Uninsightful and dull, with regurgitated US regime-compliant geopolitical narratives throughout. This author sounds more like a PR flack for the CIA (more on this in a moment) than an academic freely expressing her opinions. Thus there is very little in this book worth considering.
However, books like this can lead us to certain meta-ideas. Consider, for example the gatekeeping institutions that either permit, or forbid, books to reach the marketplace. Books like this one, which are blatantly regime-compliant and satisfy all current goodthink requirements, slide right through! Thus, as a potential reader, it is worth asking: will an "approved" book like this offer insights? Will such a book be predictive? Will it actually help you understand what's going on? Or will it simply complete the propaganda process, thereby making you think just like you're supposed to?
This takes us to an important intellectual heuristic: avoid all books written within the last fifty years. Too many regurgitate official narratives while masquerading as works of scholarship, and most are anti-insightful and anti-predictive.
I mentioned above that this author sounds like she could be a PR flack for the CIA. In a way she more or less is: she works on the Political Instability Task Force, an organization retained by the CIA to identify a watchlist of countries exhibiting warning signs of political instability.
Instead of wondering how many civil wars were caused by "factionalism" or other imagined reasons, one might hope a genuinely freethinking academic would ask a more intellectually brave question: how many civil wars have been started by the United States CIA? Anyone even vaguely conversant in 20th century geopolitics would consider this the most obvious question of all. It is telling, very telling, that this author never asks it.
(Strongly) Suggested Alternative Reading List (links will take you to book reviews on this site):
Keith Lowe: Savage Continent
[As readers of this site well know, the rest of this post is just my notes, quotes and reactions to the book: I document this stuff to help me integrate and work out my own ideas. Don't forget that I'm like Vonnegut's armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth--even the best of my ideas are written in crayon. Please read no further, don't even read the bolded parts! You have much more important things to do.]
Notes:
Introduction:
xiff We start with a story about Adam Fox, living in the basement below a Vac Shack vacuum shop, plotting the capture of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer because of her power overreaches with COVID lockdowns. "...modern civil wars start with vigilantes just like these--armed militants who take violence directly to the people."
xvii "Ukraine's current civil war is being fought by bandits, warlords, private military companies, foreign mercenaries, and regular insurgents." [We'll see over the course of this book that the author holds a blindly regime-compliant perspective of the Ukraine conflict, which is embarrassing for a book published as recently as 2022. It gives readers important clues to her (lack of) perceptiveness and insightfulness.]
xx Interesting passage here: "It has become commonplace to see Confederate flags for sale in Pennsylvania convenience stores, or American flags with a thin blue line and insignias of all kinds. We are now beginning to understand that bumper stickers like the circle of stars around the Roman numeral III, the Valknot, and the Celtic cross are not innocent. Instead, they are symbols of America's far-right militant groups, which are becoming increasingly visible, vocal, and dangerous." [Setting aside the question of whether or not this assessment of these symbols is accurate (or paranoid), this quote is fascinating from a rhetorical standpoint (although if I had to guess I doubt the author actually knows she is doing it, her rhetorical skills are too limited). It gets at an important dialectic control mechanism: if you can negatively brand the other sides' branding (for example, label them as "far right," or deem any given symbol a "symbol of hate"), you can easily capture valuable rhetorical high ground. This is a subtle yet critically important mechanism, and it actually creates the very "factionalism" the author will soon decry in coming chapters.]
xxi The introduction ends with a cliffhanger about a Bosnian Muslim who was caught in Sarajevo during the conflict there.
Chapter 1: The Danger of Anocracy
3ff On the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the toppling of Saddam Hussein.
5 "When Saddam Hussein was captured, researchers who study democratization didn't celebrate. We knew that democratization, especially rapid democratization in a deeply divided country, could be highly destabilizing... The United States and the United Kingdom thought they were delivering freedom to a welcoming population. Instead they were about to deliver the perfect conditions for civil war."
5 Citing here the ethnic divisions in the country. [Let's put a placeholder on this and retain the idea to map to other situations]
7 On Sunnis, who went from being "on top of the system" to being the losers, with lost positions, status, security etc. [The author doesn't say this--I'm saying it--but perhaps another metarule for living through a revolution is try to be independent of any regime, and obviously avoid owing your status to obedience to a regime that loses power]
9 "Over the past one hundred years, the world has experienced the greatest expansion of freedom and political rights in the history of mankind... Today, almost 60 percent of the world's countries are democratic." [One can only smile with sadness at this blindly naive quote, from a book published as recently as 2022, knowing what we know now about the major global "democracies" censoring, infiltrating the media, jailing people for memes, etc., in other words not being democracies at all. As much as I don't want it to be true, Sheldon Wolin was far more predictive with his inverted totalitarianism model, we've been living in an illusory democracy for quite a long time, perhaps even since the 1970s.]
