“See Spanish Civil War for a start on what it would be like.”
Yes. Hardly anyone knows what the SCW was about or looked like or if it even happened. Those who do are almost always parroting the ‘red’ notion of what it looked like.
I have been discussing this for years with my friends (I have patient friends) but almost every faction in America today has an analog to some faction in the SCW. The only thing preventing it here is a more generalized prosperity, but that is fading.
God deliver us from such a trial.
I think we mentally look back on our Civil War and assume that is approximately what a replay would be like.
However, our CW was, despite its blood and terror, far and away the most gentlemanly great civil war in history. Largely because it was primarily, though not exclusively, a regional war instead of an ideological one.
The border states got closer to what most civil wars are like, particularly in MO and KS.
In most civil wars the enemy is not just the enemy, he’s a traitor. Things get real personal real fast.
Spain during its CW was roughly the size of USA during ours. In our CW the total of dead civilians from atrocities was probably in the very low thousands, if that. In Spain, despite a death toll among combatants about half that of our war, the dead civilians killed intentionally, not in collateral damage, totaled somewhere around 200,000.
Archy, the co-owner of the CWII Ping List has been saying something similar for years. The US Civil War very clear boundaries in most places. You had entire states taking sides. Any future Civil War may not break out that way.
He has suggested the "Dirty Wars" in Chile and Argentina as the more likely models for future conflict in the USA.
A war of factions, various shady organizations, on the government side, taking action in the dead of night against opponents, using the aparatus of the state to find dissidents and using off-the-books federsal alphabet soup groups to persecute them.
The rebels will use typical rebel tactics, including sabotage and targeted assassinations.
Archy's a smart guy, he's thought about this stuff a lot. It's a really grim picture. To this day many people in South America don't know what happened to their dad or brother, only that he was taken away by men in black at 11:30 PM on a Tuesday in July and never seen again.