Countdown To The Brink Of Civil War And Back
Civil war or no, events are headed in a very bad direction in this country.
Over the weekend, The Washington Post attempted to reassure its readers that, despite the rising social hostility in the country, a civil war remains an unlikely prospect, even as the risk of politically-motivated violence increases:
It’s easy and logical to conclude that the United States today stands as close to the edge of civil war as it has since 1861. A broad variety of voices — including Republican and Democratic politicians, academics who study civil strife, and extremists on both ends of the spectrum — now accept the idea that civil war is either imminent or necessary. They point to evidence that can seem persuasive: a blizzard of threats against FBI agents, judges, elected officials, school board members and elections supervisors; training camps where heavily armed radicals practice to confront their own government; and polls showing that many Americans expect violent conflict.
But it’s also easy and logical to conclude that the florid rhetoric from right-wing extremists, the worried warnings in mainstream media, and the hail of threats and individual attacks after this month’s surprise FBI search of Donald Trump’s South Florida mansion add up to something well short of the frightening prospect of civil war.
People who track such threats say this summer’s violent outbursts against federal officials and government institutions amount to one more concerning surge of rage in a pattern that has persisted throughout the pandemic, spiking after the murder of George Floyd two summers ago. But the Anti-Defamation League and other watchdog groups are not seeing the kind of specific planning by private militias and online assemblages of radicals that was evident before last year’s Jan. 6 insurrection and the white-supremacist march in Charlottesville in 2017.
“We are living in a country where disinformation, conspiracy thinking and lies have resulted in deadly attacks,” said Oren Segal, vice president of the ADL’s Center on Extremism. “It’s not exactly kumbaya in this society. But we have been going through this for a long time now, and I don’t see people coming together in the more coherent organizing we saw prior to Jan. 6.”
More:
This split over how seriously to take the threat of civil war is not just another example of America’s deep divisions: It has the great benefit of existing on a foundation of shared facts. Both sets of analysts — those who say we’re heading toward civil strife and those who say the threat matrix is largely limited to lone rangers and small, disorganized groups whose dangerous but scattered acts don’t constitute a civil war — agree there is little chance of an organized, violent attack on the government, or of local or state authorities taking up arms against their federal counterparts. But there remains a sharp divide over whether a mounting series of individual and small-group attacks could add up to a warlike conflict that destabilizes the country.
What both sides in the civil war debate do agree on is that a more disturbing trend — at this point more dangerous than the sporadic bursts of violence in recent years — is the pervasive loss of trust, hope and sense of belonging in a severely damaged society.
As you might except from a Regime mouthpiece like The Washington Post, blame for the threat of civil war and the intractable divisiveness is laid entirely at the feet of the American Right, as though conservatives, Republicans, and Trump-supporting Americans are all a blood-thirsty bunch trying to ruin everyone’s good time. But the reality is the Left has not only done quite the job in terms of destabilizing the country, they’ve more than played their part in engaging in increasingly bellicose and downright threatening rhetoric.
First, they compared the Republican Party to Northern Ireland’s Sinn Féin party, which was and still is the most influential aspect of Irish republican politics. In doing so, they warned of an emerging domestic insurgency akin to the Irish Republican Army (IRA), a murderous terrorist group responsible for the loss of thousands of lives, mostly innocent, during a four-decade-long low-level armed conflict in the country known as The Troubles.
Now, they’re saying the Republican Party is worse than any extremist group in history. Hyperbole? Maybe, but it doesn’t change the fact they seem pretty damn serious about it:
To which Michael Hayden, Director of the Central Intelligence Agency under George W. Bush and Barack Obama, replied:
Hayden is appealing to his own authority - having led the CIA through the dark days of the War on Terror, he’s vouching for Luce’s testimony that the Republican Party is worse than all the other extremist and violent movements that menace the world: al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic State of Iraq and the Syria (ISIS), the list goes on. When followed to its logical conclusion, the implication is rather obvious: the Republican Party needs to be treated the same way we’ve treated terrorist groups, meaning we have to kill them before they kill us. If that’s not a threat, feel free to educate me on what is.