11 "It turns out that one of the best predictors of whether a country will experience a civil war is whether it is moving toward or away from democracy. ...Attempts by leaders to democratize frequently include significant backsliding or stagnation in a pseudo-autocratic middle zone." On the term anocracy, something in between a full autocracy and democracy, where citizens receive some elements of democratic rule but also live under leaders with extensive authoritarian powers.
13 It's mortifying to read the "scoring system" for democracies done by a research group, which lists New Zealand and Canada with the highest scores for being free and fair, but then to think of such a ranking in the context of these countries' truly authoritarian behavior during the COVID pandemic and thereafter.
14 "Saddam Hussein never faced a major civil War during his twenty-four years in power. It was only after his government was dismantled and power was up for grabs...that Iraq erupted in war.
17 Example here of Indonesia after Suharto stepped down in 1997, his successor enacted too many reforms, allowed East Timor to have independence for example, and then the country devolved into all sorts of balkanized chaos. [There's a takeaway here for all power structures and power systems: if you are the regime in power, never forget that if you give up an inch of power they'll take a mile, which is why the United States could never allow any state to secede, ever. The first just leads to the next, then to the next.]
22 This chart on page 22 here is hilarious--a freshman sociology paper level of rigor: a totally opaque scoring system, barely explained to readers, graphically represented with barely labeled and context-free axes. This is the whole enchilada of chart crimes, all in one chart!
23ff Interesting regime-compliant discussion of Ukraine and its revolution in 2014 and the alleged autocratic tendencies of Viktor Yanukovych. I wonder if the author considers Zelenskyy to be an autocrat now that he's refusing to leave office and refuses to hold elections while he prosecutes a war that is contrary to the wishes of (by now) all of his citizens.
Chapter 2: The Rise of Factions
[This chapter and all its word salad is better said in this one-sentence quote from Singapore's Lee Kwan Yew]
28ff Discussion of the death of Yugoslavia's Tito in 1980; on the ethnic amalgam that he held together by force since the 1950s. The rise of Slobodan Milosevic. [I hate to say it but now that I've lived through the past four years I now totally doubt any of the official narratives I once heard (and heartily believed) about the Yugoslavian civil war]
34ff On how since the mid-20th century more civil wars were fought between ethnic or religious factions rather than political factions. [This page and the next page are a good example of the author's word salad, where she makes mutually exclusive, mutually contradictory statements from one paragraph to the next; see for example her claim that while at first "it appeared as if ethnic diversity within a country was a key factor in the outbreak of war" then in the next page citing a study that claims "ethnically diverse countries were not necessarily more prone to war than ethnically homogeneous ones." But then in the next paragraph her own [CIA funded!] Political Instability Task Force themselves looked at nuanced measures of ethnicity and discovered that political instability came from "factionalism" "based on ethnic, religious, or racial identity rather than ideology, and these parties then seek to rule at the exclusion and expense of others." So does violence comes from ethnic diversity or not? The author moves on to the idea of factionalism as a key driver and then forgets all about the ethnic component. It's as if the author summarily redefines terms so that she can reach the desired explanation.]
39 On "superfactions", an ethnic or racial group that shares also the same religion class and geographic location, a group that interacts exclusively with its own kind. [I think if you really work out the author's (il)logic here, she's saying we're not free to associate with people like us, but rather we're required to associate with people unlike us, because otherwise it leads to civil war. I thought in a democracy we had freedom of association: we can associate with whomever we wish?]
42 Interesting comments here from the author about the alleged differences between rural people and urban people, it's interesting to hear her confidently-stated opinions on page 42-43, it sounds suspiciously like she knows absolutely zero rural people.
44 You can't help but wonder if the outcome in Yugoslavia is the norm and is what will happen in all multi-ethnic nation states.
45 On how prior regime elites (for example former Communists after communism fell) would use a strategy of "gambling for resurrection" by stoking ethnic tensions or playing on the people in other ways. "Ethnic entrepreneurs."
