Posted on 10/22/2007 6:40:16 PM PDT by dufekin
William Gibson, South Carolinian by birth, British Columbian by choice, is famous for inventing the word "cyberspace," way back in 1982. His latest novel, Spook Country, offers another interesting coinage:
Alejandro looked over his knees. "Carlito said there is a war in America."
"A war?"
"A civil war."
"There is no war, Alejandro, in America."
"When grandfather helped found the DGI, in Havana, were the Americans at war with the Russians?"
"That was the 'cold war.' "
Alejandro nodded, his hands coming up to grip his knees. "A cold civil war."
Tito heard a sharp click from the direction of Ochun's vase, but thought instead of Eleggua, He Who Opens And Closes The Roads. He looked back at Alejandro.
"You don't follow politics, Tito."
That's quite a concept: "A cold civil war." Since 9/11, Mr. Gibson has abandoned futuristic sci-fi dystopias to frolic in the dystopia of the present. Spook Country boils down to a caper plot about a mysterious North America-bound container, and it's tricked out very inventively. Yet, notwithstanding the author's formidable powers of imagination, its politics are more or less conventional for a novelist in the twilight of the Bush era: someone says, "Are you really so scared of terrorists that you'd dismantle the structures that made America what it is?" Someone else says, "America has developed Stockholm Syndrome towards its own government." Etc. But it's that one phrase that makes you pause: "A cold civil war."
Or so you'd think. In fact, it seems to have passed entirely without notice. Unlike "cyberspace" a quarter-century ago, the "cold civil war" is not some groovy paradigm for the day after tomorrow but a cheerless assessment of the here and now, too bleak for buzz. As far as I can tell, April Gavaza, at the Hyacinth Girl website, is pretty much the first American to ponder whether a "cold civil war" has any significance beyond the novel:
What would that entail, exactly? A cold war is a war without conflict, defined in one of several online dictionaries as "[a] state of rivalry and tension between two factions, groups, or individuals that stops short of open, violent confrontation." In that respect, is the current political climate one of "cold civil war"? I think arguments could be made to that effect. My mother, not much of a political enthusiast, has made similar assessments since the 2000 election ...
Indeed. A year before this next election in the U.S., the common space required for civil debate and civilized disagreement has shrivelled to a very thin sliver of ground. Politics requires a minimum of shared assumptions. To compete you have to be playing the same game: you can't thwack the ball back and forth if one of you thinks he's playing baseball and the other fellow thinks he's playing badminton. Likewise, if you want to discuss the best way forward in the war on terror, you can't do that if the guy you're talking to doesn't believe there is a war on terror, only a racket cooked up by the Bushitler and the rest of the Halliburton stooges as a pretext to tear up the constitution.
Americans do not agree on the basic meaning of the last seven years. If you drive around an Ivy League college town -- home to the nation's best and brightest, allegedly -- you notice a wide range of bumper stickers, from the anticipatory ("01/20/09" -- the day of liberation from the Bush tyranny) to the profane ("Buck Fush") to the myopically self-indulgent ("Regime Change Begins At Home") to the exhibitionist paranoid ("9/11 Was An Inside Job"). Let's assume, as polls suggest, that next year's presidential election is pretty open: might be a Democrat, might be a Republican. Suppose it's another 50/50 election with a narrow GOP victory dependent on the electoral college votes of one closely divided state. It's not hard to foresee those stickered Dems concluding that the system has now been entirely delegitimized.
Obviously the vast majority of Americans are not foaming partisans. It would be foolish to adduce any general theories from, say, Mr. "Ed Funkhouser," who emailed me twice in the small hours of Tuesday: the first epistle read, in total, "who needs facts indeed. How do you live with yourself, scumbag?" An hour and a half later he realized he'd forgotten to make his devastating assessment of my sexual orientation, and sent a follow-up: "you are a f--kin' moron. and probably queer too!" No doubt. Mr. Funkhouser and his friends on the wilder shores of the Internet are unusually stirred up, to a degree most Americans would find perverse. Life is good, food is plentiful, there are a million and one distractions. In advanced democracies, politics is not everything, and we get on with our lives. In a sense, we outsource politics to those who want it most and participate albeit fitfully in whatever parameters of discourse emerge. For half a decade, the "regime change" and "inside job" types have set the pace.