Still, as they implicate only one side in what has effectively become a cold civil war, there’s something encouraging in seeing that some within the Regime still view the risk of civil war as low. This doesn’t mean everything will work itself out and America will manage to return to “normal” (as if that means anything any longer), but it does mean whatever domestic conflict the U.S. finds itself embroiled in will take on the character of something bad, yet far less dramatic than many seem to anticipate:
Does all the noise add up only to vigorous opposition to the government, or is it evidence of concerted preparation for open warfare? The answer depends in part on what you think modern civil war would look like: Would large militias attack government institutions, or would a war be limited to haphazard acts by individuals and small guerrilla factions?
Some say a war of sorts has begun: “The second American civil war is already occurring,” Robert Reich, labor secretary under President Bill Clinton, declared in the Guardian. “But it is less of a war than a kind of benign separation analogous to unhappily married people who don’t want to go through the trauma of a formal divorce.”
Robert Reich is someone who generally lacks credibility with me, but credit where credit’s due - I consider his read on the situation a reasonably accurate one. The size and diversity of contemporary America makes it difficult for a civil war to materialize because it’s a lot easier to avoid your enemies than to have to live near them. In most countries where civil war occurs, they’re not only suffering from severe balkanization, but the different groups are fighting over a relatively small amount of territory. It’s a lot more difficult to avoid violence when there’s less to go ground, including land. This is where comparisons between the U.S. and, say, the former Yugoslavia, fall flat.
The U.S., as a civilization, hasn’t existed as long as those of the Balkans region and our divisions are nowhere near as well-defined as theirs. Furthermore, the supposed diversity of the Balkans is far outpaced by ours - just as homogeneity tends to reduce social friction, high levels of diversity can minimize social division because it’s more difficult to put people in a box. Despite the Left’s attempts to characterize the American Right as ethno-nationalist, not only is this a fabricated narrative, White Americans are an ethnically diverse demographic and ethno-nationalism has never played a role in U.S. politics, even given our racial history.
Other comparisons fall easily as flat. Many observers have noted similarities between America’s current situation and the lead-up to the 1936 - 1939 Spanish Civil War. Rod Dreher of The American Conservative is one of them, but he convincingly argues armed opposition, at least at a large scale, is futile:
This, I think, is why any talk of an American civil war is mostly just talk. The Regime -- meaning both the State and private institutional actors -- have the technological power to marginalize those it wants to marginalize. When we become a cashless society -- and the Regime used Covid as an opportunity to move us all towards that goal (remember the "coin shortage" bullshit?) -- it will be impossible to buy and sell if your card is disabled electronically. That's simply true.
I was talking with a couple of academics this morning about all of this, and we agreed that in a very short time, when the captive minds of the Millennials and Generation Z achieve political dominance, there will be a widespread agreement that these measures should be taken against the deplorable dissidents. We Americans today have created a system that can be used against us to crush our liberties -- and a progressive totalitarian-therapeutic culture that will insist on it for our own good.
Dreher’s argument is that today’s technology enables the state to exercise totalitarian control of the populace like never before, suggesting any attempt to form a serious resistance movement would likely be detected and crushed long before it catches steam. Bear in mind; for decades, federal law enforcement has and continues to infiltrate extremists groups, particularly on the Right, all across the country. The politicization of the military by the Left also guarantees no opposition movement can emerge from within the armed services. It’s from within the populace only that resistance can be fomented, but again, the unparalleled surveillance technology possessed by the state makes it largely impossible. Top it off with the fact there doesn’t appear to be a serious, well-organized resistance movement underway to begin with, rendering the possibility of civil war low. This has to be a good thing, right?
But if there’s no civil war coming, what is, exactly? After all, you can’t have people in positions of prominence calling for violence and expect peace. If you ask someone like Dreher, the trade-off for a lower likelihood of civil war is a higher likelihood of totalitarian governance. If you ask academic and historian Victor Davis Hanson, we may end up in a civil war anyway, just because one side deludes itself into thinking one is inevitable, thereby creating a self-fulfilling prophecy:
In contrast, decrying the weaponization of a once-professional FBI, and the scandals among its wayward Washington hierarchy is not insurrectionary. Nor is being appalled at the FBI raiding a former president’s and possible presidential candidate’s home, when historically disputes over presidential papers were the business of lawyers not armed agents.
Historic overreach is insurrectionary, not objecting to it. And those who warn most of some mythical civil war are those most likely to incite one.
