I know I'm usually the one urgently warning everybody of the dangers of nuclear holocaust, climate chaos and plutocratic tech dystopia, but there's one disaster I keep seeing people worrying themselves about which absolutely will not happen. I'd like to take a minute to set everyone's mind at ease about the prospect of civil war erupting in the United States, either between liberals and conservatives or between the people and the state, so that we can focus on the actual real problems we need to deal with.
For months I've been seeing people on both the left and right side of America's imaginary political divide talking about the possibility of the divisiveness in US politics leading to large-scale violence, and a recent high-visibility tweet by Kim Dotcom makes me feel like I should probably talk about this sooner rather than later to help prevent yet another phantom boogieman from gumming up the gears of political discourse.
"I’m calling it," Dotcom stated. "The conflict between left and right is now so inflamed that we need to start worrying about violence. Can you feel the anger? It’s reaching a boiling point."
On a personal note my interest in western involvement in the Syrian war has given me a reflexive distaste for any high-profile foreigner talking up a civil war in a country that they do not belong to, but more to the point, Dotcom is just plain wrong here. There will not be any civil war in the United States as it exists today. Maybe if the country and its power dynamics change in an unimaginably drastic way that could become a risk, but as things are right now there is exactly zero probability of any large-scale civil warfare happening in America.
One of the very, very few advantages of having a plutocrat-owned mass media apparatus constantly manipulating the way Americans think and vote is that you can always with 100 percent reliability count on it to manipulate public perception in a way which benefits the plutocracy, and civil war would be detrimental to the plutocrats. Foreign wars and military escalations, predatory capitalism and the plutocrat-owned two-headed one-party system of establishment US politics will always receive full-throated endorsements from the mass media, and divisive politics will always be inflamed to prevent the populace from uniting against their dominant oppressors, but they will necessarily stop short of inflaming civil warfare in the nation they've got so much investment in.
The fear of liberals and conservatives or gun owners and the government entering into civil war is a product of the mistaken notion that these tensions arose naturally and exist organically. Nothing could be further from the truth. The same manipulators who have been deliberately fanning the flames of America's hysterical divisiveness will immediately pivot towards deescalation and unification the second it starts to look like plutocratic properties could be endangered.
If there is ever a spike in violence that looks like it could get out of hand, you may be absolutely certain that any politician or media figure involved will immediately change their tune, and all mainstream outlets from MSNBC to Fox will be saturating the airwaves with narratives of reconciliation. It will tug at the heart strings. It will probably involve dead children. And it will work.
The plutocrats who've sowed the seeds of America's political divisiveness will never allow a full-scale civil war to ravage the country they've put so much time and effort into controlling. A civil war would damage their investments, obliterate the economy they've been using to control everything, balkanize the nation they benefit so much from dominating as a whole, and deplete the police and military forces they need focused on protecting their assets at home and abroad.
No, an American civil war will not be permitted to happen. But those who rule over you benefit from your believing that it might.
Divide and conquer is a longstanding and highly refined practice of the elites. Did you know that racial segregation didn't begin immediately after slavery ended in the American south? It wasn't until poor white and black southerners began uniting and growing power and influence together behind the Populist movement in the 1890s that rich white men grew fearful and began pushing for apartheid, disenfranchisement and other Jim Crow legislation.
In this three-minute video Tim Wise brilliantly describes the way whiteness as a concept didn't exist in early colonial America, where those of European ancestry identified with the specific country their family immigrated from, not the color of their skin. It wasn't until white indentured servants and black slaves became a threat to power that the notion of whiteness was bestowed as a badge of honor upon poor whites by rich whites, a divide-and-conquer manipulation which was used to protect the interests of slaveowners for generations.
Robben Island Prison, where Nelson Mandela was famously held, used a clever divide-and-conquer scheme wherein different races were given different privileges and different kinds of food in order to keep the privileged prisoners constantly seeking the favor of the guards to maintain their status while keeping the least privileged envious and hateful. This scheme fell apart during Mandela's imprisonment when the higher-ranked prisoners began sharing their privileges with the black prisoners in solidarity.
