A lot of beliefs about our civil liberties and the State died during the Great Chinese Lung Rot Scare.

Sweden during the C-19 pandemic

It would seem that counter-insurgency academic, David Betz, is not the only person wondering about a civil war in Britain, as Tim Stanley joins the chorus:

I now fear Britain is heading for open sectarian conflict, possibly war, and there’s nothing we can do to stop it. Here’s a snapshot of what I’m hearing.

On one night in Westminster, I met someone who argued for voluntary repatriation, two generations back; a Labour activist told me we must “re-educate” Muslims; and Jacob Rees-Mogg, debating me on GB News, said Britain should take “zero” refugees. I spluttered a reply about the good Samaritan and staggered off to bed, confused and depressed. For two decades I’ve argued for controlling immigration, and successive governments, including Jacob’s, increased it. Suddenly I’ve woken up in a land where everyone manically wants to reduce or even reverse it,

Too late now! The bit about re-educating Muslims is especially a hoot. I doubt it could ever have been done to the extent of overcoming that religion’s powerful hold on the lives of its followers, especially its men:

In any case the simple fact is that no effort was ever made by the British state. He does refer to the Betz interview and compresses it into a couple of paragraphs:

If you think “fear of the other” is a human instinct, the policy was mad to begin with. Combine it with economic decline and you invite ethnic competition over services and jobs….when you operate a multicultural society – packed with groups with different values and experiences, advantages and handicaps – the only way to achieve equal outcomes is to treat people differently. In this spirit, says Betz, the modern state acts like an imperial administrator, promoting the interests of preferred minorities while trying to avoid a riot.

So it’s already a fail; there have been multiple riots, of varying sizes, by Muslims and native-born Brits. I did feel for him as he wrote, because it describes the world in which I came of age, past even the bitter fights of the 1960’s and 70’s – and more recent times:

I grew up in a post-colonial world where we said “I don’t see race” and honestly, if naively, meant it. Over the past 30 years, liberal institutions have taught us to see race again – by stressing the wonders of diversity so persistently that some white people feel the state has actively taken a side against them. Ancient, binding concepts, such as “equality before the law” ring hollow. The latest Police Race Action Plan openly rejects the principle of “treating everyone the same” in favour of “equality of police outcomes”.

Over the top? Nope: Police force teaches officers about ‘white privilege’ in training:

Thames Valley Police has taught staff about topics including ‘micro-aggressions,’ ‘white privilege,’ and the difference between ‘non-racist versus anti-racist’ as part of an equity training programme.

He echoes Betz:

A situation in which millions believe cops are not impartial public servants but an occupying force is the headline metric of state failure. Mainland Britain has become Ulster.

He also finishes on much the same note as Betz with regard to the failure of politics, which is the forum where this stuff is supposed to be fixed:

Reform is a vehicle for dissent but offers no programme for change. The Tories lack imagination, and the world they exist to preserve is dead. We have no national culture to reunite us; no universalising religion to appeal to.
…
Labour, the party of racial and gender equality, has never seen fit to elect a non-white or a woman as leader. Neither is it willing to revive the economy with free market capitalism; nor to revive solidarity with socialism.

Instead it tries to knit the country back together with petty cash thrown at potholes or a roundtable on the spectre of white male violence… Labour’s instinct is to lean into multiculturalism, flirting with laws against islamophobia: the worst response imaginable.
…
Betz sees no solution, so suggests we prepare for anarchy. I’m more concerned about fascism. We’re not far away from a politician running for office as explicitly anti-Muslim, and to those who say authoritarianism cannot happen here, I reply: lockdown.

A lot of beliefs about our civil liberties and the State died during the Great Chinese Lung Rot Scare.

The well-known New York Times columnist Rod Dreher also picked up on some of Betz’s analysis:

Nearly every educated English person I know under the age of forty is seeking to emigrate, having lost hope that their country has the wherewithal to pull out of its cultural and economic crisis. In Oxford recently, an American student told me, “If the ruling class here openly hated the British people, it’s hard to know what they would be doing differently.”

But applies it to Europe as well, where the same forces are at work, plus the history (he also has an interesting section on the poorly reported 1990’s conflicts inside the former Soviet republics):

In a number of private conversations with ordinary French people—this was before the Le Pen verdict—I brought up the Betz interview (none had heard about it), and asked them if they foresaw civil war coming to France. Nearly all of them said yes. They said so with an unnerving sense of calm, as if they accepted it as a matter of course.
…
What about the rest of Europe? If Betz is right about the likelihood that civil war in one European country would likely set it off in others, that question might be in vain. If so, then history will record that the great villains of Europe’s 21st-century civil wars will not be the natives, or the Muslims, or the migrants, but rather the very social and political elites who spent decades assembling the tinder for this bonfire. 

