You Should Know

A Civil War II will probably end up at best leading to a Mad Max scenario or at worst, a Fallout scenario.

Not American, so feel free to stop reading.

It's ridiculous to me how you yanks go from zero to a hundred like this. Either normality or civil war. Like there is no in between? You have an authoritarianism problem. So resist authoritarianism. What makes you think that the only way to resist is shooting people? Resistance is a spectrum, and you have barely started using democratic means to fight back (you just started electing democratic socialists), much less active procedural and institutional warfare (is Bernie demanding a vote for every procedural point requiring a vote? Are the Dems actually using any rat fucking tactic to make the state ungovernable? Are your local and state governments really resisting beyond making angry noises?). You have barely tried non violent resistance (not the same as peaceful!) but you're such a violent culture that you jump straight to military solutions. Wtf. Those come at the very end, if everything else has failed. Has it? Nowhere near. So this talk about civil war, is that really useful?

It's worthwhile you mention Sarajevo, and in reference to that I will post this tidbit posted by a MetaFilter user in 2009 regarding their experience in the siege of Sarajevo. I have it bookmarked and post it from time to time where it seems appropriate. The reality is though, you're correct, Americans by and large don't know what they're asking for.

Well, unlike the majority of you (I assume), I actually lived several years in a period of savagery and killing, during which nothing - food, water, electricity, phone, clothing, sense of safety, school, the ability to go out in public, etc - was available, except during totally unpredictable, brief and sporadic occasions.

Of those who couldn't leave my city, Sarajevo:

Some people (very few) were prepared for what they thought would be the "long haul" - this tended to be a couple of months. These people were widely seen as lunatics and dangerously pessimistic ones at that.

Most people were not at all prepared. This included my family. Many of those - like my family - considered the idea of "preparation" to be an affront to the decency we felt most people possessed. Were we wrong? Well, I don't know. We suffered greatly; my parents were killed. But speaking only for myself, I never felt I cheapened my soul by betting on calamity. Today, that still feels like it's worth something.

But here's the main point: "Preparing" for the disaster really didn't do anyone much good. Those who "prepared" ate a little better for a while. They stayed warmer for a few extra days. They enjoyed the radio for a while longer (via batteries.) But in the end, they ended up hungry, cold and bored too, just like the rest of us. Guns and weapons helped no one directly and were even of little to no use in the defense of Sarajevo, since they were toys compared to the shells, bombs and high-powered armaments of the attacking forces. The worst parts of war were psychological - the fear, anxiety, boredom, loneliness, paranoia, bad dreams. Respite from those things came with sharing food with a neighbor, finding a piece of clothing that would fit someone you knew, commiserating with others in your position, figuring out how to make make-up from brick or french fries from wheat paste and spreading this newly-acquired war knowledge around the mahala.

We knew who had extra food and supplies. For the most part, they weren't attacked or hassled or bothered. Contrary to what these survivalists say, those in dire times generally hold on to their personal sense of pride even more than they do in normal times. I'd take a bite of a friend's salad without bothering to ask in normal times. I'd never have done that in wartime, no matter how hungry I was.

Within the domain of those trapped in the city, civility greatly increased.

You often hear how Holocaust survivors felt guilt at surviving. Well, during war, that was a feeling everyone was aware of - people started dying right away (my parents were killed near the start of the siege, for instance) - and there was a palpable enough common sense of karma to make everyone into good Samaritans. None of us understood why we survived while others didn't. I shared food when I had it, even though I often knew I wouldn't have a crumb the next day. Which was no big achievement, because nearly everyone did the same.

Those who'd prepared, well, the majority of them shared their food and whatever else they had as soon as someone else was clearly in need. I can't swear it, but I think they felt a little foolish to have been so self-obsessed, and giving away that stuff might have lessened that feeling. There were a few people who hoarded things until they ran out of stuff - eventually everybody ran out of anything worth hoarding - and they soon became wishful beggars like the rest of us. Again, I can't swear it, but I hear stories, and it seems that these people suffer from post-war trauma, guilt and nightmares more than the rest of us.

Those survivalists, I feel sorry for them. It's no way to live.

posted by Dee Xtrovert at 9:33 PM on January 28, 2009

In real life when you get hit, hiding behind cover does not regenerate your health and picking up health packs or eating food does nothing.

