A National 'Near-Death' Experience

The way in which the civil war will be waged can be readily seen right now.

An image to appear in the history books telling the story of our times? Source

Dr. David Betz’ long-awaited second installment in his essays for Military Strategy Magazine on civil war coming to the West is here! Let’s discuss his main points and see what we can extrapolate from them.

First, Dr. Betz reminds us why civil war is coming to the West:

In the first essay, I explained the reasons that this situation has arisen: a combination of culturally fractured societies, economic stagnation, elite overreach and a collapse of public confidence in the ability of normal politics to solve problems, and ultimately the realisation by anti-status quo groups of plausible strategies of attack based on systems disruption of vulnerable critical infrastructure.

The thing is, there’s no disputing any of this. In fact, we’ve been hearing the same message about the state of Western society for years now, from both sides. We may disagree on the reasons why, but there’s no disputing the West is exactly where Betz says we are.

Next, Betz reiterates that Britain and France are at greatest risk of civil war of all the Western countries:

At the time of writing the countries that are most likely to experience the outbreak of violent civil conflict first are Britain and France—both of which have already experienced what may be described as precursor or exemplary incidents of the kind discussed further below. The conditions are similar, however, throughout Western Europe as well as, for slightly different reasons, the United States;[ii] moreover, it must be assumed that if civil war breaks out in one place it is likely to spread elsewhere.[iii]

Betz’ assessment mirrors mine, though I’d rank France ahead of Britain. That said, where it happens first doesn’t really matter. What matters is that the risk is there and it’s rising.

The professor assesses the statistical likelihood of civil war breaking out in the West:

In the previous article in this journal, I explained how the conditions which scholars consider to be indicative of incipient civil war are present widely in Western states. According to the best guess of the extant literature, in a country where the conditions are present the chances of actual civil war occurring is four per cent per year.[iv] With this as an assumption, we may conclude that the chances of it occurring are 18.5 per cent over five years.

Let us assume, based on the existence of recent statements to that effect by credible national political or academic figures, that there are at least ten countries in Europe that face the prospect of violent civil conflict. In Appendix 1, I provide fifteen such examples—readers may dispense with whichever five of those they deem less credible. The chances then of it occurring in any one of these countries over five years is 87 per cent (or 95 per cent if you include all 15 of the sample).

A further reasonable assumption is that if it occurs in one place it has the potential to spread elsewhere. If we say, arbitrarily but plausibly, that the chances of spreading are half and half, then we may conclude that the chances of it occurring in one of ten Western states and then spreading to all others is about 60 per cent (or 72 per cent with all fifteen of the sample included) over five years.

In other words, the likelihood of civil war breaking out in any one country is low, if not insignificant. However, the likelihood of it breaking out somewhere in the West is virtually guaranteed in the next five years, and if it happens anywhere, it’ll happen everywhere. I’m not a math guy, so dispute his calculations and show me where his arithmetic is flawed, but if it’s not, we’re in some serious trouble, aren’t we?

We already know the message Betz has for policymakers and the public. In this essay, he has a message for military leaders. Given that the military is the wild card in any civil war or revolution scenario, it could be the most important message Betz has to offer.

He says [bold mine]:

Finally and most specifically I hope to address military commanders at all levels, but particularly those with the greatest authority. You have spent a quarter of a century now thinking about insurgency and counterinsurgency. You know exactly what is in store for a fractured society under economic stress in which political legitimacy has been lost because your own doctrine spells it out.[vi] Everything that the general staffs and ministries of defence are now doing is secondary to the primary danger.

There is good precedent for what I am suggesting be done. In February 1989 Boris Gromov was the most highly regarded general in the Soviet Army, an obvious candidate to be chief of the general staff, and in time to be minister of defence. Instead, he resigned from the Army to join the Interior Ministry as commander of internal troops—a policeman, in effect. A perplexed journalist begged him to explain why he did it. The answer was that he feared civil war.[vii]

Soviet society was configured in a way that drove it towards internal conflict, he believed. Gromov’s duty, therefore, as he understood it, was to reorient his mindset to meet the main danger. The situation faced by soldiers and statesmen in the West today is fundamentally similar. It is as imminent for them now as it was for General Gromov on the eve of the implosion of the USSR.

