Hello from England, where I am at a conference. Yesterday an Albanian immigrant taxi driver, discovering that my taxi driver friend and I were Americans, asked us if he was right in saying that the United States was heading for civil war. Maybe we could say no, but the truth is that we are very polarized and there doesn't seem to be a good way out of this impasse.
Well, at a conference here, I just met Professor Nathan Pinkosky, who last year wrote an excellent essay on the subject of the Spanish Civil War in the Claremont Review of Books. It is worth reconsidering in light of our current moment. from the test
The Second Spanish Republic (1931-1939) had one of the fastest declines in democracy in European history. In 1931, Spain created a liberal, republican and democratic constitution with a broad base of popular and elitist support. Within a few years the constitution collapsed and Spain went to war with itself. How will I go? Americans are often taught a simple moral story about this era. the fascists destroyed democracy. But the real story of the amazing Spanish republic is much more interesting and instructive. It shows how democratic regimes can die from self-inflicted wounds.
Pinkosky bases his essay on the scholarship of Stanley Payne, the foremost author of the history of the Spanish Civil War in English. That's why.
In Civil War in Europe, 1905–1949 (2011), Payne examines Spain in the 20th century. It made the first half of the 20th century so violent because of the European era of revolutionary civil wars. Until the 19th century, most civil wars were succession (conflicts between potential heirs) or secession, such as the American Civil War. In the 19th century, a new kind of revolutionary civil war broke out in Europe, pitting incompatible notions of state, society, and culture against each other. In these conflicts, revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries have tried to establish radically different regimes. Paine likes to quote Joseph de Maistre. "counter-revolution is not the opposite of revolution, but the reverse revolution". Once the revolutionary process begins, the old regime ends. Revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries, clearly interested in restoring the status quo, must establish a new regime. As Carl Schmitt argues in Ex Captivitate Salus (1950), the determination of both sides to establish a new regime is why revolutionary civil wars lead to unprecedented levels of violence. The goal is to overthrow the entire legal and political order associated with the enemy, leading to the demand for the complete elimination of the enemy.
It is very important. The Spanish Civil War was not about rivalries in the system. it was the same system. This is why everything in the United States today is incompatible. The left has been captured by a revolutionary ideology that does not accept its rivals at all and, in fact, interprets the tolerance of dissent as an unacceptable commitment to evil. Right-wing forces are pushing towards radicalization and liberalism simply for the sake of self-preservation.
That's why.
Although various parties helped spark the revolution, the main culprits were the Spanish socialists, says Paine. Unlike the Bolsheviks, who sought to overthrow liberal constitutionalism by direct means, the Social Revolutionaries used the constitutional system as a cover for their program of dissolution. They are not destroying the justice system, they are exploiting it. Lawyers on the center and right are struggling to respond to these tactics. His defeat in Spain was particularly severe. In The Collapse of the Spanish Republic, 1933-1936 (2005) and The Spanish Civil War (2012), Paine describes Spain's descent into a brutal three-year war in the face of the socialist left's abandonment of the center. and the immorality of the law. .
Other socialist movements in Europe started with revolutionary intentions, but as they grew they calmed down and began to respect constitutionalism and parliamentary rules. Over time, the Spanish socialists have become radicalized. Spain's most prominent left-wing leader, Manuel Azana (prime minister from 1931 to 1933 and again in 1936), argued that liberalism failed because it was ready to compromise. He saw the constitution of the Republic as the beginning of a radical reform project, even called a "revolution". Politicians who did not identify with constitutionalism and the left were ipso facto not legitimate.
For the Spanish socialists, the right that failed to save the monarchy in the 1920s and did not formulate another constitutional basis for the new republic was an exhausted force. Then they were shocked by the results of the 1933 election, when an apparently stable left coalition collapsed and the right unexpectedly won. Believing that history was on their side, but believing that they now need a strong push to continue on the path, the motivation of the left has become a "rabid" desire to stay in power according to Paine.