47 "If citizens come to believe there is a chance, no matter how small, that the opposition could destroy them, they will turn to a leader who offers them protection, no matter how unscrupulous."
49 Disturbing example here where a Bosnian couple went to a wedding and heard various songs performed from old Ottoman times, and one of the guests, a Serb, shouted out "Enough of these Turk songs!" The wedding went quiet. Things were changing radically and quickly.
51ff [Fascinating and disturbing to understand people's (often agonizingly slow) cognitive journey in places like Bosnia/Serbia or India/Pakistan towards understanding the seriousness and the gravity of the situation: it takes people a while to realize that shit's going down, things are not the same as they were. So another metarule to consider here is to recognize the signs for what they are and be early, not late, to see these things.]
52 The author pivots here to describe Modi in India as "a right wing Hindu nationalist." It's interesting to see that Wikipedia agrees. The old, credulous me would nod my head and say, "hmm, yep, it says right there: "right wing Hindu nationalist," yessiree!" The new, less credulous me assumes that if it's on Wikipedia and it has to do with politics it's almost certainly untrue.
What do they want me to believe?
56 "Indeed, citizens do not organize themselves into narrow, self-serving factions overnight. Often, they are unaware that the factionalism is even happening; they are certainly unaware of how dangerous it can be. They think they are ensuring their survival, defending their families and communities from emerging threats..." [The author goes sideways here: she doesn't understand the gravity of the situation, she doesn't understand that it becomes life-or-death very quickly in situations like Yugoslavia, or during India's Partition era, and so on. It's a very academic, ivory-tower perspective.]
Chapter 3: The Dark Consequences of Losing Status
58ff On Mindanao, Philippines, a predominantly Muslim region of the Philippines, Catholics were "encouraged" to move into this region; some of the best land was given to Catholics while Muslims were thrown off land that they had occupied; this gave rise to a Muslim separatist movement which had roots from prior to Philippine Independence (in 1946). On the increasing spiral of violence in the 1960s as the Muslim Independence movement got a foothold, likely financed by the Malaysian government; on how sectarian violence blew up in the region. [I wonder if this author has ever heard the axiom "diversity + proximity = war"? This is a central truth across all of human history, and we should at least keep it in mind when we look at these situations.]
62ff The author's explanation goes this way: Marcos de-democratized the Philippines and made it more of an anocracy; then the Muslim/Moro community in the Philippines lost political power and status, going from having quite a bit of self-government to having this power removed as the Philippines centralized power. [It's fascinating that the author doesn't cite nation-state centralization of power as a driver of violence and civil war. But rarely do you see regime apparatchiks argue for taking power away from a centralized government that feeds them.]
65 An intellectually childish diversion here into the Kahneman-Tversky experiments on loss aversion.
66ff Discussion of various other ethnic conflicts that fit this chapter's central theme to varying degrees: on the Abkhasian people in Georgia and their various revolts under Soviet rule and then later after Soviet breakup and Georgian Independence; a discussion of the "sons of the soil" concept: on indigenous people who are displaced; On Francisco Franco who consolidated power by elevating Castilian over other languages, banned teaching other languages like Basque, Catalan, Galician, etc. [The author lamentably calls them "dialects" here, a rather culturally deaf whiff]; On the Assam region in northeast India where Bengalis displaced local Assamese people. [I also wonder here if the author maybe has it backwards: it isn't "loss of status" that is the problem, it is mass immigration itself--imposed by an outside force (the centralized state) against the will of a given region's current residents--that is the problem. Her "loss of status" phenomenon is a "feature not a bug" that inevitably results from importing millions of new people into a region that isn't able to handle the influx. Which is why, if I were to think like a centralized government trying to suppress or enervate any given region of my country, this is the first thing I would do.]
71 [Note that the author has chances here to grapple with the idea above, she should be able to see it but she can't seem to translate the idea to countries like Europe or the USA. She states outright how the Assamese were quickly outnumbered by incoming Bengalis, and then in the 1979 parliamentary elections, "the Assamese suddenly saw their worst fears confirmed; by allowing these immigrants to enter the country and vote, the national government in Delhi--over a thousand miles away--appeared to be encouraging the transformation of Assam." Or, see this even more striking quote: "One of the main problems for the Assamese was that it was quite easy for foreigners to become citizens and vote." Again, she can see it there, but can she see it here?]
