Templar Book Week - Resistance

For today's extract for Templar Book Week we've chosen the opening of the chapter 'Learning From History'. This is from our best-selling second book Deus Vult - The Great Reset Resistance. If you're one of the many who has already bought, enjoyed and learned from this book, then please take a moment to pass this post on to someone you think will benefit from it too.

‘The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.’

The wisdom of Ecclesiastes reminds us of the value of studying the history of the past as a guide to understanding the present and predicting the future. A readiness to learn from the mistakes and successes of others is a common attribute of all successful military leaders. Since politics is the continuation of war by other means, such studies are also required by those who would influence political events and either shape, or resist the reshaping of, society.

There is no need to restrict such studies to the deeds and theories of our heroes. Given the scale of the successes of the Left, it is vital also that we make a particular point of studying, and learning from, our enemies as well. We may need to grit our teeth as we read of their favoured ends, but the means they used to achieve them should be studied dispassionately as part of our relentless search for more effective ways to promote our own aims.

As an example of the value of this process, this chapter focuses on a study of the slender, but once hugely influential, book Guerrilla Warfare by the ultimate left-wing hero and ‘martyr’, Che Guevara.

We use this book not because we have any sort of sympathy for Guevara or his blood-soaked cause, but simply because it provides a good example of the value of applying insights from military doctrine and history to our own current peaceful struggle. Che was, as already noted, one of the geniuses of one specific type of warfare, in one particular environment and in one particular time. There are many other theorists and practitioners who should also be studied: Sun Tzu, Napoleon, von Clausewitz, T.E. Lawrence,  Michael Collins, J. F. C. Fuller, Basil Liddell Hart and Heinz Guderian, to name but a few.

As an aside, reading Guevara, and considering aspects of his life, highlights the extent to which the modern left has lurched to a collection of eccentric deviations which are a very long way from the real life experiences and aspirations of the poverty-stricken peasants whose plight radicalised the upper class young Argentinian back in the early 1950s.

Che’s youthful racism is a documented fact and, while his later anti-colonialist stance took him to Africa as a military adviser, his resulting experience of and disillusionment with Black soldiers led to him developing attitudes which would lead to him being drummed out of any modern ’leftist’ body for the unspeakable sin of ‘racism’.

His attitude towards homosexuals, and marked ‘failure’ to speak out against their institutionalised and organised persecution in re-education labour camps, is another aspect of Che which the 21st century left can just about ignore in a dead historical hero but would find absolutely unacceptable in real life.

Modern snowflake leftists are happy to forgive their hero ‘Che’ for overseeing the mass execution of ‘enemies of the people’, but they really should have a bit more trouble with the probability that his hostility to the ‘BLGBTQ+ lifestyle’ extended past turning a blind eye to prison camps to personally putting bullets into the back of homosexuals’ heads.

Some of Guevara’s words in Guerrilla Warfare also strike the modern reader as remarkably ‘conservative’ for a man who remains an icon for the modern left. He refers perfectly naturally and with tacit approval to the Bible and to psalms. He stresses the need for propaganda to be based on the objective truth. And he values women in the struggle for their talents in caring for the wounded, openly recognising and celebrating innate differences between the two sexes. How times have changed!

Guerrilla Warfare is essentially a tactical manual. Published in 1961, it set down the lessons learned from the successful military struggle to overthrow the Batista regime in Cuba.  The book was intended for other revolutionary movements in Latin America, Africa and Asia. Unfortunately for Che, it was also studied by counter-revolutionary military schools. Alarmed by the spread of Communism in Latin America, the US military adopted some of Che's own tactics in training camps throughout Latin America. Che faced the results of this training during his final campaign in Bolivia, where he was captured and killed in October 1967.

Given that the overarching theme of this collection of essays is the need for, and value of, individual spiritual resistance and mass non-violent direct action, what on earth can we learn from the military doctrine of a long-dead Marxist? As it happens, rather a lot!

The very first step is to grasp that one does not have to be fighting or preparing for a fighting, blood and guts war, to find much to value in military theories and histories. The famous aphorism of von Clausewitz that ‘War is the continuation of politics by other means’ may very usefully be stood on its head: ‘Politics is the continuation of war by other means’.

By ‘politics’ we do not mean political parties, elections or any of the other window dressing and democratic camouflage of corporate plutocracy. The word derives from the ancient Greek Πολιτικά, politiká, meaning 'affairs of the cities'. As such is refers to all the vast range of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations between individuals, elites and the masses. Politicians may be rightly reviled as lower even than estate agents, prostitutes, bankers or even journalists, but unless we go and live on pillars in some desert, we must all necessarily be affected by, and involved in, politics.

The value of reading Guevara lies in the fact that there are close parallels between military war and cultural war. Thus the recommendations of a genius in the former are very likely to be adaptable by those waging the latter.

Right at the start of his book, Guevara impresses upon his reader his view that it is wrong – both morally and tactically – to turn to the politics of physical force until all peaceful means are exhausted. ‘Where a government has come to power through some form of popular vote, fraudulent or not, and maintains at least an appearance of constitutional legality, the guerrilla outbreak cannot be promoted, since the possibilities of peaceful struggle have not yet been exhausted.’

Even when the regime has lost every last shred of legitimacy, however, he warns that it remains wrong to start a war that you cannot win.

At the time of writing neither criteria is even remotely met, and nor are they likely to be met in the foreseeable future. Anyone saying otherwise is either a moron or an agent provocateur.

Among the criteria Guevara sets out as essential preconditions for successful guerrilla warfare is the presence of a potentially sympathetic population which, even before providing new recruits, supplies the rebels with food. Che had learned to be a very practical man, and no-one can achieve anything if they’re starving to death.

He would have had, just as we must have, nothing but contempt for loudmouthed fools who fantasise about armed rebellion when they can’t even feed themselves, let alone anyone daft enough to follow them, who have no disciplined structure, no ability to live outdoors, no cadre of skilled instructors. Soft clowns who couldn’t hunt a rabbit, let alone a man.

In truth, the very fact that such fools talk about using violence on platforms they know to be wide open to infiltration and monitoring exposes their worse than useless status. Che nails it in one:

‘Almost all the popular movements undertaken against dictators in recent times have suffered from the same fundamental fault of inadequate preparation. The rules of conspiracy, which demand extreme secrecy and caution, have not generally been observed. The governmental power of the country frequently knows in advance about the intentions of the group or groups, either through its secret service or from imprudent revelations or in some cases from outright declarations…..Absolute secrecy, a total absence of information in the enemy’s hands, should be the primary base of the movement.’

It should only take a moment’s thought to understand that such advice, which Guevara intended for those embarking on armed struggle, is every bit as valuable for many of those intent on waging wholly peaceful cultural or political war.

Deus Vult - The Great Reset Resistance is available for immediate dispatch. Find the order form on the rotating banner at the top of our home page, and get your copy TODAY!

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