Civil War 2.0? Not On TechnoTotalitarians Watch
Good morning from England where I am at a conference. Yesterday, an Albanian immigrant taxi driver, knowing that my friend and I were Americans in the taxi, asked if he was right that America seemed to be headed for civil war. We may say no, but it is true that we are very polarized and there seems to be no good way out of this impasse.
Well, at this conference, I just met Professor Nathan Pinkoski, an American scholar who wrote an excellent essay on the Spanish Civil War in Claremont Review of Books last year. This is worth thinking about again in the light of our present. From an essay.
The Second Spanish Republic (1931-1939) experienced one of the fastest democratic declines in European history. In 1931, Spain adopted a liberal, republican and democratic constitution based on broad popular and elite support. A few years later the constitution collapsed and Spain went to war with itself, how did that happen? Too often Americans are taught a naive preaching story about that time; Fascists are destroying democracy. But the true history of the troubled Spanish Republic is much more interesting and informative. This shows how democracies can die from self-inflicted wounds.
Pinkoski based his essay on the scholarly work of Stanley Payne, the chief historian of the Spanish Civil War, written in English. even more.
In Civil War in Europe, 1905–1949 (2011), Payne examines Spain in light of the cycle of European revolutionary civil wars that made the first half of the 20th century so violent. Until the 20th century, most civil wars were related to succession, conflicts between potential heirs, or secession, as in the American Civil War. In the 20th century, a revolutionary civil war of a new type arose in Europe, opposing incompatible ideas about the state, society and culture. In these conflicts, revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries seek to establish radically different regimes. Payne likes to quote Joseph de Maistre. "The counter-revolution is not the opposite of the revolution, it is the revolution of the opposite." As soon as the revolutionary process begins, the old regime ends. Both revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries, clearly interested in restoring the status quo, had to find a new regime. As Carl Schmitt pointed out in Ex Captivate Salus (1950), it was the determination on both sides to establish a new regime that led the revolutionary civil wars to an unprecedented level of violence. The goal is the overthrow of the entire legal and political order in relation to the enemy, leading to the demand for the absolute elimination of the enemy.
It is very important. The Spanish Civil War was not about rivals in the system. It's the system itself, which is why there is so much inconsistency in the United States today. The Left has been embraced by a revolutionary ideology that tolerates no opposition and in fact interprets tolerance for dissidents as an unacceptable compromise with evil. This pushes the right-wing forces to radicalization and anti-liberalism precisely for the sake of self-defense.
even more.
Although various parties helped start the revolution, Payne argues that the Spanish socialists were the main cause. Unlike the Bolsheviks, who tried directly to overthrow liberal constitutionalism, the revolutionary socialists used the constitutional system to cover up their plans. They don't overthrow the legal system, they exploit it. Right and centre-right legalists have struggled to respond to these tactics. Their failure in Spain was acute. In The Collapse of the Spanish Republic, 1933–1936 (2005) and The Spanish Civil War (2012), Payne describes Spain's plunge into a brutal three-year war as a result of the courage of the Socialist Left to ignore capitulation. medium and average. we really push.
Other European socialist movements began with revolutionary ambitions, but as they grew, they softened and began to respect constitutionalism and parliamentary norms. Over time, the Spanish socialists became more radical. Spain's most prominent leftist leader, Manuel Azana (prime minister from 1931 to 1933 and again in 1936), argued that liberalism had failed because it was too compromising. He regarded the republic's constitution as the beginning of a radical reform project, even calling it a "revolution". Politicians who do not identify themselves with constitutionalism and the left are ipso facto illegitimate.
For Spanish socialists, the right, which failed to save the monarchy in the 1920s and never laid clear constitutional foundations for a new republic, was a wasted force. They were then shocked by the results of the 1933 general election, when the seemingly stable left-wing coalition collapsed and the right won unexpectedly. Convinced that history was on their side, but now convinced that a strong push was needed to stay the course, Payne says the left was motivated by a "deep" desire to stay in power; “One way or another, they intend. Hold on tight".
Our modern American left is not revolutionary in the classical sense. They went through the facility and used the system to bring them down effectively. And today, when you see people in the regime working together to delegitimize populism in all its forms, think of the Spanish socialists. even more.