The question: If civil war in the West is potentially as imminent, what ought commanders be preparing to do now? The answer is that a drastic reorientation of mindset on the part of the Western defence establishment is required. Generals should be formulating strategies to respond to the reality of civil conflict now. At the very least, should they fear for their careers lest they begin to plan for the outbreak of civil war without a civilian political directive, they ought to seek such a directive.

Betz’s message is simple: Western military leaders need to quit preparing for wars with foreign adversaries and instead start preparing for wars with domestic adversaries. I can tell you, in the U.S., there’s no recognition in the military that an internal threat even exists. I’m not speaking authoritatively, but not a single public pronouncement by a military leader shows any indication they’re in the least bit concerned about the internal situation in the country they’re charged with protecting. The closest we got was the shambolic moral panic over right-wing radicalism in the military during the Biden administration. I doubt anyone’s really concerned about it now.

I’ll say this: the American public isn’t likely to take the threat of civil war seriously unless a military leader, a uniformed military leader, specifically, expresses concern. The military is one of the few institutions which still courts significant public trust, so it’d probably take someone in a position of great respect to convince everyone we’re in danger.

However, it’ll take an act of bravery for a military officer to speak out. Nobody in power wants anyone to think the country is going downhill, so if a military officer does choose to warn the country is headed for civil war, they’d be breaking ranks in saying so. This is a point Betz himself makes - a military leader who sounds the alarm on civil war is probably out of a job. It doesn’t matter who the president is, either. I don’t think Donald Trump wants a civil war breaking out on his watch any more than Kamala Harris might’ve.

Betz explains how long we can expect civil wars to last for, and the human toll we must anticipate:

Civil wars are disproportionately long and bloody. A statistical study of civil wars from 1945 to1999 found that their median duration was six years and that total deaths in them came to 16.2 million—five times that of interstate conflicts in the same period.[x] It follows that shortening their duration is the most highly desirable strategy for damage limitation. The importance of the last point above is that foreign involvement in civil conflict seems to be the most important contributor to civil war duration.

I won’t speak to Europe, but America’s next civil war will probably last much longer than six years. This is because it won’t be a “real” civil war - I use the term for the sake of simplicity. In reality, America’s next civil war will be a low-intensity conflict. The distinction between the two is a matter of intensity and scale. Civil wars are larger, if not necessarily more widespread, involve more organization among the warring parties, control of geography and governance is the primary objective of the belligerents involved, and the death toll and level of destruction much greater.

Low-intensity conflicts are smaller, less organized, more localized, involvement of the military is more limited and selective, and violence is employed for the purposes of influencing, subverting, and terrorizing. An easy way of understanding the difference: all wars are armed conflicts, but not all armed conflicts are wars. In fact, low-intensity conflicts are quite common throughout the world. Because they often occur well below the threshold of what’s commonly understood to be a war, they often go unnoticed, even by the people living in the affected country. Low-intensity conflicts tend to run even longer than civil wars, sometimes decades, because it simply doesn’t hold the attention of authorities and public long enough to merit a reaction.

I think that’s what’s going to happen in the U.S. There will be rioting and other forms of political violence - lots of it - and it won’t go unnoticed. But since there won’t be armed masses beyond partisan groups like Antifa or the Proud Boys clashing in the streets, and because the death toll will be relatively low, if not insignificant, most Americans will go years oblivious to what’s happening in their country. There will be moments where it does appear the country is about to go over the edge, no doubt, but the situation will manage to de-escalate, only for the cycle to reboot itself. Repeat these cycles enough times, you have a low-intensity conflict lasting decades.

Speaking of death toll, Betz is a lot less optimistic than I am, at least when it comes to Europe:

As for casualties, if we take Britain as an example, with a population of 70 million and assume levels of violence only as bad as the worst year of the Northern Ireland conflict (1971 with 500 deaths in a population of 1.5 million) then 23,300 killed per year would be expected. If we take the Bosnian War of the 1990s, or the more recent Syrian War as indicators we might hazard a guess that between one and four per cent of the pre-war population will be killed, with many times more that amount displaced.

Those are some sobering figures. That said, I think in the U.S., the death toll, even if catastrophic, will be sustained over a long period of time. There will be higher-casualty incidents, but these will be in the couple hundreds, at most. I doubt we’re ever going to see a situation where 1,000 people die due to political violence in five months, as someone once foolishly predicted. If violence did reach a point where thousands were dying annually, it’d not only be a pretty intense conflict, it’d imply a level of organized violence that I don’t think we’re going to see at scale here.

