Civil War II: Know Your Enemy
The problem is that this all amounts to a self-fulfilling prophecy - the more people talk about it, the more likely it becomes simply by virtue of people thinking it’s going to happen.
For the most part, I ignored the media’s coverage of the one-year anniversary of 1/6, the right-wing riot at the U.S. Capitol last January. I’ve shared my thoughts on it elsewhere and have run out of things to say about it. In fact, this probably explains my views on 1/6 better than I could ever convey:
More importantly I’ve had it with the media and the Regime’s hyperbolic coverage of the incident. Awful as the incident was, it was not on the level of Pearl Harbor or 9/11 and to suggest that it was, especially on the part of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, is utterly despicable and I refuse to validate their remarks by discussing 1/6 in any depth.
However, today, I did come across this remark from President Biden during his speech on the one-year anniversary and, honestly, it stunned me, though it really shouldn’t have:
At this moment, we must decide: What kind of nation are we going to be? Are we going to be a nation that accepts political violence as a norm?
We’ll come back to that remark. First, as we enter the second full week of 2022, civil war “fever” refuses to abate. Leading the charge are Regime forums The Guardian and The New York Times, with other outlets joining the fray. As I said a few entries ago, the media and the halls of academia mainstreaming talk of civil war ups the ante considerably. The reason? They may see the American Right as the instigators of civil war, but, the fact is, that unholy alliance of academia, media, and state have the ability to marshal tremendous resources in any major effort against those who challenge the Regime. Put simply, the right-wing boogeymen can start a war, but they cannot finish one (not alone, anyway). The left-wing Regime, on the other hand, can not only start a fight, but they can finish one, as well. But their ability to shape perceptions and forge realities even in the face of facts is probably where they’re the most powerful.
NPR summed up the situation:
Not long ago, the idea of another American Civil War seemed outlandish.
These days, the notion has not only gone mainstream, it seems to suddenly be everywhere.
Business Insider published a poll in October 2020 saying a majority of Americans believed the U.S. was already in the midst of a "cold" civil war. Then last fall, the University of Virginia Center for Politics released a poll finding that a majority of people who had voted to reelect former President Donald Trump in 2020 now wanted their state to secede from the Union.
The UVA data also showed a stunning 41% of those who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 also said it might now be "time to split the country."
Researchers have found such downbeat assessments of America's democracy are especially salient among the young. Last month, the Institute of Politics at Harvard's Kennedy School published a poll that found half of voting age Americans under 30 thought our democracy was "in trouble" or "failing." A third also said they expected there to be "a civil war" within their lifetimes. And a quarter thought at least one state would secede.
The more one hears this particular drumbeat, the louder it becomes.
Late last year, the University of Maryland and The Washington Post produced a poll saying that one-third of Americans thought violence against the government was "sometimes justified" — a belief they found even more widely held among Republicans and independents. According to the Post, just about 1 American in 10 held that view in the 1990s. [bold mine]
Given the stark polarization of our country and the mounting crises in front of it, one ought to be surprised if people weren’t more pessimistic about where things are headed in America. The problem is that this all amounts to a self-fulfilling prophecy - the more people talk about it, the more likely it becomes simply by virtue of people thinking it’s going to happen. If the Regime’s mouthpieces weren’t beating the drum so loudly, I’d be less concerned, but, because they are, and because they have the exclusive ability to mobilize the nation against the right-wing threat to the country, it makes the likelihood of civil war that much higher.
Irish writer Fintan O’Toole explained regarding The Troubles of Northern Ireland, the cost of thinking war is coming:
The conditions for civil war did indeed seem to exist at that moment. Northern Irish society had become viciously polarized between one tribe that felt itself to have suffered oppression and another one fearful that the loss of its power and privilege would lead to annihilation by its ancient enemies. Both sides had long-established traditions of paramilitary violence. The state—in this case both the local Protestant-dominated administration in Belfast and the British government in London—was not only unable to stop the meltdown into anarchy; it was, as the massacre in Derry proved, joining in.
Yet my father’s fears were not fulfilled. There was a horrible, 30-year conflict that brought death to thousands and varying degrees of misery to millions. There was terrible cruelty and abysmal atrocity. There were decades of despair in which it seemed impossible that a polity that had imploded could ever be rebuilt. But the conflict never did rise to the level of civil war.