76 A particularly strange and logically incontinent section here: "Indeed, immigration is often the flashpoint for conflict. Migrants come into a country and compete with poorer, more rural populations--sons of the soil--fueling resentment and pushing these groups toward violence. It is especially alarming, then, that the world is entering an unprecedented period of human migration, in large part due to climate change." The reader is then subject to the obligatory climate change argument: sea levels rise, droughts increase, weather patterns change, more people would be forced to relocate. [A rigorous reader will wonder, "What does this author think drove mass immigration in the past? And why make this sudden pivot to a lecture about "climate change" driving still more mass immigration, rather than addressing the underlying phenomenon itself?" Very strange.]
Chapter 4: When Hope Dies
78ff England using the same techniques of mass immigration, using Scottish Protestants to colonize Ireland after it was conquered in the 17th century; and then in 1922, when Ireland was given independence, the six counties of Northern Ireland were kept under British control, and the borders were redrawn to make sure that British/Scottish Protestants would make up 2/3 of the population [!] [Again, we see the controlling/centralized regime move its own people in to make the indigenous people become a minority in their own land. The author simply doesn't frame it this way, however, nor does she see the same mechanism in use today.]
80ff Discussion of Ireland's Bogside massacre in 1969, the Bloody Sunday event in 1972, followed by The Troubles, which ultimately weren't resolved until 1998 with the Good Friday agreement.
84ff The author makes a weakly supported argument here that the "loss of hope" is what causes civil war to break out, and causes people to resort to violence, so when the Irish Catholics of Northern Ireland realized that the British government was on the Protestant side they then resorted to violence, likewise the Moro people of Mindanao likewise "lost hope" when President Marcos declared martial law and forcibly took their lands and weapons.
85ff Discussion of the civil war in Syria against the Assad regime. [I don't know anything about Syria, but even I can tell someone writes about it as if they learned everything about it in mainstream newspapers.]
91 "Protests are a warning sign. They indicate the citizens believe their system still works but is troubled."
92 [A series of numbers that only a "studies show" sociologist could say with a straight face]: "In the 1990s, peaceful protests had a 65 percent success rate, meaning that they resulted in the overthrow of a government or the gaining of independence. But since 2010, the success rate has dropped to 34 percent." To be fair, these are not the author's numbers, she is citing Erica Chenoweth and her book Civil Resistance.
92ff The Ivory Coast and its 1990s-era transition to democracy, featuring ethnic factionalism; also Burundi in the 1990s. [Also note that the author drops a few comments here about the United States Civil War that indicates that she has a limited and overly facile understanding of that conflict.]
97ff How aggressive government repression and government violence actually hardens the populace and makes it an inadvertent recruiter for militant and revolutionary groups; also revolutionary groups know that triggering government repression can achieve this end, so they plan accordingly and do what they can to trigger a harsh government response. See Carlos Marighella, the Brazilian Marxist revolutionary who "urged fellow militants to attack government forces in order to provoke a violent reaction."
Chapter 5: The Accelerant
[This chapter is somewhat embarrassing, it reads like "old man yells at internet"... social media is terrible when it amplifies far right people and "hate speech"; by the end of this chapter the reader will early see that this author is unabashedly pro-censorship, although she never uses this word and probably would deny such an accusation; we'll also find some hilariously boomerish comments about Joe Rogan and how allegedly "mild" right wing content is a gateway drug to radicalization.]
102ff On Myanmar and the 2011 election; background on British occupation, during which Indian and Muslims killed workers who had immigrated to Burma to work for British-controlled industries, displacing Buddhist natives who were Myanmar's "sons of the soil" [here again we have another example of mass immigration causing tremendous problems down the road]. The author went to Myanmar during this period with her husband and young daughter. "When I showed people my iPhone, their faces went blank; they had no idea what it was."
104ff By 2011, Myanmar's government was already significantly reducing internet restrictions; Facebook launched soon after, although the author calls this "a disaster in the making" because in 2012 "Buddhist ultranationalists" took to Facebook to "target Muslim populations throughout Myanmar... Before long, Myanmar's military leaders were using it to post hate speech and false news stories." [Again I know almost nothing about this country and this conflict but I sure do smell a facile and superficial discussion right here.]
105ff On Facebook turning a blind eye to the "hate speech," remaining silent, refusing to acknowledge the "problem."
106 Even Aung San Suu Kyi, the champion of democracy in Myanmar, would not acknowledge the violence, claiming that allegations of ethnic cleansing were "misinformation." [This is interesting, I did not know this, I vaguely remember pressure being put on Facebook for somehow being held responsible here, but I don't remember this particular position of Suu Kyi. Remember: she has traditionally been the darling of the West.]
