Preventing a Second Civil War

“I wrote this piece to get people on both sides to calm down.”

You really don’t get it.

THIS...SUMS UP THE SITUATION.

The bigger danger is there will not be a civil war and we go like sheep to the slaughter.

YES!

Yep. We’re choosing sides for sure.

There is fighting smartly and fighting stupidly. The Capital rally and invasion was a PR disaster and completely counterproductive.

We need to remember who has all the guns and knows how to use them

https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3927807/posts
It is going to start one way or another.
When the Speaker of the House is comfortable with the idea of machine gunning down hundreds then it is going to happen soon.
I am sorry.

Why don’t we want to Civil War? We are now going full fascist. And we will never have another free election.

The only way to fix it is a reset.

Bump

Thanks.

“… this was a predatory state which the Czar and a small group of noblemen and bureaucrats ruled for their own exclusive benefit...The ruling group owned all the wealth, enjoyed all the privileges and monopolized all the political power, and it did not intend to give up any of its prerogatives. It considered the peasants to be little better than animals...”

That is simply not true. Oh, the Czars and the upper classes certainly lived like, well, kings - but there was a burgeoning middle and upper-middle class of merchants and entrepreneurs. My own great grandfather inherited a small water distribution business around 1890 in what is today the southern Ukraine. By WW1, he had built it up to the point where it employed about 50 people, and used the profits to build (with his own hands and those of his older sons) 14 houses to rent out. By today’s standards, he was a multi-millionaire - but this was a man born poor as dirt, who didn’t have a lot of formal education, but who just worked his ass off (like people in this country have done for a couple hundred years). Oh, and he was Jewish - assuredly NOT part of the aristocratic class, not even within the Jewish community. He was also far from alone - so there WAS a lot of social and economic mobility that was starting up, and what killed it was WW1 and the Communist Revolution. I’m pretty convinced that had the Czar stayed in power, or if a reasonable government had come to power, that Russia would have prospered immensely - it already had an entrepreneurial class, and all it needed was peace and trade to do well.

But compared to even a world war, Communism is far more destructive. A war only destroys property (well, and a lot of people, too). But it doesn’t completely destroy the people of a country - they clean up, rebuild and educate the youngsters to be like them or better. But Communism destroys a nation’s soul, rots minds of its people. It not only destroys, it keeps on destroying even after you get rid of it. Like the Israelites in the desert after escaping slavery in Egypt, the generations that knew Communism have to die off to get rid of the mindset fostered in a corrosive system like that. This is why Russia and Ukraine are still poor - it will take them 20 more years to finally get rid of the Communist mindset.

Here’s the rest of it:

On Monday, Congressman Steven Cohen of Tennessee gave an interview that sounded like an antisemitic caricature from “The Turner Diaries,” the White Nationalist book that inspired the Oklahoma City bombing. CongressmanCohen demanded a political test for members of the National Guard protecting him on racial lines: “The Guard {sic} is 90 some-odd percent male, and only about 20 percent of white males voted for Biden,” he said. “You’ve got to figure that in the Guard, which is predominantly more conservative … they’re probably not more than 25 percent of the people there protecting us that voted for Biden. The other 75 percent are in the large class of folks that might want to do something.” We have members of the media, who had no problems with political violence over the summer, calling for a domestic intelligence agency.

On the other side, we have people pointing to a single left-wing activist, who whipped up and joined the mob that invaded the Capitol, to claim that the whole thing was a leftist plot, and compare it to the Reichstag Fire, which allowed the Nazis to end democracy in Germany. Some of these people are calling for a march during the inauguration to defend their rights, not understanding why there would be a disaster, if even only 1% of those attending act out. There are people on social media calling for the president to use martial law, oblivious to political and constitutional realities. We are closer to civil war than we have been since 1968, if not 1860. We are losing our collective minds, and those with the responsibility to rein things in are only making things worse. Meanwhile, people of conscience are too afraid to speak truth to the power of collective lunacy. America today is almost unrecognizable.

One of the great limitations of human nature is that when we are acting stupid, hysterical, and wrathful, being told we are doing so rarely makes people re-evaluate their individual or group actions. Sadly, across the political spectrum, people are acting stupid, hysterical, and wrathful in ways that have led to political violence and will lead to more political violence. For the first time in generations, we face the prospect of tyranny and civil war. Trust in government, the media, corporations, and each other has broken down. Five years of partisan lunacy created a climate of fear and distrust. CoViD-19 exacerbated these showing failures in every institution paired with capricious government actions, and lockdowns that have negatively affected the individual and group psyche of the country. The only way to fix this is honesty, transparency, following accepted norms, accepting our mistakes without screaming about those of others, and grace. In other words, the opposite of what we have done in the last five years.