Also most war will be 99% boredom and 1% sheer terror.

... Americans don't realize they're already in a civil war? Bro a city is occupied. Secret police roam freely. Tens of thousands disappeared.

Americans are sadly locked into the path of violence as the other path will force them to face their systemic racism, and corporate idolization which is clearly not going to happen.

It took Nicole Good to be face shot before people really started to react despite 4 other similar events with non white females and I am constantly shocked how many Americans defend corporations that are literally exploiting them. America is cooked unfortunately as like most humans, myself included, we tend to become blind with power.

If you’re really gung-ho about it, go and ask a Veteran of Iraq or Afghanistan about it and see what they think. If anyone will know about it they will.

My uncle that served in Iraq still wakes up screaming in the night. He's a shell of the man he used to be. Another vet my age I knew was absolutely erratic after serving. He couldn't hold a job and ended up homeless and assaulted someone for their spot under a bridge.

My whole family bears the scars of the PTSD from what my grandfather saw from WWII. He also woke up screaming for years afterward.

"Do Not Split"

Learned about it from this episode of the Team Human podcast

But what is happening in Hong Kong is they come up with a slogan, which is translated as Do Not Split, which is, we know that some people are willing to be confrontational with riot police.

And when they are, that's going to cost the state in terms of not only resources, but it's going to cost the state in terms of political capital and support. And we know that there are some people who are not willing to do that. And we are going to abide by the protocol of Do Not Split, which means that we're not going to criticize them openly, and they're not going to criticize us openly.

If we're the pacifists, we're not going to have them criticize us for being sort of like, I don't know, limpid or flaccid or not courageous or whatever. And we're not going to criticize them for being more confrontational. And the thing is that the support is also tacit.

It's not like they have to come out and tell the media, oh, we approve of our more sort of confrontational colleagues. They just keep quiet. They just keep quiet.

Understanding that a range of tactics is probably going to be necessary. Nobody really knows what's going to work. But if everybody's pushing back against a particularly violent state, then everybody's really on the same side.

The first U.S. civil war never really ended, it has just gone into a long "cold" phase.

Those times are ending.

the problem with a civil war is collapse of the supply chain for most people, and you'll have to become useful to get protection

YSK: The average citizen doesn’t have much control over the cork in the bottle.

This administration is repeatedly and consistently provoking people. Randomly shooting people in the face, and talking about sending the military to Minnesota is going to cause things to boil over if the other people we elected don’t step in and force them to cool down.

None of us want to live in a war-torn state. That's why I and most others voted for harm reduction. What we're facing now is terrorism. The USAmerican people are being terrorized by federal forces.

People are not calling for violence for a economic policy we don't like, which is what incited the Confederacy to begin the first USA Civil War. We're dealing with federal forces who are hell-bent on terrorizing us. What politically-aware people have been calling for, for the better part of a year, is the next degree of harm reduction. Targeted political assassinations. Fighting ICE agents. Storming the capital, perhaps. With each month, this government gets more empowered and more violent.

Violence terrorizes people. We all know war is terrible. No one thinks the USA going through a Civil War will be exciting. People see violence and they want it to stop, and they see massive peaceful movements that have not worked, in the face of a government that shows no hesitation in threatening or attacking its people; and those people are desperate.

What is the alternative? We let federal agents keep shooting and abducting people until some magical aspect of Democracy manifests and pushes them out? How do we actually envision that happening? What do we do for the three years until our next presidential election? Every person who is killed, abducted, disappeared is a life permanently lost.

For those who talk about peaceful protests and voting the fascists out, how do you expect to win elections when your voters are being killed? It's not just the ICE agents, either, though they certainly are violent. Consider: Layoffs, Homelessness, Imprisonment, Emigration, Suicide. The people here today are not going to be the same people here in three years.

The reality is, the people of the USA are under violent occupation. We are living the terrors of war. Violence does not require mutual-consent; and when only one side chooses to fight, you end with a massacre. That is what we have been living through -- a slow-rolling massacre. No one knows what will stop this, but maybe, just maybe, ICE agents would think twice before going on deployment if half of the last three squads never made it home.