108 The author cites examples here where when social media became a primary means of communication in Africa, starting in 2014 and 2015, and at the same time the level of conflicts there began to rise. The author cites an example in Ethiopia of "hate speech" on Facebook, although this example is quoted from Vice Magazine. [???] [Let's also not forget that the phrase "hate speech" is a problem in itself: it is ill-defined, it seems to be an epithet mostly used to control dissent and to favor whatever the political elites favor, etc.]
109 Some unintentionally hilarious comments here on social media platforms: "Charlatans, conspiracy theorists, trolls, demagogues, and anti-democratic agents who had previously been shut out of the media environment--or at least had great difficulty gaining a mass audience--suddenly gained traction." [I wonder, does this author realize the striking irony that the CIA, the very organization that is funding her, has its own tremendous presence on social media and that, further, the US government is specifically censoring topics of discussion? Recall that this was exposed during the COVID pandemic response in the tremendously important legal suit Murthy v Missouri (formerly known as Missouri v Biden), which proved the US government censored its own citizens on these platforms--including censoring accurate, true speech that happened to conflict with the objectives of the US regime?]
109 "Open, unregulated social media platforms turned out to be the perfect accelerant for the conditions that lead to civil war." [Here is where I think we can now quite safely conclude our author is pro-censorship.]
110 Copycat discussion here of the main thesis of Eli Pariser's book The Filter Bubble; it doesn't appear the author actually read the book, however.
111 Another kind of unintentionally hilarious quote here that only an academic could write--and only another academic could spend time researching. "Walter Quattrociocchi, a computer scientist at Sapienza Università di Roma, analyzed fifty-four million comments over 4 years in different Facebook groups. He found that the longer a discussion continued, the more extreme the comments became." Also the author cites a study here that YouTube video viewers who consume mild right-wing content by provocative talk show hosts like Joe Rogan are often pulled into much more radical alt-right content, concluding that YouTube is a "radicalization pipeline." [Good Lord.]
111 "It's this business model of engagement that makes social media so terrifying to those of us who study civil wars." [I think it's far more valid to reject the main idea of this chapter and instead offer the exact contra-idea: that when people are censored--or worse punished--for talking and writing and offering their thoughts, it is far more likely they will resort to violence.]
112 "If you are an extremist and you want to proselytize, social media is the perfect tool."
113 [One could sincerely ask: how unrigorous is it to blame Facebook for things that happen in Myanmar? It's sort of like blaming television, or radio, or even the atmosphere itself (after all, air carries sound waves!) for things that happen somewhere else.]
114ff On Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines; it is transparent to the reader that the author wants to blame social media for him coming into power too. The author's comments here are mutually exclusive as well: in one paragraph she claims his campaign was "amplifying people who spread fake news and rumors about his opponents" while in the very next paragraph she writes "Exit polls showed that he had gained the support of young, well-educated voters who were tired of both the status quo and the corrupt political elite." Very strange word salad.
118 [Also rather fascinating to hear this author accused Duterte of hiring hundreds of individuals (many from China, she alleges) to create fake social media accounts to support him and harass his critics; anyone who knows about the medical dissident movement in the United States and in England will know about an identical mechanism run by the British military to do the very same thing to both American and British citizens (the medical dissident movement mocks these sock puppet accounts as "the mutton crew"). I guess all governments, including the allegedly "good" ones, are getting in on this action too nowadays.]
119 "...social media is inadvertently helping the autocrats win." [Again, the author says this without irony, but anyone with even a casual familiarity with the tremendously important government censorship lawsuit Murthy v Missouri (formerly known as Missouri v Biden) would rethink who actually are the autocrats and who, really, is illegally reaching into social media companies to censor, throttle and redirect discussion.]
119 Again, the author really struggles to see it: here she's maligning the Sweden Democrats "a far right former Neo-Nazi party" as they (quite peacefully) advocate for reducing the quantity of immigration into Sweden... except that she just wrote multiple chapters describing how mass immigration was used so ruthlessly to disrupt indigenous peoples and establish centralized control in countries like Ireland, India, the Phillipines, Georgia, Myanmar and elsewhere. She simply cannot translate this exact analogy to Sweden, and seems to disapprove even when this Swedish party peacefully advocates via the political system.