Voter fraud vote counting issues, and worsening problems with absentee ballots and lack of identity verification have been, are, and will be issues that need to be addressed. Anger at social media companies trying to control an election by controlling the spread of information is entirely justified. From the 1890s until this last decade, the Left wanted to prevent this type of corporate takeover of democracy. Wishing to address these is not voter suppression or antidemocratic. It is ensuring that representative democracy can occur and that the results will be respected. On the other hand, having a protest to influence members of congress, while they validate an election is monumentally dangerous and foolish. At best, it was bad optics. It had no chance of success, because everyone in Congress understood that had it been successful, we would see such rallies normalized after every election. Therefore, I opposed such a rally when I thought it would be held at the Washington Monument. I regret that I only made my concerns in private, instead of warning people. Then again, the people who needed to be warned were the ones least likely to listen. A rally at the US Capitol would have been far worse, even if it had been entirely civil. But there was no way for it to have been civil. The people planning irresponsible rallies lack the understanding of how to minimize risks in them. Holding a rally next to government buildings has a built-in risk of egged-on lunatics and agents provocateurs storming these buildings and having otherwise sane people follow them because of mob psychology. What happened on January 6th was entirely foreseeable and showed a failure of those leading the event, the Capital Police, DC Police, and National Guard.

Unfortunately, overreaction to this horrifying incident will only make things worse. Over 70% of American believe or believed that there was widespread voter fraud and/or issues with the voter count and mail-in ballots. From the moment Donald Trump was elected, Democrats claimed there was election fraud or foreign interference, which led to an impeachment, and many on the left claimed this was happening in 2020 right until networks began calling the election for former Vice President Biden. Many Americans believe that the election was stolen or rigged thanks to information suppression by the media and social media. Polling has shown that a significant percentage of Biden voters would have voted differently had they known about the Biden family scandals and especially those with China. Efforts by social media and the MSM to suppress discussion of this has only created more disenchantment and radicalized a minority. Any effort to properly respond to what happened on January 6th must address this. Unfortunately, the most common responses (media suppression, removing the president, impeaching the president, and going after his supporters) have and will only worsen the situation and risk serious bloodshed. Media suppression has the paradoxical effect of promoting the wildest of conspiracy theory promoters by giving them the mantle of victimhood, making the delusional look sane, and creating a reason for mainstream social media users to move to platforms dominated by these individuals. Removing the president through the 25th Amendment or impeachment would have made him look like a victim of a deep state/mainstream media/oligarch coup and “prove” the allegations that lead to the protests in the minds of even more Americans. This would have led some Americans to believe that only armed action can protect the president from this “coup.” The same thing will happen if prosecutors, who refused to indict BLM organizers for violence target the president.

The worst-case scenario is one which motivates a significant percentage of the roughly 75 million Trump voters to act to defend themselves. For the past four years, there have been calls for punishing Trump supporters. We have seen private companies do this and even schools and municipal governments breaching First Amendment protections by going after Trump supporters, anyone right-of-center, or even liberals who are not woke enough. In response to the protest and violence of January 6th, there has been increasing calls, including from the media, to go after Trump supporters. If this is paired with actions by small majorities in Congress moving to disarm the public and radically change the country, government officials will face far more than a few hundred-armed individuals.

Banning discussion of voter fraud on Social media will not fix this. Banning Trump will not fix this. Banning social media platforms like Parler, which refuse to censor enough political speech, will not stop this. Facebook taking down the page for the Walk Away Campaign of Democrats, who left the party to support Trump, will not fix this. CNN and other media organizations trying to get Fox News dropped by cable companies will not fix this. Cancelling books written by members of congress, will not fix this. Calling a decision by a publishing company to do so Orwellian will not fix this. Calling for unity by demanding that one party surrender will not fix our situation. Marching on Washington DC or state capitals will not fix this. Calls by people on social media for millions of Americans to be declared seditious and disarmed will not fix this. And in response, others are pointing out how easy it would be in a civil war to destroy the infrastructure, which allows urban centers to exist. Each of these steps has only made the situation more volatile. Each has added volatility to a situation that we dare not allow to get worse.

Collectively and individually, we need to make an effort to stop acting impulsively and to calm down. We need to humanize our opponents and try to understand them and their fears. Virtually everyone, who questions some of the results from the last election is not a White Supremacist seeking sedition . Similarly, most people who pushed for police reforms this year did not seek to end policing, the nuclear family, and capitalism. We need to see those with whom we disagree not as political, or G-d help us, military enemies, but as other Americans, who need our love and understanding and compassion. We need to realize that 99% of these political opponents are not dangerous revolutionaries. They are people, who have been caught up in the rhetoric of regime politics, where only one side is deemed just, correct and allowed to win. This needs to end. We need to stop calling our Founding Fathers racist and worthy of destruction. We need to stop responding to this by downplaying past and current racism. We need to stop sharing stories without checking their veracity. We need to stop writing things online that we would not say in person. We need to remember that those seeking to silence any opposition almost always have positions that can survive no fair opposition.