Our modern American left is not revolutionary in the classical sense of the word. They started from the institutions and manipulated the system to effectively overthrow it. And today, when you see the people of the regime collaborating to delegitimize populism in all its forms, think of the Spanish socialists
Second, the center and center-left have allowed themselves to descend into revolutionary politics, beckoning the violence of the left and punishing the right. the rise of the "Antifascist" trope in the 1930s, described in Paul Gottfried's excellent Antifascism; The left justified the violence of socialist youth in Spain. Central authorities have been unable or unwilling to stop attacks on private property, businesses, churches, convents and clergy. Instead, they blamed the victims, arresting not the real criminals, but the monarchical and conservative scapegoats. As the cultural theorist René Girard understood, this scapegoat does not interrupt the cycle of violence, but reinforces it. When revolutionaries attempt to cleanse a corrupt state and society using scapegoats, those who kill them become martyrs, and their sacrifice becomes the redemption of nascent counter-revolutionaries. In Spain, monarchists and conservatives have transformed large sections of the population from apathy to anger. By allowing murders to go unpunished and unjustly punishing the innocent, the left created martyrs throughout Spain, fueling the counter-revolution and turning the conflict into a religious war.
Consider the regime's different response to the "largely peaceful" riots of Floyd's summer since the Jan. 6 attack. This is not to justify January 6 or to minimize its evil. On the contrary, the two acts of violence were treated very differently by the regime and its media components. Also, the attorney for the Boston Department of Justice released a statement today, pledging to protect doctors and hospitals who sexually mutilate children from abuse. good But think, Roe v. Wade was ejected. The administration, both progressive and center-right, creates a kind of martyrdom.
Another quote from Pinkosky.
A third factor in the collapse of the republic was centrist support for unconstitutional actions to preserve the so-called liberal consensus, which the French political theorist Pierre Manent called "the fanaticism of the center".
It reminded me of last week's shocking tweet by former US spymaster General Michael Hayden.
From General Hayden's Wikipedia page:
He was the director of the National Security Agency (NSA) from 1999 to 2005. During his tenure, he oversaw the controversial surveillance of technological communications between individuals in the United States and suspected foreign terrorist groups, leading to illegal NSA surveillance. . controversial
So they know who General Hayden is and what he is willing to do to protect his American citizens regime. Here is an excerpt from my book Live Not By Lies that tells you what we are up against.
In 2013, Edward Snowden, a rogue National Security Agency analyst, revealed that US federal government spying was far greater than previously thought. In his 2019 book The Permanent Record, Snowden wrote that he learned this
The US government was developing its law enforcement capability. At any time, the government can search the past messages of anyone they want to victimize for a crime (and everyone's messages have evidence of something). Anytime, forever, any new administration (future rogue NSA chiefs) can show up on the job and flip a switch, instantly track everyone by phone or computer, find out who they are, where they are. . they were what they did and what they had done in the past.
Snowden wrote about a 2013 public speech CIA chief technology officer Gus Hunt gave to a tech group that got nothing but airwaves. Only the Huffington Post mentioned it. In his speech, Hunt said: "Indeed, it is within our power to be able to calculate all human-generated information." He added that the masters of the CIA, after taking this data, want to develop the ability to archive and analyze it.
Understand what it means. your private digital life belongs to the state and always will. We currently have laws and practices that prevent the government from using this information against individuals unless they are suspected of engaging in terrorist, criminal, or espionage activities. But dissidents have repeatedly told me that the law is not a safe haven; if the government decides to delete it, it will commit a crime based on the data collected or use it to destroy its reputation.
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I think that's why all the talk of the American Civil War is just hot air. Regimes, i.e. institutional actors both state and private, have the technological power to exclude those they wish to marginalize. Once we become a cashless society, and the regime has used Covid as an opportunity to push us all towards that goal (remember the "coin shortage nonsense"), it will be impossible to buy and sell if your card is disabled. electronically This is simply true.
I was talking about all this this morning with some academics and we agreed that in a very short time, after the captive minds of millennials and generation Z have gained political dominance, there will be a broad consensus that these measures must be taken against the disaster. . . the dissidents Americans today have created a system that can be used against us to suppress our freedoms and an advanced totalitarian therapeutic culture that will insist on our welfare.
What are we doing? What can we do and what should we do? Better to start talking, innovating and networking while we can. In a sense, the bleak speculation about “civil war” prevents us from talking more seriously about the threats to our liberties from this emerging revolutionary bourgeois regime and how we can realistically confront them.
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