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.
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12 responses to “No, There Will Not Be Any Civil War In America”
So, let me get this straight. All cowboys are and have always been filthy ass rich and a government that becomes tyrannical should never be overthrown…?
Naive, aren’t we. It’s adorable honestly. Like this has only been up for a couple years. More like a couple decades. I no longer consider the masses on other side to be fellow countrymen, but more of a threat to the republic and for which she stands. It’s possibly the only way back because we are way to far gone. Bang the gong because I have zero interest in unity at this point
While I do agree that that the masses are manipulated to be at odds amongst themselves, you give too much credit to the media’s power to be able to reel it in when it passes the boiling point. It was way back in 1987 when Reagan repealed the fairness doctrine which allowed for a steady stream of right-wing propaganda to flow for decades. Fox News has been poisoning a huge segment of the population for over a generation leaving us with an ideological divide that is so wide that congress doesn’t even attempt to bridge it any longer. If violence sparks a civil conflict there is no chance that it will be quashed with some heartfelt please over dead children. Consider this, if a Civil War does occur, in 50 years time when it is being discussed as history and is compressed in the way that history always is, historians will likely name the events that happened in Charlottesville as the beginning. That would mean that we are, right now, in a civil war.
“Did you know that racial segregation didn’t begin immediately after slavery ended in the American south?” No, that’s wrong. Look up Reconstruction, Share-cropping, and Convict Leasing.
“…whiteness as a concept didn’t exist in early colonial America…”
That’s also wrong. If “whiteness as a concept” did not exist, then blacks would not have been regarded as sub-human and treated as the property of whites. Look at the white-supremacist colonialism that existed in India and South Africa during the same historical period.
spot-on, Caity! today in the amerikkkan empire with its ample bread-and-circus act, there are far too many sheeple and so few radicals…
The Battle of Blair Mountain WV (25-Aug. to 2-Sept.1921)
was the largest labor uprising in US history and the largest, best-organized, most well-armed uprising after the 1865 US Civil War.
10,000 coal miners fought against
30,000 armed contractors and government agents.
Total est. deaths: 60-130 killed
985 miners were arrested.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain
Hello Ms. Johnstone,
I am a major fan of your work, but I do not and cannot concur with the
central premise of this essay.
Thanks in no small part to the Internet, the Empires’ divide and conquer tactics
(employed abroad as well as at home) that you make reference to, though still effective,
are not the sure bet they were, say, twenty years ago.
(Those who think that the Empire will continue its predations indefinitely should ponder the lessons of history. For example In the year 1910, it was unlikely that any Russian subject could have foreseen the tumult that would soon engulf that nation, let alone the type of government that would emerge within a decade; the Romanov dynasty — what with its Boyars, its courtiers, its ballerinas, its army, its clerics, and its mystagogues — seemed immutable, no?)
So — how can I be so certain that America’s days are numbered? Easy — because America’s middle class is shrinking — and at a rapid pace — with no prospects whatsoever of reversing its decline.
And no nation — regardless of its governmental architecture, or its ideological template — will long endure absent the stabilizing influence that only a prosperous middle
class can provide.
Some time ago, I hastily wrote this essay: https://www.ericpetersautos.com/2012/05/07/deathstar-america-and-the-endgame-of-empire
I wish I could state otherwise, but I have seen no political developments over the past six years that have undermined its thesis.
The corruptions of the American nation-state are terminal, that is to say
the cure, such as it were, will no less fatal than the disease.
The sole remaining question for all inhabitants of our planet
can only be: What can we do to minimize the death and destruction
that will invariably accompany America’s decline and demise?
I love your articles, especially the humour you often inject into them but for the love of God will you please do some research into the climate change scam and stop promoting it, look at the work of astrophysicist, Managing Director and founder of WeatherAction Piers Corbyn (Jeremy Corbyns brother) has done exposing the nonsense – http://www.weatheraction.com/ , James Corbett has also done some great work exposing it – https://www.corbettreport.com/?s=climate among many others, you seem like a genuine person who cares about truth so i hope you will take the time to have a look, anyway, keep up the great work 🙂
In a world of screaming headlines, it is easy to mix up crime news with history.
Jihadist attacks in recent years in Europe have had an enormous media impact, yet they only involved a tiny percentage of the immigrant population, took place very sporadically in different countries, killed a tiny fraction of the people killed by traffic accidents and had no political impact whatsoever (except for people getting excited about the headlines, not about the events in themselves).
That’s what I call “crime news”.
What is happening in Syria, on the other hand is “history”.
To make a “historic” civil war you need to have whole army divisions, armed local police forces and the like going over to the enemy, with tanks and cannons, like happened in Yugoslavia.
That’s very different from people saying horrible things about each other on Facebook.
No chance of a “historic” civil war in the USA.
This article is something with which I disagree. Yes, I don’t see a civil war resulting from political differences, but I do think that the only way that the people of the U.S. will turn things around, is by the second U.S. war of Independence, as approved by the existing Declaration of Independence.
Right now, the masses are working longer, harder hours, for relatively lower wages (when compared to what the dollar used to buy) and, in most places of employment, little or nothing in the way of benefits. Yes, right now, they are struggling to hold the meager things they now have. However, there will reach a tipping point, where most will have lost nearly everything. At that point, and with oligarchic control of the nation, they will only have two choices – die or fight back. I believe thy will fight back once the vast majority has hit rick bottom, though I cannot predict when that will be. I simply do not see any way that there will be a peaceful domestic solution to what ails this country.
If we had a civil war, many, many people would be killed. Who then would be the government’s army? And the government’s slave labor? They’d have to fight and work for themselves, and they wouldn’t dare do that.
Would that more people understood their lot in life, as you so eloquently explain. Imagine what a world we could create if that ever happened. I’m not optimistic; the “great unwashed” are happy in their filth.