A luxury the U.S., and to a lesser extent Canada, has is the ability for people to migrate internally. There’s simply not many places left in Europe to run to. Eventually, that’ll be the case in the U.S. also. But that day is much further down the road for us than it’s for Europe. This is going to put a cap on how intense the violence will get, though, as we saw in 2020, America’s major metropolitan areas are all potential “hot” zones.

We’ve seen throughout history going back decades how crime and unrest in urbanized areas leads to “White flight.” If things do get bad again like they did in 2020 for an even longer period of time, if order isn’t restored to our immigration policy, we could see even greater migration to suburbs and other still-nice places to live, in turn placing greater pressure on these areas. You can see how the conflict not only intensifies, then, but also spreads.

It’s a mistake to think civil war, collapse, or revolution is something which only affects cities, while rural areas are safe havens. This is a misconception you see commonly peddled throughout the prepper/survivalist community, which is terribly unfortunate. However, make no mistake - the cities are at the bleeding edge. The condition of the urban areas serve as a good indication of how close a country is to conflict.

Betz elaborates:

Putting these factors together allows one to outline the trajectory of the coming civil wars. First, the major cities become ungovernable, i.e., feral, exhausting the ability of the police even with military assistance to maintain civil order, while the broader perception of systemic political legitimacy plummets beyond recovery. The economy is crippled by metastasising intercommunal violence and consequent internal displacement. Second, these feral cities come to be seen by many of those indigenes of the titular nationality now living outside them as effectively having been lost to foreign occupation. They then directly attack the exposed city support systems with a view to causing their collapse through systemic failure.

Note - a lot of this is already happening in European cities. “No-go” zones have been a thing in France for decades, for example. The U.S. has no shortage of bad neighborhoods, but even then, we’ve yet to have our first true no-go zone. One mitigating factor is that American cities are much tougher to attack systemically, because our infrastructure, problematic as it is, is still more robust and resilient than that of Europe. For all the talk of the vulnerability of so-called “complex systems,” they’re also more capable of withstanding shocks and recovering.

Still, Betz says to expect infrastructure attacks as the primary modus operandi of the coming civil wars of the West. The idea is to make life as unlivable as possible, to sow chaos and disorder, and by doing so, cause pain to your enemies and to further undermine the legitimacy of the status quo. You can see how even a low-intensity conflict can then cause tremendous damage over time, leading to economic, political, and social destabilization, then translating into a civil war or revolutionary environment.

The consequences of infrastructure attacks cannot be underestimated. We have two examples from just this year alone. Just a week ago, there was a major power outage in southern France, which knocked out electricity in the major coastal city of Nice, impacting nearby Cannes as well, where its world-famous annual film festival was ongoing at the time. In late April, there was an outage affecting all of Portugal and Spain, with at least three deaths attributed to it. Thankfully, there was no civil disorder resulting from the outage, but had it gone on any longer than 10 hours, who knows what would’ve happened?

While there’s no evidence the outage affecting Portugal and Spain were the result of sabotage, the outage affecting France was attributed to arson. The motive is unknown, since no suspects have been identified. It’s also true that the fragility of Europe’s power grid has been an area of concern for years now, so outages becoming more frequent can also be just a matter of incompetence and neglect finally rearing their ugly heads. However, this only underscores the extent to which Western infrastructure truly is vulnerable to malicious activity.

I think the urban-rural divide will be much less prominent in the U.S. than in Europe. Most of America lives in metropolitan areas and rural areas, with their sparser, older populations, aren’t exactly a prime source for insurgents. But there are still plenty of angry people out there on both sides who either have nothing to lose or think they can get away with it.

Betz spends the rest of the essay discussing mitigation strategies. It’s all very surreal; suggestions we may soon need cultural protection programs, secure zones, and ways of accommodating refugees in the West seems like something out of a movie. But as an academic, that’s his job - provide solutions. I don’t expect anyone to listen, however.

