So anyways with the rapid rise of fascism I feel it’s a good time to point out that it’s perfectly legal to follow unjust orders slowly, badly, or inefficiently
Breaking the law, even an unjust law, has consequences that not all can afford. But also a very large number of us are also very stupid, or very confused, or very lazy, and so it’s not unreasonable that someone at the bottom of the chain of command might make a typo, or misplace some paperwork, or leave a Friday afternoon email for Monday morning.
When something goes wrong, or an operation slows down, because a low-level worker somewhere sent a package to the wrong address or left someone on hold for an hour or didn’t fill out a particular form correctly- Do you immediately assume malicious intent? Or do you usually just brush it off as some underpaid idiot being bad at their job?
You also gotta not brag about it. Keep your political opinions on the down low. Be noncommittal or ignorant or undecided. Say things like “I’ve never heard of that”, “where did you hear that?” or “that’s interesting, I heard a conflicting story from here, how weird”. Never be outwardly confidant of what you know. When there is a silence, don’t fill it- leave the space and let the other fill it for you. That’s how you get information, that’s how you find sources, that’s how you reduce the value of anything others get out of you.
Virtue signalling by wearing pins and ribbons and loudly declaring your place is not safe in some environments. It will place scrutiny on you and everything you touch. Nobody believes the guy who says “fuck my boss and everything he stands for” scratches the boss’s car by accident, even if it is an accident.
If you want to slow the march of a tank, filling the path with mud is going do more than laying down in front of it.
So fun fact: back during the Second World War, the U.S. Army, yes that U.S. Army, wrote an entire manual about how to sabotage a giant machine made of people that is destroying the world and everyone in it. It's called the Simple Sabotage Field Manual. What @teaboot describes is one of the most highly recommended strategies in there, because just about anyone can do it no matter what role they have in the machine, and it's really remarkably effective.
The whole thing's on the internet archive and I highly recommend reading it cover to cover.
