This is the first piece I’ve written where I realized afterwards that it would actually suit both this publication and my Dark Futura one. So, for the first time I will publish it on both in order to reach both audiences, since the two have now diverged over time, and there are many people who only subscribe to one and not the other. Thus, my apologies for anyone who’s a subscriber to both and gets a double email, as this will be a rare occurrence on a subject that happens to pertain to both publications.
I often mention my long-held forecast that I predict the United States will either devolve into civil war or secession by the year 2030. Hearing this, many have asked me to expound at length about my thoughts on this, why and how I see it unfolding. So I’ve decided to finally treat the topic in a more in depth manner than the usual comment reply allows.
I.
The truth is, this is a popular prediction to make for many people on the ‘Right/Alt-Right’, but few actually delineate the specific mechanisms by which it can happen. And it is here that I believe I can shed some pertinent light as to the exact process, already in motion, that I believe will lead to these scenarios.
First, let us define a few basic ground terms so that we’re on the same contextual page. Just like how many people euphemistically say “WW3” when they actually mean “nuclear war”, when in reality WW3 has no direct, inherent relation to nuclear war per se, as it can simply be a global conventional conflict akin to WW2, similarly here, many people vaguely invoke ‘civil war’ without understanding what the term might actually imply.
Particularly in today’s cultural climate, when they conjure up ‘civil war’, many people are subconsciously referring to some sort of Rwandan Genocide-style conflict between the two opposing sides of Liberals and Conservatives, where the actual civilians have taken up arms and are battling it out in the streets. This notion of a ‘civil war’ is driven by endless memes posted by both sides which depict things like armed antifa leftists against conservative militiamen rifling it out in some dystopian suburban battlefield, perhaps akin to Seattle’s CHAZ ‘Autonomous Zone’.
Yet the historical precedent for ‘Civil War’, at least as it’s known in the U.S., is more synonymous with secession in the sense that it was two opposing governmental forces backed by conventional standing armies engaging in real military combat, rather than the a ragtag free-for-all of citizens armed with kitchen knives and .22 pistols in the city park.
In fact, to further confuse the point, the American Civil War was conceptually no different than a Revolutionary War, like that of 1776. And many people have pointed out that the Revolutionary War itself was in actuality a Civil War, which means that to some extent the U.S. has already gone through two civil wars, to make a rhetorical point.
This is all to make the point that what I’ll be mostly concentrating on here is not the Rwandan-style conflict that Twitter trolls envision as the model of a ‘civil war’, but rather the other variety.
The Rwandan-style one has the least chance of happening because it presupposes some sort of de-centralized, stochastic ‘free-for-all’ where people just happen to take up arms against the fellow man. Sure, there will be sporadic armed conflicts occurring regionally, owing to the growing racial and political divides in the country. But there exists no real formalized mechanism by which the two sides can even cohere into some semblance of organized, opposing armies with a central command, staff structures, etc. This is mostly a juvenile consideration, at least for any time in the semi-near future, of which we’re speaking. One could perhaps envision such a scenario much farther down the line than is possible to predict: some sort of weird, lawless, dystopian post-apocalyptic Mad-Max-style future in the year 2100, or something like that. But for our purposes, this is unrealistic and unworthy of serious deliberation.
II.
There is a third option some people refer to when invoking civil war: that of ‘people vs. the government’. I’ll treat this one briefly on its own, because there are a few important considerations here.
Firstly, this idea has gained traction as numerous American politicians have wielded this cudgel as a threat against upstart Americans who might like their chances in an uprising. Biden himself has remarked on at least two or three different occasions that ‘Americans need F-15s not AR15s to fight against the government’, implying that U.S. citizens can never defeat the government unless they’re armed with high level strategic weaponry, as opposed to mere small arms.
Read it all: https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/on-secession-and-civil-war