THE GROWING THREAT OF CIVIL WAR....

 

This essay by David Betz (from the Department of War Studies, Kings College, London)  who will be labled as a right wing academic and  Australian Professor M.L.R. Smith looks at the growing threat of civil war in Western societies (by which they seem to mean 'white' societies). The Military Strategy Magazene has obvious links with the military and both Betz and Smith are on its editorial panel.

It touches on a range of issues but hones in on the issue of immigration as the major reason for 'breakdown'. It only mentions the growing economic crisis in passing, and fails to look in any detailed way at the division between the rich and the rest that is the cause of much conflict but it does mention a number of material issues that are relevant including the decline of organic societies and the erosion of the democratic process by 'elites'. It also fails to mention the 'forever wars' that wrecked countries that many recent immigrants lived in and were forced to leave - Iraq, Libya, Syria and Afghanistan, which those associated with the Military Strategy Magazene no doubt had a role in wrecking.

The main force creating social breakdown is identified as immigration rather then the economic changes both in Britain and abroad that are at the real root of it - but I have no doubt that the perception and reality of immigration was the major driver in Brexit and said so at the time.

Articles like this will be embraced by the likes of Farge and Tommy Robinson BUT it would be a mistake to say that everything that it touches on is wrong. The arguments HAVE some relevance and need to be examined but they are too partial and need more context and nuance and have to be confronted. It is more than an academic rant makes a dozen recommendations that deserve consideration.

My view is increasingly that 'ordinary people' (aka the working class) have been increasingly ignored by the politicians - Blair and Starmer et al - who have traditionally represented them and who adopted neo-liberal and globalist strategies that impoverished and alienated their electoral base. We need to get back to class-based politics and see stand-alone idenitity politics as a diversion rooted in creating short-term 'progressive' electoral alliances rather than tackling the long term material interests of the electorate.

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'Three decades ago, most Western states could still be described as cohesive national communities. Today, they resemble patchworks of tribes: identity-based, virtually segregated and increasingly fearful of one another.[112] What has emerged is not a temporary rift but a calamitous transformation—from national societies into fragmented polities.[113] Repairing such a condition will take decades, and even then, only after conflict has likely burned its way through.[114]...

Underlying these fissures are economic realities. Stagnant wages, debt accumulation and job precarity are not ‘early warnings’ but active drivers of social dislocation.[127] For generations, the ideology of progress in the West rested on a simple promise: that material conditions would steadily improve, that each generation would surpass the last.[128] This faith underwrote every other social and political claim of progressivism.[129]

The most potent source of agitation in Western societies is mass immigration.[142] It stands at the centre of both elite policy and popular resistance. The consequences are tangible: wage suppression, inflated housing demand, strains on welfare and public services, heightened crime[143]—particularly sexual assault[144]—and increasingly overt acts of cultural iconoclasm.[145] For many, immigration represents not adaptation but displacement, imposed from above and maintained even when electorates have voted against it....

When populations feel like ‘strangers in their own land’, the resulting charge is political dynamite.[146] Territorial affinity is not some abstract principle, but the core of many, if not most, people’s sense of identity.[147] When that tie is perceived as severed—and especially when large sections of the population conclude they did not choose their dispossession—the shattering can become a call for revolt. It is precisely the emotional potency of dispossession that gives such narratives their mobilising power.[148]

The deeper fault line lies in the collapse of social capital. As Robert Putnam demonstrated in Bowling Alone (2000), social capital sustains societies just as financial capital sustains economies: it underwrites trust, cooperation, and resilience.[149] Yet subsequent research, including by Putnam himself, has confirmed across a range of disciplines that large-scale ethnic diversity corrodes this capital.[150] In practice, diverse communities display diminished trust, weaker voluntary associations, higher levels of crime and heightened alienation.[151]...

The rise of the financial technocrat is no accident: today’s ruling class is drawn not from the ranks of statesmen but from high finance. Rishi Sunak,[160] groomed in hedge funds before becoming British Prime Minister; Canadian Prime Minister, Mark Carney,[161] who moved seamlessly from Goldman Sachs to the helm of two central banks; and Mario Draghi,[162] the central banker who became Italy’s premier—all embody a transformation in which government is less the art of statesmanship than the arithmetic of accountancy.

The most decisive act, however, was the adoption of mass migration and multiculturalism as state doctrine. In Britain, Tony Blair’s government announced in 2000 its driving political purpose to re-make the country through large-scale immigration. According to one of Blair’s advisors, Andrew Neather, part of the aim in doing so was intentionally to ‘rub the Right’s nose in diversity’.[163] This deliberate reshaping of the demographic and cultural fabric was not merely policy but a redefinition of the nation itself—and, for many, a breach of the social contract, with the Institute of Race Relations declaring in 2007 that Tony Blair had left the country ‘more divided—by race, class and status—than he found it’.[164]......

This assessment has attempted something straightforward: to identify the forces pushing developed states—above all in Europe—towards social fracture and the prospect of severe civil strife, and to draw out the strategic implications. It has also sought to show that the sources of these tensions are neither hidden nor mysterious. They are well documented, albeit in disparate form, across the serious scholarly literature.

In that regard, the academic consensus on civil war causation is not obscure; it is, in truth, little more than the plain sense of political theory that Europe’s ruling elites ignore or pretend not to understand. Thomas Hobbes himself spelled it out in Leviathan: ‘The obligation of subjects to the sovereign is understood to last as long, and no longer, than the power lasteth, by which he is able to protect them’.[173] When rulers cannot protect, they cannot command obedience. It is that simple—and that deadly.

Yet today’s elites, convinced of their own permanence, behave as though exempt from the oldest rule in politics: lose legitimacy, lose everything. Academics can rehearse the point in 10,000 words or 100,000; reality requires far fewer: legitimacy is perishable, anger is rational, consequences are unavoidable.