I agree. To have civil war you need multiple opposing armed forces of somewhat similar military strength. I don’t really see that happening because of the purges of military leadership but an insurgency is very possible.
Comment on Would the United States actually risk a Tiananmen Square incident?
JoMiran@lemmy.ml 9 hours ago
Everybody keeps expecting civil war when what we’re likely going to get is akin to “the troubles” of Northern Ireland. Prolonged, indefinite, bloody, insurgency. Bombings. Assassinations. More heavyhanded fascist paramilitary actions. Blood and chaos.
LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net 9 hours ago
BigDanishGuy@sh.itjust.works 5 hours ago
Agreed, civil war will only happen if states bands together and starts fighting each other or the federal armed forces.
What we’ve seen so far has been almost too small to be called skirmishes. The intensity and size of the confrontations will likely increase, but it won’t be civil war.
edible_funk@sh.itjust.works 15 minutes ago
Even if states band together who they gonna send? Police side with ice. Military sides with ice. Maybe you get the state national guard and some reservists but you’d need the guard to effectively mutiny and hope they follow the state instead of the fed. Realistically there’s no way organized fighting occurs. It’s just going to be police and military killing protesters with an occasional guerilla strike against them.
WoodScientist@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
At the end of the day, the die hard MAGA folks are a quarter of the country. The stuff they’re doing is wildly unpopular. At some point you have to fight for democracy. It is worth dying for. It is worth killing for. If we have to go through a troubles, so be it. Frankly, this probably isn’t going to end until we start seeing a whole lot of dead Evangelical Christians. The Christian nationalists are so used to being able to violently oppress and persecute everyone else. They don’t realize that their own lives and freedoms can be just as easily destroyed.
We already are in a civil war. One portion of the population has declared war on everyone else, hell bent on forcing their evil beliefs on everyone else. They do so in the confidence that they themselves will never face persecution, the loss of their rights, or a threat of violence. White Evangelical Christians are way too fucking comfortable.
Honestly, a troubles might be the best thing to knock some sense into these fuckers. Once the retaliatory killings start and their churches start getting torched, maybe it will finally get through their thick skulls that if you want to live in a democracy, you have to be willing to respect other people’s choices and let them live their own fucking lives.
The troubles ended because both sides felt threatened. No one felt safe. This encouraged everyone to come to the table. Right now one side feels invincible. They believe they can act with complete impunity against the rest of the population. So far, we’re all just holding our punches and trying not to escalate things, but these fuckers just keep pushing. Something will have to give.
Mutual bloody violence is a superior option to one-sided bloody violence, which is the situation we have now.
ohulancutash@feddit.uk 8 hours ago
Incredibly fucked up to think there’s any upside to the troubles. Typical clueless yank energy.
Diddlydee@feddit.uk 7 hours ago
As someone who lived through the Troubles, there were clearly upsides vs the country we had before.
The civil rights movement grew at a pace, the police service was completely revamped, and cross community relations improved dramatically. Most importantly, we largely stopped killing each other.
There was nothing good in the Troubles, but what came out of it was undoubtedly better than what had been there before.
ohulancutash@feddit.uk 7 hours ago
We then ask was this due to the troubles, or was it a progression held back by the troubles.
WoodScientist@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
Would it have been better if there was violence, but only one side was violent?
Peace happens when both sides have a motive to achieve peace. You cannot have a peace treaty when only one side is willing to use force.
ohulancutash@feddit.uk 8 hours ago
Three sides were using force. The republicans and unionists were mainly occupied with using violence against their own people suspected of “disloyalty”.
RIotingPacifist@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
People forget that labor unions were a major factor in Tiananmen Square, US labor unions are not a credible threat to take over so don’t need to be put down as brutally.
bstix@feddit.dk 8 hours ago
They used to be.
Triasha@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
Yep, there is no organization capable of staging armed opposition to the government. A series of mass shootings and maybe some explosives is all we are going to get.
Given the number of incidents, I wouldn’t be shocked if historians decide later we are already living through it. Political assasinations in Minnesota, the attempted murder of pelosi’s husband, attempted trump shooter, charkie Kirk, the car bomb in Memphis that didn’t go off a few years ago. The United Healthcare CEO hit. Attempted kidnapping of Gretchen Whitmer.
There is plenty of violence to go around, but nothing that would rise to civil war.
I have imagined a scenario where a debt crisis degrades the capacity of the federal government and polarization leaves citizens and national guard more loyal to their state than the federal government, but we are a long way away from that.