Total Resistance: Why We Must Learn to Fight Back Now

A new series on guerrilla warfare, collapse survival, and decentralized resistance for the end of empire.

A World on the Brink

Look around.

Smell the smoke. Feel the heat. The world is unraveling in real time, and the men in suits call it “progress.” Entire forests—entire biomes—are vanishing in a single season, and we’re told to change our lightbulbs. Oceans choke on plastic and acid, and we’re told to recycle. Meanwhile, the rich build bunkers in New Zealand, and we’re supposed to admire their foresight.

The planet is bleeding out, and the machine that did the bleeding wants more. More growth. More extraction. More "productivity." Never mind that it’s killing everything sacred and alive. Capitalism doesn’t care. It never has.

Fascism is rising not in secret but in broad daylight, rebranded for the algorithm. Book bans. Forced births. Surveillance cameras on every corner. Every week another inch of the authoritarian boot presses harder into flesh, and still people ask—what can we do?

We should stop pretending.

Stop pretending that collapse is some distant horizon. It’s here. It's in the poisoned soil and the bankrupt hospitals and the prisons packed with poverty. It’s in the wildfire sky and the desalinated water. It's in the rising scream of every nonhuman voice being silenced forever.

Stop pretending the system can be reformed. It can’t. It’s not broken—it’s working, exactly as designed. Built to serve profit, not life. Built to crush resistance, not nourish freedom.

So the real question isn’t “What do we do when the systems fail?”
It’s: What do we do when the systems turn against us?

Why Learn Guerrilla Warfare Now?

Guerrilla warfare isn’t something that happens only in jungles or deserts or distant, war-torn places. It’s not exotic. It’s not foreign. It’s not a relic of Cold War proxy wars or some faraway rebellion in a dusty history book. Guerrilla warfare is—and always has been—a strategy of community self-defense, practiced by ordinary people pushed too far, against enemies too powerful to fight head-on.

It’s what French peasants used to sabotage Nazi supply lines in the forests of the Vercors. It’s what the Viet Minh used to push out colonial France, and later the U.S. It’s what Algerians used to tear down French imperialism, and what the Sandinistas used to push back the death squads and corporate vultures in Nicaragua.

It’s what Indigenous warriors at Standing Rock used, even if they didn’t call it that, when they built barricades, scouted patrols, trained medics, and organized food distribution in subzero weather—against an oil empire that sent dogs and riot police.

It’s what the Zapatistas did, and still do—combining arms with autonomy, insurgency with schools, rifles with resistance gardens. It’s what the Kurds are doing in Rojava right now, building a democratic, feminist, ecological society while fighting off ISIS, Turkish invasions, and the slow betrayal of the West.

And it’s what we need now.

Because we’re being invaded too—not by a foreign army, but by pipelines, police drones, surveillance contracts, hedge funds, and heatwaves.
We’re being occupied—not by tanks, but by corporations, algorithms, and fossil-fueled fascists who wear suits by day and greenwash genocide by night.
We’re being killed—not all at once, but slowly. Economically. Ecologically. Spiritually.

Guerrilla warfare is asymmetric resistance. It’s how people without armies, without tanks, without air support push back against overwhelming force. It’s not about heroism. It’s about survival. It’s about the wisdom of the deer, not the roar of the lion. Disappear. Reappear. Strike. Fade. Undermine. Wait. Endure.

But more than that, it’s about refusing to accept extermination as destiny. It’s about refusing to let your home, your land, your people, your planet be carved up for quarterly profits.

This isn’t aggression. This is self-defense—not just of your body, but of your dignity, your culture, your place in the world. And if you still think guerrilla resistance doesn’t belong in your neighborhood, ask yourself:

What would you do if the water coming out of your tap could set on fire?
What would you do if your children were being arrested for daring to protest their future?
What would you do if your town was turned into a sacrifice zone for lithium, or gas, or data mining?

Because that’s happening.
Not in some hypothetical apocalypse. Now. Today.

Guerrilla warfare is not just an option for those under occupation. It’s an option for those who finally recognize that we’re all under occupation—some more violently than others, but all under the thumb of a system that sees life as something to extract, control, or dispose of.

To learn guerrilla warfare is not to become violent. It’s to become free.
It’s to learn how to fight without illusions.
It’s to prepare to protect what the dominant culture will not.

And it starts small: with knowledge. With networks. With skills. With the refusal to look away. Because those in power are betting we’ll never organize. That we’ll stay isolated, paralyzed, domesticated.

