“If a second civil war breaks out in the US, it will be a guerrilla war fought by multiple small militias spread around the country. Their targets will be civilians – mainly minority groups, opposition leaders and federal employees. Judges will be assassinated, Democrats and moderate Republicans will be jailed on bogus charges, black churches and synagogues bombed, pedestrians picked off by snipers in city streets, and federal agents threatened with death should they enforce federal law. The goal will be to reduce the strength of the federal government and those who support it, while also intimidating minority groups and political opponents into submission.

We know this because far-right groups such as the Proud Boys have told us how they plan to execute a civil war. …

Civil war experts know that two factors put countries at high risk of civil war. The US has one of these risk factors and remains dangerously close to the second. … The first is ethnic factionalism. This happens when citizens in a country organise themselves into political parties based on ethnic, religious, or racial identity rather than ideology. The second is anocracy. This is when a government is neither fully democratic nor fully autocratic; it’s something in between. Civil wars almost never happen in full, healthy, strong democracies. They also seldom happen in full autocracies. Violence almost always breaks out in countries in the middle – those with weak and unstable pseudo-democracies. Anocracy plus factionalism is a dangerous mix.

We also know who tends to start civil wars … The groups that tend to resort to violence are not the poorest groups, or the most downtrodden. It’s the group that had once been politically dominant but is losing power. … Today, the Republican party and its base of white, Christian voters are losing their dominant position in American politics and society as a result of demographic changes …”

aus: Barbara F Walters Beitrag zu: ‘These are conditions ripe for political violence’: how close is the US to civil war?, The Guardian online, 6.11.22, im Internet.

Abb.: Sara Rahbar: Flag #12, Land of Opportunity, 2008-2013, im Internet.

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