Technologies of Resistance from Nazi Germany to Myanmar

Young people are always in the forefront of resistance movements, and they use the latest communications and other technologies to build networks of solidarity.

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This essay is the first in a series about resistance to authoritarianism. I will cover best practices and principles, the range of actions that may be considered as resistance (and how non-action can also constitute resistance) and what we can learn from organized and other forms of resistance in the past and present.

We know that authoritarian systems of governance are spreading across the world. A 2022 Freedom House report found that 38 percent of the global population live in Not Free countries, and about 20 percent live in Free countries.

We hear much less about the resistance movements that are emerging to contest this shift. 2019 set a world record for protests, and since then Chile, the US, Belarus, Iran, China, Poland, Israel, Venezuela, and Serbia have experienced the biggest demonstrations those countries have had in decades— or ever.

While the reasons for the protests differ in each national case, around the world, people are refusing to stay silent in the face of forms of governance that negate the dignity of the individual, control the body, break the spirit, and plunder the workforce and the planet.

“Dictatorships put people to sleep, and the only ones brave enough to fight it are youth,” said taxi driver Renato Gomez, a witness to years of Chilean protests in 1980s Santiago. Young people are often among the first to organize for action: they know that their futures are at risk due to environmental plunder, autocratic control of reproduction, state violence, and hate crimes.

Moving from Nazi Germany to Myanmar today, this essay focuses on resistance actions by young people, who have utilized the media and other technologies at their disposal in creative and effective ways to call attention to injustices and build horizontal networks of information exchange and solidarity.

The White Rose, 1942-43: An Anti-Fascist Social Network in an Analog Era

In June 1942, one hundred people in Munich received a shocking letter in the mail. Signed by “the White Rose Society,” it asked Germans to “adopt passive resistance – resistance – wherever you are, and block the functioning of this atheistic war machine before it is too late…Don’t forget that every people gets the government it deserves!”

Three more missives appeared over the next six weeks, reaching thousands throughout southwest Germany and up to Hamburg. A fifth (written with Munich University professor Kurt Huber) appeared in early 1943.

The Munich University students behind the letters had absorbed lessons in mass communications from the regime they so despised. As the brother-sister conspirators Sophie and Hans Scholl stated, their goal was to produce “compelling propaganda” that would “impact a large part of the population.” While the Scholls grew up with an anti-Nazi father, they knew how Nazi institutions operated. Hans Scholl was a former Hitler Youth squad leader, and other members of the group had served in the military.

Building a chain of collaborators that reached to Vienna, the White Rose expanded from letters to graffiti actions, like painting “Hitler mass murderer” on a Munich bookshop, and they distributed leaflets at train stations and phone booths. Most recipients of the letters were chosen because their jobs put them in contact with many people, as with educators, doctors, and owners of restaurants, pubs, and bookshops.

The White Rose letters asked the recipients to copy the messages and spread them “from person to person.” Working in an analog era and in a police state, they tried to construct an anti-fascist social network.

The White Rose eluded the authorities throughout eight months of activity, even when the Gestapo hired a philologist to examine the letters for clues to their identities. But on February 18, 1943, Sophie Scholl was spotted distributing copies of their 6^th letter at Munich University. She and Hans were arrested and executed just four days later. Their fellow students and Huber were also rounded up and killed.

In death, the White Rose gained the mass audience they’d dreamed of; Allied aircraft dropped tens of thousands of their letters over the country. “I had to act out of my inner conviction and I believed this inner obligation was more binding than the oath of loyalty I had given as a soldier,” Hans Scholl told Gestapo interrogators, explaining his actions.

The Myanmar Resistance, 2021 to the Present: Humor and Tenacity

The Scholls would likely have appreciated the new possibilities opened to resisters by the use of social media, which gives dissidents the potential to have that large-scale impact they dreamed of. Of course, Adolf Hitler’s inheritors ban social media platforms to silence dissenting voices, flood permitted platforms with trolls and disinformation, and use digital infiltration to track dissidents at home and in exile.

Yet today’s resisters have known how to create a sense of digital intimacy that exposes abuses and involves others in their experiences. The young resisters against the military dictatorship that staged a coup in 2021 in Myanmar are a case in point. After the democratic opposition led by Nobel Peace Prize recipient Aung San Suu Kyi won the 2020 election in a landslide victory, the military claimed election fraud and took power, forcing Ms. Suu Kyi into house arrest and using violence against protesters.

The wide-ranging and highly effective resistance that appeared almost immediately includes coders and encryption specialists who find workarounds for government censorship. Hong Kong protesters used apps such as Tinder to organize protests in 2019, and Myanmar resisters study the Hong Kong protests carefully.

They can also create apps to weaken the adversary financially, as with the Stay Away app launched by Genxyz in Yangon to allow people to quickly find businesses tied to the military junta and boycott them.

Raised with Instagram, TikTok and other platforms, they use memes and create eye-catching slogans and story lines to attract international media attention for their cause. The coup is “so bad, even introverts are here,” read one sign at a Feb. 2021 protest; “We pay you to protect us, not kill us,” read another.

Protesters in Yangon, Feb. 2021. Aung Kyaw Htet/SOPA Images/LightRocket vai Getty Images.

Many of these digital insurgents are now fighting in the armed resistance, which a Feb. 2024 United States Institute of Peace report calls “one of the most successful anti-authoritarian movements the world has ever seen.” With very little international support, the armed resistance has forged enough unity among a wide variety of ethnic and other armies to carry out large-scale operations that have taken back dozens of towns from military control.

“The end may not be near, but the end is clear,” wrote journalist Koh Ewe in TIME in October, forecasting an eventual collapse of the military, which has lost legitimacy in the eyes of a new generation of Burmese due to its corruption, incompetence, and repression. Yet many of these young people don’t just want to defeat the military and end the junta: they see this civil war as a rare opportunity to change the system and create “a new political paradigm no longer dominated by the military,” as Burmese scholar Ye Myo Hein argued in August 2024.

Around the world, resistance activities have created a sense of movement and possibility in situations that seem intractable. In Myanmar, armed and digital resisters have used every available technology to gain the upper hand on and off the battlefield against a much more powerful conventionally armed adversary. With humor, intelligence, and tenacity, they are creating a new future for their country.

References

Quote from taxi driver Renato Gomez, in Pamela Constable and Arturo Valenzuela, A Nation of Enemies. Chile under Pinochet. New York: 1993, 165.

Quotes from the Scholls and the White Rose in Annette and Jud Newborn, Sophie Scholl and the White Rose. London: 2018, and Christiane Moll, “Acts of Resistance: the White Rose in the Light of New Archival Evidence,” in Michael Geyer and John W. Boyer, Resistance against the Third Reich 1933-1990 (Chicago, 1994), 173-200.