Towards The Realization Of A Self-Supporting Dissident Movement

As I said last week, no dissident movement succeeds without operating as an insurgency. No insurgency succeeds without external support.

Support for dissident operations of any kind--violent or not, criminal or legitimate, moral or not--requires the erection and refinement of a logistics capacity in order to ensure that what you need to get done has the men, material, and money required to do so.

This is why dissidents operate as insurgencies; without support from the population the dissidents claim to support this capacity cannot be erected on-site, but must instead be funneled in from outside (i.e. support from a party hostile to the dissidents' enemies).

What has changed in the last few generations is the capacity for a dissident movement to acquire external support without being coopted into the thrall of a rival power to the dissidents' enemies. As I noted last week and several times before that, there is liminal space between the imperial spheres of power and influence. Many of the states in these spaces have residency and business regimes friendly to foreigners--that would be you here--so long as they don't make problems for the hosts.

Are you a serious dissident movement? Do you want to erect your own support network that operates in these liminal spaces, and thus can render aid to your operations? You shoud if you are. I will review the benefits.

• Taking advantage of international regulatory arbitrage, just like your enemies, LEGALLY move assets and personnel around. Got an effective operator? Protect his family by securing their assets using your offshore front office's services to put them in a trust, and if they are open to it move some or all of them out of the reach of your enemies so he can focus on doing work for the cause.
• Secure access to the banking system by using banks that do not give two shits about you, and can issue you cards that you can use in your home state.
• Using the same rules as your enemies, and based out of the field office you erect offshore, erect a corporate structure that can turn into as many revenue streams as your group can manage. Then employ as many of your supporters, especially those that are not field operators, as possible to ensure their loyalty to you as well as provide plausible reason to vet them and filter out enemy agents.
• Using the opportunity of a neutral space, contact and network with compatible dissidents operating elsewhere to erect mutual support across state (and sphere) lines so as to avoid being coopted by the imperial powers in thrall to Empire. (Hint: This is where adherance to the same religion becomes a formidible and practical asset, even if the sects are not identical.)

What this is not is cheap or easy. That's why it requires that the dissident be serious before attempting it. In addition to getting a passport, the operative doing the work of setting up the offshore office will need to have certain papers in order and the legal authority to spend the thousands of US dollars (or equivalent). He will also need have at his back a successful economic operation that he can use to legally attain access to the foreign state in that liminal space, which means that a dissident operation must prove itself serious by having a competent business arm in operation.

It may seem counter-intuitive, especially for nationalist dissidents, to do this but there is no viable alternative to this option that both mitigates the threat of the state and avoids being coopted by hostile foreign imperial powers. The fight at home must, by necessity, involve going abroad- both to secure support and to create fallbacks should things go wrong.

Fortunately, some dissidents already do this. There is hope. The rest is just getting them to see the opportunity and point them in this direction. Empire is waiting to fall.