My position is somewhere in the middle between Dreher and Hanson. I believe the hostility between the two sides, coupled with the irresponsible and threatening rhetoric by those in power (including the president, as we will see), will bring America to the brink of a second civil war, but we won’t actually plunge into the abyss. Instead, it’ll mark the beginning of a new, more violent and unstable era in our history.
The Troubles of Northern Ireland have no definite start date, but it’s generally accepted that the summer of 1966, when a Loyalist paramilitary group known as the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) formed in response to fears of the rising threat of militant Irish republicanism, was when the long-dormant conflict began to escalate. Two Catholics were murdered and one Protestant killed unintentionally that summer by the UVF. Led by Protestant fundamentalist minister-turned Northern Ireland politician Ian Paisley, Loyalist extremists became increasingly active in the following years and, after a prolonged period of civil unrest, British troops were deployed in 1969 to bring order to the deteriorating security situation.
Three years later, The Troubles hit a fever pitch. 480 people were killed in 1972, the most in all the years of the conflict. It was also a year defined the incident known as “Bloody Sunday,” when British troops shot and killed 14 unarmed protesters and injured many more. Northern Ireland appeared on the brink of outright civil war. For reasons which merit separate discussion, it didn’t happen and, though casualties remained high for several years thereafter, they came close to the peak of 1972 ever again. What instead ensued were almost 30 more years of low-intensity conflict that consumed several hundred more lives and forever changed many more.
The lesson here is that the U.S. can still become a more violent and destabilized place without facing the prospect of civil war. The state can pursue a campaign of persecution against those it deems “enemies of democracy” or, as Ian Paisley did, whip up malicious sentiments which lead to Americans committing acts of violence against other Americans, similar to the way the UVF terrorized Irish Catholics. Feeling emboldened, violent criminals can run roughshod over civil society, doing whatever they want knowing full well nobody’s going to dare try to stop them. Meanwhile, law-abiding citizens the man seen in this video below are forced to live in fear of not only the criminal, but of what the law will do to him should he get involved and his actions be deemed outside the bounds of a Good Samaritan by big-city legal systems which seem bent on unleashing savage hordes on the innocent:
In some places, there already exists what can only be described as a state of total anarchy. At times, it’s a wonder a civil war hasn’t broken out yet:
Even in America’s biggest and richest city, public transportation amounts to a terror ride:
Then you have what, at times, resembles an attempt at racial genocide in the San Francisco Bay Area, with daily attacks against Asian-Americans by mostly Black perpetrators:
Civil war or no, events are headed in a very bad direction in this country. On one hand, you have a slow-burn breakdown of the rule of law which could effectively lead to something resembling a civil war, where society is preyed upon by barbarians, left defenseless by authorities unable or unwilling to protect the people while insisting on collecting its taxes. This leaves only private citizens to assure its own safety, but would the authorities tolerate that? After all, criminals don’t threaten the state - those who threaten the state’s monopoly on legitimate use of violence do.
Then you have the American Left looking to go on the offensive against its political opponents and millions of Americans for daring to oppose them:
The anarcho-tyrant-in-chief President Joe Biden plans on delivering a speech to the American people about our rights being under threat:
However, based on comments from earlier in the day, I’m convinced this speech will effectively amount to a declaration of war of sorts. No other president in our lifetimes has attempted to sound so threatening to Americans who are merely exercising their constitutional right to bear arms and accurately see the government as increasingly becoming hostile to them and their way of life:
I’ve never heard Biden say anything remotely similar to the criminal class in our country. It says everything about who he and the Regime view as the real enemy: Americans who don’t share their vision for what this country is and what it ought to be. And they have many people and weapons at their disposal with which to go on the attack.
Make no mistake about it: we’re slowly reaching something of a tipping point. It’s easy to step out into the world and go about your daily lives and think things aren’t so bad. Remember: that’s exactly what the people of Northern Ireland thought in 1966. Three years later, civil unrest had become a part of life and troops were patrolling the streets. In today’s America, there’s a lot of anger and hatred of the other bubbling beneath the surface. Worst of all, a lot of it seems to be coming from the people who are in a position to act on their hostile impulses: the Regime. We may not be headed for civil war, but armed conflict and violence can still become a normal part of our lives. It may yet become something we’ll have to learn to live with.
The shape of what’s coming has yet to become fully clear. Whatever it is, it’s not peace, that much is certain.
Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.
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