So, lets say we get to August or some summer month, and 4,000,000 people are protesting right out front the white house.
Do they send in the tanks? Do they kill 1,000,000 people? Would republican civilians see empathy for the dead americans who were democrats? Or would it unite the nation like 9/11 did, except this time against the government?
Everybody keeps expecting civil war when what we’re likely going to get is akin to “the troubles” of Northern Ireland. Prolonged, indefinite, bloody, insurgency. Bombings. Assassinations. More heavyhanded fascist paramilitary actions. Blood and chaos.
I agree. To have civil war you need multiple opposing armed forces of somewhat similar military strength. I don’t really see that happening because of the purges of military leadership but an insurgency is very possible.
Agreed, civil war will only happen if states bands together and starts fighting each other or the federal armed forces.
What we’ve seen so far has been almost too small to be called skirmishes. The intensity and size of the confrontations will likely increase, but it won’t be civil war.
Even if states band together who they gonna send? Police side with ice. Military sides with ice. Maybe you get the state national guard and some reservists but you’d need the guard to effectively mutiny and hope they follow the state instead of the fed. Realistically there’s no way organized fighting occurs. It’s just going to be police and military killing protesters with an occasional guerilla strike against them.
Yep, there is no organization capable of staging armed opposition to the government. A series of mass shootings and maybe some explosives is all we are going to get.
Given the number of incidents, I wouldn’t be shocked if historians decide later we are already living through it. Political assasinations in Minnesota, the attempted murder of pelosi’s husband, attempted trump shooter, charkie Kirk, the car bomb in Memphis that didn’t go off a few years ago. The United Healthcare CEO hit. Attempted kidnapping of Gretchen Whitmer.
There is plenty of violence to go around, but nothing that would rise to civil war.
I have imagined a scenario where a debt crisis degrades the capacity of the federal government and polarization leaves citizens and national guard more loyal to their state than the federal government, but we are a long way away from that.
i mean i only have a minor in history and have been saying this since steve scalise got shot but go off queen
At the end of the day, the die hard MAGA folks are a quarter of the country. The stuff they’re doing is wildly unpopular. At some point you have to fight for democracy. It is worth dying for. It is worth killing for. If we have to go through a troubles, so be it. Frankly, this probably isn’t going to end until we start seeing a whole lot of dead Evangelical Christians. The Christian nationalists are so used to being able to violently oppress and persecute everyone else. They don’t realize that their own lives and freedoms can be just as easily destroyed.
We already are in a civil war. One portion of the population has declared war on everyone else, hell bent on forcing their evil beliefs on everyone else. They do so in the confidence that they themselves will never face persecution, the loss of their rights, or a threat of violence. White Evangelical Christians are way too fucking comfortable.
Honestly, a troubles might be the best thing to knock some sense into these fuckers. Once the retaliatory killings start and their churches start getting torched, maybe it will finally get through their thick skulls that if you want to live in a democracy, you have to be willing to respect other people’s choices and let them live their own fucking lives.
The troubles ended because both sides felt threatened. No one felt safe. This encouraged everyone to come to the table. Right now one side feels invincible. They believe they can act with complete impunity against the rest of the population. So far, we’re all just holding our punches and trying not to escalate things, but these fuckers just keep pushing. Something will have to give.
Mutual bloody violence is a superior option to one-sided bloody violence, which is the situation we have now.
Incredibly fucked up to think there’s any upside to the troubles. Typical clueless yank energy.
As someone who lived through the Troubles, there were clearly upsides vs the country we had before.
The civil rights movement grew at a pace, the police service was completely revamped, and cross community relations improved dramatically. Most importantly, we largely stopped killing each other.
There was nothing good in the Troubles, but what came out of it was undoubtedly better than what had been there before.
We then ask was this due to the troubles, or was it a progression held back by the troubles.
It was deeply rooted systemic shitting on that was going nowhere.
Incredibly absurd perspective. It’s like a US southerner saying “There were no upsides to the civil war”, and then someone points at the federal abolishment of slavery, and you respond “oh yeah well the question now is did the civil war prevent the south from releasing their slaves from captivity?”