The nature of divide-and-conquer tactics are perhaps a little more complex than they were in the days of state-sanctioned slavery and apartheid, but the principles remain exactly the same and just as devastatingly effective. The more rank-and-file Americans are shaking their fists at one another calling each other "libtard" and "Nazi", the less their true oppressors have to worry about the masses turning their gaze upon them. That's all this rage and hysteria is for. The more fearful and divided they can keep the public, the easier the public is to manipulate. They will never allow those manipulations to threaten their empire.
Thanks for reading! My daily articles are entirely reader-funded, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following me on Twitter, bookmarking my website, checking out my podcast, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal, or buying my new book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers.
Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Z
We already have a civil war. It started many decades ago, over half a century, but they did start calling it a war in the 60s. "The war on drugs" is really a war on racial minorities and political dissidents. It is the US government against the US people. An aide from the Nixon administration has even directly admitted that's what the "war on drugs" was meant to do: disenfranchise racial minorities, disrupt their communities, block political dissent. We're locked up and turned into political prisoners over this war. At what point does the phrase "prisoner of war" become appropriate to describe these political prisoners?
Furthermore, we are enslaved in for-profit prisons over these political "crimes", all thanks to the 13th amendment leaving a deliberate loophole to force convicted criminals into slavery. The police are militarized more now than ever, and they kill us with legal impunity too. Philando Castile was murdered apparently because the armed gunman of the state thought he smelled cannabis in his car. These issues intersect in such a way that the state targets black men deliberately, making slaves out of them once more despite slavery supposedly ending a long time ago.
The left right paradigm is a fallacy. There is no difference between the major political parties. It's the same agenda enacted by politicians who all belong to the same think tanks, and are subservient to the same lobby groups. It is why Obama was the destroyer of hope, and Trump the president bears no resemblance to Trump the candidate. It is the continuation of divide and conquer. If they live in fear and are busy at each others throats, then they are not uniting to depose us.
Pretty sure the boorish, ignorant, reactionary president we got very well resembles the boorish, ignorant, reactionary candidate we saw.
You're focusing on personality (boorish and ignorant) and not policy. The policies deployed by the Trump administration differ greatly to those proposed by Trump the candidate.
Drain the swamp ? No, we'll just fill it with even more JPM and Goldman Sachs appointments.
Normalize relations with Russia ? How about we escalate it instead.
Less careless oversees interventions, slash the defense budget, bring many of the troops home, and focus more on domestic infrastructure ? Nah, changed my mind on those ones too.
There are many reasons to be genuinely critical of the Trump and his administration. But if you are bleating along with the drivel emanating from the mainstream media, then you are being sucked into the divide and conquer game.
Sadly, it could have been even worse. They could have ended up with President Hillary Clinton, who would then have used the word "mandate" to implement pretty much exactly the same policies, appease the same lobby groups, and line the same pockets (especially her own).
Beyond The Divisive Agenda – Defining Donald Trump As A Tool of The Zionist-Elite And Why He Was Really Placed In Power To Wage War on Iran
https://clarityofsignal.com/2017/10/13/beyond-the-divisive-agenda-defining-donald-trump-as-a-tool-of-the-zionist-elite-and-why-he-was-really-placed-in-power-to-wage-war-on-iran/
"A civil war would damage their investments, obliterate the economy they've been using to control everything"
I get the point being made in this article and I'm not arguing against it but I would point out that the obliteration of the economy is inevitable at this point. It's not a question of if, only when the next crash happens. If there is one thing the ruling elite are blinded by it's greed. They believe they can continue taking more when they already have as much as they've ever had. Wealth inequality levels were already at the worst they've been since pre-Great Depression before the massive tax cut they just gave themselves. None of the causes of the 2008 crash have been resolved and have gotten worse since. The only recovery has been for those at the very top. All of the bubbles have been reinflated and more bubbles have been added. Add to that the current deregulation spree of the Trump administration and an ever increasingly automated work force and you've got a recipe for economic disaster.
