Would the Geneva Conventions Apply in a American Civil War?

Imagine another American Civil War, but this time in every state

Civil War is a 2024 action thriller from writer and director Alex Garland. Starring Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, and Stephen McKinley Henderson, Civil War takes place in the near future and shows the United States entering a new Civil War after California and Texas attempt to separate from the country.

https://youtu.be/VS11aa64Lvs

Not long ago, the idea of another American Civil War seemed outlandish.

These days, the notion has not only gone mainstream, it seems to suddenly be everywhere.

Business Insider published a poll in October 2020 saying a majority of Americans believed the U.S. was already in the midst of a "cold" civil war. Then last fall, the University of Virginia Center for Politics released a poll finding that a majority of people who had voted to reelect former President Donald Trump in 2020 now wanted their state to secede from the Union.

The UVA data also showed a stunning 41% of those who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 also said it might now be "time to split the country."

https://www.npr.org/2022/01/11/1071082955/imagine-another-american-civil-war-but-this-time-in-every-state

What would a second American civil war look like?

You’d need a theory of fascism and capitalist crisis to understand

Imagine the American Civil War had never happened: would the world be better or worse? That’s the question I kept asking myself as I read Barbara Walter’s book How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them.

Walter’s premise is that America stands at greater risk of armed civil conflict than at any time since Appomattox. Her supporting evidence is data from the Polity5 project, a political science initiative that tries to code the quality of democracy against specific metrics, plus case studies from the civil wars of post-Cold War era.

The question the book asks has become highly relevant following Joe Biden’s dramatic Pennsylvania speech, in which — flanked by US marines — he attacked the MAGA movement, whose rhetoric has turned insurrectionary and which (after the Mar-a-Lago raid) may react violently to any prosecution of its figurehead, Donald Trump.

But I found two concepts absent from Walter’s writing: a theory of fascism and a theory of capitalism.

Civil wars used to be about class, now they’re about culture and ethnicity, is the book’s assumption. Stopping them is a good thing and there is stuff democratic governments can do, if they can find the willpower.

But what if stopping them is not a good thing? What if — faced with an insurrectionary mass movement with genocide among its fantasies — defeating it by any means necessary is the primary goal?

I ask this question not because I want to diminish Walter’s proposed solutions — which lie along the same axis as the Militant Democracy 2.0 project I advocate in How To Stop Fascism. It’s just that I now doubt they would work before some kind of political confrontation with the insurrectionists.

https://medium.com/mosquito-ridge/what-would-a-second-american-civil-war-look-like-f73bd9e8d040

The far right is calling for civil war after the FBI raid on Trump's home. Experts say that fight wouldn't look like the last one.

https://www.businessinsider.com/new-us-civil-war-wont-look-like-last-one-historians-2022-8

What a new U.S. civil war might look like

Following an earlier 2017 survey, Foreign Policy’s Best Defense blog opened a poll about the likelihood of a second U.S. Civil War.

Best Defense Second Civil War correspondent

Following an earlier 2017 survey, Foreign Policy’s Best Defense blog opened a poll about the likelihood of a second U.S. Civil War. However, framing it as a second civil war embeds numerous assumptions about warfare on U.S. soil that are based more on history than the current reality of how power acts in the world. The distinction is critical to effectively counter the emergence of networked violence in America.

It’s easy to imagine that a second civil war might proceed like the first: two institutionalized factions wielding state militaries against each other along prescribed strategic fronts. Generals would choose a side, those with the most troops and firepower at their disposal would claim victory. The outcome, we imagine, would likely be a winner-take-all restructuring of the United States.

But that’s not really how wars are fought in the 21st century. Indeed, much of the last century was about deconstructing the habits of large-scale, state-driven conventional warfare. As networks distribute power to the edges, warfighting shifts further away from a handful of monolithic forces and towards a diverse web of small actors. Warfare now often proceeds from ideologically and economically marginalized communities whose suffering and fear is wielded by cunning global actors. They become guerrillas, rebel factions, proxies, and insurgencies. Sometimes they look more like tribal conflicts composed along racial, religious, familial or economic lines, often on top of resource crises that push violence to become a necessary solution. But they are rarely simple two-sided conflicts.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/10/10/what-a-new-u-s-civil-war-might-look-like/

Without democracy the only thing you have left to look forward to is the next civil war...

IF TRUMP ESTABLISHES AN AUTHORITARIAN DICTATORSHIP HOW LONG WILL IT BE BEFORE SOME GENERAL OR ANOTHER BILLIONAIRE TAKES IT FROM HIM..? IF HISTORY TELLS US ANYTHING - IT WON'T BE LONG..

ROMAN EMPERORS — VERSUS — USURPERS AND RIVALS

Political instability returned to the Empire with the Crisis of the Third Century (235–284 AD), which saw at least 26 civil wars in just 50 years as usurpers sought the imperial throne.

By the way, MAGatMilitia vs the Pentagon is a no brainer..

Pentagon Plan to Fight Extremism in the Ranks Is a Start, But Experts Say Problems Loom.

Experts who study extremism are calling the Pentagon's latest report and plan to combat extremism in the ranks a step in the right direction, but one that relies on an already problematic approach -- leaving the issue for commanders to fix.

The 21-page report, released Monday, created new guidelines for activities that are banned for service members by adding more detail and clarity on what constitutes extremist activity as well as "active participation."

Since the Pentagon began discussing a crackdown, it has lacked a clear definition of what types of actions would get service members in trouble. Most troops aren't broadcasting membership in extremist groups, and what constitutes support had previously been ambiguous.

The new policy bans a range of things from advocating terrorism or supporting the overthrow of the government to fundraising for an extremist group – even something as basic as "liking" or reposting extremist views on social media. The report also emphasized that "military personnel are responsible for the content they publish on all personal and public Internet domains."