Betz in particular is not just seeing indicators of civil war in Britain, and Europe, but across the entire West, in the article published in Military Strategy Magazine that Louise Perry read, causing her to invite him on for that podcast.

Civil War Comes to the West

Much of it repeats what he said in the podcast, just in very dry, academic language, so I won’t repeat much of it here and you can read it yourself if you wish to. It’s just that he does make a few points that were not emphasised in the podcast, possibly because his sharp points would likely come across much more sharply in a non-academic format.

The literature on civil wars is united on two points. Firstly, they are not a concern of states that are rich and, secondly, nations which possess governmental stability are largely free of the phenomenon.

He argues that very mixed societies, “heterogeneous societies” are no more prone to civil war than very homogenous ones (think Japan). The problem is what happens as the mix changes:

The most unstable are moderately homogenous societies, particularly when there is a perceived change in the status of a titular majority, or significant minority, which possesses the wherewithal to revolt on its own.

He puts both of these arguments forward to try and counteract the arguments that Western nations are too rich, cohesive and stable for civil wars to break out nowadays.

I don’t think we’re as rich as GDP figures and consumer items like cellphones would suggest, as I look at Gen-Z polling across the West showing almost despair about their prospects for finding a mate, starting a family and buying a house – or even getting a decent job and income.

Betz focuses on stability and the growing lack of trust within societies, although he includes economic issues which sound like the Gen-Z stuff:

In terms of economic financialization, debt issuance, and consumption, the West has reached the end of the line, which means that a gigantic gap in expectation of well-being is opening. If there is one other thing that the literature on revolution agrees upon it is that expectation gaps are dangerous.

But his real concern around stabilty and trust is focused on the fact that Western societies have been attempting to become multicultural over recent decades, not so much naturally but driven by “social and political elites”, and he goes after both identity politics…

Identity politics may be defined as politics in which people having a particular racial, religious, ethnic, social, or cultural identity tend to promote their own specific interests or concerns without regard to the interests or concerns of any larger political group. It is overtly post-national. It is this above all that makes civil conflict in the West not merely likely but practically inevitable, in my view.

… and multiculturalism:

[T]hus far what has been practiced is a sort of ‘asymmetric multiculturalism’ in which in-group preference, ethnic pride, and group solidarity—notably in voting—are acceptable for all groups except Whites for whom such things are considered to represent supremacist attitudes that are anathematic to social order…. Approximately 75 per cent of post-Cold War civil conflicts have been fought by ethnic factions

With regard to those forced attempts at multiculturalism the main practitioners have been in Western Europe and the argument has been that what has worked for America over some 200 years, can work in Europe. It’s not working, either in Europe, or Britain. But there’s a key difference between the two continents: America is a multi-ethnic society, not a multicutural one:

Is America a melting pot? Or are we some sort of a tossed salad? Actually, and in an even more real sense, we are both at once. Or at least we have been and should continue to be. Culturally speaking, we have long been a melting pot. Ethnically speaking, we have always been a tossed salad.

Moreover America made huge efforts to Americanise those masses of immigrants:

The public school system responded by adding Americanization to their list of educational responsibilities, which already included heavy doses of Protestantization. Then two creeds were put to work to promote and advance one culture.

But even in America that’s no longer the case because the brain-rot of multiculturalism has infected that society also -that all cultures are equal. That is a claim that immigration itself should destroy. if your culture is so great, why move to another one? And why then demand that the culture you’ve escaped from should be given equal status with the one you’ve joined?

Of course it’s actually not been cultural comparisons that have led to the migration – which was sometimes the case in the past, especially when it came to questions of political systems and freedom – but economics, on both sides, with assimilation treated as an afterthought, if that.

The notion that multiculturalism is a laudable goal for American society is itself evidence of our unraveling. After all, it suggests indifference about any single culture, even our own, maybe even especially our own. Which, come to think about it, may well be the point.

Exactly. On the receiving end of these immigration flows is the culture of the West and particularly Anglophone and “White” culture that has decided to downgrade itself in shame and embarrassment for past colonial conquests around the world – including capitalism – and racism.

And no people and culture are more ashamed of themselves than the Germans, as witnessed by this Green Party member, Dr. Stefanie von Berg, exulting before the German parliament:

Mrs. President, ladies and gentlemen. Our society will change. Our city will change radically. I hold that in 20, 30 years there will no longer be a [German] majority in our city. …. And I want to make it very clear, especially towards those right wingers: This is a good thing!

I hope that Dr. Stefanie von Berg lives long enough to actually live her dream, and to watch her children and grandchildren (if she has any) also live it.