Do Not Obey – Episode 2 of Candlelight: Nonviolence In Dark Times

There are popular social posts going around that read: Do not obey in advance or Don’t self censor or Don’t do the fascists’ work for them. In this session, we’ll look at the chilling effect of knowing a repressive regime is coming into power . . . and how we can resist doing its work for it. 

Author/Activist Rivera Sun shares stories, quotes, and strategic wisdom in these videos on courage, resistance, defiance, love, humor, solidarity, and soul force. This project was made possible in partnership with Pace e Bene Nonviolence Service.

Quotes: 

“The tap root of power lies below the surface. It is obedience, cooperation, collusion; the social glue that ensures that each day proceeds much like the last. Every single one of us has the power to give or withhold our willing participation. To ‘reproduce’ or reshape society.”
— Alex Begg, Empowering Earth, 2000“Lesson 1: Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.”
— Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny, 2017.“Stories of resistance have been taken from us, the books burned, the songs stifled or forbidden, the troubadours sent wandering in the wilderness . . . but even if we forget, even if the stories are taken away, something in us will remember when the time comes. It’s a mystery but it’s true.”
— Pam McAllister, You Can’t Kill The Spirit

Explore the Stories Further:

Czechoslovakia’s 10 Commandments of Nonviolent resistance to the Soviet Invasion of 1968Denmark’s Resistance to Nazi Occupation in 1940-45Arne Serj’s “10 Commandments of a Good Dane”Explore the creative resource and study guide on the Rescue of Danish Jews in our Nonviolent History Coloring Page SeriesWatch the Denmark segment of A Force More Powerful200,000 Washington Post subscribers cancel their subscriptions (Note: In the video, Rivera Sun says it was 30,000, but the number is actually much higher.)X users move to BlueSkyAbout the Candlelight: Nonviolence In Dark Times Series

It’s easy to feel hopeless or powerless. But all throughout history, in the worst situations, people have turned to the tools of nonviolent action to build “a way out of no way.” They’ve ousted dictators. They’ve ended authoritarian regimes. They’ve stopped wars. They’ve won rights, freedoms, democracy, justice, and liberation. In Candlelight: Nonviolence In Dark Times, we’ll explore stories from around the world that offer shining examples that can inspire us today. 

Author/Activist Rivera Sun shares stories, quotes, and strategic wisdom in these videos on courage, resistance, defiance, love, humor, solidarity, and soul force. 

Pace e Bene is a 34-year old nonviolence organization that seeks to foster a culture of active nonviolence in our world. https://paceebene.org/

Transcript

Hello, welcome back to Candlelight Nonviolence in the Dark Times. Today we’re going to talk about a concept called “Do not obey in advance,” or as I like to think of it, “Don’t do your oppressor’s job for them.”

We’re going to start, as always, with a quote, for reflection, for centering. This comes from Alex Begg in Empowering Earth, which came out in the year 2000. Incredible to think of this wisdom coming to us over 24 years. “The tap root of power lies below the surface. It is obedience, cooperation, collusion; the social glue that ensures that each day proceeds much like the last. Every single one of us has the power to give or withhold our willing participation. In so doing, to ‘reproduce’ or reshape society.”

Think about that. But the social glue that holds things and the status quo of how they are is either that we participate, or we don’t. That we ensure that today was the same as yesterday, or that today is wildly different than the day that came before. And we notice how this happens in negative ways, right? We notice how things seem to be getting worse and worse and worse.

But we need to be aware of our power to disrupt the pattern of either things staying the same or sliding worse and worse and worse with our decisions, whether or not to go along with life for business as usual. This is true anytime. It’s true in the best of times, and it’s certainly true in the worst of times. We either go along with injustice, we participate in it, or we allow it to continue by standing aside or doing nothing or remaining passive.

Or the third option there is that we throw our lives into the cogs of those wheels and grind them to a screeching halt. That’s the kind of power that I’m interested in. 

When it comes to authoritarian regimes coming to power or people who espouse the politics of hate taking public office in the halls of power, this is even more true and even more important to understand and speak out against. From the very tippy top of a dictator’s office or an abusive president’s office all the way down through the ladder of people who carry out his or her orders, whether or not we obey or we continue things on their devastating path can make the difference between success or failure of a movement or the toppling or the enshrining of a dictator.

To know that we have this power is both empowering and a slightly fearsome responsibility. If we can choose to stop dictatorship in its tracks, why don’t we? If we are somewhere in the vast machinations of the entire system of politics and government and society that we are bound up in have an opportunity to halt injustice in its tracks, are we brave enough to take that opportunity?

When authoritarian regimes come to power, one of the things that happens very quickly is that people self-center. They stop speaking out. We’ve already been seeing this. We see people obey in advance and try to get themselves in a safer position, or a position that is aligned with the oppressive regime coming to power. We need to have the courage to not obey in advance and to put the burden of enforcement onto our opposition, to have this as our default setting rather than, “We’re going to comply and just go along to get along.”

We have seen this play out in numerous places around the world. Last time, we talked a little bit about the Danish rescue of the Jews and the Danish resistance to Nazi occupation in the World War II era. When Denmark was invaded, they did some things very quickly that helped them build a really robust resistance, even though they put up only six hours of military resistance. One of the things was a pamphlet that was circulated by a teenager, Arne Serj, who made a flyer called “The Ten Commandments for Danes.” He originally printed only like 25 copies of this for influential citizens in his smaller town, but very rapidly, the document started getting copied and passed hand to hand across the country, and then was soon considered a revered roadmap for resistance.

