PRIMED FOR CIVIL WAR?

I cannot believe I am writing this post. Something unimaginable a year ago is all becoming chillingly real

“Absolutely listen to this both” was the message under a link sent to a highly confidential Signal chat I’m in.

“When you do, let me know what you think”

That was the simple message from ‘M’ to me, and the other participant in an encrypted conversation that has been going on for a couple of years. Needless to say, ‘M’ is a man with I suspect extremely sensitive connections, as is the other member of our chat. I don’t fully understand what they do other than what they say they purport they do. But they know I’m a journalist. And pass on vital information.

We discuss all sorts of things in short staccatto exchanges peppered with sardonicism. Largely geopolitics, occasionally domestic politics, but with a keen eye on the future, rooted in strategy and linked to intel, OSINT and serious connections.

I clicked on the link. I listened

05:34 “Well that’s me not able to sleep" - I type - “Fuck me it’s true I can see it so clearly”

06:39 “Agreed. I’m awake as well. Fucking hell”

A few hours later the third person adds

09:22 “I hear the most horrendous stories coming out of the Midlands.”

What could be so bad that three people who regularly discuss nuclear threat levels, the predatory and ominous manoeuvres of the anti-Western axis from grinding maritime logistics to a halt, to collapsing the dollar, to invasions and terror proxies have been kept awake all night in cold realisation?

The major threat to the security and prosperity of the West today emanates from its own dire social instability, structural and economic decline, cultural desiccation and, in my view, elite pusillanimity.

David Betz: Civil War Comes To The West

Professor Betz isn’t some sort of reactionary crusty bouncing off the walls of a dusty University departmental library searching for end-of-career meaning. No.

He has advised or worked with the UK MOD and GCHQ on strategic issues, counterinsurgency and stabilisation doctrine, cyberspace and cyber strategy and advised British commanders in Afghanistan. He lectures abroad (United States, Israel and Italy) as well as at the UK at the Defence Academy to the Advanced and Intermediate Command and Staff. And he is an expert in what makes civil wars start.

And he has seen the prerequisite ingredients for mass social unrest, nay, civil war, as existing right here, in Europe.

Not Serbia, not Kosovo. The United Kingdom.

Let’s go through them. One by one.

1. The most unstable societies are moderately homogenous, particularly when there is a perceived change in the status of a titular majority, or significant minority, which possesses the wherewithal to revolt on its own.

2. A plunge in the stock of ‘social capital’, which is both a kind of ‘superglue’, a factor of societal cohesion, as well as a ‘lubricant’ that allows otherwise disparate groups in society to get along

3. Economic crisis.

What we see in the UK is a significant cohort of the native born population marginalised and silenced, increasing angry, increasingly desperate. The ballot box is supposed to prevent the taking up arms. But what about when repeated elections are not delivering what the public want? What if it’s not even being offered? Add to this a growing minority group that actively despises and wills destruction upon its host. And febrile factions around the periphery pushing for increasingly extreme demands and largely being needed.

Then add the dissolution of the societal glue, the concept of ‘Britishness.’ The things that otherwise can unify different peoples, shared ideas of statehood, culture and language, not only lost, but actively attacked.

And perma economic crisis. A country that cannot live within its means. The highest energy bills in the world. The pigheaded drive to Net Zero oblivion. A housing crisis. Collapsing public services. Record levels of capital flight with millionaires leaving the UK faster than any other country.

The ground is fertile for civic unrest.

Add to that a significantly diminished army, troop numbers at 70,000 today from 120,000 at the turn of the century. A police force that has lost all respect and authority. Towns and cities awash with knives. And a Government that will continue to drive the car off the cliff and into oblivion for another four years, calling anybody that tries to stop it a racist, xenophobic, far right danger and even imprisoning people in televised trials to set an example and instil fear into the public.

It sounds like a dystopian novel. Something unimaginable even 9 months ago under the previous Government. But then. Southport. The first sign of impending doom. Just as flashing lights precede a migraine, the bad omens are clear. We live in a dangerously febrile country.

An arbitrary scan of social media today. A man who was burning the Quran outside the Turkish Embassy to protest President Erdogan who he perceives to be siding with Islamists, stabbed by another man who ran out of a nearby house. A pack of marauding migrants in Blackwood in South Wales brawling in the street with crowbars. A litany of faces posted by police forces relating to repeated sex offences against little girls. Barely one of them appearing to be native born. Stabbings, gang rape, drug dealing, gang fighting, violence, paedophilia. Time and again, the perpetrators all exhibiting one common denominator.

One more Southport could be all it takes for the powder keg to explode.

And it’s not just us.

Every. Single. Western. European. Nation. Crime statistics showing an undeniable correlation between mass migration and the most heinous and violent of acts. Two gang rapes every day in Gerrmany. Repeated terror attacks. Swedish cities with repeated bomb attacks between rival foreign gangs. And European Governments refusing to act or even acknowledge the public’s justified horror.

Over the last thirty years the West has preoccupied itself thanklessly in an expeditionary capacity in the invertebrate civil wars of others. It ought to have learned that it is impossible to maintain an integrated multi-valent society once neighbours start kidnapping each other’s children and murdering them with hand drills, blowing up each other’s cultural events, slaying each other’s teachers and religious leaders, and tearing down their icons. It is soberingly worth noting, moreover, that plenty of instances of all those things have occurred already in the West and all of them have occurred in France alone in the last five years

Betz is explicit that the prejudice against the native born populations is a key factor; the ‘asymmetric multiculturalism’ in ethnic pride and group solidarity are to be celebrated for all groups, except Whites, where it is considered supremacist or racist.

In academic parlance, ‘downgrading’ describes when the dominant group perceives a situation of status reversal. Not just political defeat but where they no longer get to have authority over which language is used, or culture celebrated. In civil war theory, this is the start of the ticking clock.

Photo by Jay Heike on Unsplash

Betz goes on to chillingly observe that most of Britain’s critical infrastructure is undefended, with locations publicly available. Whether an attack on trunk roads, the national grid, cyber hacking, or water supplies is carried out by a domestic faction, or indeed an agitateur or agent from a hostile state such as Russia (who have been increasingly carrying out arson attacks on weapons manufacturers) is immaterial. How it could all play out is harrowingly imaginable.

A Pro-Palestine Protest clashes with an Anti-Immigration protest. Stabbings occur. Muslim men take to the streets from mosques, armed with weapons as was observed during the riots. The violence quickly spreads to other urban areas. In the chaos, the grid is attacked plunging the city into darkness. Opportunistic mass looting breaks out, the police outflanked and outnumbered. The army is called in. Even if the initial outbreaks are quelled, the scars remain, leading to embedded division and distrust and rapid social and economic deterioration.

It is not simply that the conditions are present in the West; it is, rather, that the conditions are nearing the ideal.

The relative wealth, social stability and related lack of demographic factionalism, plus the perception of the ability of normal politics to solve problems that once made the West seem immune to civil war are now no longer valid.

In fact, in each of these categories the direction of pull is towards civil conflict.

Increasingly, people perceive this to be the case and their levels of confidence in government would seem to be declining even more in the face of the apparent unwillingness or inability of leaders to confront the situation honestly.

I highly recommend listening to the incredible podcast by the utterly brilliant Louise Perry where she interviews David Betz on this very subject.