123 "It used to be that far-right parties were unelectable in liberal democracies." [Fascinating use of rhetoric here: if you call something "far-right" does that make it so? Further if they were unelectable and yet now they are electable why does this author think that might be so? She refuses to ask or even consider this question.]
114 Discussion here about Shane Bauer, a journalist who "easily" infiltrated a militia group. The author leaves out his political leanings, leaves out the fact that he writes for far-left publications, etc. Interesting.
Chapter 6: How Close Are We?
129ff Predictable pearl-clutching discussion here of Trump after the 2020 election and leading up to Jan 6. [The author in general has been able to mask her Trump derangement syndrome for most of the book, but this chapter she can't quite keep up the facade.] President Trump "reminded me" the author says, of Venezuela's Nicholas Maduro and Ivory Coast's Laurent Gbagbo, both election losers who claimed their elections were stolen. "A part of me did not want to accept the implications of what I was seeing... This is America, I thought. We are known for our tolerance and our veneration of democracy."
135ff Discussion of her Polity Project and its democratization scoring; periods when it was higher versus lower; the author gives no information about the generation of these numbers whatsoever; it's rather interesting also that, for example, after Nixon's resignation the democracy score maxed out, despite the fact that one can easily consider that to be a coup which placed an unelected bureaucrat into the presidency. This scoring system indicates more about the political leanings of the scorers than it objectively describes. [Note on page 138-139 there's a comment on Canada being also having a max democracy score, despite the country's authoritarian pandemic response and lockdown, and its totalitarian asset seizures of wrongthinkers and protesters during the lockdowns.]
138ff Another interesting discussion here as the author criticizes Trump for challenging shutdowns and lockdowns in some of the more repressive states like Michigan and Minnesota: I think now that we're taking a much healthier look back at the excesses of the pandemic response, and how they harmed rather than helped things, this author may wish that these effectively pro-lockdown opinions were not permanently printed in a book for all to see. By the way, this is an object example of how this book is anti-predictive.
142 The book has become blatantly partisan at this point.
150ff The author finally does tie certain ideas together here: she describes working-class America (or as she describes it "White America," an interesting choice to marginalize a group that collectively is most certainly not all white!) and its struggles due to coastal/urban elite policies of deindustrialization, global trade and immigration as drivers harming and displacing these groups. However in a beautiful turn of rhetoric she marginalizes this entire idea by calling it "a simplified framework" and drops the idea. The other thing that's interesting here is that because her model shows that demagogues and populists take advantage of these displacements, then she can neatly fit Trump into exactly that predetermined role.
152 [I can't help but make a side note here about "conspiracy theories" and the use of the phrase itself as an epithet to marginalize discussion. One of the problems with those who use this phrase to marginalize others is that after a few years, everybody can look back and see which "conspiracy theories" actually turned out to be true--and then, more importantly, look back and see which people called those (ultimately correct) theories "conspiracy theories"! Obviously the "conspiracy theory callers" will later look like jerks, or at best they will look like useful idiots--or at worst, well, like PR flacks for the CIA. Note also that the conspiracy theory callers will then have to move to the next stage of the PR textbook, which is to "distance yourself" from your prior remarks. Things are going to get very interesting in the coming years throughout the entire media, holy cow.]
152ff A series of paragraphs here where the author cites "studies show science" that Republicans share more false news than Democrats, that conservatives spread misinformation more than liberals, that those who support Trump are racist, or worse: aggrieved racists resentful of "Black gains." The author is really piling on here and it's becoming incontinently partisan.
156ff The book suddenly, unintentionally, asks an extremely interesting question. "But when does sporadic violence escalate into civil war? How do you pinpoint the moment when hope is lost? The CIA has been studying this question for decades, in an effort to quell insurgencies around the world--in effect, to stop civil wars before they start." [The author says this with a straight face, somehow, and hilariously, this might be the first time anyone has seriously asserted that CIA might try to "stop" a civil war: usually they're doing the exact opposite!]
158 "The second stage of insurgency, which the CIA calls the incipient conflict stage, is marked by discrete acts of violence. Timothy McVeigh's attack in Oklahoma City could be viewed as the very earliest attack, in some ways years before its time."
159 "The open insurgency stage, the final phase, according to the CIA's report, is characterized by sustained violence as increasingly active extremists launch attacks that involve terrorism and guerrilla warfare, including assassinations and ambushes, as well as hit-and-run rates on police and military units." [Note that if I were running a control playbook for keeping a regime in power in the modern era, I would write this kind of report too, and then use it as justification to abrogate still more freedoms from the people, as part of a long-term process of consolidating more and more control.]
