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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.
America dodged a bullet when Trump dodged one.
Don't think any other event in my lifetime has been so close to setting off a civil war.
I know at least two men that are a combination of drunk, belligerent, massive Trump supporters, and in possession of enough firearms that they could have easily turned into a problem. The problem is that I don't know tons of country rednecks, maybe a dozen. So that is probably a bad sign of just how fucked things might have gotten.
Their goal wouldn't have been taking control of the government, it would have been shooting the politicians they didn't like.
At best it wouldn't have been a civil war, just a decade or two of people deciding it's ok to shoot politicians they don't like and all the impacts of that norm.
By comparison we are fine nowadays. There is always going to be a low background noise if violence and murder in a country this size. Certainly sucks when it's you or someone you know that is the victim. But as long as you are staying out of certain cities and areas you are unlikely to be that victim.
What sets off ugly civil wars is being forced to choose sides. "Help me find the rebels or I torture you until I'm satisfied you don't know" vs "Help me hide from the government or my friends come back and kill you and your family". It doesn't start that bad, just a case of ping ponging escalating consequences.
There is only one relevant military power in the US, which is the US military.
While a majority of the ranks might support Trump, most of them likely do not believe that the 2020 was stolen and would be willing to shoot fellow citizens to right that wrong. I also think that most officers will support the constitution as interpreted by the SCOTUS, a sentiment which will also have some popularity with the enlisted men and women.
The right-wing militias are obviously different, but for the most part they are just cosplaying. They might have a lot of small arms, but when faced with tanks they would fare very poorly. A proper civil war requires somewhat like parity in weapons, either because the domestic stockpile is split between the factions or because foreign powers are providing arms.
The worst outcome I can see for the US would be something like the Troubles. Now, the Troubles were bad, but they were very far removed from being a full civil war. There is a difference between 3500 people killed and more than 650k people killed (like in Syria).
I don’t think the military rank and file would refuse to shoot if ordered simply because the US military has made training such that widespread insubordination is not going to happen. You might have a few stragglers, but I would expect them dealt with in a manner that would make the problem moot. Even among the officers, they are going to obey orders because that’s what they’re trained to do as much as the rank and file do.
I’ve just never understood the weird fantasy that the military or the police were going to en mess break with the leadership. That’s not how military or police think of themselves. They don’t make policy or decide whether or not an order is “legal” or “moral” or “good”. They follow orders without question because not doing so means a good possibility of worse things for their unit or the country as a whole. A cop who’s questioning whether or not a law he’s charged with enforcing is useless as a cop. He’s attempting to do the judge’s job. A soldier who won’t follow orders is a danger to his unit. He’s also attempting to do the job of the civilians who have decided he should be carrying out the mission he’s been given.
"Having an army willing to crack skulls domestically" is a solved problem and the USA has chosen not to do it, at least in some sort of generalized red tribe rebellion(localized flareups might be different because that's an easier problem to solve). American soldiers are probably willing to do war crimes under orders overseas, that doesn't mean they're willing to invade their own home towns.
I'm not claiming that 'American soldiers sympathize with the red tribe over the country', I'm saying that the US Army is not going to put down mass rebellions without substantial reorganization. Again, a repeat of the LA riots is different.
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You are correct 99% of the time. Most of the time, the duty of a soldier is not in doubt, it is obeying the (non-atrocious) orders of the leadership of his country.
Put simply, as long as the President, Congress and the SCOTUS are on the same side, the military will follow their orders, and any attempt at civil war by other parties will go extremely poorly.
However, you could also consider what happens in a constitutional crisis. For example, on J6, Trump was still the commander of the military, and he could have tried to deploy the marines to "stop the steal". If you then rely on the civilian leadership, things would get hairy, because the commander of the US military is the president. However, US soldiers do not swear simply to follow the orders of the US president. Instead, they swear:
In a constitutional crisis, the US military is sworn first and foremost to uphold the constitution, and famously, the constitution says what the SCOTUS says it says. (Within reason. If five SC justices decided to rule that one of them is in fact legally the president, and ordered the marines to occupy the White House, the military leadership might follow their own interpretation of the constitution instead.)
This "of course the military will follow the civilian leadership", which you take for granted, can be taken for granted in the US (after the civil war, anyhow), but historically seems to be the exception rather than the rule, as far as democratic states are concerned. In Weimar Germany, when the democratic leaders were asking the military to help with militants which attempted a coup in some cities, the reply was "Reichswehr schiesst nicht auf Reichswehr" -- we do not shoot our own. Spanish fascism started as a military coup, as did most military dictatorships in the Americas. "Military leadership decides they don't like election results" is a very common failure mode of having a military.
I’m not so sure the distinction is there. It’s something that the soldiers give an oath to do, and other than that, the emphasis is always on obedience, not making policy. And the ability to demonize whoever the outgroup is is pretty strong in most military and police departments. By the time you get to the point where American troops are being ordered to fire on American civilians, they will absolutely believe that they are threats to America itself. They’ll be terrorists, insurrectionists, militia members, whatever can be said about them. Those giving the orders are going to be brave defenders of the order. The other institutions countermanding the order will be compromised in some way.
It’s not going to be something that starts with the rank and file, certainly. It’s not structured to have people on the ground just decide on their own which orders are good or bad. It’s structured to have a unit take control over people and territory by doing a small part of the whole operation. Soldiers are taught to simply do their jobs. Even in things like nuclear silos, the people running them are explicitly selected for their ability to compartmentalize their part of the whole. Orders come in, flip these switches, turn these keys, and do so while insulated from the uncomfortable thought that you just trained to (or in hypothetical actually did) launch a weapon that will absolutely kill millions of people where it’s targeted. In other units it’s going to be drop this bomb by drone, or take out these militants, or protect these high value buildings. They aren’t going to think of it as “killing Americans” but doing a mission they’ll be told is defending American life.
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