In his Woodpile Report for this week, Ol' Remus linked to an article that describes one way in which a hot civil war might arise. The article is "
Send Them Back" from the
Amerika blog. Key part:
It sounds horrible, but if diversity does not work, the only way to un-do it is to remove the newcomer groups. They need to go back home and apply what they have learned here. For some, reparations-with-repatriation are only fair. But they need to go, and soon.
We either fix this, or we face a series of bad options like civil war, balkanization, or partition, all of which end the power that the United States has wielded. Diversity has destroyed that; we need it back, so we must end diversity, which means that we must Send Them Back.
This seems broader than Kurt Schlicter's "
... Simple, Effective Comprehensive Illegal Immigration Reform Plan: Go Home." Schlicter wrote, in part:
Get out, illegals. Go home. Or don’t go home – I don’t care where you go. You just can’t stay here in America.
This is my elegant, uncomplicated comprehensive immigration reform plan. If we did not invite you in – if you didn’t have the basic courtesy and respect for this country to ask to come here, then get out. And don’t come back – if you snuck into America, you don’t get to come back.
It’s simple and fair. The fair part is important, because it’s about time that our immigration laws be fair to the only people who should matter when we make our policies – American citizens.
Yes, the goal of our immigration system should be one thing – to benefit American citizens. It may scandalize the elite to prioritize our own people, but that’s okay – in fact, I hope they run in 2020 on a platform of putting foreigners first.
Of course, there would be violent opposition to either plan, whether the broader expelling of non-citizens or recently made citizens, or merely focusing on those that are here illegally.
A. Mass Immigration Is Harmful.
David Frum, writing in The Atlantic, relates that by 2027, the foreign-born proportion of the U.S. population is projected to be 14.8 percent. Under present immigration policies, the U.S. will become majority-minority in about 2044. Even cutting immigration by nearly half would postpone that historical juncture by only one to five years. And, as, he further observes, "[n]obody is seriously planning for such population growth—building the schools and hospitals these people will need, planning for the traffic they will generate." Nor, I would add, as we see in California in particular, is the necessary housing and other infrastructure being built or maintained. The consequence is higher living costs and cost of living.
Housing costs in the hottest job markets have grown much faster than the wages offered to displaced workers. Simply put, a laid-off Ohio manufacturing worker contemplating relocating to Colorado to seek a job in the hospitality industry is likely to discover that the move offers no higher pay, but much higher rent. An immigrant from Mexico or the Philippines faces a very different calculus. Her wage gains would be significant. And while her housing options may seem lousy to someone accustomed to an American standard of living, to her they likely represent a bearable sacrifice for all the other opportunities offered by life in the United States—and possibly a material improvement over living conditions back home.
The consequence, as Frum explains, is that:
Mobility between countries appears to have the perverse effect of discouraging mobility within countries—in effect, moating off the most dynamic regions of national economies from their own depressed hinterlands.
Keep this in mind, because a strong division between rural and metropolitan areas has effects we will discuss below.
Part of the problem we face is declining birth rates among natives. Again, turning to Frum's article:
When natives have lots of children of their own, immigrants look like reinforcements. When natives have few children, immigrants look like replacements. No wonder that, according to a 2016 survey conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute and The Atlantic, nearly half of white working-class Americans agree with this statement: “Things have changed so much that I often feel like a stranger in my own country.”
According to Frum and research he cites, this alienation within one's own country is a threat that can prompt totalitarian tendencies. This seems to tie in with the findings by Robert Putnam concerning the inverse relationship between diversity and social capital. From a 2007 article, "
Bowling With Our Own," in
City Journal:
Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, is very nervous about releasing his new research, and understandably so. His five-year study shows that immigration and ethnic diversity have a devastating short- and medium-term influence on the social capital, fabric of associations, trust, and neighborliness that create and sustain communities. He fears that his work on the surprisingly negative effects of diversity will become part of the immigration debate, even though he finds that in the long run, people do forge new communities and new ties.
Putnam’s study reveals that immigration and diversity not only reduce social capital between ethnic groups, but also within the groups themselves. Trust, even for members of one’s own race, is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friendships fewer. The problem isn’t ethnic conflict or troubled racial relations, but withdrawal and isolation. Putnam writes: “In colloquial language, people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down’—that is, to pull in like a turtle.”