159-160 "Where is the United States today? We are a factionalized anocracy that is quickly approaching the open insurgency stage, which means we are closer to Civil War than any of us would like to believe." [The author goes on to make a rather striking prediction, which (now that we look back two years after this book's publication and nearly four years after the January 6th event) turned out to be not only non-predictive but needlessly alarmist: that January 6th, 2020 "could well be the first of a series of organized attacks in an open insurgency stage."]
Chapter 7: What a War Would Look Like
161ff Pages and pages here where the author literally makes up a civil war situation in 2028, an entirely imaginary wish-fulfillment scenario from the author's mind. One insightful review of this book on Goodreads aptly describes this chapter as a "fever dream."
162: A rather telling part of the scenario occurs here, "Secret Service agents foiled plans to assassinate president-elect Kamala Harris as she gave a speech announcing her intention to ban assault weapons..." [I believe here we can safely conclude that this author had absolutely no idea about Biden's incredible cognitive decline, even as recently as late as 2022 when this book was published. She assumes that Harris would be running for election (not re-election, notably) after Biden finished his term in 2028.]
172ff Discussion here of the stages of ethnic cleansing: classification, symbolization (these two stages are where differences are highlighted among the country's citizens, and then they are categorized by symbols); the third stage is discrimination; stage four is dehumanization, stage five is organization, stage six is polarization. The author is citing the group Genocide Watch and an article called The Ten Stages of Genocide. The author appears rather unrigorous as she force-fits United States history to these stages, she eventually claims that the United States is "solidly in stage five, perhaps entering stage six." Also I'm not sure how rigorous it is to surreptitiously substitute the words "ethnic cleansing" for "genocide."
175ff On "extremists today" who subscribe to the idea of accelerationism, that the end must be hastened. Ironically if you look at the centralistas and administrative state apparachiks running most major nation-states today (in countries that are allegedly "democracies"), you see on the contrary quite a rapid "hastening" of consolidation of power in their hands! The author moves on to an accelerationist group profiled by PBS's show Frontline, using all the obligatory -ists: racist, fascist, national socialist, etc., and coincidentally "all of whom are young white men." Also "they gather at 'hate camps' to train members." [This sounds so off, so ridiculous, that it might be more likely that the Boomers running Frontline got really badly trolled by some excellent, hilarious pranksters.]
177ff On to the idea of leaderless resistance, originated in the 1950s by the CIA to be used in Eastern Europe; the author claims that this type of leadership didn't work well in the pre-internet age but it's made perfectly for social media; she then goes on to cite the "Boogaloo Bois" [which I also thought was just a troll organization? But I could be wrong here]. "...if there's another civil war, these will be its soldiers."
185ff On the terrorist strategy of "spoiling" where terrorists try to subvert more moderate insurgent groups, especially when a peace agreement seems imminent.
187 ***[Here we have the author inadvertently illustrating a wonderful example of how when you use "narrative-first" or "what does my regime want me to believe" to navigate reality, it can cause you to arrive at conclusions that are exactly upside down after your regime later changes its narrative.] "The Rise Above Movement (RAM), a white supremacist group based in California, has traveled to Ukraine for training with the Azov Battalion. As Tim Hume reports in Vice, Azov has handed out pamphlets at Neo-Nazi concerts in Europe, created propaganda videos, and headlined far-right conferences in Scandinavia. They've sold the war in Ukraine as a way for far-right groups to gain combat experience, which they can then use to train their own militants." [Oops, wait: it turns out that we re-narrated the whole Azov thing: they aren't Nazis at all, in fact there aren't any Nazis at all in Ukraine, nope, none at all! These are our guys, good guys, fighting for our team against Russia! ...We have always been at war with Eastasia...]
187ff Back to the Ten Stages of Genocide [and the author correctly calls it "genocide" here, rather than the Ten Stages of Ethnic Cleansing as she put it on page 172ff]; now to the seventh stage, the preparation stage, where leaders indoctrinate the populace with "if we don't kill them, they will kill us" thus reframing genocide as self-defense, after which a country explodes quickly into stages eight and nine: persecution and extermination, and then the final stage: denial.
189 "An armed population increases the likelihood of this kind of security dilemma." [It would be far more interesting to consider additional sides of this statement and to treat the topic with some rigor rather than just make this assertion and move on.]
