I recently came across links to a two-part article by David Betz, a professor of war at King's College London, published in Military Strategy Magazine. Entitled "Civil War Comes to the West" (Summer 2023) and "Civil War Comes to the West, Part II: Strategic Realities," (Spring 2025) the author explores how "the cult of ethnicity," decline in societal trust and social capital, multiculturalism and political polarization has brought western nations to the brink of civil war. He notes, for instance:
What might be described as ‘intertribal conflict’ is by no means confined to the virtual spaces of the Internet; rather, it manifests also in physical fighting in a self-reinforcing feedback cycle. Many examples of this from recent headlines might be given. A good one though, is the city of Leicester in Britain, which over the last year has witnessed recurring violence between the local Hindu and Muslim populations, both sides animated by intercommunal tensions in distant south Asia. A Hindu mob marched through the Muslim part of town chanting ‘Death to Pakistan’.
He also observes:
[I]t can be said that a generation ago all Western countries could still be described as to a large degree cohesive nations, each with a greater or lesser sense of common identity and heritage. By contrast, all now are incohesive political entities, jigsaw puzzles of competing identity-based tribes, living in large part in virtually segregated ‘communities’ competing over diminishing societal resources increasingly obviously and violently. Moreover, their economies are mired in a structural malaise leading, inevitably in the view of several knowledgeable observers to systemic collapse.
All that is needed to touch it off, he predicts, would be a severe economic downturn. But he also mentions how vulnerable are modern cities to disruption of utilities and basic services, hinting that concerted disruptions could finally push the populace over the edge.
"The trouble is that the urge to fight, indeed the wish to accelerate towards conflict," he writes, "is not confined to just one group—as one might gather from the recent alarm over far-Right populism—but is of a rather more general character, with radicalism increasingly visible in all sorts of communities." And he uses France as an example where Muslims have committed many of the atrocities there (albeit in smaller numbers) that we saw committed against and between communities in the Middle East conflicts. He continues (footnotes omitted):
Approximately 75 per cent of post-Cold War civil conflicts have been fought by ethnic factions. Therefore, that civil war in the West will be likewise is unexceptional. The nature of the belief that Mansoor invokes as being important is, however, worth dwelling upon. I would suggest that the belief in question is the acceptance by all groups in society of the precepts of ‘identity politics’.
Identity politics may be defined as politics in which people having a particular racial, religious, ethnic, social, or cultural identity tend to promote their own specific interests or concerns without regard to the interests or concerns of any larger political group. It is overtly post-national. It is this above all that makes civil conflict in the West not merely likely but practically inevitable, in my view.
Identity politics will not only play a role in the cause of any such civil war, but in how it plays out. Betz explains (footnotes omitted):
Scenarios, mostly focused on the United States, of what civil wars in the West would look like exist in the literature. They tend to share one thing in common particularly, which is the expectation as expressed by Peter Mansoor, professor of military history at Ohio State University, that they will,
…not be like the first [American] civil war, with armies manoeuvring on the battlefield [but] would very much be a free-for-all, neighbour-on-neighbour, based on beliefs and skin colour and religion. And it would be horrific.
My LDS readers may find this description eerily familiar. As I've previously related, Duane S. Crowther's book, Prophecy--Key to the Future, cites various early LDS Church leaders concerning a second civil war. For instance, Orson Pratt, speaking in 1879, described this second civil war:
[I]t will be very different from the war between the North and the South. Do you wish me to describe it? I will do so. It will be a war of neighborhood against neighborhood, city against city, town against town, county against county, state against state, and they will go forth, destroying and being destroyed and manufacturing will, in a great measure, cease, for a time among the American nation. Why? Because in these terrible wars, they will not be privileged to manufacture, there will be too much bloodshed, too much mobocracy, too much going forth in bands and destroying and pillaging the land to suffer people to pursue any local vocation with any degree of safety. What will become of millions of the farmers upon that land? They will leave their farms and they will remain uncultivated, and they will flee before the ravaging armies from place to place; and thus will they go forth burning and pillaging the whole country; and that great and powerful nation, now consisting of some forty millions of people, will be wasted away, unless they repent.
(Crowther p. 50). Joseph Smith is also quoted as saying:
A terrible revolution will take place in the land of America, such as has never been seen before; for the land will be literally left without a supreme government, and every species of wickedness will run rampant. Father will be against son, and son against father, mother against daughter, and daughter against mother. The most terrible scenes of murder and bloodshed and rapine that have ever been looked upon will take place.
(Crowther 53).
Despite the focus of the foregoing passages on the United States, Betz says in the second part of his article that he expects civil war to first erupt in the U.K. and France. But, he adds, "[t]he conditions are similar, however, throughout Western Europe as well as, for slightly different reasons, the United States; moreover, it must be assumed that if civil war breaks out in one place it is likely to spread elsewhere." As to how the war will break out and progress, Betz predicts:
... First, the major cities become ungovernable, i.e., feral, exhausting the ability of the police even with military assistance to maintain civil order, while the broader perception of systemic political legitimacy plummets beyond recovery. The economy is crippled by metastasising intercommunal violence and consequent internal displacement. Second, these feral cities come to be seen by many of those indigenes of the titular nationality now living outside them as effectively having been lost to foreign occupation. They then directly attack the exposed city support systems with a view to causing their collapse through systemic failure.
Betz states that his purpose is to provide a warning to both the statesmen and military leaders, and encourage military leaders to study how they might "win" such a conflict. But one has to ask, win against who?
Betz is quite clear that there are certain political asymmetries here focused around geography (rural versus urban) and ethnic (the native whites versus the replacement population). (Unmentioned, of course, is the power axis--elites versus commoners). For instance, he displays a map of France showing which areas voted for Marine Le Pen's National Rally in the 2024 election versus other parties, and it rather pointedly is clear that those voters in the French countryside voted for Le Pen, while only a few urban islands voted for other parties. The police and military, I would expect, will support the locus of political and economic power which are centered in the cities. Meaning that in a civil war, the police and military should be expected to turn their guns against the native white populations.
We see this already--particularly in Europe--where the governments are increasingly hostile to the native white populations and any speech, acts, or people around whom they might rally. How else to explain the recent conviction of a man in Britain for burning a copy of the Koran, not because the burning was illegal, but because it might cause some sort of psychic harm to Muslims; the serial prosecution of Tommy Robinson in the UK; or the threatened ban of the AfD party in Germany. These governments are working to head off civil war, but they seem to be concentrating their efforts on only one ethnic group, and it isn't the imported populations. These efforts will ultimately fail, however, because they merely underscore how the native white populations are being turned into second-class citizens and will breed further resentment among whites while encouraging the imported populations to further assert themselves.
Reminds me of the fall of the Jaredite nation, but more especially the sorry state that the Nephites were in leading up to and immediately after the Gadianton Robbers successfully destroyed that government.
ReplyDeleteThe Gadiantons were quite clear in their opposition to the dominant Nephite culture, and believed that they had been wronged by the dominant Nephite culture, which matches with the grievance culture of today's leftists.
DeleteAll the ingredients are there, and the Overton Window is moving.
ReplyDeleteAll we need are some invaders waving the flags of foreign countries while burning a major city. Oh, wait...
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