Like, I’m trying to use less hateful language, but I really don’t know what the fuck else to say to you other than point out the fact that you… well, like, some people just need someone to grab their heads and shake them really hard for a while. That’s you.
Would it have been better if there was violence, but only one side was violent?
Peace happens when both sides have a motive to achieve peace. You cannot have a peace treaty when only one side is willing to use force.
Three sides were using force. The republicans and unionists were mainly occupied with using violence against their own people suspected of “disloyalty”. As usual, regular people were the big losers.
Incredibly fucked up to think there’s no upside to fighting imperialism. Typical clueless Brit energy.
People forget that labor unions were a major factor in Tiananmen Square, US labor unions are not a credible threat to take over so don’t need to be put down as brutally.
They used to be.
“Would republican civilians see empathy for the dead americans who were democrats?”
You mean a couple hundred paid agitators that were bussed up from asylums in south America?
Because that’s the story your average republican voters would believe. I know it’s a bit hyperbolic but some of the shit I’ve heard them say about Mrs Good, and in general about the current protests leads me to feel that there is no limit to the lies an average republican voter is willing to suck down.
All that said I do not believe the military would follow those orders, but I’m not sure they would interfere if the DOJ started killing protesters in front of them.
They 100% believe all the protesters are bussed in with pallets of bricks waiting for them. My co workers 100% believe this.
Its fucking sickening. And they all have kids, teaching them all this fox news hate and racism daily.
Sometimes I truly just want to leave here.
America bombed its own city 40’ish years ago, and the entire country just moved on without a care. And about 60 years before that, almost forty city blocks were razed to the ground because the inhabitants were black.
Yes, they 100% could risk it. America is an extremely propagandized country, with patriotism on the right reaching jingoistic levels.
What was the name of the event where the US bombed itself 40’ish years ago?
The MOVE bombing in Philadelphia. Also against black people, by the way.
Thank you! Im gonna research it now!
Buddy, we’ve already bombed our own citizens multiple times. Battle of Blair Mountain for starts.
Battle of Blair Mountain for starts.
Just worth saying again so ppl research it
1921 Tulsa is on the line.
Rosewood
Oh my sweet summer child, the United States has had several tiananmen Square style incidents.
Look up the bonus army, Kent state, battle of Blair mountain…
Just to add: Ruby Ridge…
Ruby Ridge was a shootout between a family of paranoid religious whackjobs and the feds after they cocked up handing a guy a warrant, which eventually got taken by what today would be called “Magats” as a rallying cry.
- Bonus army saw 17,000 vets, 26,000 supporters against the US Army and their tanks.
- Kent State was a load of unarmed college kids against The Ohio National Guard.
- Blair Mountain was 10,000 coal minters against The Police, Army, and a Pinkerton Company.
They call make Ruby Ridge look like a bar squabble.
It’s crazy that you believe that government propaganda from then, but rightfully distrust the government now.
lemmy.ml is over there.
I literally got information from Wikipedia. The wife believed that the end of the world was nigh. Now I will admit, even back then, you didn’t need to believe the end of the world was nigh to not trust the government. But let’s be frank, ruby ridge was not on the same level as the bonus army, or the battle of Blair mountain, or Kent state.
If you think I shoot out between a conspiratorial family who believed at the end of the world was nigh and group of incompetent cops is equivalent to the battle of Blair mountain, then frankly, I think it’s you that’s fallen for the propaganda.
I am not saying it’s worse, I’m saying it was still a collosal government fuck up that resulted in the deaths of an entire family.
Are you trying to tell me that it was ok simply because they believed in a sky daddy???
Yeah, no. The religious nutter part is utterly irrelevant.
What IS relevant is that the ATF entrapped the dude; they wanted him as an informant, so they spent a long time cajoling and threatening him into cutting a shotgun down for them (“short barrel shotgun”, a National Firearms Act of '34 violation), and when he did, they immediately fucked his life. He ended up getting arresting him, he bonded out, and then got multiple differing dates for a court hearing. He didn’t trust the courts because he thought the gov’t was out to get him (spoiler: they were), and so skipped court. The judge issued a warrant improperly, and then the US Marshalls showed up, and everything went downhill.
