How to Disappear

Lessons learned, mistakes better not made.
Best to start at 15:50

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“Escape is the oldest story of freedom. It is also the simplest.”

Half a century ago, an anarchic scholar struck out to write a heroic story of peasants. As the bodies piled up in Vietnam, it seemed as if people actually cared about peasants. The task had not been easy, given that peasants usually serve as the stage upon which more dramatic disputes between nationalists and colonizers are performed. But in the archives he uncovered books and records to wield against those who had discounted his lowly peasants.

The heroic peasants were a good start for the anarchic scholar. But, after national liberation struggles began claiming that the heart of the nation beat within the peasant, the scholar found an even more elusive class of people: hill peoples, those who buck authorities with a run to the hills. Through diligent scholarship, he was able to bring together an impressive array of theories and terms to describe how people transformed themselves into poor materials for state-making.

The anarchic scholar loved how hill peoples’ slash-and-burn culture was an elaborate trick to be left alone. But everything is different now, he reluctantly admitted. After World War II, it all changed. Most States used technologies, both mechanical and human, to eliminated their “dark twins” in the hills. Space was spanned, he said. The peoples still in the hills were the last ones to escape, and they are on the verge on disappearing, he lamented.

Not far away, a similar discovery was made.

A young college student was tired of the usual posturing of campus activism. The daily barrage of manufactured urgency and its subsequent oppression Olympics asphyxiated most of us long ago. But he had a plan. And the brutal human cost of Reagan’s flagrant imperialism in Latin America demanded a response. So, after gaining a little know-how in engineering, with a focus on alternative energy, he headed south to make a real contribution to ‘people who could use help.’

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exceptional cities

“From now on, I’ll describe the cities to you,” the Khan had said, “in your journey you will see if they exist.”

But the cities visited by Marco Polo were always different from those thought of by the emperor.

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gestures, grimaces, glances

… Newly arrived and quite ignorant of the language of the Levant, Marco Polo could express himself only by drawing objects from his baggage – drums, salt fish, necklaces of war hogs’ teeth – and pointing to them with gestures, leaps, cries of wonder or of horror, imitating the bay of the jackal, the hoot of the owl.

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The Urbanization of Insurgency: The Potential Challenge to U.S. Army Operations

The likelihood of urban insurgency — irregular (i.e., guerilla or terrorist) warfare in cities — is increasing as the dual demographic trends of rapid population growth and urbanization continue to change the face of the developing world. Whereas cities once provided a relatively better standard of living for people migrating from the countryside, they are now overcrowded and overburdened. Generations are growing up in the slums that surround the capital cities of many of the world’s developing countries, and infrastructures are proving incapable of serving the massive urban populations. And the situation is getting worse. Moreover, insurgents are entering this ripe environment.

Unable to maintain operations among the dwindling rural populations, insurgents are following their followers into the cities. In countries as diverse as Peru and Turkey, insurgents are setting up “liberated zones” in urban shantytowns. Such zones, which are nearly impenetrable, afford the insurgents many of the same advantages they enjoyed in the jungles of the rural areas. Perhaps most important, urban insurgencies are frequently linked to broader insurgent movements in the countryside. Using terrorist tactics, urban insurgents tie up the government’s security forces in the cities, giving their brethren in the rural areas room to maneuver.

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