However, the belief that there was going to be a civil war in Ireland made everything worse. Once that idea takes hold, it has a force of its own. The demagogues warn that the other side is mobilizing. They are coming for us. Not only do we have to defend ourselves, but we have to deny them the advantage of making the first move. The logic of the preemptive strike sets in: Do it to them before they do it to you. The other side, of course, is thinking the same thing. That year, 1972, was one of the most murderous in Northern Ireland precisely because this doomsday mentality was shared by ordinary, rational people like my father. Premonitions of civil war served not as portents to be heeded, but as a warrant for carnage. [bold mine]
I agree with a lot O’Toole says in his piece. However, he does something that’s become a defining characteristic of mainstream civil war talk: laying the potential culpability entirely at the feet of the American right-wing:
Could the same thing happen in the United States? Much of American culture is already primed for the final battle. There is a very deep strain of apocalyptic fantasy in fundamentalist Christianity. Armageddon may be horrible, but it is not to be feared, because it will be the harbinger of eternal bliss for the elect and eternal damnation for their foes. On what used to be referred to as the far right, but perhaps should now simply be called the armed wing of the Republican Party, the imminence of civil war is a given.
Indeed, the conflict can be imagined not as America’s future, but as its present. In an interview with The Atlantic published in November 2020, two months before the invasion of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, the founder of the Oath Keepers, Stewart Rhodes, declared: “Let’s not fuck around.” He added, “We’ve descended into civil war.” The following month, the FBI, warning of possible attacks on state capitols, said that members of the so-called boogaloo movement “believe an impending insurgency against the government is forthcoming and some believe they should accelerate the timeline with armed, antigovernment actions leading to a civil war.”
After January 6, mainstream Republicans picked up the theme. Much of the American right is spoiling for a fight, in the most literal sense. Which is one good reason to be very cautious about echoing, as the Canadian journalist and novelist Stephen Marche does in The Next Civil War: Dispatches From the American Future, the claim that America “is already in a state of civil strife, on the threshold of civil war.” These prophecies have a way of being self-fulfilling.
The Guardian of the UK, which seems to have produced more civil war-related articles than any other outlet, attempted to salvage the honor of President Biden by painting him as a tragically innocent, naive figure in the face of the malevolent Right:
Joe Biden had spent a year in the hope that America could go back to normal. But last Thursday, the first anniversary of the deadly insurrection at the US Capitol, the president finally recognised the full scale of the current threat to American democracy.
…
The anxiety is fed by rancour in Washington, where Biden’s desire for bipartisanship has crashed into radicalized Republican opposition. The president’s remarks on Thursday – “I will allow no one to place a dagger at the throat of our democracy” – appeared to acknowledge that there can be no business as usual when one of America’s major parties has embraced authoritarianism. [bold mind]
As I explained previously, the Left’s anarcho-tyrannical regime, presided over by President Biden, is an indirect dictatorship. Is it really only one party embracing authoritarianism?
Barbara Walter, an academic at the University of California, San Diego, who has become the Regime’s point-woman on all matters civil war-related, goes even further, laying it not only at the feet of the Right, but also an entire race of Americans.
What I see happening is what we've seen happening in other countries. Here in the United States, we are in the midst of a massive transformation of our country. From being a country that's a white majority to being a country that's non-white majority. By about 2045, the United States will be a minority white country. That's a fact. What we are witnessing is a subset of the white population, which is unwilling to accept this and that also fits what we've seen historically.
It’s here that we return to President Biden’s remarks. Only in the context of 1/6 does the man who, nominally, represents the will of American people, acknowledge the unacceptability of political violence. It leads me to wonder: do they realize how normal political violence has become and that it’s their side that’s normalized it?
Not a single one of these civil war-themed articles make any mention of left-wing political violence, even the incidents that didn’t escape the media’s eyes (especially the 2020 George Floyd riots). Though it’d be inconvenient for them to admit, the Right doesn’t have a monopoly on storming government buildings. The Left is very good at it.
Though they didn’t dare storm the Capitol, left-wing extremists exacted revenge for losing the 2016 presidential election through rioting. As they often do, violent leftists take their anger out against public, attacking innocents and anyone standing in their way, destroying property, and committing other crimes in the name of justice.
Finally, Democratic politicians, for years, have called for or implied calls for political violence. And the Left often employs rhetoric, particularly in the wake of the COVID pandemic, that can only be described as proto-genocidal.
If it seems like political violence and vitriolic rhetoric has become normalized, it’s in large part because it’s become endemic on the Left, the faction of our political divide that controls all our major institutions and the levers of power. And, now, they’re convincing Americans it’s actually the other side that wants to do terrible things. Not a single one of these articles mention Antifa or violent left-wing protests and these are intentional omissions. It’s not that these things don’t happen - they do and the evidence is overwhelming. The difference is that left-wing violence has become both normalized and have the tacit endorsement of academics, journalists, and even politicians, as they’re viewed, at least behind closed doors, as justifiable in the face of a far worse threat.