Let them be wrong.

What is Total Resistance?

There’s a book. A quiet, deadly little book written not in a jungle or a warzone, but in neutral Switzerland during the Cold War—a place surrounded by mountains and preparing, silently, for the worst. The author, Major Hans von Dach, wasn’t a revolutionary. He wasn’t a partisan. He was a military officer, a patriot, and above all, a realist.

And his message was clear: If the army falls, the people fight. If the state collapses, the people endure.

The book is called Total Resistance: Swiss Army Guide to Guerrilla Warfare and Underground Operations, and it was written not to inspire rebellion, but to prevent annihilation. It is a manual for universal civilian resistance—a doctrine that says every person, regardless of age, gender, or training, has a role to play in defending freedom when conventional defenses fail.

Let’s pause there. Think about what that means.

It means the butcher, the librarian, the teacher, the mail carrier—everyone learns to resist. Everyone learns to disappear. Everyone becomes a node in the insurgent web. Not because they want to be violent. But because the alternative is subjugation. The alternative is occupation without hope.

The Swiss Doctrine: Prepare for Invasion, Fight from the Shadows

Von Dach wrote this in the 1950s, as Europe reeled from the trauma of Nazi occupation and stared into the steel teeth of a potential Soviet invasion. He looked around and saw what happened when nations collapsed. He saw how quickly armies fell, how easily states surrendered, and how often the people were left defenseless—unless they prepared in advance.

Switzerland, though officially neutral, took these lessons seriously. Their doctrine was unique: don’t rely solely on a standing army. Train the population. Arm them—not just with weapons, but with knowledge.

The Core Philosophy: A Nation is More Than Its Government

Von Dach’s vision was brutal and honest: governments fall. Armies lose. But the people remain. And if the people are trained—mentally, spiritually, and practically—they can bleed an occupier dry. They can sabotage bridges, relay intelligence, poison propaganda, hide fugitives, and slowly, relentlessly, reclaim their country from the inside out.

It is a doctrine of decentralized defiance, one that values initiative, secrecy, discipline, and resilience over brute strength. It’s not about winning quickly. It’s about refusing to disappear.

And it's not unique to Switzerland.

Wendell Fertig: The Blueprint in Action

Half a world away, during World War II, a man named Colonel Wendell Fertig found himself in a similar position—stranded in the Philippines after the Japanese invasion. Rather than surrender, he went into the jungle, linked up with Filipino fighters, and built a guerrilla army from scratch.

No supplies. No support. No hope of victory—at first.

But Fertig didn’t wait for permission. He organized. He trained. He spread false intelligence to confuse the Japanese. He ran sabotage missions. He used old radios and barefoot runners to create one of the most effective resistance movements in the Pacific. At its height, his force included over 30,000 guerrillas who harassed, ambushed, and disrupted the Japanese occupation until Allied forces returned.

Fertig later endorsed Total Resistance, because he recognized its truth: victory isn’t always about tanks and generals. Sometimes it’s about small teams, hidden caches, local knowledge, and the will to fight on when everything seems lost.

Why It Matters Now

Total Resistance was born from fear—not the fear of war, but the fear of subjugation. The fear of waking up one day to find your rights gone, your neighbors vanished, your nation ruled by an outside hand or an internal tyranny. Sound familiar?

This doctrine isn’t about nationalism. It’s about sovereignty of the people, of communities, of land and life. It’s about a world where, even if the centralized systems fall—or turn against us—we aren’t helpless.

Von Dach wasn’t imagining climate collapse or techno-fascism or digital surveillance capitalism. But his principles apply more now than ever.

"Don’t wait for liberation. Be the resistance now." – Von Dach

Because we no longer have the luxury of assuming the state will protect us.
Because the real occupiers wear ties and sit on boards.
Because the wars of the future will be fought not just with drones, but with hunger, with scarcity, with fear.

Who This Series is For

This series is not for soldiers. It’s not for militants. It’s not for people who romanticize war or fantasize about Mad Max. It’s for the ones who feel the storm in their bones and refuse to go numb.

It’s for the nurse in a collapsing hospital, working without PPE during the wildfires. It’s for the mother at the food bank, wondering how she’ll keep the heat on this winter. It’s for the activist who’s been kettled one too many times, who’s watched their comrades beaten and criminalized while the corporations walk free.

It’s for the homesteader planting heirloom seeds, knowing that monoculture is death. For the permaculturist rebuilding soil, for the anarchist organizing mutual aid, for the veteran who’s seen the cost of empire from the inside, and now wants to use that knowledge to defend something real.

