 Just because it's old doesn't mean it's not any good. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to another edition of Tactical Book Review. Today's book is Total Resistance by Major H. von Dachbern. This is a Swiss Army Guide from about 1958, and let's talk about it. So, like I mentioned, this is a Swiss Army Tactical Manual printed from what I can tell about around 1958. That's when the end note was written in the book. Couldn't find an exact date on publishing. Obviously translated, I'm guessing from German, due to the fact that the guy's last name is von Dachbern. Maybe French, you know, they speak a couple different languages in Switzerland, but assuming translated from German. And this is the Swiss Army Guide to Guerrilla Warfare and Underground Operations. The purpose of this manual was this idea, remember, this is 1958. So this is right in the midst of the Cold War. This is just after World War II, about 13 years after World War II. And Switzerland, which, you know, remained neutral somehow throughout World War II. Some of you probably know a little bit more about that than I do. And now, of course, is living in the midst of the Cold War, which, you know, if you weren't alive during, like I wasn't really, I mean, I was born technically towards the end of it, but don't really remember the Cold War being a thing, but it was a very big thing at the time. So the purpose of this manual, given that's the context, the purpose of this manual was written for Switzerland for the idea that if Switzerland was invaded and they were completely overrun and they had become enemy-occupied territory, how then should the people of Switzerland continue to resist the enemy? So that's the purpose of the book. And he breaks it down into two kind of major parts. The first one is guerrilla operations, right? So how he frames it, how he suggests it, is running battalions of guerrillas, about 400-ish guys give or take in kind of three detachments and then a command element. And they're basically just running around the mountains and woods of Switzerland doing guerrilla stuff, right? Blowing things up, attacking things, living in the woods, hiding out, coming out of nowhere and attacking, like, you know, guerrilla, general guerrilla operations. And so he gives ideas and ways to do that and it's, you know, it's a tactical manual. So it talks you through that. The other part of the book, which I thought was even more interesting, was the kind of what to do if you live in occupied territory. Like, you know, the enemy controls the city that you live in, it's occupied territory. They have bases and soldiers and trucks and tanks and all the stuff. And so how do you kind of do your underground spy craft kind of stuff in order to resist the enemy? What are things you can still do to resist the enemy given the fact that you live in completely occupied territory? What are you gonna do now? And I thought that was really interesting too, that that had a lot of kind of different angles on things, ways to think through that and ways to continue to try to resist the enemy. He has this great section on passive resistance. For example, stuff like the enemy comes in to eat at your restaurant, right? And you always make them wait longer. You always give them the worst quality food and you always charge them the most money. Stuff like that. And if you're getting like, if you're the enemy occupied soldier and everybody's actually doing all this stuff and everywhere you go, it's just more difficult for you. It could really make your life unpleasant. It might not sound like it, but all those little things add up and they add up pretty quickly. And it can really, you could get this feeling of, at the best, it's gonna be really unpleasant. At the worst, it's gonna be psychologically wearing and taxing, which I think it would get to that point pretty quick. This is a short read. The pages in here, I mean, I printed this out as a PDF, okay? But it does that double page thing on each side there. And it's only like 170-ish pages. On this PDF, I'll try to include the link below, if I remember. But a couple of the pages got cut off and some of the text on the pictures, like this one, for example, is super tiny and a little tough to read. But by and large, you'll be able to print the book off for yourself. Hey, you can't really complain. They have copies on Amazon if you want a better quality print. And you can always buy one there. One of the really intriguing things that I'd like to read from you from this book is the discussion about what happens when the enemy takes over and how they are going to influence the youth. So I'm gonna read you some of these sections of how the enemy will influence the youth, for no particular reason. And you can just kind of think about them in today's context and if that strikes any chords with you. All right. So ways that the enemy will try to influence the youth. They will eliminate or at least greatly reduce the influence of the family, church, and school upon young people and replace it with the influence of the party and its youth organization. They will have the introduction of political lessons, political influence into class. Gradually the number of hours of political instruction increases until it becomes the main subject. They will alter texts, schools, and teaching theory to implant the new ideology and employ teachers who will follow the party line. There will be a prohibition or at least a heavy discrimination against church activities. By intimidation attempt to reduce the influence of the home on youth and if necessary children are to denounce their parents. They will remove Christian symbols, crosses, pictures, et cetera, in public. They'll prohibit religious magazines and books and they will limit and finally prohibit church services. This is just a side note again that I found in here so we're going through the education thing. In order to consolidate power, the enemy will attempt to set one group or class against another. Don't know anything about that. Okay, so back to the education bit here. Attempts will be made to misrepresent and change history. Efforts will be made to degrade and neutralize all former democratic institutions and principles. The enemy will supplant instruction and citizenship with his own ideology and party doctrine. All instruction such as reading, writing, arithmetic, history, geography will be systematically saturated with politics. The first words which the youngest student will spell or write will be the party slogans of the enemy. Such words as peace, freedom, democracy will be so twisted and distorted that the younger generation will no longer know what they really mean. The occupation power will force students to learn its language. Religion will be ridiculed. Attempt will be made to disprove religious beliefs by dishonest presentation of scientific fact. So those were just some of the juiciest quotes. I just read those to you for thought. So overall, I would recommend that you read Total Resistance. Like I said, it's a quick read. I think all in it maybe was four or five hours of reading time. It did not take that long. And there's just a lot of information in here that could be relevant to you. One of the things I really like about this book is that it's written for just kind of the everyday guy or girl, right? And that's how in general we are looking at these books during our tactical book review is as everyday Americans, how can we continue to equip ourselves with important tactical knowledge so that we can live our martial American heritage like we're supposed to? And this book isn't written for the soldier necessarily. It's not written with the idea of you're gonna have this huge military industrial complex behind you. It's written for your country. It's completely overrun. You have to go underground or be a guerrilla or be part of the resistance. And what are you gonna do now? And so because it doesn't have that huge military industrial complex behind you, it just really works with you and what you got on hand. And that I think is one of the strong values of this book and it's a reason that you should read it. So even if you're not a reader, even if you don't follow these videos very often, I would recommend this one to you just because it is so small, there is a lot of knowledge you can gain in here and it's gonna be helpful. The time for reading is now, get out and read a lot. Do brave deeds and endure.