Voice of the Resistance

"Eyes Only. This is a Streaming Freedom video bulletin. It cannot be traced, cannot be stopped, and it is the only free voice left in this city."

—Eyes Only (Logan Cale), Dark Angel

Attention tropers! Calling all willing and able-bodied rebels and sympathizers everywhere! The Empire has swept upon us in a flash, supplanting our administrators, monitoring our discussions, and flooding our on-site ads with propaganda! YKTTW is no longer safe! All formerly reliable channels have been domineered! The Quisling controls all stations, papers, and broadcasts!

Do not worry however, tropers! We of La Résistance and our team of intrepid reporters have teamed up to bring you the news, as it happens, the way it happens! We bring you the truth! For as long as this war continues, we will continue to report the scandalous truth behind the Alien Invasion's acts all across this Vichy Earth. We are... The Voice Of The Resistance!

Tune into this article every night at 8 PM for the latest updates on the war. You can also inquire at your local Greasy Spoon for a free copy of our newsletter. Ask for Beverly--the password is "swordfish".

Examples of Voice of the Resistance include:

Comic Books

  • Non-radio example: In an Elseworlds story in which an ancestor of Kal-El helped the British defeat the American Revolution, the Daily Planet is the only newspaper that dares tell the truth about the British.
    • Elseworlds, nothing. In Final Crisis, after Darkseid takes over television, radio and the internet, the Daily Planet relocates to the Fortress of Solitude and become the only free news source on the planet.
  • IDW's Transformers comics feature Blaster, whose main job in the war is not battle but being The Voice.

Fan Works

  • In The Man With No Name, the Big Bad tries to enlist Mal to be this for his resistance since he's a war hero and can rally the masses. Judging by the coffee he threw in the faces of his reciters (not to mention all of the absolute CRAP the villain had put the crew through thus far), Mal said no.
  • In Fallout Equestria, DJ Pon-3 acts as this as a reference to Three-Dog in Fallout 3.
  • "Radio Free Britain" in The Arithmancer, which is far more of a general resistance program than its canon counterpart "Potterwatch". Xenophilius Lovegood's memographed newsletter Liberation just as much so even though it's not a radio broadcast.

Film

  • Despite the fact that most major cities have been vaporized, TV news is still being broadcast in Independence Day.
  • The Captain Harlock movie Arcadia of My Youth has a textbook example.
  • The cult classic They Live! features a pirate TV broadcast warning about the alien conspiracy that is marginalizing the human race.
  • John Connor in Terminator: Salvation, as per the page quote. His broadcasts contain his message of hope, along with useful advice about fighting the machines. He is doing that against his superiors' wishes, though.
  • "Radio Free America" in Red Dawn.
  • I Am Legend had the protagonist making regular daily broadcasts to anyone else who might have escaped the zombie plague.

Literature

  • Potterwatch in the final Harry Potter novel.
    • And when the Daily Prophet and other newspapers get taken over, the Quibbler turns from a crazy Conspiracy Theorist magazine to the only reliable print media outlet (at least until Luna gets taken hostage and Xenophilius becomes willing to collaborate to get her back).
  • Katniss becomes this in Mockingjay.
  • In Robert A. Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, the lunar newspaper regularly printed columns by Adam Selene and "Simon Jester." This was easy to manage because the newspaper was printed by a computer--who was secretly a member of La Résistance.
    • The trope is also subverted by the messages the Lunar Colony sends to Earth. One set is standard propaganda designed to make the Lunar Colony look strong, and also to thumb their noses at Earth. At the same time, the colonists also send phony "clandestine" messages from people supposedly loyal to Earth, telling them a very different (and equally) false story that the Lunar Colony is weak and chaotic. The idea behind the second set of messages is to give the people of Earth a false sense of security.
  • China Mieville's Perdido Street Station has the city being run by an oppressive government, but there's an underground newspaper named The Runagate Rampant. Of course, this being a Crapsack World, things don't work out so well for them.
  • In World War Z, the resistance radio "Radio Free Earth" was actually an international effort to broadcast information to survivors around the world. It's "resistance" because zombies cover most of the planet. The transmissions were broadcast from a ship at sea, with a full crew of operators in relative safety. The translators and broadcast operators have hectic, but important jobs, sending the information to as many regions in as many languages as possible. The operators in reception get to spend every possible moment gathering information by listening in to government and civilian transmissions from around the world as the zombies take over. By the time the book takes place, every one of the operators has already killed themselves.
  • In Lloyd Alexander's Westmark trilogy, Keller publishes one of the few newspapers that dares to criticize Cabbarus.
  • In the early chapters of the Stephen King novel The Stand, information about the spread of the virus is being controlled by the military. Several non-official information sources spring up, including a lawyer who prints and hand delivers a newspaper, a television news crew that takes back control of the broadcast in a coup, and a talk radio host who encourages callers to talk about the virus. All are violently silenced. In the later chapters, the "good" survivors use ham radios to broadcast their location and direction of travel, to allow the survivors to converge.
  • In the Dread Empire's Fall books, the Resistance publishes a newspaper through the enemy-controlled computer systems.
  • Dr. Tsion Ben-Judah in the main Left Behind book series was this for the Tribulation Force, so much that those who became true believers in Christ during the Tribulation were pejoratively called "Judah-ites". Buck Williams follows close behind with his online publication The Truth, which disseminates the information that the Global Community-controlled press doesn't want the general public to know about Nicolae Carpathia.

