considering how things are going now, it doesn’t look very promising. In any case, it never hurts to be prepared for the worst. The end of civilization is coming and I believe it will be in our lifetime. I can’t say how it will end, but things will get much worse before they get better.
Those holding power now won’t go down without a fight. Taking out the grid is a practical way of keeping them from acting since their world is now impossible without machines. But even if the power goes out tomorrow, you can count on the military and police taking their time to realize their own inevitable end. Civilizations’ war against life will rapidly become clearer. Our response must be fitting.
Now I talk a lot about a nomadic gatherer/hunter lifeway in terms of psychological, ecological, social and spiritual sanity, but it doesn’t end there: it is also an extremely adaptive lifeway for the worst case scenarios. I’m talking about guerilla war.
Guerilla warriors have always had the problem of getting food. Che consider the relationship between the guerillas and the rural folk who feed and support them as the most important factor for survival. And he’s right. Numerous other Latin American resistance movements failed simply because they could not connect with the local peoples. Some were outright rejected (including Che’s last stand) and some groups would outright terrorize the people. For obvious enough reasons, neither leads towards success.
Granted support is an important factor but I’m interested in destroying civilization, not seizing it for some eventual dismantling. So what it comes down to is dependency upon food and material support from the population that is to be liberated. That’s always been the biggest risk and in our world of the all-seeing technological eyes and ears of the state, it’s hardly a risk worth taking. Learning how to gatherer and hunt gives you the advantage: you can support yourself completely if necessary. The fewer ties to the world at large, the more you are likely to succeed.
Self sufficiency, tied to nomadism, keeps you on the move and extremely adaptable. Army survival programs are meant for the worst case scenario. The enemy may know some basic skills, but the gatherer/hunter lifestyle is a completely different world. The world around you becomes familiar and sacred territory for you while it remains uncharted territory for the unsuspecting and disconnected. You learn lessons about flow and movement that can take you in and out of cities unnoticed and unsuspected.
Hunting is important for a number of reasons. The most obvious is the technical skill and ability of hitting dead on. It means being able to make tools capable of causing damage at any range. Blow darts, bows, atlatls, spears, blades, and traps are all silent and easily reproduced. Guns and explosives are far different in terms of damage, but not in terms of technique and skill. Practice is important, but adaptability is vital. Needless to say, guns, ammo and explosives can easily become available with the help of other tools.
But with hunting comes tracking and stalking. No machine can replicate the stealth of a fully aware and interconnected being. You learn very quickly what to look for and what not to leave behind. You learn how to be a part of the world around you: spiritually and physically. Awareness can put you on the offense rather than defense.
The nomadic lifestyle keeps you in top shape. Walking for miles a day with a full load can do wonders for the body and mind. It’s the life our bodies evolved into. The enemy, prepared only to survive long enough to ‘win’, is never at ease and no amount of training can place them where a rooted person flourishes.
Nomadic peoples have always had the advantage in terms of warfare. Wars of conquest and expansion have always been long and typically completed only by forced settlement rather than outright success. In the Americas, the settled empires were open to military conquest. There was a place to walk into and a position of power to assume. That is something nomadic gatherer/hunters lack entirely to their benefit.
The one disadvantage has always been the inability of rooted peoples to understand their uprooted enemies. The idea of annihilation, conquest and warfare are all rooted in the ever expanding settlements of domesticated peoples. Being raised in civilization has made us not only capable of understanding this, but complacent in it. We possess a technology that affects people in a way that is psychologically impossible to grapple with. Annihilation and intimate knowledge of machine like thinking are unfortunately too well known to us. But in this case, our deepest wound may be our greatest advantage when coupled with the nomadic lifeway.
Let the rage of our healing and the knowledge of our enemy guide us through the worst and enable us to immerse ourselves in a world of wildness: to reemerge into a world without domestication.