It was a very, very clear case of entrapment, and what the gov’t did was inexcusable. It doesn’t matter that they wanted him to spy on the Aryan Nations, what they did to try and bend him to their will was evil.
Don’t minimize that shit.
The gov’t can, and will, crush every single person that they can get away with crushing.
Ffs, the response to the LA Riots in '91 happened two years after Tienamen.
Nevermind the police response to Occupy Wall Street and BLM.
Do they send in the tanks?
You don’t use tanks in a city. You use machine guns.
Do they kill 1,000,000 people?
If they can, probably
Would republican civilians see empathy for the dead americans who were democrats?
Ask yourself how many people in the US showed empathy for the Gazans.
Or would it unite the nation like 9/11 did, except this time against the government?
Lol no, the US is a terminally propagandised country. Iraq has WMDs, Venezuela has drugs, free healthcare is bad somehow, Israel is not genociding the Palestinians, etc. etc.
Free healthcare is bad because of taxes.
Idk why Americans are culturally allergic to paying taxes.
I can only assume it stems from the revolutionary motto of “No taxation without representation”, which permanently affixed the idea in everyone’s head that taxes were inherently bad.
And nobody within a 30 mile radius of me understands how a fucking tax bracket works. /Hyperbole
If you really wanted to use the military, you would just drop anti personnel cluster bombs. That would do any crowd in.
Fun (?) Fact: Trump is actually a fan of the massacre:
Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength," he said.
“That shows you the power of strength. Our country is right now perceived as weak… as being spit on by the rest of the world.”
We’re rounding people up into interment camps. We’re way past tank man.
…ok, but you do realize what hspprned the 2 days prior to tank man, right?
Short of sending an M1 Abrams, they’ve thrown everything at us along with the kitchen sink.
We’re way past Tank Man. Also, they already sent in the tanks. The police have riot vehicles which are typically repurposed military tanks.
I don’t think you understand how bad it is in the US right now.
There has never been anything like this in this country since WWII and even then the Japanese labor camps were leaps better than alligator alcatraz.
Dude… Just no. They have not thrown the kitchen sink at us. Tear gas, unconstitutional arrests, even shooting people in isolated incidents is not even fucking close to how bad it could get. Short of sending an M1 Abrams? How about just unloading full auto rifles into a crowd? How about taking out targets with predator drones? FFS, they only just started deploying LRAD.
Things can, and very well may, get so, so, SO much worse even before tanks start rolling in the streets.
This isn’t Iran.
If they could have done all that by now they would have.
It would be fairly difficult to convince any military branch or even police force to open fire on its own protesting citizens. There is a reason why we have three branches of government and Congress and a Senate.
That’s not to say I’m not downplaying it. It’s still really bad out there.
Ice is the new age Gestapo.
This is the endgame Moscow wants: Balkanization and destabilization.
America failed itself, and Putin loves to add more gasoline to the fire. Either that country must save itself, or the rest of the world experience the unimaginable once the collapse is completed.
You guys are gonna blame leftists and/or Putin all the way to prison, aren’t you? What’s happening now is purely American, baby, and non-whites have been subjected to it for hundreds of years.
Sarcasm aside, you really don’t need to look much further than American literacy rates and money in politics to see how we got here. Bonus points if you look into FPTP and gerrymandering. Of course it’s much easier to be intellectually lazy and just say “this is all Putin’s fault. Just wait till the miderms”.
edit: geopolitics- yea, the US did this to itself (but a few people made a lot of money!!).
Capitalism
Bananas.
All the things that were said the USSR would do, we did unironically.
Friendly reminder that Boris Yeltsin shelled Parliament back in 1993
If you stand up against this, everyone on every other side tries to tear you down as a traitor to their own cause(s).
There is no winning in the middle anymore.
Honestly though, we did it to them first with the Soviet union. It may have toppled by itself but we were DESPERATELY funding and fomenting the same shit in the Soviet union for decades.
It worked.
Now it’s working here.
Without a doubt
heck we are the blueprint for a lot stuff like this in fact the Nazis studied us for protips on how to do Industrialized racism
The government has been fascist for a while and has killed its own people demonstrating several times. Too me some time to understand this myself but when I did, I’ve been talking about it for 20 years to people who’ll listen. Needless, not many cared.