Second, the Centrists and the Center-Left plunged into revolutionary politics, winking at the aggressive Left and punishing the aggressive Right. The rise of the "anti-fascist" trope in the 1930s, detailed in Paul Gottfried's Extraordinary Anti-Fascism; In Spain, he justified the violence of the young socialists. The central authorities are unable or unwilling to stop attacks on private property, businesses, churches, monasteries and clergy. Instead, they blame the victims, scapegoating monarchs and conservatives rather than real criminals. As cultural theorist René Girard understands, these scapegoats do not stop the cycle of violence, but intensify it. When revolutionaries try to use scapegoats to purge a corrupt state and society, murderers become martyrs whose victims redeem ambitious counter-revolutionaries. In Spain, the monarchy and conservative scapegoats have turned the apathy of the general population into anger. By leaving murders unpunished and unjustly punishing innocent people, the left created martyrs throughout Spain, ignited a counter-revolution and turned the conflict into a religious war.
Consider the different regime responses to the "mostly peaceful" riots in the summer of Floyd following the January 6 attacks. This is not an excuse for January 6th or an understatement of its brutality. In other words, the regime and its media have reacted very differently to the two violent incidents. Similarly, attorneys for the Boston Department of Justice today released a statement promising to protect doctors and hospitals that mutilate children from violence. OK. But think of all the pro-life crisis maternity centers that have sprung up since the fall of Roe vs. Cross. Both progressive and centre-right regimes create a kind of martyrdom.
Another quote from Pinkoski.
The third factor in the disintegration of the Republic was the introduction by the centrists of unconstitutional measures to save the so-called liberal consensus, which the French political theorist Pierre Manant called "centrist fanaticism."
This is reminiscent of a shocking tweet by former top US spy General Michael Hayden last week.
From General Hayden's Wikipedia page:
From 1999 to 2005, he was director of the National Security Agency (NSA). During his tenure, he oversaw controversial surveillance of technology communications between U.S. citizens and suspected foreign terrorist groups, leading to unauthorized surveillance of disputes. NSA.
So you know who General Hayden is and what he is willing to do for his fellow Americans to protect the regime. Here is an excerpt from my book Living No Lies to tell you what we are dealing with.
In 2013, National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden reported that US federal government spies are much bigger than previously thought. In his 2019 memoir The Permanent Record, Snowden wrote that he studied this
The US government is constantly building the capacity of law enforcement agencies. Governments can always delve into the past reports of those they wish to prosecute in their search for crime (and all reports contain evidence of something). Any new administration, any future rogue NSA boss could show up at any moment and as easy as flipping a switch, track everyone instantly on the phone or computer and find out who they are, where they are and what they are. up to. who they did with and what they did in the past.
Snowden writes about a public speech given by Gus Hunt, the CIA's chief technology officer, to a technology company in 2013 that did not come as much of a shock. This was only pointed out by the Huffington Post. Hunt said in his speech: "We are almost within our reach to calculate all the information that people produce." He added that after the CIA master collects the data, he intends to develop the ability to store and analyze it.
Understand what it means. Your private digital life belongs and always will belong to the state. We currently have laws and practices that prohibit governments from using this information against individuals unless they suspect they are involved in terrorism, criminal activity, or espionage. But dissidents have repeatedly told me that the law is not a safe haven. If the government intends to kill you, they will create evil based on the data or use it to destroy your reputation.
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For this reason, I consider all talk of the American Civil War to be essentially rubbish. Regimes, that is, states and private institutional actors, have the technological power to marginalize those they seek to marginalize. Because we are becoming a cashless society, and because the regime has taken Covid as an opportunity to push us all toward this goal (remember the “coin shortage” nonsense), it is impossible to buy and sell when your card is electronically deactivated. . This is true.
I was talking about all this with some scientists this morning, and we agreed that very soon, once the minds of the captive Millennials and Generation Z reach political dominance, there will be widespread agreement that these measures against the unfortunate dissenters should be taken. Today, we Americans have created a system that can be used against us to destroy our freedom and a progressive totalitarian and therapeutic culture that will claim it for our benefit.
what do we do about it What can we do and what should we do? We'd better discuss this among ourselves, innovate and build connections while we can. In some ways, the gloomy talk of "civil war" prevents us from talking more seriously about the threats to our freedom posed by this nascent revolutionary bourgeois regime and how we can actually fight them.
