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Two Israeli embassy staff were shot dead late yesterday night as they were walking just outside the Capitol Jewish Museum. The Capitol Police have identified the suspect as one Elias Rodriguez of Chicago. Reportedly, Rodriguez shouted “Free Palestine” as he executed the couple, who were engaged to be married.
I have been meaning to write a “Civil War vibe-check” top-level post. My intuition was that the danger of such a nightmare scenario was receding, having peaked twice, with the mass-shooting at the Congressional baseball team practice game, and the George Floyd Riot/January Sixth Riot forming a stockbroker’s double blow-off top before a consistent decline in risk.
Recently multiple events have made me question this. The Zizian cult killings, the suicide bombing in Palm Springs over the weekend, and now this, make me feel like something is perhaps coming. Maybe not a full Syrian Civil War, but at least another Days of Rage similar to the period in the 1970s after the great wave broke and began to recede. I would appreciate hearing anyone’s thoughts.
In Russia, Yeltsin shelled Parliament with tanks during a massive economic depression killing over 100, with a an unstable new government. No civil war. The military obeyed Yeltsin.
Also in Russia there was the Prigozhin failed coup, still no civil war. The military obeyed Putin.
Either Russia is an inherently stable country (unlikely) or it's just very hard for an urbanized, industrialized, well-developed country to have a civil war.
I think the US would need a massive military defeat and an economic depression for a civil war. Maybe, maybe Trump's assassination attempt succeeding would be enough but I doubt it. Civil war needs more than just discontent, it needs parity between the sides. If they blew Trump away then, it'd be a pretty convincing deep state victory: no civil war just a smooth continuation/consolidation.
Have there even been civil wars in modern industrialized states that weren't linked to the larger state breaking up (Yugoslavia), another war, clear ethnic conflict or another more powerful state meddling and triggering the war?
By the standards of their day, Spain and Greece.
I'd put Greek civil war as a result of WW2 given that it already started during WW2 in practise. Spanish civil war counts, tho.
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I mean, the urbanisation rate of those countries at the time of their civil wars were sub 30% which was about half of the European average.
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There's a strong bias in the US around not viewing white on white conflict through an ethnic lens. The differences in geography, religion, and ancestry would be enough to label the conflict as ethnic if it were to happen in a different country.
Red tribers already see DC as more of a colonial occupier than their elite.
Also the US civil war is seen as the template for a civil war. But that was a war of secession, specific regions had military organizations and used them to try to separate from the national government.
Proper civil wars (an attempt to change the government) are more of a sliding scale of actions by locals.
It'd be more of smaller scale disruptions followed by either an attempt for the feds to regain legitimacy or a brutal crackdown.
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Excuse me but what's the point of listing four qualifiers? Your question just becomes meaningless at that point.
The point is that US isn't / wasn't recently a part of a larger state breaking up, is not engaged in a major war nearby, has no direct ethnic conflicts that would map to side A vs side B and there isn't a more powerful state meddling and intentionally triggering a civil war in US. The civil wars that come to mind were all driven by one of those four factors (which don't apply to US) or are / were in countries that aren't by any meaningful definition "modern and industrialized" (ie. various African conflicts).
The US Civil War would have been "a larger state breaking up" if the South had won.
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