In the 41 sites Putnam studied in the U.S., he found that the more diverse the neighborhood, the less residents trust neighbors. This proved true in communities large and small, from big cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, and Boston to tiny Yakima, Washington, rural South Dakota, and the mountains of West Virginia. In diverse San Francisco and Los Angeles, about 30 percent of people say that they trust neighbors a lot. In ethnically homogeneous communities in the Dakotas, the figure is 70 percent to 80 percent.
Diversity does not produce “bad race relations,” Putnam says. Rather, people in diverse communities tend “to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more, but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television.” Putnam adds a crushing footnote: his findings “may underestimate the real effect of diversity on social withdrawal.”
Read the whole thing. See also, "
The downside of diversity" from
The Boston Globe.
There is evidence that diversity negatively impacts educational outcomes. We, of course, expect that non-English speakers will fair poorly in school, but, as Frum reports, "here’s something more surprising: Evidence from North Carolina suggests that even a fairly small increase in the non-native-speaking presence in a classroom seriously depresses learning outcomes for
all students."
There are economic costs as well. Again, from Frum's article:
First, adding millions of additional immigrant workers every decade makes the American economy in the aggregate much bigger than it would otherwise be.
Second, immigration contributes very little to making native-born Americans richer than they would otherwise be. In 2007, in the course of arguing the economic case for more immigration, George W. Bush’s White House tried to quantify the net economic benefits of immigration to native-born Americans. The advocates’ own calculation yielded a figure of $37 billion a year. That’s not nothing, but in the context of a then–$13 trillion economy, it’s not much.
Third, the gains from immigration are divided very unequally. Immigrants reap most of them. Wealthy Americans claim much of the rest, in the form of the lower prices they pay for immigrant-produced services. Low-income Americans receive comparatively little benefit, and may well be made worse off, depending on who’s counting and what method they use.
And finally, while the impact of immigration on what the typical American earns is quite small, its impact on government finances is big. Estimates from the National Academy of Sciences suggest that on average, each immigrant costs his or her state and local governments $1,600 more a year in expenditures than he or she contributes in revenues. In especially generous states, the cost is much higher still: $2,050 in California; $3,650 in Wisconsin; $5,100 in Minnesota.
Immigrants are expensive to taxpayers because the foreign-born population of the United States is more likely to be poor and stay poor. Even when immigrants themselves do not qualify for a government benefit—typically because they are in the country illegally—their low income ensures that their children do. About half of immigrant-headed households receive some form of social assistance in any given year.
Assertions that federal tax revenue from immigrants can stabilize the finances of programs such as Medicare and Social Security overlook the truth that immigrants will get old and sick—and that in most cases, the taxes they pay over their working life will not cover the costs of their eventual claims on these programs. No matter how many millions of immigrants we absorb, they can’t help shore up these programs if they’ll need more in benefits than they can ever possibly pay in taxes. ... Under the present policy favoring large numbers of low-wage earners, the United States is accumulating huge future social-insurance liabilities in exchange for relatively meager tax contributions now.
Not discussed by Frum is the cost on the criminal justice system. Frum asserts in his article that first generation immigrants commit fewer crimes than natives, but that second generation and later commit crimes at higher levels. Edwin S. Rubenstein's paper, "
The Color of Crime," reviews crime statistics based on race and notes that most minorities' share of violent crimes is well above their representation in the population. Thus, that more fecund immigrants may, in the first generation, commit less crimes is not reassuring as to what later generations will do.
B. Will Mass Immigration Increase The Odds of Civil War?
The short answer is "yes." In a paper entitled "The Nature of Conflict" (
PDF, 103 pp.), published in the
Department of Economics Working Papers 2015-08, Department of Economics, Williams College, revised Aug 2015, researchers examined civil conflicts following World War II and determined that ethnic differences were a significant contributing factor in most of those conflicts. From the paper:
The genetic diversity of a national or subnational population can contribute to conflicts in society through several mechanisms. First, genetic diversity may have an adverse effect on the prevalence of mutual trust and cooperation (Ashraf and Galor, 2013a), and excessive diversity can therefore depress the level of social capital below a threshold that otherwise subdues the emergence of social, political, and economic grievances and prevents the culmination of such grievances to violent hostilities. Second, to the extent that genetic diversity captures interpersonal divergence in preferences for public goods and redistributive policies, overly diverse societies may find it difficult to reconcile such differences through collective action, thereby intensifying their susceptibility to internal antagonisms. Third, insofar as genetic diversity reflects interpersonal heterogeneity in traits that are differentially rewarded by the geographical, institutional, or technological environment, it can potentially cultivate grievances that are rooted in economic inequality, thereby magnifying society’s vulnerability to internal belligerence.