190ff After discussion and an admission that there exists left-wing terrorism, briefly citing examples from ANTIFA, the author quickly brushes aside this idea, as the author claims the left wing is too diverse to be coordinated successfully; quickly she returns to blaming the right wing for everything. The author culminates with this strange paranoid quote: "America was lucky that its first modern autocratic president was neither smart nor politically experienced. Other ambitious, more effective Republicans--Tom Cotton, Josh Hawley--have taken note and will seek to do better."
Chapter 8: Preventing a Civil War
194ff Discussion of how South Africa was brought back from the brink of Civil War in the 1980s; the author cites the good fortune that South Africa had Mandela and De Klerk to work out the compromise rather than P.W. Botha; she contrasts this with Assad in Syria who "chose not to compromise."
198ff "Civil wars are rare--in any given year, less than 4 percent of countries that meet the conditions for war actually descend into armed conflict--but where they do happen, they tend to repeat themselves. Between 1945 and 1996, over a third of civil wars were followed by a second conflict. Since 2003, with the exception of conflicts in Libya and Syria, every civil war has been a sequel--a repeat of a previous war." On the idea of a "conflict trap": see countries like Ethiopia, Myanmar, India, Croatia/Serbia, etc.
199 [We learn here that in 2014 the author was commissioned by the World Bank to study the conflict trap: I think if we were to ask Michael Hudson, he might argue that she is therefore an agent of yet another control device for global hegemony; note also she argues that countries that avoid conflict traps/repeated civil wars "doubled down on democracy"--a vacuous phrase if there ever was one. Worse, next she cites two success stories, Mozambique after their 1992 Civil War and Liberia after their internal conflict ended in 2003, when even with just a cursory check one can find high levels of violence motivated by ethnic tensions in both of these countries since; note that in Mozambique there was violence going on while she was still writing this book. This author should know better.]
202ff The author presents her solutions to make the US more democratic; one of her ideas is to eliminate the electoral college [lamentably, this reveals the author's inability to consider second-order consequences]. Her other ideas are largely bromides: increasing government accountability, improving public services, eradicating corruption, we need to make sure that all Americans are allowed to vote, that all votes count, etc.
205 Discussion here on normalcy bias and how the average citizen can't see the progression towards civil war.
206 [Interestingly oblivious quote here, especially given the USA's performance in Afghanistan a year before this book's publication]: "We are more prepared, as a country, to counter foreign enemies such as al-Qaeda then we are to disarm the warriors in our midst, even though the latter are currently more virulent and dangerous." [It's also interesting to think about the mental paradigm (and propaganda paradigm) of mouthing overstatements of American military capability, while likewise overstating the threat of so-called "enemies in our midst".. both of these are the kinds of things which lead to endless wars, both at home and abroad.]
209 More substance-free bromides here on how to fix "the problem": making government more effective, prioritizing early education, universal healthcare, a higher minimum wage [with minimum wage, we again see the author again reveal an inability to consider second-order consequences: questions on minimum wage quite often do this!], etc.
211ff On using lawfare and targeted retaliation against domestic insurgent groups.
215 Again on conspiracy theories: the author complains about social media as a bullhorn for conspiracy theories. [Once again: in future years we're going to look back and be appalled at how predictive many of these so-called conspiracy theories actually were. It used to be a facetious joke to tell people to "get a conspiracy theory friend because it's the only way to know what's going on"... sadly it's not so facetious any more.]
220ff The author and her husband actually talk about what they would do if they had to leave the United States, it turns out that they hold, between the two of them, Swiss, Canadian, Hungarian and German passports! "In the end we decided on Canada" with Switzerland as the backup. [Oddly, and ironically, we get to see them choose the country that, of all of the so-called democracies, that tilted most disastrously towards autocratic behavior during and after the 2020 pandemic response!]. However at the end of the chapter and the end of the book she backtracks, saying they have no intention of leaving. [This is a wonderful example of what Nassim Taleb would call "I don't care what you think, just tell me what's in your portfolio."]
Acknowledgments
229 We can sometimes infer quite a bit about a book and its author by reading the acknowledgments, and there is somewhat of a concerning comment here: "An even bigger thanks to Natalie Boyer, who was my indispensable finder-of-all-facts no matter how obscure. She had a gift to synthesize enormous amounts of difficult material into simple summaries which were then easy for me to use." [I can't know this for sure of course, but this sounds suspiciously like the author may not have researched very much of her own book.]