Partisans

In a full on, wheels off, catastrophic societal collapse, only history can credibly predict what's to come. It tells of other and similar times when civilization had been upended, of wars and revolutions and the other madnesses of nations. Some are too remote in time or place to be of use, the Wars of the Roses or Pol Pot's Cambodia, say. Our best candidate is Occupied Europe in the 1940s, when what otherwise would be recorded as a time of civil wars, chaos and freelance armies was masked by the world war. What interest us here is not the battles of national armies nor even the malevolent police states imposed on conquered peoples but rather the undergrounds and their militia, what they seemed to be and what they were.

Recall Germany and Russia attacked Poland in 1939 and split it into two zones of occupation. In both zones POWs were executed, citizens rounded up for forced labor or outright extermination, and years-long terror campaigns begun. The European Allies responded to the invasion by declaring war on Germany but, note, not on Russia. In 1940 Germany attacked and defeated France. Again there were two zones, occupied France in the north and unoccupied but collaborative Vichy France in the south. In 1941 Germany attacked Russia, the largest invasion in history, which proved to be as unsuccessful an occupation as it was an unsuccessful military venture.

World War II in the east was a contest between two single-party states, the national socialists of Germany and the international socialists of Russia. Both were ruled by personality-cult dictators, both were police states using citizen-surveillance and unlimited terror to stay in power. Vassal states supplied both with food, labor, raw materials and manufactured goods; Russia's largely by terror and political domination, Germany's by annexation and finally by war and occupation. As with socialist states everywhere, economic reality required they be supported from the outside, the method being plunder and enslavement—the true endpoint of socialist economics as admitted openly by national socialist Germany.

In reaction to the occupation in Europe and the east, armed resistance was hastily organized.

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