The other night, I was eating lunch at my desk, in our small open office. The IT guy and one of the robot techs were debating whether the summary execution of Alex Pretti was justified. IT guy believes the government’s version of events, suggesting that Alex brandished his firearm (which is patently false). They openly support the state’s murder, and further, encourage it. It might be a bit difficult to get them to go along with a massacre, but they’ve already been walked through 2 murders, and are primed for more.
Would something like this ever happen? Hope not. But if it does, god help us all.
I’ve checked out from trying to advocate for the truth. You cannot reason with someone who is arguing in bad faith. The blatant disregard for the live’s lost, instead focusing on proving a point to justify the theft of those live’s. It’s gross. How anyone can look at the system that has been fully exposed in front of them and say More of that! blows my mind. But those are the people that will backup Trump if such a thing happened.
I don’t think IT guy, or at least the equivalent people in my life, would be supportive to the point that they would actively involve themselves in a shooting war in support of Trump, which is what this hypothetical scenario would turn into.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned about conservatives it’s that they will start to pay attention once something impacts them personally. They are fine with the lies when it’s about some abstract person some other place but when it involves someone they know or happens in their town they will change their tune quickly. Of course not all of them but enough to matter. These kinds of people prioritize familiarity and perceived stability over just about anything else. As long as things are stable enough that they can maintain most of their routines they won’t think too deeply about anything. This kind of event, and the ensuing chaos, would force them to take a deeper look at things in a way that they’re currently too comfortable to be forced to confront.
I don’t think IT guy, or at least the equivalent people in my life, would be supportive to the point that they would actively involve themselves in a shooting war in support of Trump, which is what this hypothetical scenario would turn into.
He wouldn’t have to, the army and the police would do the shooting.
The point is that you don’t casually go about your routine during a civil war
deleted by creator
I’m still surprised that all of the January 6 insurrectionists could just storm the capitol building without being shot. They were breaking into the main building that had all of our lawmakers in it at the time, and only one of those morons was shot. Only the stupidest one. The queen of morons.
And did you notice what happened after that idiot was shot and killed? Nobody else tried to go through that window.
Wasn’t there an incident where Pelocy was begging for the national guard to be called in? Or maybe one of the cabinet members. And Trump kept declining.
So the only people to do the shooting were the limited number of capital police. I don’t think they’re set up for riot defense and it’s a lot to ask them to individually put their lives on the line by just shooting into the crowd.
They can’t risk it. Too many people could record it so they couldn’t control the narrative.
Too many people recorded the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti for them to control the narrative, but all that happened was that one guy got demoted.
It is building political pressure against them, they’re very clearly uncomfy within the administration. It may not directly fix all our fucked up shit but the admin blinked for the first time this cycle when it was looking increasingly likely that they had no limit and we were headed straight for a police state.
We survived last time by keeping them consistently on the defensive and for the first time we’ve managed to control the narrative again
It’s not over yet. I choose to believe this is the turning point.
Do you think they care? Dude they’re shooting unarmed women in the face in broad daylight in front of thousands of witnesses and on video.
And just imagine, the heartless coward that did it isn’t facing charges and gets to lie down in his own bed every night and walk up the next day.
Yep
No consequences so far
Civil wars have started over less than this
Civil wars require 2 sides capable of taking power.
IIRC they moved Ross out of state. So yes, he’s not in jail but he’s not exactly lounging at home either.
Hard disagree. Their base will believe anything.
If we set up gas chambers in Florida some people would be insisting they were harmless showers while they were being forced into them.
Based on the reaction to all of this, it’s kinda clear they do not give a shit. So we’ll see how the all plays out.
They’ve done it before. They’ll do it again.
They’re waiting for AI video to get “good enough”. Once AI can make believable clips of length 3 minutes or so. Then they can murder with impunity and half the country will say “that’s just AI, they would never do that”.
Haven’t been paying attention, have you?
Kent State says yes
This thread is actually really depressing.
Sometimes depression is a natural and healthy reaction to the world around us.
No one liked the nonviolent solution, no one will like the violent solution.