I think this passage is very important, however. Many Americans tend to think the “culture wars” are a silly distraction from the so-called “real” issues, but this is a fatally wrong way of thinking:

It is for this reason that the so-called ‘Culture Wars’ ought to be regarded by strategists seriously, as manifestations of deep conflicts that have the potential to become violently actual. The American sociologist James Davison Hunter, who coined the term ‘culture war’ thirty years ago, warned of this in a recent interview:

…I’ll just call to mind an observation made over a hundred years ago by Oliver Wendell Holmes, who said, between two groups of people who want to make inconsistent kinds of worlds, I see no remedy but force…

In the early 1980s, early 1990s, people were still willing to engage each other. I’m not sure that the arguments got very far, but the very process of engaging each other was important. I think we’ve largely given up. There’s an exhaustion. And that spells some trouble.[xix]

Moreover, smashing symbols of the collective countenance of one’s enemy is the central element of civil war strategic messaging. There is, simply put, no surer way to demonstrate the demise of one social order and its replacement with another. That is why from ancient times, such as when the Hebrews obliterated Canaanite shrines, to modern times such as when the Afghan Taliban exploded the Bamiyan Buddhas, iconoclasm and civil war have been partners.[xx]

I, too, sense a sort of exhaustion with it all, a disengagement by both sides. On one hand, this can be seen as a form of de-escalation. On the other, it could very well be the calm before the storm. People are dis-engaging because they know there’s no bridging the divide. Instead, we’re quietly picking sides. The next time something happens which stokes partisan passions, we’re going to see an explosion of hostility like never before. It happened in 2020. It’ll happen again. Then, the battle lines will be drawn and we’ll see who sides with who.

In fact, destruction of cultural artifacts is already happening, still ongoing as we speak. Statues have been defaced and removed. Ages-old artworks are being destroyed. All by leftists, I might add. The civil war might not be here yet, but the West is a civilization in conflict. There’s nothing “normal” about the times we’re living in, many of us would just rather pretend otherwise.

I think the Russian experience, as described here by Betz, is instructive of what lies ahead for the U.S.:

Although Russia narrowly avoided civil war in the post-Soviet era, the 1990s might be described as a national ‘near death’ experience. The social impact of an economic implosion that was more severe than the Great Depression was extraordinary. For two periods, both of nearly a year in duration, the state was unable to pay the salaries of most military officers completely and in a timely manner. Only the Strategic Rocket Forces received sufficient funding to remain credible, as the state verged on bankruptcy.[xxx]

That describes it perfectly: a national ‘near death’ experience, where the country is driven to the brink, while never quite crossing into the oblivion. Maybe we won’t see a complete implosion of our economy - the Russian economy was already tremendously weak thanks to the blessings of communism - but life will be much tougher than it’s now. There are big problems in making the comparison, but I think the Russian experience is the closest there is to what the U.S. will undergo beginning anywhere from a few to several years from now. At least, it’s a better comparison than Bosnia, Lebanon, or Spain. As for Europe? That’s a totally different ballgame.

The most interesting part of the essay is that Betz concludes with a table listing all the countries of Europe, in order highest to lowest risk of civil war, briefly explaining the warnings and their specific contexts. The top four countries at greatest risk, according to him, are the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Sweden. As I’ve said before, I think the risk in the first two countries is far, far greater than the last two, to say nothing of any of the other countries. But just as well, if it happens in any one country, it’s likely going to spark some kind of conflict in any other.

What’s driving all these countries to war? Immigration. What about the U.S.? Immigration is definitely a part of it, though not the whole story. However, whether immigration is what’s tearing our society apart or not, one thing is for sure: immigration doesn’t help and makes things worse. We’ll close this section on something

Rod Dreher

, who, in his Substack, said something which underscored the urgency of the moment:

They still haven’t, though they are coming closer. But with each passing year, it becomes ever more difficult to act to change things. Last night at the party, a Hungarian who approves of his country’s migration policy said, “In the end, you can’t stop them. You can’t tell a young man who has walked here from Afghanistan to go back. He won’t do it. He will find a way.”

This is a lesson for Americans, too. Someone who comes from halfway around the world to try to cross over that southern border into the U.S. won’t be denied. If he can’t do it legally, he’ll do it illegally. Nobody comes all that way only to be turned away. Does this mean we say “yes”? Of course not. What’s this, anyway, a contest? Those who travel the longest way get to enter the country? If you’re going allow Mohammad from Afghanistan to enter the country, there’s no argument for keeping Alejandro from Mexico out. You need to let them all in. And that’s not an option.

But what can we do?

