Sabotage

There are countless horrible things happening all over the world and horrible people prospering, but we must never allow them to disturb our equanimity or deflect us from our sacred duty to sabotage and annoy them whenever possible.

Auberon Waugh: Another Voice: An Alternative Anatomy of Britain

Sabotage is the deliberate destruction of property to obstruct or weaken an opponent. The French were the first to use the term, sabotage coming from sabot, a wooden shoe worn by the peasantry and lower classes, akin to the Dutch clog. A pervasive myth about the term sabotage is that it is derived from the practice of angry factory workers in the city of Liege who would throw their shoes into workplace machinery to er, clog up the works. This would make the first saboteurs a Belgian version of the Luddites: disgruntled workers intent on damaging machines which they feared would take away their jobs. In truth, the sabot is pretty basic footwear, likely to make even the most graceful person look like a clumsy oaf – and it is the noise and ungainliness associated with the sabot that is the origin of sabotage – wearing these shoes would turn you into an awkward clodhopper. Sabotage was applied to a variety of situations involving cackhandedness and general bungling in early French uses, such as playing a piece of music inexpertly or performing badly in a show, as well as botched workmanship.

It is not until the end of the nineteenth century that the word sabotage is used in the context of direct action and in labour disputes. The journalist, syndicalist and anarchist Émile Pouget first introduced the concept of sabotage in a work context in 1897, when he was instrumental in getting it adopted as a tactic by the national congress of the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) trade union to protest against unfair working conditions. Sabotage was defined as ‘poor work for poor pay’ and could involve working very slowly, doing work deliberately badly to aggravate the employer’s customers and cause a loss of business or wilfully destroying property – sabotage as we understand it today. French railway workers were swift to turn ‘sticking it to the bosses’ into an art form. American labour organiser, William ‘Big Bill’ Haywood, founder member of the Industrial Workers of the World union (1905), expresses his admiration for their tactics in his pamphlet The General Strike (1911). Although not ostensibly striking, and indeed claiming overtime for shoddy and dilatory work, the railwaymen left thousands of tons of freight piled up at French ports and managed to ‘forget’ about perishable goods aboard rolling stock that they left abandoned in remote sidings. Even when freight did find its way onto the railways, it had the mysterious habit of going to the wrong destination: freight bound for Paris would end up in Lyon or worse Marseille or Bayonne at the opposite end of the country.

With the outbreak of World War I, the word sabotage acquired military senses, being used for clandestine action to inflict damage that would disrupt the economic or military resources of an enemy: flooding mines, destroying supply chains, burning fields of crops, smashing machinery, dynamiting infrastructure etc. Railway sabotage remained a tactic of choice in wartime, and was especially prominent in German-occupied Europe in World War II. For example, the Polish Resistance carried out around 600 attacks on railway infrastructure in the years 1942–1943, causing widespread disruption to German logistics and the French Resistance and Britain co-ordinated a series of railway sabotages in an operation known as Plan Vert, prior to D-Day in June 1944. The latter operation hindered German efforts to stop the Normandy landings, which enabled Allied troops to gain a foothold on French soil.

While sabotage is still used for deliberately throwing a spanner in the works or wreaking havoc behind enemy lines, 21st-century saboteurs come in all shapes and sizes, the sexy French -eur being the morpheme of honour for agents provocateurs everywhere. Hunt saboteurs use direct action to disrupt fox hunts – a pastime which they equate to other enlightened bloodsports, like bearbaiting and cockfighting – and thus ruin the innocent enjoyment of those determined to see pageantry in spurring on a pack of hounds to rip a cornered fox to shreds; political saboteurs (often connected to political parties or their proxies in the media) orchestrate smear campaigns to damage the reputation of political opponents or those who might threaten their own vested interests; ecoteurs are environmental activists who destroy property that is destined to cause environmental destruction and cyboteurs distribute malware to paralyse computer systems and networks or to infect them with spyware that steals personal data and confidential information.

Sabot is first attested in English at the start of the 17th century, three hundred years after its close relative sabaton ‘armoured foot covering’ was borrowed, again from French. While these may be rather rare words in English, their cognates are common words for ‘shoe’ in many languages of Europe and the Near East, e.g., Portuguese sapato, Spanish zapato and Basque zapata, all of which are likely descendants of Persian چپت (čapat) ‘traditional leather shoe from Khorasan’. Spanish zapato is the origin of the surname Zapata, an occupational surname meaning ‘cobbler’ or ‘shoemaker’, so Emiliano Zapata, the famous Mexican revolutionary hero may well have had a shoemaking ancestor. Perhaps more familiar to English speakers is Italian ciabatta, which originally was a kind of slipper, but is now better known as a delicious type of bread.

Ciabatta is surprisingly new. It wasn’t invented until 1982, when a miller and baker in Veneto named Arnaldo Cavallari decided to create an Italian rival to the French baguette, which was increasing in popularity and thus threatening his business. Baguettes were seen as ideal for making sandwiches, so Cavallari’s alternative had to do the same job to pass muster. After several weeks of experimenting with different flours and different variations of traditional bread recipes, Cavallari settled upon the ciabatta, made from a soft, wet dough of high gluten flour. It was moulded into a low, oval shape which resembled a carpet slipper. Beware though, ciabatta-making requires a very light touch and a wet and sticky dough. If the dough is too dry or you apply a bit too much pressure in the kneading, it will sabotage all your efforts, leaving you with a loaf of flat, dense splat!