How Civil Wars Start – The Threat

A new book by Barbara Walter, How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them, discusses The Political Instability Task Force, and its predecessor, the State Failure Task Force, which uncovered what leads to civil war. I used their work to discuss preventing Trumpian extremism in my book, Unfit for Democracy. Walter is trying to help us survive him.

911 took our eyes off domestic American terrorism which has been deadly ever since the 1995 bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma, and the principal terrorism threat most of the time since. As Walter describes, by 2007, a Department of Homeland Security team found “bomb-making manuals, weapons training, and hundreds of militia-recruitment videos” on “‘right-wing’ … extremist websites and message boards.” But an “outcry” from congressional Republicans pressured DHS to withdraw the report and repeatedly blocked investigations into domestic terrorism because of extremist support. Still, the FBI found extremists infiltrating law enforcement much like the KKK had done in the age of segregation.

A student of mine described how domestic terrorists used threats of violence to intimidate judges and elected officials where he came from. We’ve now had judges, congressmen and other officials threatened, shot, sometimes killed, a plot intercepted before the perpetrators could kidnap and execute a state governor, and threats to the FBI have spiked.

Unfortunately, that’s what the gun movement has been about. The NRA started as an organization of hunters but hunters’ rights have never been threatened. The issue has been the ability to threaten, shoot and kill Blacks and public officials.

The extremists have been arming for decades. The NRA disavows subversion, but it was taken over by extremists using Confederate rhetoric about fighting Washington tyranny. It supported people arming themselves with powerful weapons that could take on the police or the Army. It backed extremists turning themselves into fighting forces with caches of guns. The thrust of private militias trying to take on American government by force and violence has long been obvious. They’ve been using gun shows and social media to advertise the need to deal with what they call tyranny in the U.S. Their ads, militias and videos shaped domestic terrorists like Timothy McVeigh, whose bomb killed more than two hundred people in Oklahoma City, those who tried to kidnap the Michigan governor, shot members of Congress and attacked the capital on Jan. 6. Their threat to America is very real. The portion of America that sympathizes is closer to the size of some of the world’s most vicious takeovers than most of us would like to realize.

That leaves two questions: What are the likely effects, and what can we do to stop it?

The likely effects are disastrous. Violent revolutions almost always result in the rule of rufians who have only their own interests at heart. The American Civil War was fought over the right to enslave other people. Not surprisingly it resulted in self-appointed bands of thugs committing murder and mayhem long after the War was officially over. The extremists aren’t fighting for equality but to reinstitute “white” racial dominance. The right to control or attack others with guns turns people into tyrants, and a gun-toting mob we should fear. It’s the first step to the violent overthrow of our Constitution and country. As Walter pointed out, terrorists magnify their power by intimidating those who don’t “believe the government can take care of them or protect them from violence.”

I’ll get back to what we can do to stop it next week.

— If you think I’m on target, please pass it on. For the podcast, please click here. This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on Sept. 6, 2022.