I hate to say it, but the only way to really stop it is to start shooting these men, as if they were invading soldiers. The fact that they do not carry weapons allows them to weaponize the humanity of the Europeans against them. Hear me clearly: I am NOT saying that Europeans SHOULD shoot them. I am saying that I cannot think of any effective means other than that. Europe is at war, and refuses to recognize it. J.D. Vance was completely right in his Munich speech, when he said the greatest security threats to Europe are within. The leadership class, in government, media, academia, and everywhere, absolutely does not want to hear it. In fact, one big reason they scapegoat Hungary is that Orban must be held out as a villain, to justify their own civilizational self-hatred, and refusal to act to defend the safety and sovereignty of their own countries.

Dreher isn’t wrong: without violence, there’s no protecting the border. But shooting migrants, especially if women and children are included, seems unthinkable. This means having a secure, fortified border, and a deportation train going is the only way. Those are the humane, moderate solutions. Anyone who thinks closing the border and tracking down migrants already within the country is cruel must offer an alternative besides “let them all stay.” But they can’t, because there’s no alternative, besides violence.

Last bit from Dreher:

In Brussels last week, a European told me that the main difference between Europeans and Americans is that Europeans are by nature more passive. They might recognize the problem, but don’t feel that they can do anything about it. If true, this explains a hell of a lot. Europeans — at least western Europeans — are laying down to die.

It occurred to me this morning that I am actually living here at a massive hinge point in history. European civilization seems to be coming to an end. It’s not an exaggeration. Imagine what it was like living in the western Roman Empire during the barbarian invasions (ca. 300-600). It was a time when the Romans lost the means and the will to resist the migration waves. It ended Roman civilization.

That’s what this feels like now.

If Europeans don’t fight back, they’ve capitulated. Even compromise is capitulation if you’re giving up any part of what’s yours in exchange for them not killing you. But fighting back is what turns it into a war.

The unwillingness of Europeans to fight back is what makes civil war over there unfathomable to me. The willingness of Americans to fight back is what makes civil war over here plausible to me.

Getting Inside Britain’s Head

I made the comment recently that if anyone in Britain is capable of shifting the national narrative on immigration and implement more restrictionist policies, it’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

Here’s why:

Source

Starmer, for all his faults, it still more popular than other party leaders. Unfortunately, for the British Right, none of their leaders - Nigel Farage of Reform UK and Kemi Badenoch of the Conservative Party - are popular, while Starmer of Labour and Ed Davey of the Liberal Democrats are wildly popular. I confess that I don’t understand UK politics entirely well, but others have confirmed my suspicions that Britain is well to the left, more so than the U.S., and the popularity of leftist politicians supports that assertion.

That said, the popularity of its figures doesn’t translate into popularity of the party. When asked who they’d vote for if elections were held tomorrow, British voters sounded a different tune:

Source

If Nigel Farage isn’t popular, his party sure is. Similarly, if Ed Davey is popular, his party isn’t. Of course, this needs unpacking to better understand what’s really happening. The age divide appears most prominent in Britain, where younger voters (age 18-24) remain as idealistic and pro-status quo as ever, preferring Labour and Green. Voters aged 25 to 49 seem more conflicted, with Labour and Reform UK getting top picks. Older Britons don’t seem conflicted at all, with Reform firmly commanding their vote. Among the oldest, the Conservatives, who seem liked by nobody overall, still hold sway.

A gender divide exists, but it, too, carries nuance. While male voters prefer Reform by an overwhelming 35 percent compared to 22 percent for female voters, it’s still the most popular party for the latter, if only by a slim margin. Women not only seem more politically conflicted than men, they still also have a strong preference for the mainstay parties of Conservative and Labour, reminding us once more that women aren’t the radicals they fashion themselves as. Men are most in favor of radical change, but we’re not seeing men and women go in totally opposite political directions, either. Maybe that’s a good thing for Britain.

Besides age, the biggest area of divergence is geography. Outside London, Reform prevails, even in Scotland, a country which, at least from the outside looking in, appears insanely leftist. If Britain is indeed headed for civil war as Dr. Betz said, for now, the battle lines appear to be emerging around age and geography. Of course, we won’t know for sure until the catalyzing event occurs which forces everyone to pick sides.

We’ll cap this off on something British political commentator

Neil O'Brien

said on his Substack recently:

There has been a lot of chat about the idea of a “vibe shift” in politics recently. I think this both is and isn’t true.

Actually, many people have been worried about these problems for a long time. I used to hear about these concerns in focus groups 25 years ago.

Two things have changed though.

On the bad side, the problems have all got more intense and harder to ignore.