But that, too, is characteristic of a cold war. In the half-century from 1945, most Americans and most Russians were not in active combat. The war was waged by small elite forces through various useful local proxies. In Grenada, for example, Maurice Bishop's Castro-backed New Jewel Movement seized power from Sir Eric Gairy, the eccentric prime minister, in the first-ever coup in the British West Indies. Mr. Bishop allowed the governor general, Sir Paul Scoon, to remain in place (if memory serves, they played tennis together) and so bequeathed posterity the droll paradox of the only realm in which Her Majesty the Queen presided over a politburo. Though it wasn't exactly a critical battleground, Grenada springs to mind quite often when I think of cultural institutions in the U.S. and the West. The grade schools no longer teach American history as any kind of coherent narrative. "Paint me warts and all," Oliver Cromwell instructed his portraitist. But in public education, American children paint only the warts -- slavery, the ill-treatment of Native Americans, the pollution of the environment, more slavery ... There are attempts to put a positive spin on things -- the Iroquois stewardship of the environment, Rosa Parks' courage on the bus -- but, cumulatively, heroism comes to be defined as opposition to that towering Mount Wartmore of dead white males. As in Grenada, the outward symbols are retained -- the flag, the Pledge of Allegiance -- but an entirely new national narrative has been set in place.
Well, it takes two to have a cold civil war. The right must be doing some of this stuff, too, surely? Up to a point. But for the most part they either go along, or secede from the system -- they home-school, turn to talk radio and the Internet, read Christian publishers' books that shift millions of copies without ever showing up on a New York Times bestsellers list. The established institutions of the state remain under the monolithic control of forces that ceaselessly applaud themselves for being terrifically iconoclastic:
Hollywood's latest war movie? Rendition. Oh, as in the same old song?
A college kid writes a four-word editorial in a campus newspaper -- "Taser this: F--k Bush" -- and the Denver Post hails him as "the future of journalism. Smart. Confident. Audacious." Anyone audacious enough to write "F--k Hillary" or "F--k Obama" at a college paper? Or would the Muse of Confident Smarts refer you to the relevant portions of the hate-speech code?
Speaking of which, Columbia University won't allow U.S. military recruiters on campus because "Don't ask, don't tell" discriminates against homosexuals, but it will invite Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose government beheads you if they think you're bebottoming.
It's curious to encounter the soft-left establishment's hostility to the state. Go back to that line of Gibson's: free peoples develop "Stockholm Syndrome" about government all over the world, not least in Stockholm. It seems a mite inconsistent to entrust government to manage your health care and education and to dictate what you can and can't toss in the trash, but then to fret over them waging war on your behalf. Perhaps the next president will be, as George W. Bush promised, "a uniter, not a divider." Perhaps some "centrist Democrat" or "maverick Republican" will win big, but right now it doesn't feel that way.
Asked what would determine the course of his premiership, Britain's Harold Macmillan famously replied, "Events, dear boy, events." Yet in the end even "events" require broad acknowledgement. For Republicans, 9/11 is the decisive event; for Democrats, late November 2000 in the chadlands of Florida still looms larger. And elsewhere real hot wars seem to matter less than the ersatz Beltway battles back home. "The domestic political debate has nothing to do with what we're doing here," one U.S. officer in Iraq told the National Review's Rich Lowry this week, "in a representative comment offered not in a spirit of bitterness, but of cold fact." As Lowry remarked, "This is the lonely war" -- its actual progress all but irrelevant to the pseudo combat on the home front. In Neuromancer, William Gibson defined "cyberspace" as "a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators in every nation." The "cold civil war" may be another "consensual hallucination," but for many it's more real than "the lonely war."
(I posted this back in November of 2006, but it remains relevant):
I believe that if we are attacked on that level, we are more likely to face a military takeover of the government, than a civil war per se.
Consider sometime in the future, with a democratic president (you-know-who, perhaps the next John Kerry, or another Dhimmi Carter), and a democratically-controlled Congress.