In addition to the aforementioned mechanisms that apply to both intergroup and intragroup conflict, genetic diversity can also manifest a link with intergroup conflict in society through its potential role in facilitating the endogenous formation of coalitional groups in prehistory and the subsequent differentiation of their respective collective identities over a long expanse of time (Ashraf and Galor, 2013b). Specifically, following the “out of Africa” migration of humans, the initial endowment of genetic diversity in a given location may have catalyzed the formation of distinct groups at that location through a process of endogenous group selection, reflecting the tradeoff associated with the size of a group. Although a larger group can benefit from economies of scale, it can also be less cohesive due to costly coordination. Thus, in light of the added contribution of genetic diversity to the lack of cohesiveness of a group, a larger initial endowment of genetic diversity in a given location may have given rise to a larger number of groups, given the level of intragroup diversity. Over time, due to the forces of “cultural drift” and “biased transmission” of cultural markers that serve to distinguish “insiders” from “outsiders” of a group (e.g., language dialects, customs and traditions, norms of social conduct), intergroup divergence in such markers would have become more pronounced, leading to the formation of distinct collective identities along ethnic lines, and thereby, linking prehistoric genetic diversity with the degree of ethnolinguistic fragmentation observed in a given location today. The resultant fragmentation can then facilitate intergroup conflict in society either directly, by fueling excessive intergroup competition and dissension, or indirectly, by creating more fertile grounds for political elites to exploit ethnic mobilization strategies.
A few well known examples can illustrate this principle.
Cam Brown, writing at The American Thinker earlier this year, noted in his article, "After the Boomers Are Gone, the Bloodshed Begins":
In the case of historical examples, we can point to places such as South Africa, Brazil, and the Rwandan and Yugoslavian debacles of the 1990s as a counterpoint to the belief in a multicultural paradise, as each has had great disharmony and violence between the different ethnicities who live there. The balkanization of Yugoslavia is a likely outcome facing a large number of Western nations — something that has been the case throughout history. (Even those of much more similar ethnocultural background have had difficulties assimilating and living together, such as the Irish and Italians who first arrived in the New World with significant tensions and clashes with the already existing citizens of North America.) Another case in point in history is the former Soviet Union's policy of population transfer, which was meant to break down nationalist sentiment but created various degrees of disharmony throughout its former "empire" (notably in Ukraine).
* * *
I want to stress that what is to come may not be as bad, or, if one gets more dramatic, horrific as it could be. The title of this article was meant to be provocative, not necessarily prophetic. Undoubtedly, though, there will be varying degrees of stress (social and economic) and disharmony, depending on the nation or region of a nation. ...
The crux of the matter is that the United States (and Europe, for that matter) are not just facing a future of multiculturalism and "diversity," but are currently being invaded. Steve Sailer has warned, "
America is expected to add something like 100-120 million people in four-to-five decades, almost all people of color who have never before been fully assimilated into any First World nation. Every great city is going to look like Los Angeles, and, as Putnam reported earlier, Los Angeles is a textbook example of a multiracial, multiethnic, multilingual city where levels of suspicion and mistrust approach the maximum." Numbers like that are not just a few interesting people moving in, but the replacement of entire populations.
Military historian Martin van Creveld has explained that war is often associated with invasion, writing:
At some times, war and migration were essentially the same, as in the great migration of peoples during the first few centuries after Christ, the Arab expansion after 632 AD, the Magyar invasion of Europe, the Mongol invasions of China, and the movements of many African tribes from one part of the continent to another…
In a 2006 article, Steve Sailer provided another example on immigration being invasion being war, that being Lebanon. He observed:
... Lebanon was a successful democracy beginning in 1943, when it gained independence from France. It enjoyed a free press, women's suffrage (from 1953), and a booming economy centered on banks, trade, and tourism.