On a more promising note, new media has allowed a bottom-up conversation that wasn’t possible before. Social media has dismantled the barriers to entry, and an infrastructure of intermediate media (substack, online magazines, talk radio and tv) is increasingly allowing that to shape the national conversation. At the start of this year we went from an online argument about the grooming gangs to votes in parliament within a couple of weeks. Prestigious real world magazines can pick up ideas from the online world. Many taboos are suddenly collapsing, and gatekeepers are becoming irrelevant.

This country’s problems are monumental and interconnected. The only positive thing is that more and more people can see that, and want to do something about it.

I think this is true of the U.S., also. It annoyed me to hear Trump supporters talk about how the 2024 election was a “landslide” victory. It wasn’t, far from it. But it did signal that at least half the country is totally dissatisfied with the status quo and recognize that we’re not living in normal times. Until Trump returned to the White House, the Regime took comfort in that they controlled the narrative and that they could effectively tamp down any dissent either through direct or indirect means. No such assurances exist any longer and, as a society, the West has to entertain different attitudes and ideas, not just liberal ones.

It may not be enough to avert civil war. But it’s probably the only way.

The Form Of The Civil War Takes Shape

If there’s anything I want people on either side to understand, whether they agree with anything else I say or not, it’s this: the civil war might not have started, but our societies are in a state of conflict. The way in which the civil war will be waged can be readily seen right now.

We just saw two examples in the last month of what to expect. First, you had the bombing of the fertility clinic in Palm Springs, California:

Source

The incident was classified as an act of terrorism, given the motivations of the bomber, who took himself out in the process:

A nihilistic ideology may have driven a 25-year-old man to detonate a bomb outside a southern California fertility clinic, killing himself and causing wide destruction in the process.

Published reports indicate Guy Edward Bartkus considered himself a “pro-mortalist,” someone who believes it’s better to die than to continue existing and that it’s wrong to bring new sentient life into the world. He is suspected of detonating a powerful explosive Saturday targeting American Reproductive Centers in Palm Springs, where in vitro fertilization (IVF) services are offered.

“It’s one of the strangest, I guess you’d say, single-issue domestic terrorist movements I’ve ever seen,” national security expert Hal Kempfer, a retired Marine intelligence officer, told “NewsNation Prime” on Sunday.

It’d be a grave mistake to dismiss this incident as the work of a crazy person. Crazy people are clearly dangerous. If you have enough of them in a country, and America has no shortage of them, they can cause a whole lot of carnage and death. Besides, we all know there’s no dismissing any incident like this had it been committed by someone associated with the political far-right.

Then there was the shooting at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C.:

Source

The shooter, Elias Rodriguez, is a far-left activist who donated to Joe Biden’s campaign in 2020, and, like most leftists, harbored hatred for White people.

From journalist Ken Klippenstein’s research:

Still, when it came to race, Rodriquez’s hatred seemed reserved for white people.

“Lol you probably would have to actually genocide white people to make this a normal country,” Rodriguez wrote in one post. “Like even a very targeted and selective rehabilitation program would probably have to lead to the lifetime imprisonments of tens of millions of white people.”

There’s nothing exceptional about Rodriguez’s beliefs. They’re quite common throughout the West among those who hold leftist, liberal views. You’re more likely to find someone with his views than you would anyone with far-right views. This makes you wonder - why do groups like the Anti-Defamation League, who are devoted to fighting racism and antisemitism, so worried about far-right and White supremacist groups, when the far-left has proven to be at least just as big a threat, possibly more, to Jews in America?

For now, it’s enough to say that there are millions of people like the Palm Springs bomber and the Capital Jewish Museum shooter in the country. The Regime chose to focus its attention entirely on the supposed threat posed by right-wing extremists, a choice which has proven to be entirely to be a form of political prosecution, a totally ineffective one, at that, since the far-right threat is nowhere near as prominent as they claimed it was. The Left has always posed more of a threat when it comes to political violence, and its proving to be as clear and present as ever.

Now imagine incidents like the Palm Springs bombing and the Washington shootings happening with much greater frequency: on a monthly, even weekly basis. America’s demographic profile might make a protracted insurgency like The Troubles of Northern Ireland less likely, but the sheer number of violent extremists in this country can absolutely lead to a Years of Lead-type of low-intensity conflict fueled not through organized violence, but by lone-wolves. Millions of them, coupled with the occasional riots by groups like Antifa, will cause immeasurable damage to the country.

