Well Jack Black, you’re certainly a gloomy guy that’s for sure. Got any ideas? Or, are you just gonna resign yourself to stew in your pot of misery?
Sorry, my post does read that way. I guess I am a bit resigned about the prospects for real change in a good direction at this point.
One would have thought if people were going to rise up it would have happened already.
Here’s something I wrote on the topic in early 2013:
There is a big difference between a civil war and a coup d’etat.
A civil war implies too groups that have enough size and military might to fight each other. They can, of course, be very lopsided affairs. It would appear that the US Military completely outclasses the Taliban, but then again it has apparently been very difficult for the US Military to vanquish them.
A coup is a much simpler thing. The Army comes in and deposes the current ruler and life continues. Could a Coup take place in the USA? Your comments suggest that one could, but it seems quite unlikley to me. The military higher ups are too smart to want to own the problems that the POTUS has: budget deficits, the debt, American’s declining standard of living, etc. Because of our long history as a Republic I don’t think a General would have any legitimacy as the ruler, which probably makes it less attractive to pull off a coup.
As for an actual civil war, that is interesting to contemplate. There have been many fiction books written that include that idea. In most of them have some break-away state or states pull out of the USA. (”Middle America” series, Chappaqua Uprising, Boston T. Party’s Molon Labe. Ross’s Unintended Consequences, the latter volumes in Matt Braken’s Enemies Foreign and Domestic trilogy are set in a post-civil war America where the USA has fractured into several different political entities. Heading deeper into the darkness there is the explicitly racist future civil war scenario in The Brigade trilogy by Covington, and a matching book where the Latino’s revolt in LA and form Azatlan.)
Personally I’m in agreement that State vs. State conflict like the first American War Between the States is unlikely, and most of the scenarios that call for groups to organize into units as big as we did in the civil war, as in many of the books above, that just seems highly unlikely.
Tom Chittum’s book “Civil War II” is not a novel or fiction, it’s an analysis of how the USA is headed to civil war. His experience in Rhodesia and Yugoslavia informs his views, and he argues that no matter what kicks it off societies always shatter along racial and ethnic and religious lines. His view of CWII is therefore various racial groups in different areas fighting each other.
Archy has said for years that the scenario most likely is a dirty war similar to those in South America where factions fought in the dark, but everyone pretended things were normal in some ways in the day. Disappeared people, assassinations, sabotage. Factions will include governments, but also para-governmental groups, small cells of dissidents, unions, gangs.
Bracken’s article on the dynamics of the opening phases of such a war is still perhaps the most detailed and well thought out scenario that anyone has come up with:
CW2 Cube: Mapping the Meta Terrain of Civil War 2
Lots of speculative fiction and some interesting non-fiction has been done on this topic.
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I probably view such scenarios as even less likely now than I did three years ago. Things like super-computer enabled electronic surveillance, smart phones, drones, etc. mean it’s going to be harder and harder to ever do anything like that.