The Pentagon's spokesman, John Kirby, explained during a press briefing Monday that the new policy is "a more clear explanation of what commanders' authorities and responsibilities are" and stressed that military leaders will look to unit commanders to enforce it "because they know their units and they know their people better than anybody."

He also stressed that the Pentagon is not planning systemic surveillance of service members' social media accounts to find infractions.

However, Kristofer Goldsmith, an Iraq War veteran who has spent years studying extremism in the ranks, told Military.com in an interview that this mechanism is a major weakness of the Pentagon's intended fix.

"The average commander is focused on getting their troops combat ready; they're not spending any time learning what 1488 means," he said, citing a symbol popular with white supremacists.

Goldsmith explained that much of the online extremist activity that he has tracked and studied "is encoded language that the average person is not going to understand."

"These individuals with extreme views on race and anti-government sentiment … their ability to camouflage is a survival tactic," he added.

Kirby stressed that the newly prohibited behavior "wouldn't be something that the command or the department's going to be actively fishing for."

The military's reliance on unit commanders to address problems in the ranks has not always been successful. Years of failure by leaders to deal with an epidemic of sexual assault has led to congressional efforts to remove commanders from the equation.

"Just like in incidents of sexual assault, if you have people in charge who are not specialists, you are going to do a very, very poor job of addressing the problem," Goldsmith said.

And with extremist rhetoric and even action becoming an increasingly prominent feature of the political sphere, commanders may not always take action.

A National Guardsman who was part of the mob that rampaged through the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 is still serving in Wisconsin despite having been sentenced by a federal court to probation and a fine for his actions. Fellow soldiers and his commander wrote letters of support ahead of his sentencing.

A major in the Marine Corps was arrested in May for his part in the Capitol riot but is also still on active duty. The Corps held a hearing in September on whether to let him keep serving but has yet to reach a decision on the matter.

Kirby said that leaders in the Pentagon "have full confidence in our commanders' ability when something's reported to them to treat it appropriately and to look into it in the manner that they see fit."

Andrew Mines, a research fellow at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, said in an interview with Military.com that some of the suggestions and recommendations in the report show promise for future action.

The report recommends centralized centers dedicated to the issue of extremism, something that Mines believes could be particularly helpful for supporting service members who have become entangled in extremist ideologies.

"I really think the best option for their side of things would be to kind of create more of a centralized office that is staffed by a bunch of case managers ... focusing on nonpunitive measures first," Mines said.

Mines, who is also wary of leaving the issue to commanders to solve, noted that this approach would alleviate much of that criticism.

"You can give commanders all the training you want, they're still never going to be at the point where they have the same kind of competencies and expertise that folks with mental health background, with kind of generalist backgrounds in extremist organizations and extremist ideology."

Mines said that the next step would be for the Pentagon to focus more on prevention than punishment.

"If you … don't focus on the primary prevention side, you're always going to be playing whack-a-mole," he said

Goldsmith also noted that, on the whole, the report is a positive step. "In defining extremist activity and behavior and giving an affirmative way for commanders to measure it -- we've got the most important step," he said.

"No one policy change, no one administration is going to do this," Goldsmith said. "The insider threat is never going away, and it is going to constantly evolve."

-- Konstantin Toropin can be reached at konstantin.toropin@military.com. Follow him on Twitter @ktoropin.

Related: 10 Airmen Investigated for Trespassing at Capitol Riot, New Military Extremism Report Shows

Related Topics: Military Headlines Capitol Hill Riots Department of Defense - DoD

https://www.military.com/daily-news/2021/12/21/pentagon-plan-fight-extremism-ranks-start-experts-say-problems-loom.html

The Threat of Civil Breakdown Is Real.

National security officials are still not prepared for a far-right revolt.

The Manhattan district attorney’s indictment of former President Donald Trump for 34 felonies so far has not resulted in the “death and destruction” that the former president warned of and may have desired. The protests near the courthouse, though loud, were non-violent and essentially performative. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who had encouraged the far-right demonstrators, left the scene after five perfunctory minutes, unable to make herself heard over the din.

We and others have written of the prospect of a new civil war in the United States, which seemed a real, if still remote, possibility immediately after Jan. 6. Now it is starting to look less plausible, given the strength shown by the political center in the 2022 midterms and President Joe Biden’s largely effective tenure in the White House.

Yet full-scale civil war is not the only danger. Far-right Americans are highly unlikely to coalesce into a cohesive force that could wage war, but an army is not required to wreak sustained havoc and destabilize the country. In a deeply polarized environment, smaller pockets of armed unrest could easily ignite and spread disorder. The hyperbolic reactions of far-right Republican political figures and media commentators to the Trump indictment signal that they certainly do not believe the MAGA fever among their constituents and consumers has broken.

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIHDLrTHWBtaAouZFxTWYzVqsHCCIT-feDLdDEbEccZ3ktFu7h4n90QYsMe_6QQnW5AnSw9Q4QiWUnZZs4Ck1mYZL10aOCLILsLn1_Q-HJICUg-Vw9q8w9Oqch_dE6WTRB8zU3ODNo-wGC90ur5I4RA_zNbdyYEa_TQTv0pIaIgxxAHwPvDvPxX_zrWSK0/s600/BB.jpg

GOOGLE HEADLINE FOR LINK...

The “Shared Psychosis” of Messianic Trump Syndrome...

An Apocalypse of One: Of Cult Leaders, Messianic Delusion, and Radicalization

Donald Trump's pilgrimage to Waco was about more than a campaign rally

https://conspiranon.blogspot.com/2023/12/maga-pastors-trump-was-indicted-for.html