Another aspect of the Regime’s civil war narrative is the insistence that there are thousands of angry, armed, and dangerous Americans across the country willing to shed blood to destroy democracy. Well, they got half of that right. There certainly are thousands of Americans who, with enough pressure, can become angry, armed, and dangerous. Again, this isn’t the sole province of the Right. Michelle Tandler (I can’t recommend her feed enough) shared something quite revealing, something we all knew to be true but was rarely said out loud:
For those who may be unaware, the Weather Underground was a far-left terrorist group active in the 1970s responsible for several bombings against banks and government facilities, including one inside the U.S. Capitol in 1971.
This probably explains, in large part, why left-wing terrorism has subsided in recent decades: yesterday’s terrorists are, today', members of the establishment. They no longer have to employ violence as regularly to get their way. If they do, there are plenty of young, hungry activists or street criminals willing to or unknowingly doing so on their behalf.
While there’s no doubt there are those on the Right willing carry out acts of violence, the same can most certainly be said of the Left and they have the history to back it up. Worse, many of these extremists are now educating students in our schools, influencing the thinking of other educators, and even those in positions of high power and exposure in government and media. Many of their students go on to become participants in political violence and harbor extremism in their communities.
I could spend a lot of time on assessing the threat posed by each side, but my point is that the academics and journalists warning of civil war aren’t impartial actors. Sure, they fear civil war, but what they fear more is the other side starting it. Going back to the idea of this being a self-fulfilling prophecy, suspicion and outright hatred of those “backward,” “deplorable,” “nationalistic,” and “ugly” Americans who don’t buy into the notion of the United States as nothing more than a globalist "idea” motivates the belief they also want to destroy democracy. How else do you deal with such a malevolent threat through something other than violence?
For now, the Regime is content on using its levers of power to excise, isolate, and marginalize the perceived threat, including achieving ideological solidarity within the military. But this sort of thing is only likely to exacerbate tensions and resentment among those targeted, to say nothing of the impact it’d have on the military’s warfighting capability (something that requires a deep dive of its own). If it’s not okay to say “The Nidal Hasans are still there” when speaking of Muslims in the military, why is it okay to say “The Timothy McVeighs are still there”?
I hope it’s not the case, but it’s becoming increasingly obvious that the Regime has identified a threat, picked out a target, and is stepping up efforts to prosecute that target in the preemptive fashion Fintan O’Tool described earlier. Where this goes, nobody knows, but I can’t imagine it’s anywhere good. The country is increasingly becoming squeezed by two competing factions with asymmetric levels of strength that see each other in the worst light imaginable. And tensions are rising because the other side does and says things that makes them feel increasingly insecure.
Prof. Barbara Walter, blaming the Right for the escalating hostility, says:
The groups that tend to start civil wars are the groups that were once dominant politically but are in decline. They’ve either lost political power or they’re losing political power and they truly believe that the country is theirs by right and they are justified in using force to regain control because the system no longer works for them.
The same can be said of the Left, can it not? After all, despite controlling all the major institutions and single-handedly shaping popular culture and discourse to their preferences, the Left still portrays itself as the oppressed underdogs, in an existential struggle against the tide of hateful and intolerant reactionaries who want to crush them when, in reality, they’re just folks who’d rather just be left alone. If tensions are escalating because the Right, Whites, males, whoever, feel to be in decline, they’re also escalating because the Left, non-Whites, females, whoever, feel to be under constant threat, even though they’re the ones in dominant position and encroaching on those who, again, would rather just be left alone.
Who’s reality is more real?
Antonio Garcia Martinez offers a perfect foil to Prof. Walter and all the journalists warning of civil war:
The fact we’re still in a conversational phase about the whole matter is a good thing and feeds my belief that most of this civil war/collapse talk to be Live-Action Role-Play (LARP). The problem is, LARPs can still have real-world consequences - the 1/6 rioters found that out the hard way. But the right-wing counter-revolutionaries truly believe themselves to be a new generation of patriots who’ll fight for freedom much the same way as our ancestors did to birth a new country in 1776. Meanwhile, the left-wing urbanites who write for major publications, run government, and teach at our universities really believe they’re the defenders of democracy. As time goes by, these beliefs can become so entrenched to the point these LARPers can no longer distinguish between what’s real and what’s not.
There’s sure to be more to come on this discussion and the civil war fever likely won’t break any time soon. For now, we can only hope neither side overreaches or presents targets of opportunity for the other.
Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.
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