And then it all came tumbling down. A hellish civil war erupted in 1975 and flared on and off into the early 1990s, with 100 different militias pounding each other with artillery duels inside Beirut.
Although it's hard now to remember, during its three decades of stability and prosperity, Beirut was known as the "Paris of the Arab World". ...
With a superb location at the east end of the Mediterranean, Lebanon's Christian Arabs were Western-oriented, literate, and entrepreneurial. Protestant missionaries from New England founded the American University of Beirut, the premiere university in the Arab world, as long ago as 1866.
* * *
Under French guidance, the Lebanese worked out an ingenious political system. The goal of this "confessional gerrymander" was to restrict all political rivalries to within each ethnic group. The largest and most advanced group, the Christians, always got the top political post, the presidency. The Sunnis, who were second in numbers and wealth, got the number two job, the prime ministership. The rural Shi'ites were left with the speakership of the chamber of deputies.
* * *
But Lebanon's “confessional gerrymander” worked fairly well…for while. Of course, it failed to build national parties that transcended ethnicity. But, then, those are rare anywhere.
The more serious problem: Lebanon's demographics shifted. The constitution was based on the 1932 census, when Christians comprised 54 percent of the population. Regrettably, but predictably, the best educated ethnicity, the Christians, had the lowest birthrate and were most likely to emigrate. In contrast, the poor and backward Shi'ites proliferated—and stayed put.
As the demographics changed, the original distribution of power among the groups became increasingly contentious. The Shi'ites demanded a new census. The Christians, who predominated in the cushiest government jobs and were guaranteed half the seats in the legislature, resisted.
Then, immigration became the straw that broke the fragile Lebanese camel's back. ...
Palestinian refugees had started arriving in 1948 and sped up after the 1967 Six Day War. Then, in the "Black September" of 1970, King Hussein of Jordan turned on Yassir Arafat's Palestinian Liberation Organization and booted them out of his country. They relocated to Lebanon.
By 1973, Palestinians made up one tenth of Lebanon's population, and were radicalizing. They forged alliances with the other outsiders, the Druze. And PLO attacks on Israel brought retribution raining down on Lebanon as a whole, outraging the ruling Maronites.
On April 13, 1975, four Christians were killed in a drive-by shooting of a church. Later that day, a Maronite Phalangist militia massacred 27 Palestinians on a bus. The country descended into civil war, polarizing along Christian-Muslim lines, but with many strange alliances and rapid betrayals.
In his article, "
On the Coming Civil War," C.B. Robertson explains how a permanent shift in demographics could contribute to a civil war:
In order to determine whether war is likely, one has to determine whether war is desirable to at least one possible participant.
Political power is dependent upon the formation of supporting coalitions. These coalitions are composed of demographics which can be dissected and appealed to in an almost infinite variety of ways (women, Christians, men over the age of 45, people who listen to metal, etc). However, three categories of demographic identity seem to overpower all others when push comes to shove, historically speaking. Those are race, religion, and nationality.
Despite all talk of being a “post-racial society,” American political scientists live and breathe strategies and techniques for getting the “Hispanic vote” or the “white evangelical vote” or the “inner-city black vote.” Obama managed to get 95% of blacks, and it is reasonable to suspect that the Democratic Party selected him in part to appeal to this demographic block, regardless of the personal motives and intentions of candidate Obama himself. As the first Prime Minister of Singapore Lee Kuan Yew said in an interview with Der Spiegel, “in multiracial societies, you don’t vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion.”
Political entities like the Republican party and the Democratic party — and the Aristocratic families they are attached to (the Bushes, the Clintons, the Kennedys, the Roosevelts, etc) — live and die on political power, in the way that businesses live and die on demand for their products and services. If the potential payoff outweighs the risk, then they are likely to choose less traditional, or rather, less traditionally acceptable means of acquiring and retaining that power as a strategy.