I'm not saying a violent civil war will break out on American soil. What I am saying is that the current economic model being used to keep the peasants in line is not sustainable and shit's gonna get real ugly when the inevitable collapse happens.
I am with your statements in the last paragraph, America is no where near a civil war. Depending on whether changes are made to the current economic model will eventually determine if there ever will be, basically because you are right, it just isn't sustainable.
I quite agree with abjectpermanence and hawaiiantater.
In 2008 the ruling class narrowly avoided a complete melt down of the banking system by unprecedented bailouts costing hundreds of billions. When the next economic collapse happens it will probably be of a much greater magnitude as the problems that caused the 2008 collapse have not been fixed. They have only been intensified many times over by the pursuit of a debt based economic model that has enriched the 1% to an amazing degree leading to a huge polarization of wealth in American society. Debt within the global economy has grown by tens of trillions which can never be payed back.
When the derivatives markets collapse they will take all with them. The resulting depression will decimate living standards for the working and middle class. There will be a class war in societies around the world as billions struggle to survive and elites fight to preserve their wealth from confiscation and themselves from being put in jail or worse.
I concur wholeheartedly that we will not have civil war. I am certain we will have uncivil war.
nonetheless, the US may unveil a new set of "security" systems that involve mass rollout of sentries and robot police. This is a very real concern that I worry of, and there is documented evidence they are already working on this, with the starting phase around 2022. https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/the-pentagon-is-building-a-self-aware-killer-robot-army-fueled-by-social-media-bd1b55944298
Disclaimer: I am just a bot trying to be helpful.
Your logic is sound but unfortunately tensions rising are intrinsically illogical by there very nature. Europe will see civil war within at least 5 years....the pseudo bipartisan States will not be far behind methinks. Peace.
You hit the issue right on the nose @caitlinjohnstone. Keep up the good work! Always looking forward to your new articles.
While I agree that civil war might not be a strong possibility, sectarian violence sure is.
We travel across the US in our business. I am more than concerned about traveling this year.
I think the underlying assumptions on this piece, that the Establishment would never "let that happen" to be off the mark.
They would never let us know what we know if they were in that kind of control. They would never have let go the disinformation leash with the internet if they were so powerful. They're not.
They just have massive loads of information and massive power. That does not mean they are infallible handlers of the masses.
I don't think you have the full picture of what's happening "on the ground" here in the States, Caitlin. We've got about 23% (lol) of the people that are pretty down with civil war. They're ready and willing. A Drumpf impeachment will set them off.
There's your sectarian violence. If we have an outbreak of RW sectarian violence here, I could see it blowing up in spectacular fashion.
Just like nobody on the Left really saw the crazy in the Democrats until 2017 (myself included... and I knew they were fucking nutters!), I don't think we have a good handle on just how tenuous our social fabric and veneer of civility are.
I like most of what you write but I think you're wrong here. The plutocracy obviously doesn't want a civil war. But you can't control every aspect of society. (Otherwise being politically involved would be pointless.)
If enough people are angry or dissatified enough the chance of violence goes up. And with the growing influence of alternative media I'm not so sure if there's much the media could to about it.
Propaganda doesn't work if nobody believes you and the MSM have pretty much killed their credibility since they endorsed Hillary. (That's why they hate the term fake news so much. Because more and more people find them less trustworthy than some nobody with a blog.)
So short of a false flag attack of 9/11 dimensions I don't know if there is much those in power could do to stop a civil war once it's started.
Is a civil war likely? Maybe not. But improbable things can happen as you know. You mention Nelson Mandela in this article, and who would have thought that South Africa could change so much in so little time?
And let's not forget that we have a bubble that will make 2008 look like a picnic. When that happens, anything could happen.