Live Action TV

  • In Babylon 5, "The Voice of the Resistance" was broadcast from the Babylon 5 station by Susan Ivanova when Earth was under the control of President Clark. Sheridan mentions getting the name from the French Resistance.
  • There was one in Dark Angel: Logan, a/k/a "Eyes Only".
  • V - The Series used to begin each episode with a faux bulletin from "Freedom Network", until they dropped the idea in mid-run.
  • Radio Free Roscoe takes the idea and drops it into a High School setting, with a group of students running a pirate radio station to speak out against the oppressive administration.
    • A purportedly secret radio station which nonetheless has a call-in number. More than enough for the FCC to come down on them like a hammer, except RFR takes place in Canada. So maybe as long as they keep their CanCon quotas, the CRTC won't care.
  • In 'Allo 'Allo!, Michelle of the Resistance gets the plan to broadcast from a secret radio transmitter hidden in a hearse. Unfortunately, the batteries they stole didn't allow them to transmit very far which was probably a good thing for Rene who had to drive the hearse under the nose of the Germans.
  • One episode of NCIS: Los Angeles featured a masked man who acted as the Voice of the Libyan Resistance via webcasts. He ends up murdered by the Libyan government, who then has another person don the mask and use the broadcasts to try to lure all the resistance groups to a summit where they can be ambushed.

Video Games

  • The resistance got one up and running in Half-Life 2: Episode One, but only after they commandeered the defeated bad guy's propaganda system.
  • There is a Voice of the Resistance in some two levels of Command & Conquer: Renegade, in a town occupied by Nod forces.
  • The IRIS Network newsletter/news program in Beyond Good and Evil.
  • The Voice of Free Mars and the Dystopian Sno-Men serve this purpose in Starsiege.
  • In Shin Megami Tensei 2, the hero's designated bodyguard took over the Mesian TV broadcasts to reveal the truth about some of the horrific things they had done. Naturally the Mesians tried to shut him up.
  • Three-Dog at Galaxy News Radio in Fallout 3. He starts out as the voice supporting the Brotherhood of Steel, but later on he becomes the voice of the Resistance once the Enclave moves in.
  • Professor K at Jet Set Radio in Jet Grind Radio and Jet Set Radio Future.
  • Ace Combat 6's Emmerian Independence Radio. At one point, Ghost Eye admonishes you for listening to it during a battle.
    • Similar broadcasts are referred to in AC04, but the enemy eventually jams them or something.
  • Freedom Fighters has a mission where you invade the Soviet Armed Forces Network studios to set up a Freedom Phantom TV station.
  • In Famous has news broadcasts both from the regular media and pirated broadcasts from "The Voice of Survival." The latter has a more genuine interest in helping the citizens, though he continually denounces Cole as a terrorist. Turns out he was doing that on orders from the First Sons, and they kill him anyway.
  • Michael Liberty in the StarCraft Expanded Universe.
  • Susan Bradley is the spiritual (and military) leader of the Bora in Tachyon the Fringe. Some of the Bora mission briefings include her calling out to any willing pilot to aid the Bora in their fight against the Mega Corp GalSpan. She also commands an elite squadron of Space Fighters known as "Susan's Lance" and has scored numerous victories against GalSpan holdings.
  • Mechwarrior 4: Vengance has broadcasts by a person literally going by the handle "The Voice of the Resistance," which play in between missions and inform the populace about what has transpired, attempting to keep up morale in the face of Steiner oppression.
  • The Voice of Freedom network fulfills this function in Home Front.
  • The Kids' Grid in Pokémon Colosseum serves this purpose in the Under, quietly resisting Cipher until Wes kicks said gang to the curb.
  • Subverted in 7.62: High Calibre, the "Voice of Freedom" radio station is just as full of propagandized "news" as the alternate government run "news" station, only favoring the Marxist rebels instead of the corrupt dictatorship.
    • For example: After an early mission has the player resolve a bank robbery the government radio station claims a purely government operation with no causalities (regardless of actual results) and claims the rebels as responsible (despite the attacker being a well known common criminal) while Voice of Freedom claims the government hired actors with prop guns to rob the bank (even though the attackers were clearly criminals on drugs and had real guns), had SWAT kill them and used the distraction to rob the bank themselves only for the rebels (who were not present) to show up and return the stolen goods.

Real Life

  • The BBC served this purpose for occupied Europe during World War II, even to the extent that it was used to give secret messages to the French Resistance—which is the Trope Namer.
    • They would begin their news broadcasts with, "This is London calling." Thus the song by The Clash.
      • A tradition that was carried into the Eurovision Song Contest of all things. The various capital cities don't tend to say it so much these days, but the UK still does.
      • Mundanely but sensibly this was not just used to give rousing speeches but to send operational orders. For instance an innocuous sounding code word buried in a context where an outsider would not think it unusual might order a cell to activate.
  • Radio Free Europe, which was founded in 1949 by the National Committee for a Free Europe.
  • And of course the ever present effort of zinesters and Samizdat writers and copiers, anywhere there is something worth saying that someone with power doesn't want said. The photocopier and Internet have been great boons to this effort.
    • This is so bad that, during the height of the Soviet Union, a general wrote a paper to the government on how having only forty photocopiers (with only half of them working) was causing a severe paperwork back-up within the military. The government's reply basically was that it was a means of publication, and one that could potentially be used by counter-revolutionaries.
      • Rendered hilarious by the fact that the more tech-saavy counter-revolutionaries had collected the parts to build their own photocopier.
    • The same could be said for the Iskra and the Pravda under Tsarist rule in the Russian Empire. These news papers were the voice of the workers resistance
  • Al-Manar, multimedia organization run by Hezbollah of Lebanon.
  • Wikileaks/Julian Assange and Anonymous could be considered this, but YMMV.
  • As of 21st century, social networking sites seems to have taken this role. Facebook and Twitter are instrumental for Arab Spring. And the Indignados. And the Occupy movement. It's Super Effective, largely because governments all over the world haven't caught on to the power of the internet.
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