So these Ten Commandments were: You must not go to work in Germany and Norway. Don’t go do your job. Stay at home. Go on strike. Okay, if you have to go to work, number two: do a bad job for the Germans. Don’t do a good job. Lose the paperwork, slow things down, have a fifth cup of coffee that day. Make mistakes, file the permits in the wrong place. 

You shall work slowly for the Germans. Right? That was number three. And we talked about a few weeks ago the idea that The Nazis really wanted the Danish to build them warships in their factories. And the Danish shipyard workers were so effective at doing things like screwing in bolts, and then when the Nazis weren’t looking, unscrewing those bolts, that by the end of years of occupation and the war they hadn’t built a single warship for the Nazis. And that has to have had an impact on the Nazi’s ability to win or, in this case, lose the war. So think about that. Think about all the ways that you can bog down injustice, slow it down. simply by doing your job poorly. 

The fourth commandment was: You shall destroy important machines and tools. The fifth was: You shall destroy everything that might have been a benefit to the Germans. The sixth was: You shall delay all transport. Number seven was: You shall boycott all German and Italian films and papers. What that might look like for us today is turning out the propagandistic news that reinforces the politics of hate. Sometimes we get stuck in doom scrolling and just obsessing over every little horrible thing that they’re saying. We need to turn that off, especially if it’s only serving our oppressors in terms of either distracting us from the tangible actions we could be doing or if it’s immobilizing us through fear. Both of these situations is a detriment to our movement activity and a benefit to those who are causing harm and destruction.

Number eight on the Danish commandments was: You shall not shop at Nazi stores. We have so many opportunities to resist in this way. We saw this During the election, when the Washington Post caved to Jeff Bezos, the new owner, saying, “You’re not going to endorse a candidate.” 30,000 people canceled their subscriptions. We’re seeing this in people leaving Twitter for Bluesky or leaving Facebook for Bluesky. So where can you stop sending money to the very people whose politics and policies we are resisting? Go through your Rolodex. Go through your bank statements—don’t put a single penny into their hands.

Number nine on the Danish Ten Commandments was: You shall treat traitors for what they are worth. So, you know, when people change sides and decide to align with the politics of hate, we don’t need to pretend like everything’s okay. I think we can find ways to be truthful and honest that are not wounding and harmful and violent. I think we can certainly express our displeasure with them in clear ways, and we can make it socially uncomfortable or uneasy for them to continue to align with hate.

And number 10 says: You shall protect anyone chased by the Germans. How powerful is that? You shall protect anyone chased by the Germans. This could be whistleblowers. This could be even people within certain political parties who are speaking out against the tyranny or the abuses of their party. This certainly applies to migrants, refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants who are currently being persecuted. This certainly applies if you see an LGBTQ person being harassed in the street. Or if someone shouts at someone, Go back to your own country.” How can you protect these people who are being persecuted?

These commandments were incredibly powerful for the Danes. But they aren’t the only Ten Commandments. I think the Danish list actually inspired a later campaign in the 1960s, late 1960s, when the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia with the intention of making it part of the Soviet Union again. The Ten Commandments for the Czechoslovakians was, “If a Soviet soldier comes to you, you don’t know, don’t care, don’t tell, don’t have, don’t know how to, don’t give, can’t do, don’t sell, don’t show, do nothing.”

Would you like those again? When someone who is part of the politics of hate comes to you wanting you to do anything, you don’t know, don’t care, don’t tell, don’t have, don’t know how to, don’t give, can’t do, don’t sell, don’t show, do nothing. This is a list of ways we can non-cooperate with injustice, how we can not obey the authoritarian regimes. We can refuse to comply with the politics of hate. We can resist doing its work for it.

Now, as you saw between these, we can do this in really bold and public and visible ways. We can also do this, if risk is high, in quiet, in hidden, in covert ways. Ways that will slow down the machinery of the politics of discrimination and hate, but at the same time might allow us to continue to stay in our jobs continuing to slow down the politics of hate and discrimination. As with anything in civil resistance, these ideas are useful on an individual level, but they are far more useful the wider spread they are.

So if you know someone who works in the halls of power, who has choices to make about whether they’re going to go along with a policy rollout, or whether they’re going to help file paperwork for a certain political belief or political stance, even if it’s enshrined into law, if you know people like this, share this with them. Send them this episode, or make a short list version of it. They may need to hear these stories. This series, Candlelight: Nonviolence in Dark Times, is all about sharing the stories making sure that the stories of resistance are widely known and shared and circulated. 

In You Can’t Kill the Spirit, author and activist Pam McAllister wrote, “Stories of resistance have been taken from us, the books burned, the songs stifled or forbidden, the troubadours sent wandering in the wilderness … but even if we forget, even if the stories are taken away, something in us will remember when the time comes. It’s a mystery but it’s true.”

Our time together today is this way of remembering the stories we need, because the time that we need them in is now. The time has come. We must resist, we must refuse to comply, we must refuse to obey or to work for the policies of hate and the tyrants of injustice.

If you have gained something from this episode, pass it on. Share it. Because like lights in the dark, when we light up enough of us, it all starts shining together.

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