- Chittum, Thomas.
Civil War Two.
Seattle: Amazon Digital Services, [1993, 1996] 2018.
ASIN B07FCWD7C4.
-
This book was originally published in 1993 with a revised
edition in 1996. This Kindle edition, released in 2018,
and available for free to Kindle Unlimited subscribers,
appears to be identical to the last print edition, although
the number of typographical, punctuation, grammatical,
and formatting errors (I counted 78 in 176 pages of text,
and I wasn't reading with a particularly critical eye) makes
me wonder if the Kindle edition was made by optical character
recognition of a print copy and never properly copy edited
before publication. The errors are so frequent and egregious
that readers will get the impression that the publisher
couldn't be bothered to read over the text before it reached
their eyes.
Sometimes, a book with mediocre production values can be
rescued by its content, but that is not the case here.
The author, who served two tours as a rifleman with the
U.S. Army in Vietnam (1965 and 1966), then fought with the
Rhodesian Territorials in the early 1970s and the
Croatian Army in 1991–1992, argues that the U.S.
has been transformed from a largely homogeneous republic
in which minorities and newcomers were encouraged and
provided a path to assimilate, and is now a multi-ethnic
empire in which each group (principally, whites and those
who, like most East Asians, have assimilated to the
present majority's culture; blacks; and Hispanics)
sees itself engaged in a zero-sum contest against the
others for power and the wealth of the empire.
So far, this is a relatively common and non-controversial
observation, at least among those on the dissident right
who have been observing the deliberate fracturing of the
society into rival interest groups along ethnic lines by
cynical politicians aiming to assemble a “coalition
of the aggrieved” into a majority. But from this
starting point the author goes on to forecast increasingly
violent riots along ethnic lines, initially in the large
cities and then, as people flee areas in which they
are an ethnic minority and flock together with others of
their tribe, at borders between the emerging territories.
He then sees a progression toward large-scale conventional
warfare proceeding in four steps: an initial Foundational
Phase where the present Cold Civil War heats up as street
gangs align on ethnic lines, new irregular forces spring
up to defend against the others, and the police either
divide among the factions or align themselves with that
dominant in their territory. Next, in a protracted
Terrorist Phase, the rival forces will increasingly
attack one another and carry out strikes against the
forces of the empire who try to suppress them. This
will lead to increasing flight and concentration of each
group in a territory where it is the majority, and then
demands for more autonomy for that territory. He
estimates (writing in the first half of the 1990s) that
this was the present phase and could be expected to last
for another five to twenty-five years (which would put its
conclusion no later than 2020).
The Terrorist Phase will then give way to Guerilla Warfare,
with street gangs and militia groups evolving into full-time
paramilitary forces like the Viet Cong and Irish Republican
Army. The empire will respond with an internal security force
similar to that of the Soviet Union, and, as chaos escalates,
most remaining civil liberties will be suspended “for
the duration of the emergency”. He forecasts this phase
as lasting between ten and twenty years. Finally, the
situation will progress to All-Out, Continuous Warfare,
where groups will unite and align along ethnic lines, bringing
into play heavy weapons (artillery, rocket powered grenades,
armour, etc.) seized from military depots or provided by
military personnel defecting to the factional forces. The
economy will collapse, and insurgent forces will fund
their operations by running the black market that replaces
it. For this phase, think the ex-Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
When the dust settles, possibly involving the intervention of
United Nations or other “peacekeeping” troops, the
result will be a partition of the United States into three
ethnically-defined nations. The upper U.S., from coast to
coast, will have a larger white (plus East Asian, and other
assimilated groups) majority than today. The Old South
extending through east Texas will be a black majority nation,
and the Southwest, from central Texas through coastal California
north of the San Francisco area will be a Hispanic majority
nation, possibly affiliated or united with Mexico. The borders
will be sharp, defended, and prone to occasional violence.
My problem with this is that it's…ridiculous.
Just because a country has rival ethnic groups doesn't mean
you'll end up with pitched warfare and partition. Yes, that's
what happened in ex-Yugoslavia, but that was a case where
centuries-long ethnic tensions and hatred upon which the lid had
been screwed down for fifty years by an authoritarian communist
regime were released into the open when it collapsed. Countries
including Canada, Ireland/Northern Ireland, and Belgium have
long-standing ethnic disputes, tension, and occasional violence,
and yet they have not progressed to tanks in the street and
artillery duels across defended frontiers.
The divide in the U.S. does not seem to be so much across ethnic
lines as between a coastal and urban élite and a
heartland productive population which has been looted at the
expense of the ruling class. The ethnic groups, to the extent
they have been organised as factions with a grievance agenda,
seem mostly interested in vying for which can extract the most
funds from the shrinking productive population for the benefit
of their members. This divide, often called
“blue/red” or “globalist/nationalist”
goes right down the middle of a number of highly controversial
and divisive issues such as immigration, abortion, firearms
rights, equality before the law vs. affirmative action, free
trade vs. economic nationalism, individual enterprise vs.
socialism and redistribution, and many others. (The
polarisation can be seen clearly by observing that if you know
on which side an individual comes down on one of these issues,
you can predict, with a high probability, their view on all the
others.)
To my mind, a much more realistic (not to mention far
better written) scenario for the U.S. coming apart at
the seams is Kurt Schlichter's
People's Republic
(November 2018) which, although fiction, seems an
entirely plausible extrapolation of present trends
and the aftermath of two incompatible worldviews
going their separate ways.
September 2019 