Long before the “progressive” movement had taken over the Democratic Party, immigrants and racial minorities were not particularly powerful as a demographic block. Yet as time went on, and the generally more populist and “working class” appeal of the Democratic party drew in more immigrants and racial minorities, non-whites as a block grew as both a source of political power and as a self-identifying demographic within America. The logic of oppositional parties vying for power naturally pits the constituent demographics against each other: men against women, Catholic against Protestant, Northerner against Southerner, and White against Black. This is all “politics as usual,” and while it can build tension, and even violence on occasion, it is not, by itself, a likely source of civil war in most cases, because in normal politics, there is equilibrium. A win for Republicans in one cycle is likely to herald victory for Democrats in the next, and vice versa. When the wins begin to appear permanent, however, the equilibrium is lost. The desperation of the survival instinct — the survival of the party’s political power, that is, not the individuals it constitutes — may tip the scale and make war attractive.
He continues:
When the demographic blocs are genetic, rather than based upon intra-national issues, and when there are disparities in birth-rates between these groups, and then massive waves of immigration, the political equilibrium is gone, seemingly for good. In its place is a whole lot of confusion, mistrust, resentment, and in some cases, hatred. And at the center of it all lies control over the most powerful military and economy in the world.
The Left’s investment in minorities united by their opposition to whites means that more immigration will lead to a permanent victory for the Left. If the Right manages to stem the flow of immigration, or reverse it, then it will win a permanent victory over the progressive Left. The permanence of victory and the high stakes of the game mean that no strategy will be off the table, so long as it works. And history is nothing if not an ongoing demonstration of the viability of warfare.
In short, war is almost certainly in our very near future.
Robertson also explains why he believes such a war will be racially motivated rather than based on religion or nationality:
Why race? Why not religion? Why not nationality? Though the United States is broadly more religious than Western Europe, it is still not religious enough to motivate a war in defense of Christendom. In fact, most of religiosity now seems geared more towards being nice and getting along with everyone than with traditional religious piety. Religion simply isn’t a sharp enough line in the West to dictate the sides in a coming war.
So too with nationality. America has tacitly granted the outsider’s definition of what it means to be American. This definition includes holding certain values and little else… except it is the values themselves that are in dispute. Thus virtually anyone can claim to be “American” when it is convenient, and oppose it in turn. Race is the only historically major identity left, and we cannot easily slough off our skin and swap it in for something different.
While I agree with Robertson's general assessment as to Christians uniting to fight against the encroachment of evil, religion won't be a complete non-factor. The Left has invested heavily in the LGBT+ population and using one's opinions about the LGBT+ lifestyle as a significant marker of who is an "insider" and who is an "outsider" or "deplorable".
Now, as I've discussed before, the coming civil war will not be like the first Civil War of the 1860s. There will not be clean demarcation lines, at least not initially. It will be a war of parent against child and child against parent, neighbor against neighbor, town against town. How? Because, as Robertson argues, the conflict will not be white against black, or some such, but between pro-white and anti-white, which will not fall along neat, ethnic lines.
As descriptors, “pro-white” and “anti-white” are subtly but importantly different than “white” and “non-white.” An Asian man cannot be white, but he can be pro-white. A white woman cannot be non-white, but she can be anti-white. ...
Opposition to whites has been tastefully disguised for the last 30-40 years, generally speaking, but it is gradually becoming more overt. In the beginning, it sounded very plausible: abstract articulations that objectified morality — thus separating an individual from any right to take his or her own side in a matter of politics — were applied selectively to whites. “White privilege” and other manifestations of standpoint theory were injected into academic discussions of politics. Many whites were shockingly open to the concept, as if inherited privilege were a bad thing if it did not benefit all peoples of the globe equally. ... In some circles, anti-white sentiment is so commonplace that it’s banal. The future of the Left is probably progressive, and the progressive movement is fundamentally anti-white. This is not a matter of ideology; it’s a matter of acquiring and retaining political power. The progressive left has invested itself in a large demographic set composed of groups with nothing in common except that they are not average white people. If they are not anti-white, they lose.
C. What Will A Second Civil War Be Like?
In effect, we already know to a certain extent because we are already in it. Robertson believes that the physical violence will be subdued, and similar to what we saw in the 1960's and 1970's: protests and riots, an occasional shooting or bombing, and harassment (including lawfare, doxing, and public shaming). I would also not leave out physical sabotage and hacking. But Robertson believes that the real fear will arise over possible harassment:
The real fear will not be from the violence, but from the ever-present threat of having one’s business or family harassed for signaling — intentionally or otherwise — that you are on the wrong side. Any degree of asymmetry in this harassment campaign will incentivize the general public to side with the more terrifying of the two sides, meaning that despite everyone’s protestations to the contrary, the more intolerant side is likely to win in the long run. Civility is not the way to salvage things; it simply loses.
