Carpe Momentum: Revoke Consent

What the GI resistance teaches us about saying no to authoritarianism and building a new world from the ground up.

During the Vietnam War, an extraordinary thing happened: thousands of U.S. service members rose not just against the war, but against the institution they were conscripted to serve. The GI resistance movement, often overlooked in official histories, became one of the most potent internal threats to the war effort. And it didn't begin with riots or firebombs. It began with information, with mimeograph machines, with newsletters. Mere whispers passed hand to hand in the beginning, until they became shouts.

While there were moments of violence, fragging incidents, and sabotage, what defined the GI resistance was not destruction but dissent. It was soldiers giving each other permission to say no, to refuse, to resist. Underground newspapers circulated between bases and barracks, spreading news of court-martials, racial injustice, and the staggering death tolls. Publications like Vietnam GI, The Bond, Fatigue Press, and slogans like FTA, "Fuck The Army", did what Pentagon propaganda never could or would: they told the truth.

In these papers and pamphlets, soldiers read what they already felt in their bones, that the war was unwinnable, immoral, and a betrayal of everything they'd been told they were fighting for. These publications were written by soldiers, for soldiers. They gave names to the quiet doubts many carried, and through that act, made refusal possible. Entire companies refused orders. Navy crews disobeyed deployments. Pilots declined to fly bombing runs. What made this movement historic was not just its defiance, but its reach: it pierced the military's top-down command structure with a bottom-up contagion of conscience.

This resistance was supported by a network of GI coffeehouses, unofficial gathering places outside base gates, where troops could access information, meet civilian allies, listen to radical music, or just breathe without surveillance. These hubs served as distribution centers for literature and meeting points for planning. The military brass, unnerved by these spaces, often tried to shut them down, but like the newsletters themselves, they kept springing back up.

The goal of this underground movement was simple and profound: to end U.S. participation in Vietnam and stop the waste of American and Vietnamese lives. And while politicians dragged their feet and newspapers equivocated, it was these soldiers, young, disillusioned, and courageous, who turned their refusal into a kind of warfare. A war against the war.

What made this movement effective wasn't just its moral clarity. It was its infrastructure. A decentralized, improvised communications network allowed isolated individuals to find each other, coordinate, and act with collective purpose. It wasn’t one party, one union, or one charismatic leader. It was a web, a culture, a signal.

If we’re serious about building the next system, one that challenges both capitalism and authoritarianism, we’ll need more than critique. We'll need the modern equivalent of that mimeograph machine. A resilient, democratic, decentralized communications network that allows today’s workers, students, caregivers, and creators to find one another, tell the truth, and start saying no to a future they didn’t consent to.

The GI resistance didn’t win the war, but they helped end it. When President Nixon realized that even the most highly trained personnel, pilots, were refusing orders to fly bombing runs, he understood the war was no longer sustainable. The chain of command had fractured. The will to fight had eroded from within. And they did so not by begging those in power to change, but by withdrawing their labor, their obedience, and finally, their belief. They stopped participating in the machine. And then they told others how to stop, too.

This is our task now. To find each other. To talk to each other. To rebuild our own spaces, our own resistance coffeehouses, digital or physical. These might look like cooperative community centers, local media collectives, mutual aid hubs, or federated online networks outside the reach of surveillance capitalism. They could be worker-owned cafés hosting teach-ins, encrypted group chats for workplace organizers, neighborhood gardens that double as meeting spaces, or Substack collaborations that stitch together a counter-narrative to the corporate press. What matters is not the form, but the function: they must be spaces where truth is told, solidarity is forged, and strategies are shared. And from them, a network can emerge, not centralized, but connected. Because ultimately, this is about revoking our consent to be governed by an authoritarian regime, a regime that calls itself democratic while suppressing votes, criminalizing dissent, and concentrating power in the hands of the few.

Consent is not passive, it is not assumed. It must be earned, and when it is not, it must be withdrawn. That is our right and also our responsibility. We do not owe obedience to systems that exploit us. We do not owe silence to those who silence us. Like the GIs who passed hand-stenciled leaflets between bunk beds and sea bags, we must once again remember the power of simply saying: No more.

No more to rule by wealth or to governance without justice. No to lives sacrificed for profit or ego or empire. We revoke our consent. And we build from that refusal, not just a critique, but a movement.

This is how it begins. With small acts of defiance. With messages passed hand to hand. With people remembering they are not alone. And with the quiet but world-changing decision to stop participating in our own abuse.