Wargaming Civil War v2.0
A little theorizing on how it all might go down, and what it might look like if/when it does.
The 1860s US Civil War was primarily an economic paradigm war. The Southern agrarian plutocrats backed the Black manned slave labor system. The Northern industrialist plutocrats favored debt-wage slavery powered by European mass immigration.
Given that the first US civil war was an oligarchic conflict, what would today’s US-based oligarchs fight over in a 2.0 civil war? Slices of cherry pie. Control of population centers. What would the hoi polloi fight over? Trans bathrooms. Abortion. Race issues. School prayer. Whatever else oligarchs don’t care about.
Any civil war discussion needs to factor in the Pentagon. They control the soldiers and weapon systems. If the MIC split into two factions, I imagine we’d see something like “woke” Pentagon vs “family values” Pentagon, with Raytheon owning both sides.
I don’t see any intentional Battle of Antietam mega-army fighting mega-army scenes. Unlike Springfield rifles and Gatling guns—F35 fighter jets, stealth bombers, and ICBMs cause serious damage to infrastructure and oligarch holdings. Mushroom clouds spouting up across America is bad for business. The rules of engagement would need to be carefully controlled. An internecine US nuclear war is scarier than Black Jesus.
Like ancient Rome, the US is a multicultural empire. To keep Rome’s diverse groups from splintering, Emperor Constantine made Christianity the official state religion. In America, Whites, Latinos, and Blacks make up the bulk of the population. All are predominantly Christian- at least by birth. America’s remaining unifiers are football, smartphones, Google, and the threat of state violence. Mushroom Cloud Jesus might be the empire’s last bottle of Elmer’s Glue. I prefer Hippie Jesus over Mushroom Cloud Jesus.
Restoring school prayer, filling up prosperity gospel mega-churches, and outlawing “gayness” won’t restore America’s manufacturing base, rebuild its decayed infrastructure, or clean up the poisoned rivers. Nor will it prevent the upward transfer of wealth that comes from corporate governance, endless MIC war, and a Fed owned by 8 banking families.
Christian (Zionist) Nationalism might keep the dying empire on life support for a little while longer, but collapse is inevitable. All empires crash—pathologically corrupt ones sooner than later. If Christian Nationalism failed to keep the food rations above starvation level, WW3 seems like the next logical play. If the international bankers remained on top and human civilization stayed intact after WW3, I suppose the next phase would be One World Government dystopian dictatorship.
If oligarch-managed civil war could prolong the empire’s lifespan, it also holds the potential to shorten it. As demonstrated by Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Ukraine, neocon/neoliberal ventures turn into massive clusterf*cks. What if a civil war went sideways and started whipping around like a live electric cable in a windstorm? A case of controlled chaos turning into uncontrolled chaos.
Where a civil war gone sideways winds up is hard to say. I suppose it could turn out really good or really bad. Anything from a new and improved American republic to Mad Max.
The above-excerpted analysis is certainly, well, different, to say the least. That said, it seems to me that the latter option might be a safer bet. But I’ve never been the betting type, so what the hell do I know. The history of human warfare shows that the one safe assumption we can make, in all times and all places, is that we can’t possibly know beforehand what will happen, nor how the thing will all shake out, until it actually, y’know, does shake out.
Throughout the duration of the actual conflict itself, we can reliably count on widespread horror, misery, and deprivation as the stuff of everyday life, carrying on far longer after the war’s outcome has been decided than is generally expected. As Gen Wellesley lamented after the Battle of Waterloo: Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.
War can be conclusive or inconclusive; destructive or productive; justified or not; those things, and many more besides. It is a cruel, ravening beast with many faces, all of them terrible to those caught up in its toils. War is also a permanent fixture of the human landscape, as unpredictable as it is inevitable. Wracking and painful as it surely is, human nature itself mandates nonetheless that the awful scourge of war will be with us always.
Oddly enough, though, war can sometimes be a good thing, even a desirable thing when the sole alternative is submission, slavery, and degradation at the hands of a ruthless despot. It has been described as a crucible in which irrelevancy is burned away, leaving only personal honor intact. It should never be rushed recklessly into; likewise, it should not be rejected out of hand when it has become obviously necessary. Just as war can be the plaything of greedy, over-ambitious potentates, it can also be the last desperate resort of men too long preyed upon by them.
In the somber, cautionary words of a wise and noble warrior who certainly knew whereof he spoke: it is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.
(Via Wes Renegade)
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