It’s also important to remember: when a society is on edge, even a non-political act of violence can set off a conflagration. This is the case in an environment where everything, literally every doggone thing, is viewed through a political lens. Last week, a vehicle drove through a crowd of Liverpool FC supporters celebrating their team winning the English Premier League title, injuring many, but thankfully killing nobody.

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There’s no evidence that this was a terrorist attack or even intentional. I know that sounds absurd - running over people with a vehicle is always a choice - but it could’ve been a defensive response. In fact, there’s not much information about this incident at all, even over a week after it happened. Still, in a country like Britain, where social tensions rest on a knife’s edge, incidents like these, terrible in the good times, raise the temperature during the bad times.

What absolutely didn’t help was the British media and state colluding to let everyone know the driver was a 53-year-old White man. They, along with the liberals, might think this is a way of keeping the racists at bay, but all this does is prove that Britain lives under a two-tier system which views its natives, White males especially, with derision and suspicion, while non-Whites and foreigners receive state protection.

Rod Dreher related this story told to him by a British acquaintance:

I don’t know if you readers ever interact with Britons these days. It happens to me a lot here in Budapest, and of course I also travel every couple of months to the UK. The sense of anger and doom among them is really quite something. An English friend I talked with yesterday pointed out the video of the incident in which a driver crashed his car into a large crowd of football fans in Liverpool the other day. The driver was white, and police don’t think it was a matter of terrorism. But my friend said the interesting thing about the video was that the mob did not run away from the car when it stopped, but towards it. He said you could read the lips of some of those who rushed the car. They were saying, “Kill him!”

“If they had opened the door and found a Muslim there, they would have done it,” he speculated.

That sounds like a society on the brink.

I concede I don’t understand British society as well as I probably should. But color me skeptical - I don’t think any Briton, especially a White male, wants to be caught on camera killing a Muslim, let alone a Black or Brown person. Granted, out-of-control emotions can make even the most docile of us lash out violently. But even then, killing someone is a line most people have a tough time crossing.

That said, just look at the videos of the incident - they appeared ready to kill the driver, even seeing that he was White. Of course, had they killed him, they would’ve been celebrated, or at least not condemned for doing so. Had the driver been Muslim and been killed by the mob, Britain’s powerful Muslim community would’ve had something to say about it and the state would’ve likely brought the hammer down on the mob.

It really makes me wonder how likely civil war could be in the UK if one side’s capacity for resistance is completely suppressed. But what’s without a doubt is that tensions are high and it might not take much to light the inferno.

We’re On The Precipice

Just as I’m about to wrap this piece up, distressing news out of Boulder, Colorado [WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT]:

Source

As usual, the bastards at outlets like MSNBC are describing the suspect as a “White male,” but we’re not dumb enough to still fall for that, are we?

Here’s the suspect, Mohamed Soliman. And yes, he’s an illegal immigrant, if you needed to know:

Source

I’ve been saying the civil war is probably at least a few more years away, but sometimes, I don’t know. There’s enough violent extremists in this country right now to not only keep acts of terrorism like this going for years on end, but to push the country to the brink tomorrow. People are radicalized like they’ve seldom been and the government, especially under the previous administration, has allowed the situation to get so far out of control, there’s no way to restore order without a fight of some kind.

I’m going to have to save more of my commentary on the Boulder incident for a future post, but I hope it shows all of you why I’m so convinced a civil war is on the way. There’s just no way it cannot happen at this point. Our societies are too fractured now to withstand this sort of assault on civil order, and the level of division cannot be overcome democratically.

If anything, the incident in Boulder is an indictment against “Our Democracy.” Look at what this man has to say about what’s become of his city:

Source

You can trace a straight line between the decision to let our society unravel completely with this terror attack earlier today. Any vaccum in authority will inevitably become filled by someone, typically the barbarians. There’s nothing compassionate about making society disorderly. Nobody benefits from it. It looks like it’s a lesson we’ll need to learn the hard way.

Finally, I think this image sums up everything wrong about America and the West today:

They’d deny it, but the ideology represented by the flag on the left is what allowed a savage like Mohamed Soliman into the country. That ideology needs to be defeated, but again, it’s not going to happen without violence.

Enough out of me - what say you? What do you think about David Betz’ latest essay? If you were on the fence, does it convince you? Has your own assessment changed any? Which countries do you think are at greatest risk of civil war in the West? What form do you think the civil war will take, in your country or any other? How close are we, exactly?

Talk about it in the comments section.

Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.

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