Charles Carreon, The Arizona Kid

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Tyrants -- They Never Hear the One That Hits Them
by Charles Carreon
June 17, 2025

All Successful Rebellions Are Stealthy

History rarely records the first whispers of revolution. Before barricades go up, before flags are raised, before tyrants are toppled, rebellion begins in silence, in secret, and in shadow. Every successful rebellion starts not with a trumpet, but with a whisper. From Europe to Latin America to Africa, this is the common root of insurrection.

Consider Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution in 1989. There were no riots, no mass graves. The regime collapsed under the weight of its own lie when candlelight vigils, banned poetry, and students shaking their keys in the Prague air made the continued fiction of authoritarian legitimacy impossible to maintain. Vaclav Havel, playwright-turned-president, proved that imagination and moral persistence could dethrone a state.

Shift to Cuba, 1950s: a revolution conceived not in radio broadcasts or grand pronouncements but in prisons and mountain hideouts. Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, along with Vilma Espín and Haydée Santamaría, plotted each step through whispers, persuasion, and coded messages. Soldiers were persuaded to defect before they were defeated in combat. Sierra Maestra was the womb of a rebellion born in strategic stealth.

Cross the Atlantic to Mozambique, where the FRELIMO movement fanned the flames of independence against the Portuguese. Josina Machel, a young fighter and educator, inspired a generation with the quiet defiance of her service to refugees and wounded soldiers. Eduardo Mondlane built the foundations of victory not on open battlefields, but through years of slow, careful organizing and moral argument.

In all three, as in so many others, the pattern holds: stealth, not spectacle, births lasting revolution.

Deploying Media Weapons to Counter Oppressive Propaganda

Authoritarian regimes rely on control of the story. They produce histories that are half-erased, futures that are hollow, and presents too overwhelming to analyze. Yet wherever oppression reigns, the counter-narrative lives.

In the USSR, it was samizdat — the illegal underground self-publishing network that hand-copied banned books, essays, and news accounts. Writers like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Natalya Gorbanevskaya gave voice to a silenced reality. Every carbon copy was an act of treason against the state’s monopoly on truth.

In Chile under Pinochet, the guitar of Victor Jara and the words of Gladys Marín became more powerful than any rifle. Jara’s voice was mutilated by his torturers, but his songs remain.

In apartheid South Africa, artists like Miriam Makeba and playwrights like Athol Fugard crafted truths no newspaper dared print. In Vietnam, songs like "Bài Ca Giã Tường" served as signals and salves. In the West, The Clash’s "Clampdown" made British youth question empire in their own tongue.

The rebels wrote poems. They performed plays. They edited leaflets. They painted walls. They turned each act of communication into an insurgent weapon. And they did it not always with rage, but with irony, beauty, double meanings, and charm. Soft language, hard resistance

Developing Disgust for Empire

Before people resist, they must stop admiring their oppressors. Rebellion ripens when the emperor becomes ridiculous, the state becomes boring, the tyrant becomes tacky.

The fashion, art, and music of rebellion have always played this role. In the UK, punk rock made monarchy and imperial nostalgia seem absurd. Songs like The Clash’s Clampdown and Sex Pistols' God Save the Queen reframed obedience as a kind of death.

In the U.S. civil rights movement, the dignified defiance of Black marchers contrasted violently with the snarling faces of Southern sheriffs. In Argentina, Rodolfo Walsh’s writing made the junta’s lies look desperate and cruel.

In Tibet and among Uyghur artists, the Chinese state’s sterilized slogans are undercut by whispered prayers and coded poems. In Tiananmen Square, the Goddess of Democracy—papier-mâché and defiant—faced Mao's granite gaze and made the old tyrant look like a cartoon.

When young people reject the aesthetics of tyranny—the uniforms, the television programs, the slogans—the moral authority of the oppressor begins to rot.

Make them look stupid. Make them look small. Make them look scared. That’s where power begins to slip.

Building Support for Open Rebellion

Open rebellion doesn’t happen spontaneously. It is cultivated. It is nurtured. It is built over years of quiet planning, failed actions, whispered rumors, clandestine alliances, and moral preparation.

In the Sierra Maestra, Fidel and Che didn’t just shoot guns; they educated, negotiated, recruited, and persuaded. Many Batista soldiers surrendered not out of fear, but respect.

In South Africa, the ANC began underground organizing as early as the 1940s. Decades of exile, sabotage, and clandestine action set the stage for the explosion of resistance in the 1980s.

In Poland, Anna Walentynowicz’s firing triggered the Gdansk shipyard strike that birthed Solidarity—but it was only possible because thousands had been preparing underground for years. Catholic youth groups, independent press, labor circles: they all laid the invisible groundwork.

In Chile, the fall of Pinochet was preceded by years of slow moral attrition. When Judge Garzón issued the arrest warrant in 1998, the world was ready to receive it as justice, not vengeance.

Open rebellion is the fruit. Stealth is the root.

Keepin' What You’ve Earned

The tragedy of revolution is not only its bloodshed, but its loss through complacency. Many of the Eastern Bloc nations that broke free from communism in 1989 are now seeing democratic backsliding: Hungary under Orbán, Poland under PiS, and even the Czech Republic flirting with autocracy.

The United States, long seen as a beacon of liberal democracy, now finds itself on dying ground, as Sun Tzu would put it. Trumpism has built a junta not only of politicians, but of judges, sheriffs, media moguls, and militia commanders. They are preparing for a permanent coup by legal means.

But America still has weapons: institutional inertia, professional ethics, public employee resistance, and the stealth rebellion of ordinary decency. Nurses, postal workers, IRS agents, city council members, state judges, and school librarians are quietly refusing.

What we need now is mass stealth moral rebellion: workplace conversations, memes, songs, quiet refusals, ritual shaming, brave humor, and stealth organizing. If we make it socially shameful to support tyranny—if we activate decency in the human heart through stories, art, speech, and example—the junta will find the machine failing.

We do not need everyone to fight. We need some to resist, some to resign, and many to remember. The true battle is in the sympathies and loyalties of the uncommitted majority.

All revolutions begin in secret. So does every redemption.

Start now. Speak quietly. Fight well.

Produced with AI research and drafting. To see the full research session, click here.