"The concept of leaderless resistance was reportedly developed by Col. Ulius Louis Amoss, an alleged U.S. intelligence officer, in the early 1960s. An anti-communist, Amoss saw leaderless resistance as a backup for the possibility of a Communist seizure of the United States.
The concept was revived and popularized in an essay published by the anti-government Ku Klux Klan member Louis Beam in 1983 and again in 1992. Beam advocated leaderless resistance as a technique for white nationalists to continue the struggle against the U.S. government despite an overwhelming imbalance in power and resources. In the same year the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) was formed as an eco-resistance movement.
Beam argued that conventional hierarchical pyramidal organizations are extremely dangerous for their participants, when employed in a resistance movement against government, because of the ease of disclosing the chain of command. A more workable approach would be to convince the like-minded individuals to form independent cells, without close communication between each other, but generally operating in the same direction."
The "leaderless resistance" concept was central to The Turner Diaries.
"The Turner Diaries is a novel written in 1978 by William Luther Pierce (former leader of the white Nationalist organization National Alliance) under the pseudonym "Andrew Macdonald". The Turner Diaries depicts a violent revolution in the United States which leads to the overthrow of the United States federal government, nuclear war, and, ultimately, to a race war leading to the extermination of all Jews and non-whites. The book was called "explicitly racist and anti-Semitic" by The New York Times and has been labeled the "bible of the racist right" by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The novel has been associated with a number of real-life violent crimes. Most notably, some have suggested that a scene depicting preparation for the bombing of the J. Edgar Hoover Building, the FBI national headquarters, served as the inspiration for the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 by Timothy McVeigh, who had promoted the book."
This book is directly responsible for many acts of domestic crime, domestic terrorism, international terrorism, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Tea Party movement.
"The diary section ends with the protagonist flying an airplane equipped with an atomic bomb on a suicide mission to destroy The Pentagon, in order to eliminate the leadership of the remaining military government before it orders an assault to retake California."
Sound familiar?
So this "leaderless resistance" concept formulated by an American OSS operative found homes in the KKK, the Patriot Movement, and ultimately in Al-Qaeda and the Tea Party.
A Leaderless Organizations can't be defeated by conventional means. You can't kill them all. There is no leader to remove. They will never sign a Peace Treaty.
It is a distributed, autonomous tactic of asymmetric warfare fueled by a fanatic ideology.
As more and more radical ideologies embrace this clearly successful strategy, the modern concept of a civilized society becomes increasingly endangered.
We seem to be headed for a New Dark Ages where radicalism, superstition, hatred, tribalism, religion, fear, paranoia and greed are the main drivers of human interaction.
Once again we find that the greatest enemy we face was one that we created and exported.
We are, and always have been, our own worst enemy.
When we fall, we will have ourselves to blame.
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