Consider that the Iranians/Pakistanis/terrrorists/whoever get lucky by smuggling into the United States 3 or 4 nukes and succeed in blowing out the core of several cities (need not even be the #1 and #2 targets, which of course are Manhattan and D.C.). But also consider that - in the immediate aftermath and chaos - it may be difficult-to-impossible to pin the blame on any specific nation.
What would the official [Democratic] U.S. Government "response" _be_ from a democratic regime?
You would certainly see martial law in the ground zero areas, and perhaps extending even statewide and into the surrounding states.
But I seriously doubt we would see the Democrats take off the gloves and sharpen the knives for war. Their inherent weakness and inability to act would become glaringly apparent as the days progressed.
I would even expect there to be official Democratic statements of "conciliation" towards the Muslim world, that America might begin to address and accomodate their "grievances".
Under such pressure, I believe the leadership of the armed forces might begin talking among themselves about the need for some kind of "action" to propel the nation towards self-defense (of which the Democrats seem to know nothing).
And I also believe that "the Right" - knowing that the Democrats will never defend the United States and engage the forces of Islam full-center - will accede to a military coup under the pressure of the times.
It may be seen as an act of desparation by those of us who are not willing to "submit" in this struggle - but given the record of the Democrats, it may also be seen as the only logical course of action that will permit the nation to recover from the attack, counter-attack, and move forward in the face of paralysis and inaction by those who control the government.
And I must truthfully say that, under such a scenario (hopefully I'll be long gone before the Islamic world develops such capabilities), I would welcome it as an alternative to Democratic surrender.
Off-the-wall, I suppose, but to me, this seems more likely than "civil war", at least at first.
In a civil war, two (or more) sides take up arms and fight against each other.
In our times, the Democratic side is unwilling to fight even with the most powerful military force on earth willing to stand behind them. I don't see "man-in-the-street" liberals actually "fighting" against anyone. They are much more willing to run up the white flag than the American one!
- John
Science, technology, education, and for that matter capitalism and democracy, are all essentially amoral. They are ways of doing things more efficiently and don't in themselves have much to say about the rightness or wrongness of what is done with them.
Science is the pursuit of knowledge. To bring ethics into science, other than things involving the scientific process itself such as falsifying data, you have to import your moral judgment from some source outside science.
The Nazi scientists performing horrific medical experiments on children in the camps may have done excellent scientific work and derived useful knowledge from it. You cannot, from science alone, extract any logical reason why such experiments were wrong.
They don’t carry Homage to Catalonia in my local library system. Just 1984 and Animal Farm. Pitiful.
Wasn't defending it, simply observing that the invalidation of natural law - usually pursuant to trivialities - has awful consequences.
In my opinion, we have come to the prewar stage where only active avoidance will serve.
Prior to the first one, a majority did not want war, but if their words or deeds in which they believed so deeply resulted in war, they were either OK with that, or indifferent.
Right now, words are being deployed which amount to a call to arms, Pete Stark's rant in the House being a recent example.
People are much too careless with civil war on the horizon, IMO.
If the factions do not care about avoiding a war as much as they care about the certainty that only they are righteous and fit to rule, war is what we are going to get.
Agreed, the left is in full "Lord of the Flies" mode. It's worth noting, too, that the Democrats' recapture of a majority in Congress has not halted this trend. Quite the opposite, in fact - they've grown ever more shrill. A few election cycles ago, I worried that a Democrat victory would bring about an insufferable leftist gloat-fest; now I think there's something considerably darker in the offing.
Somebody in lurk mode sent me a link to an earlier use of Cold Civil War, from 2001. I guess there’s not much new under the sun.
The Cold Civil War
by Michael Moriarty, Actor and Columnist
August 8, 2001
http://www.american-partisan.com/cols/2001/moriarty/qtr3/0808.htm
Hillary as President, though, would be a whole different kettle of Clintons.
She craves power -- not just its trappings, but the power to rule and make others bend to her will.
Plus, she's got plans.
In particular, the ongoing connection between her and the ChiComms is very disturbing.