Of course, simple harassment can be effective. I recently came across
an article at Gates of Vienna explaining the simple techniques used by Muslims to gain control of the public space simply by the act of holding large prayer groups in public spaces to intimidate the native Europeans:
Mass prayer meetings were organized first in Paris, ostensibly to demand more mosques. A couple of hundred or even thousands of worshipers congregate together on a certain street or square and simply occupy it. An imam leads the prayer. Usually sound systems are brought to accommodate the worshipers. The reasons for those prayer meetings vary. Often to demand more mosques. But on other occasions they demand less nudity (a small prayer meeting was held on a beach in Belgium for that), no dogs, more halal food somewhere, or what have you. Anything goes.
That prayer meeting on the beach in Belgium was a tiny one. Size, however, doesn’t matter. What they do is effectively take over a street, square, or in this case part of a beach, and do whatever they want. Which, for now, is to scare the doodoo out of passersby by praying. A tactic that works wonders for them.
Mohammedans know very well what they are doing. They defy the haram governments in the countries they are colonizing. Technically, you need to apply for a license for any kind of demonstration, including a prayer meeting. Since they don’t do that, the police could in theory arrest them. But there is a problem. We are democratic, they are definitely not. How can you even begin to arrest ‘innocent’ people who merely pray? We’re not talking about five people praying together, but many hundreds of people. That’s for starters.
They know exactly what they are doing, and would love nothing more than for the police to move in for mass arrests or with teargas. Many of the worshipers are women and children. They are there for a purpose, not by accident. Any idea how much violence would occur if the police did try to intervene? I haven’t mentioned real jihadis or ordinary heavily-armed men who are almost certainly among the worshipers. Itching for 72 virgins. They’d like nothing better than provoke a riot.
So what do the police do? Just like our spineless politicians, they look the other way. It’s not worth it. Or so our political superiors think. Looking the other way worked for fifty years, so why wouldn’t it work now? That’s because giving in a little bit each time adds up to giving in a lot.
Robertson's opinion has not changed in the subsequent year. In an article from earlier this month, he discusses Samuel Culper's series of videos on a civil war, and writes:
The basic gist is essentially this: the right-wing presumptuousness of military victory assumes that there will be a “trigger” that will culturally allow actual warfare to take place. However, such a trigger is unlikely to take place, not least because it is in the left’s interests to ensure that it does not. This is why they will likely avoid any potential trigger policies (namely, gun-confiscation bills). Without such a trigger, there will be no real “war,” at least in the conventional sense, and the low-intensity conflict we have been experiencing will continue and escalate with lawfare, psychological warfare, and low-grade political violence, such as Antifa’s domestic terrorism and the Rep. Steve Scalise baseball shooting.
This is not “war,” but it is not “peace” either. It is not “business as usual,” and it is likely to get significantly worse before it gets any better, although Culper believes it is unlikely to reach the levels of, say, the Spanish Civil War. A more likely comparison is to the Irish “Troubles.”
This is in line with my own predictions[.]
But I think Robertson errs if he assumes that the civil war will remain a "cold" civil war. Because there is a built in incentivization to be more intolerant in order to prevail, there is an incentivization to increase violence, especially if one side begins to lose.
Thus, the Left's outrage when Conservatives have the temerity to resist, such as the recent chants of "send her back" in response to Donald Trump's recital of the outrages of Somali-born Congresswoman Ilhan Omar. It is an unwelcome reminder that
they, too, are mortal. But, perhaps more significantly, is that there is a sizable contingent of the population, whether because they are wannabe Left wing tyrants or because they come from countries that have seen civil wars and guerrilla wars, who are willing to engage in political violence--
the contagion theory of civil war. And this contingent increases in size with each day, week, and month that we continue to allow mass immigration.
Any serious attempts to reverse the effects of mass immigration will be a sufficient trigger for a hot civil war. Neither the Left nor affected populations will stand idly by if their future political power--a power to which they believe they are entitled--is taken from them.