It mostly doesn’t and sooner or later your cell gets discovered, infiltrated, and you’re imprisoned or killed.

But that’s part of the wager you make when you sign up. You wager that you can do a little good before the fash capture or kill you. No one gets out of life alive.

Maintaining real operational secrecy is extremely difficult. It’s not telling your partner where you go late at night for days at a time, and it’s also your partner not asking and never talking about your strange schedule and covering for you when they must and coming up with a cover that is believed and doesn’t raise questions. It’s the same with your kids, or, really, it’s getting far away from your kids because the enemy will use them against you. It’s getting orders from someone you’ll never meet, whose name you don’t know, and carrying those orders out to the best of your ability, and when you do get compromised it’s keeping your code words and recognition signs firmly between your teeth for as long as you can while they torture you because every minute you hold out is another minute the network can pack up and run and cover it’s tracks. It’s knowing that one of your own might put a bullet between your eyes some day because someone up in Intel thinks you’re compromised, and accepting that as part of the job.

There’s a reason that resistance forces tend to die 10:1 or 100:1 in favor of the occupiers. It’s a very dirty business and death is the expected outcome for you and for most of your comrades. And it likely won’t be a good or clean death.

Sometimes the best thing you can do is not get involved in the first place if you know that’s not the kind of fighter you are, if you know you couldn’t keep it together, keep your mouth shut. There’s lots of jobs that need to be done and most of them aren’t the very exciting ones. It’s important, as much as you can, to kill any pride that says you need to prove yourself or do more than you’re able or take on tasks you aren’t suited for. Killing that pride, accepting your limits, understanding that you’re part of a big, long process of history going all the way back 15,000 years to the inventing of agriculture, that’s important. And sometimes there’s no choice so you do a job you’re no way suited for until it destroys you.

And I’m not necessarily talking about exciting big news stories. The enemy doesn’t care if you’re doing international terrorism or consciousness raising sessions. They’ve got lots of money to spread around and if they think you’re a threat they’ll come down on you no matter how preposterous it sounds. There’s that story right now, the Jewish scholar in the UK who got picked up at a rally for Palestine and he’s up on terrorism offenses for stating the plain truth.

You do the best you can, for as long as you can, and when you go down you try not to take your comrades with you. And hopefully, some day, it’ll have been enough. z

For instance no one on Hexbear should be doing anything too exciting. We’re international, we’re in contact with official state enemies. The servers are hosted in France while the membership is all over the anglosphere and beyond. The enemy can legally scrape and analyze everything that happens on Hexbear and they likely are, even if it’s at a low level that’s handled by bots and algorithms. We’re all already compromised to some degree in that we’re going to be in the enemy’s databases. So if they’re running network analysis on an activist and one of us is in that activist’s phone or socials they’ll get flagged as a potential tankie. Or they won’t, we really don’t know a great deal about how the intelligence services really function. As mentioned in this article the feds were able to set this guy up to get caught on the eve of the election because someone snitched on him.

If this all sounds a bit doomer try to remember that we’re waging a wildly asymmetrical struggle. The fash have enormous resources, lots of expertise, and the help of a deeply, deeply indoctrinated culture that views us as the enemy even when we’re just sitting around shitposting. But they’re not invincible. The US feds kind of famously hate dealing with Anarchists because there’s no structure to infiltrate, there’s no way to bribe people because everyone’s poor and immediately suspicious of anyone who flashes money around, and even if they turn someone there’s no leadership to infiltrate! And the fash fuck up all the time, they’re just dorks like everyone else, they’re not hyper-competent super spies. They make mistakes, they get trapped by their own brainworms, they fall asleep on the job.

We’re in this for hte very long haul. As long as there are people who want to be free there’s hope.