Interesting; and interesting to note that the Clintoons are very cozy with the Chinese, if you catch my drift. I’ve long pondered the question of whether or not it might be worse for us if the Dems lose in ‘08, particularly if by a slender margin? By that I mean that I’m concerned we’ll see an outbreak of civil disorder in the form of mass killings particularly of whites which is why we’ve purchased property far from any large city. We can’t help but notice that the gov’t and particularly a Democrat lead gov’t wouldn’t break it’s neck to save the lives of whites. When whites were attacked in the Cincinnati riots they called it “Acceptable Venting.” There may well be a hot civil war here, but I for one won’t be sticking around for it.
I think you are correct. During the Spanish Civil War, there was not as much of a geographical division of sentiments as found during America’s Civil War. Often, rightists and leftists coexisted in the same town, though mostly in different neighborhoods. That is similar to the situation in the US today.
Of course, as the war evolved, left/right groups coalesced and people moved to the areas controlled by the side they agreed with. Often they were forced to move because of violence.
The so-called fifth columnists were rightists in Madrid supposedly helping the Nationalist forces as four columns of Franco’s army moved on the capital.
Both sides were coalitions. The Loyalist faction was made up of liberals, republicans, anti-clericals, syndicalists, anarchists, and Communists. In the end, they were betrayed by Stalin and the Communists.
The Nationalist side included monarchists (like Franco), authoritarians, clericalists, conservatives/reactionaries, and fascists. Franco is generally not considered to have been a fascist. He used the fascists for his own purposes.
Yup. It's f***ing insane. Both parties are going to pay a price for it.
There will either be a religious right third party, or a fusion "national unity" center party, or even both
I agree with you about the fusion "national unity" center party. I think the serious activists of both right and left have basically driven away "normal Americans." The whackadoodle left is alienating Democrats, and the "I speak for God, who hates illegal immigrants" wing of the Republican party is doing the same on the right.
As Steyn puts it, "in advanced democracies, politics is not everything, and we get on with our lives. In a sense, we outsource politics to those who want it most and participate albeit fitfully in whatever parameters of discourse emerge."
What I think probably happens is that a center (leaning vaguely rightward) party forms around somebody whose positions are somewhere in the vicinity of a Rudy Giuliani (though probably not Rudy himself).
The looney-left Democrats will coalesce around somebody like Hillary or Ron Paul, and the remaining Republicans will commit suicide with somebody like Tom Tancredo.
Interesting times. It would be hard to rule out almost anything going forward.
I can’t disagree with a word of that.
Dispatches from the CCW (cold civil war)
Yes, but considering that the numbers are very small, I'm not it's of more than local importance -- sorta like the "Republic of Texas" folks from a few years back.
FR is a great place, but (like DU) I seriously doubt that it represents anything close to mainstream political views, such as they are.
I'm more inclined to believe that the mainstream will end up rejecting both extremes, and realigning to a centrist party. This election, or the next one, is probably the last gasp of the hideous primary mess that has metastasized over the last 40 years or so.
And thd Spanish at least all spoke (not counting Catalan or Basque) one language, Spanish, and were all of one basic ethnic stock. Today we in the USA have a more complicated situation, with a large Spanish speaking minority in many parts of the country, and multiple races, white, black, etc. If anything, our CW could be uglier than Spain's, and that was hell on earth.
Got to 2012 and have a charismatic conservative sweep the republican primaries on a platform of massive deportation, nuclear attack against the country found plotting against us, etc.
The left and their fellow travelers in the media, academia, Hollywood will kick up an outrage, violence will be in the mix. Threats will be made if this conservative is elected against Saint Hillary and if he, or she, wins half the country will refuse to recognize the election.
This scenario is sliding from possible to probable with each passing day.
That's not "one scenario," that's a series of worst-case scenarios, none of which has any necessary connection to the next.
The only "new" thing you've brought to the table is that Hillary Clinton gets elected ... and then what? Would she be effective?
Methinks his point is that a particular election outcome will greatly increase the chance of the other events.
“Civilization” exists only insofar as people cooperate, which usually happens only because great personal harm will promptly follow if they don’t. Given a leader expressing no semblance of what is usually called “strength” (i.e.: enforcement instad of empathy), the expected result is collapse of borders, welfare and security.
Bush responded to 9/11 by overthrowing two governments.
How would Hillary respond?
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