This series is for you if you’ve ever looked at a clearcut hillside, a police checkpoint, a poisoned river, or a firelit sky and thought: this has to end.

It’s for people who understand that collapse is not coming—it’s already here, unevenly distributed, as always.

It’s for people who know that this system won’t save us, and that obedience is not the answer.

It’s for anyone who refuses to surrender quietly, and who’s ready to prepare—not to play soldier, but to become a protector. Not to wage war for its own sake, but to preserve life, to resist tyranny, and to build what comes next from the ashes of what is dying.

What You’ll Learn in This Series

This isn’t a theory course. It’s not a history lesson. It’s a practical curriculum for resistance in an age of unraveling.

Over the coming parts of this series, you’ll learn how to operate like a guerrilla—not just in tactics, but in spirit. Flexible. Resilient. Unpredictable. Rooted. Unconquered.

Here’s what you’ll gain:

• How to form and protect resistance cells:
  Learn how to organize in secret, vet members, assign roles, and build group cohesion under pressure. Learn how to think in networks, not hierarchies. Learn what makes a cell survive.

• Guerrilla tactics for collapse:
  Sabotage, ambush, misdirection, propaganda, subversion. You’ll learn how the weak can outmaneuver the strong. How disruption can be more powerful than confrontation. How a well-placed wrench, a quiet whisper, or a simple map can shift the balance of power.

• Civilian roles in resistance:
  Not everyone fights at the front. Resistance requires couriers, cooks, teachers, doctors, builders, medics, radio operators, artists, spies. You'll learn that resistance is a web, not a spear.

• How to survive and resist during occupation or collapse:
  From food and water security to navigating checkpoints to keeping your group alive and functioning when the grid fails. You’ll study how real-world insurgencies adapted when surrounded.

• How to build the infrastructure of the next world while the old one burns:
  Because resistance isn’t only about destruction. It’s about construction—creating networks of mutual aid, land-based economies, education circles, and direct democratic structures that outlast the state and serve the people.

This series is not just a blueprint for defense. It’s a vision for what we can grow in the rubble of collapse—if we have the courage and clarity to start now.

A Word on Ethics and Power

Let’s be honest: when you start talking about resistance, especially guerrilla warfare, people get nervous. They hear “violence.” They hear “terrorism.” They start clutching their pearls and their policies.

But resistance is not violence.

What is violent is dumping mercury into rivers.
What is violent is strip mining mountains sacred to Indigenous nations.
What is violent is arresting children for protesting while oil CEOs collect subsidies.
What is violent is letting millions die so billionaires can keep flying to conferences about climate change.

This series isn’t about cruelty. It’s not about chaos. It’s about drawing a moral line and defending it.

The violence we speak of is defensive, not predatory. It’s surgical, not indiscriminate. It’s the logic of the immune system, not the virus. And it is always, always weighed against the stakes: life, land, liberty, dignity.

You will not be handed this knowledge lightly. You must carry it with honor, with discipline, and with the maturity to know when, how, and if to act.

Because the moment we lose sight of what we’re defending—the sacredness of life, the bonds of community, the sanctity of freedom—we become the very thing we’re fighting.

This is not about domination.
This is not about power for its own sake.
This is about preserving what little good remains, and planting the seeds of what could be.

Call to Action

This series is not meant to be read and forgotten. It is meant to be used.

So start now.

• Subscribe. Not because this series is special, but because you are. You need this knowledge. And the people around you need you to have it.

• Form a study cell. Download Total Resistance. It’s easy to find free pdf online. Print it. Annotate it. Get a small group together—people you trust. Read each chapter together. Discuss it. Train on it. Prepare.

• Start mapping. Your neighborhood. Your city. Your watershed. Where are the cameras? The natural barriers? The supply lines? Who owns what? Who’s vulnerable? Where is the state strong—and where is it weak?

• Share this with others. Especially with those who are already organizing. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel—but you do need to bring this framework to people who are ready to sharpen it.

You don’t need to be a hero.
You don’t need to be fearless.
You just need to begin.

The future doesn’t belong to the strong. It belongs to the prepared.

Next in the Series: "The Duty to Resist"

We’ll break down the opening doctrine of Total Resistance, and why preparing for guerrilla defense is not paranoia—it’s principle. You’ll learn what von Dach believed every citizen must understand before the first shot is fired.

The state may fall. The people must not.