a. The purpose of this paper is to characterize simple sabotage, to outline its possible effects, and to present suggestions for inciting and executing it.
b. Sabotage varies from highly technical coup de main acts that require detailed planning and the use of specially-trained operatives, to innumerable simple acts which the ordinary individual citizen-saboteur can perform. This paper is primarily concerned with the latter type. Simple sabotage does not require specially prepared tools or equipment; it is executed by an ordinary citizen who may or may not act individually and without the necessity for active connection with an organized group; and it is carried out in such a way as to involve a minimum danger of injury, detection, and reprisal.
The Office of Strategic Services (1942–1945), formed during World War II, was the first intelligence agency of the United States and predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency. The OSS was formed to coordinate espionage activities behind enemy lines for all branches of the U.S. Armed Forces; other functions included propaganda, subversion, and post-war planning. Among its more curious legacies is the Simple Sabotage Field Manual, a slim document published in 1944 that weaponized the art of workaday disruption. No bombs, no bullets — just the slow sanctification of inefficiency: misfile papers, prolong meetings, insist on protocol. And yet, beneath its tactical clarity pulses a spiritual provocation: the manual reveals how fragile order truly is — how civilization can be undone not by violence, but through the gradual erosion of its functions. In this light, simple sabotage becomes liturgy, and the saboteur a priest of disorder. Read it not as a relic of wartime cunning, but as a prophecy of decay, written in the margins of procedure.
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