Yeah no shit. Who thinks that?

The question is what the alternative would be. Look at history for the answer. The easy comparison would be Germany leading up to, during, and after World War 2, but that would be low-hanging fruit considering how very directly the US regime is trying to force other countries to join them. (Anschluss, anyone?) Look also at the countries where extremist regimes took over and didn't get forced out until years later and the damages they did to their country and the people living in it. Unfortunately too many examples there to name. The US regime and their stormtroopers will continue to harass, arrest, and outright kill people who have a legal right to live in the US simply over the color of their skin or otherwise until they are stopped. And they will most assuredly not stop by the power of fingerwagging and strongly stated words.

Great post.

However, from a European perspective all this has been a long time coming, ignoring all warnings and with open arms (pun not intended).

So for the US I don't see how it can be fixed without going through this.

I'm sorry.

My roommate watched a woman get dragged from her wrecked car, bleeding and screaming for help, being disappeared by ICE. They were recording and I've seen the video. I'll probably never forget it. I carry a whistle now but I pray I'll never need it. We're like two weeks into whatever the fuck this is and I'm already sick of it. I'm tired of running to the window every time I hear a car alarm, I'm tired of wondering if I hear the wind or a whistle. I'm tired of worrying about more people I know getting abducted, and scrutinizing every vehicle that drives past if they're going to fuck with me because I'm visibly queer and also trying not to be mistaken for the gestapo occupying my city. Is this an occupation? And I know war is worse. Fuck all of this.

A real civil war wouldn't last longer than three weeks here in the US. A small group of whacked-out people love the idea of it, but they certainly have not thought it through. It's just a fun thought for them because they have never cracked open a history book and don't have any real perspective regarding what war actually means.

This is the country that couldn't go three weeks without a haircut or toilet paper in 2020. People would walk into their first empty grocery store, toting their big impressive AR-15 rifles, and then demand that the war be ended.

The next "civil war" will just be a series of Luigi-like instances. My prediction is that the justice system will simply start failing to get grand jury indictments like they did with the ham sandwhich throwing incident.

you dont get battle lines until there's been a few years of mass killings on both sides, before Regime Loyalist and Opposition "states" or lines solidify.

I think there's gonna be a lot of Asian American stores getting looted if this happens.

Asian diasporas are always considered the universal "soft target", I mean just read the news.

We'd have LA Riots all over again, law enforcement will leave us to die while racist mobs lynch us.

Im glad you've said this. Before I saw The Death of Yugoslavia, I honestly believed that modern warfare was clean, clinical, and restricted to willing combatants. That the Geneva Conventions, various constitutional statements, and human honour and decency were a part of modern wars. At least since Vietnam.

No. I was disabused of that notion by this documentary. Yes, I agree, the BBC shouldn't have the last word on a war in Eastern Europe. The BBC probably shouldn't have the last word on anything. However, they did happen to have the first word — to me — on the importance of understanding how modern wars get started, how they progress, and chillingly, why they don't end. It's a sad, slow, solemn march into oblivion.

More like This War of Mine, maybe.

A game so depressing I stopped playing.

Everybody know it not a game but st some point there is no othet options and fight oppresion

I would prefer peace. But let's be frank, that isn't likely to happen, because the Trump Regime consists of people who don't value a peaceful, kind, and just world.

I doubt that America as we know it can survive, period. There needs to be a change - whether that's about wealth classes, political beliefs, or various -isms. We can't use a system that was intentionally broken to fix things. The words of slavers from 250 years ago are too weak. The way that things have developed across the regions of this massive, unwieldy, federation needs amendment.

Unfortunately, right now the pendulum is swinging hard in one direction. There's no meaningful fighters on the other side. So us little people have to cling to hope - and that hope is increasingly looking like it has to come from force, and from the barrel of a gun.

I'm dead in a month as soon as any major part of our infrastructure/supply chain crumbles. yaaaay.

I do wonder if I'm on somebody's list.

I heard there's no respawns in IRL.

I think the country splits into multiple nations before a true all out conflict. Maybe a 4 part split.

Old South Northeast Some kind of Texas southern alliance with other states in the Louisiana purchase Northwest and Pacific coast.