We need politicians and the media to stop constantly and brazenly lying. We need fact checkers to fact-check themselves and deal with their biases. We need to stop pretending that there are no people of ill will on our own side, while assuming that the worst of our opponents represent all of them. We need American businesses large and small to remember that every American is a potential customer. We need these companies to realize that having employees who respectfully disagree with management or with any groupthink is a blessing, which allows for greater diversity and understanding. We need greater transparency from all branches and levels of government. We need civics and history education, not indoctrination. We need a media that remembers to distrust government and corporations, to hold those in power they agree with to account for misdeeds and lies, and to hold themselves to the same standards. We need to realize that the Wokeists and left-wing conspiracy crowd, and the Alt-Right and QAnon are all toxic in and of themselves, but together form a binary poison that is a threat to the republic. This means calling out toxic lies on your own side and the opposition. The notion that Donald Trump won the popular vote, but this was stolen by a Venezuelan voter machine corporation has not been proven by any data and is thus an inflammatory lie. The same is true for the idea that police in this country are randomly shooting unarmed people of color. Both are inflammatory lies that have led to riots and bloodshed. It isn’t just up to the opposition to call these out. It is the responsibility of those, who would benefit in the short term from these lies to do so.

We need to remember that the last time we had a civil war 2.5% of the 31 million people in America died and that we have roughly eleven times more people in the US today. We need to look around and realize that 44% of Americans live in a household with at least one firearm and that there are almost 400,000,000 privately-owned firearms in America, or roughly two firearms for every adult in the US, who does not have a felony record. Millions of Americans have been trained in the use of explosives in the military, and everyone reading this could find manuals for making improvised explosives and the location of targets like water pipelines with only a few minutes of searching online. We should remember the panic buying and hoarding that occurred only a few months ago and ponder what would happen if civil war disrupted transportation, electric transmission, clean water, and the distribution of food and medicine. The rioting from the early summer was nothing compared to what will happen when banks do not have money, no one can process credit cards, and stores run out of food. Few in America today could imagine the horrors of a civil war in America today, where the fight would not be between the states, as much as between rural and urban centers, which depend on each other for necessities.

We need to remember that neighbors who look, act, or think differently are still our neighbors and friends, who deserve tolerance, respect, and grace. We need to remember what is best about America and live up to it. We need to look at the death of Capitol Hill Police Officer Brian Sicknick. We need to see him not as an agent of federal tyranny or as a pawn, whose death can be used to bludgeon political opponents. Instead, we need to remember him as a martyr to the republic, a Trump supporter who died trying to stop a lawless mob. We need to follow his words and example and say “stop” before the division, distrust, and violence sown for the past years brings forth a cataclysm and rivers of blood.

America is the oldest democratic republic, but we are not eternal. Every republic before us collapsed into civil war, foreign invasion, or became a dictatorship or empire. Democracy all too easily degenerates into demagoguery, organized political violence, and tyranny. Future generations will look back at this moment with pride or horror. We get to choose how we will be remembered.

Prevent it? It’s already started.

No, he doesn’t. Too late.

Cam down?

What would John Locke had already done......

Thank you for a very thoughtful reply. Sounds like your grandfather was quite a guy, and by extension, your grandmother as well (Behind every great man ...).

Remember, my quote was from a book. Comparing the quote to your comment I can’t keep from wondering if the great distance (in 1890) from southern Ukraine to Petrograd (St. Petersburg) and Moscow helped your family to prosper.

In the U.S. today people still prosper even though the left now controls all three branches of government. Give them time, they’ll ruin it. And the left also has control over most of the media, universities, schools by and large, big tech, and the entertainment industry.

The one part of the quote about considering the peasants to be little better than animals hits home to me. They call us “Deplorables”, “Nazis”, “White Supremacists”, etc., when most of us want liberty, freedom, and equality. The thing is, the lies are repeated so often by the media that many people actually believe them (Goebbels was right.) Some on the left, usually Hollywood types, want to send us to “re-education” camps. And many on the left want to financially ruin anyone who doesn’t fall in step with them.

The left is immensely powerful and their totalitarian tendencies are on the rise.

Well, they did take over and they stole the election and got away with it. Got away with it....so far. I don't belueve this is iver just yet. Sure looks that way. What we gound out in all this is the Constitution is not in effect. The evidence being tjat it was violated at every level. That kind of benefits us. WE'RE ALL ANARCHISTS NIW! There are no law and we no longer consent to be governed by those not following the UN Constitution. Imho, we are already at war.

It is unavoidable at this point, although it will be a combination of a civil war, Revolutionary War, and WWIII because foreign troops WILL :( be involved.

You are correct, that is a MUCH bigger danger!

I posted this here like I posted it elsewhere. I did write it and I don’t expect people to read my blog in general. I don’t write much on it. I used it because of character limits on Twitter and Parler.

1. A civil war would not be a war of the states, but in states. It would be a war between rural and metropolitan areas. During the Civil War, we lost at least 3% of the population. You want 10 million dead and our infrastructure destroyed on the hope we "win?"

2. Younger Americans are more leftist. They are the ones who would be soldiers. While many in the military might defect, the US military and its heavy equipment will be on the side of the government.

3. Calling for a war is an admission that you cannot win the battle of ideas.