Sabotage (action)
Sabotage is a deliberate action aimed at weakening a political entity, effort, or organization through subversion, obstruction, disruption, or destruction. One who engages in sabotage is a saboteur. Saboteurs typically try to conceal their identities because of the consequences of their actions and to avoid invoking legal and organizational requirements for addressing sabotage.
Etymology
The English word derives from the French word saboter, meaning to "bungle, botch, wreck or sabotage"; it was originally used to refer to labor disputes, in which workers wearing wooden shoes called sabots interrupted production through different means. A popular but incorrect account of the origin of the term's present meaning is the story that poor workers in the Belgian city of Liège would throw a wooden sabot [Note 1] into the machines to disrupt production.
One of the first appearances of saboter and saboteur in French literature is in the Dictionnaire du Bas-Langage ou manières de parler usitées parmi le peuple of d'Hautel, edited in 1808. In it the literal definition is to 'make noise with sabots' as well as 'bungle, jostle, hustle, haste'. The word sabotage appears only later.
The word sabotage is found in 1873–1874 in the Dictionnaire de la langue française of Émile Littré. Here it is defined mainly as 'making sabots, sabot maker'. It is at the end of the 19th century that it really began to be used with the meaning of 'deliberately and maliciously destroying property' or 'working slower'. In 1897, Émile Pouget, a famous syndicalist and anarchist wrote "action de saboter un travail" ('action of sabotaging or bungling a work') in Le Père Peinard and in 1911 he also wrote a book entitled Le Sabotage.
Sabotage in warfare
Sabotage in warfare, according to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) manual, varies from highly technical coup de main acts that require detailed planning and specially trained operatives, to innumerable simple acts that ordinary citizen-saboteurs can perform. Simple sabotage is carried out in such a way as to involve a minimum danger of injury, detection, and reprisal. There are two main methods of sabotage; physical destruction and the "human element". While physical destruction as a method is self-explanatory, its targets are nuanced, reflecting objects to which the saboteur has normal and inconspicuous access in everyday life. The "human element" is based on universal opportunities to make faulty decisions, to adopt a non-cooperative attitude, and to induce others to follow suit.
There are many examples of physical sabotage in wartime. However, one of the most effective uses of sabotage is against organizations. The OSS manual provides numerous techniques under the title "General Interference with Organizations and Production":
- When possible, refer all matters to committees for "further study and consideration".
- Attempt to make the committees as large as possible—never fewer than five
- Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.
- Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.
- In making work assignments, always sign out unimportant jobs first, assign important jobs to inefficient workers with poor machines.
- Insist on perfect work in relatively unimportant products; send back for refinishing those with the least flaw. Approve other defective parts whose flaws are not visible to the naked eye.
- To lower morale, and with it, production, be pleasant to inefficient workers; give them undeserved promotions. Discriminate against efficient workers; complain unjustly about their work.
- Hold meetings when there is more critical work to be done.
- Multiply procedures and clearances involved in issuing instructions, paychecks, and so on. See that multiple people must approve everything where one would do.
- Spread disturbing rumors that sound like inside information.
From the section entitled, "General Devices for Lowering Morale and Creating Confusion" comes the following quintessential simple sabotage advice: "Act stupid."
See also
- The following articles have yet to be written
- Birth control sabotage
- Edmund Charaszkiewicz
- Cichociemni
- Colin Gubbins
- Direct action
- Espionage
- Fifth column
- Gaslighting
- Guerrilla warfare
- Industrial espionage
- Kedyw
- Norwegian heavy water sabotage
- Partisan
- Political warfare
- Setting up to fail
- Social undermining
- Special Activities Division
- Tampering
- Terrorism
- The Mole, TV series
Notes
- ↑ A sabot is a dutch wooden shoe
External links
- Office of Strategic Services Simple Sabotage Manual
- News, accounts and articles on workplace sabotage and organising – Sabotage, employee theft, strikes, etc.
- Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching
- Article on malicious railroad sabotage
- Sabotage, the conscious withdrawal of the workers' industrial efficiency
- Aadu Jogiaas: Disturbing soviet transmissions in August 1991.
- The Tallinn Cables, A GLIMPSE INTO TALLINN'S SECRET HISTORY OF ESPIONAGE, Lonely Planet Magazine
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