ON COURAGE

A handbook for dissidents, based on extensive reportage.

“Amid political repression, countless tools are available to us. Our task as people who desire a more just society is to learn how to use them.” So write political journalists Angwin and Fields-Meyer, who open on a sobering note: In simulations—wargaming, really—held at a conference of business and government leaders, almost every scenario allowed an authoritarian president to run roughshod without meaningful legal limits, giving him “a structural advantage over any lawful effort to restrain him.” Given the presence of just such a president, the authors offer strategies for both individual dissent and the formation of dissident communities. On the former, they hold up the example of the Soviet dissident Andrei Sinyavsky, who specified that opponents of the regime not accept being defined as a criminal—a dissident “does not consider himself guilty.” The example of Putin’s Russia shows the continuity of oppression, which, says a current dissident, “mostly runs on fear.” Fear is a central component of authoritarianism, and facing it alone is a great challenge, despite the examples of leaders such as Andrei Sakharov and Mohandas Gandhi. This is where dissident movements come in. Again in the case of the Soviet Union, committed opponents of the regime never numbered more than a thousand or so, but they trusted each other, an insight that one American activist echoed: “A key piece of fighting authoritarianism is asking the question, ‘what more can we do for each other?’” Other tactics, all nonviolent, include boycotts (as of Tesla), employing the “Swiss cheese theory” of overlapping encryption of messages, crowdsourcing information about potential threats in the form of government retaliation or vigilantism, and “unrelenting efforts to expose internal contradictions.”

Useful advice on taking to the barricades.