Civil War 2.0 Not On Techno-Totalitarians’ Watch

Good morning, from England where I am attending a conference. After finding out I was an Albanian-immigrant taxi driver and that my friend and I were both American, he asked us whether he believed America is heading towards civil war. Although we said it was unlikely, it’s true that America is highly polarized and there appears to be no way out.

Well, here at the conference I’ve just met Prof. Nathan Pinkoski, an American academic who wrote an excellent essay last year in Claremont Review of Books, on the subject of the Spanish Civil War. This essay is worth revisiting, given the current situation.

The Second Spanish Republic (1931-1939) suffered one of the most accelerated cases of democratic decline in European history. In 1931, Spain established a liberal, republican, democratic constitution on a wide basis of popular and elite support. Within a matter of years the constitution had been destroyed and Spain was now at war. What is the secret to this? Americans often believe a simplistic morality story about the period, that fascists have destroyed democracy. The true story about Spain’s troubles is more fascinating and informative. This story shows that democratic regimes can be destroyed by their own mistakes.

Pinkoski based his essay on Stanley Payne’s scholarship, the most important English historian of Spanish Civil War writing. More:

In Civil War in Europe, 1905-1949 (2011), Payne examines Spain in light of Europe’s cycle of revolutionary civil wars that made the first half of the 20th century so violent. Most civil wars before the 20th century concerned either succession–conflicts between potential heirs–or secession–such as the American Civil War. In the 20th century a new, revolutionary kind of civil war arose in Europe, pitting irreconcilable conceptions of state, society, and culture against each other. In these conflicts, revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries aimed to establish radically different regimes. Payne loves to quote Joseph de Maistre’s phrase: “The counterrevolution does not oppose a revolution but it is an opposing one.” The old regime ends once the revolution has begun. Both revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries–who are ostensibly interested in restoring the status quo ante–must found a new regime. As Carl Schmitt observes in Ex Captivitate Salus (1950), the determination of both sides to establish a new regime is the reason why revolutionary civil wars bring unprecedented levels of violence. It is the goal to destroy the entire legal and political system associated with the enemy. This will lead to the need for their absolute destruction.

This is extremely important. It was not about competing systems; the Spanish Civil War was all about the system. The United States is today so incompatible because of this. This revolutionary ideology has taken the Left captive and makes it impossible to tolerate any rivals. In fact, tolerance of dissent is a unacceptable compromise with evil. The Right is motivating the Right to radicalize and embrace illiberalism for self-preservation.

More:

Though a variety of parties helped set the revolution going, Payne argues that the chief culprits were the Spanish socialists. Revolutionary socialists are not like Bolsheviks who want to destroy liberal constitutionalism through direct means. They use the Constitution system as a cover to their plans to do away with it. They do not overthrow the legal systems, but they use them. This tactic is not being used by the right-leaning legalists. Their failure in Spain was especially acute. In The Collapse of the Spanish Republic, 1933-1936 (2005) and The Spanish Civil War (2012), Payne describes Spain’s descent into a brutal three-year war as the result of the socialist Left’s brazenness meeting the center’s carelessness and the Right’s pusillanimity. Other European socialist movements started with radical ambitions, but they became more responsible and respectful of constitutionalism and parliamentary norms as they got older. Over time, Spanish socialists became more radical. The most important leftist leader in Spain, Manuel Azana (prime minister from 1931 to 1933 and again in 1936), contended that liberalism failed because it was too willing to compromise. The republican constitution was his vision of radical reform. He even called it a revolution. ipso were those who did not equate constitutionalism and leftism illegitimate.

To Spanish socialists, the Right–which failed to save the monarchy in the 1920s and never articulated a different constitutional basis for the new republic–was a spent force. They were therefore shocked at the result of the 1933 election, when a seemingly stable left-wing coalition collapsed and the Right unexpectedly won. Assured that history was on their side, but now convinced that it needed a strong nudge to stay on course, the motivation of leftists became, in Payne’s assessment, a “visceral” desire to stay in power: “One way or the other, they were planning to hold onto it.”

The current American Left is not revolutionary in the traditional sense. They marched through institutions and now want to use the system for their own ends. Today, you can see that the Regime is working with the Spanish socialists to undermine populism. More:

Second, the center and center-Left enabled the descent into revolutionary politics by winking at the Left’s violence and punishing the Right’s. The rise of the “anti-fascist” trope in the 1930s, recounted in Paul Gottfried’s excellent Antifascism: The Course of a Crusade (2021)–which Payne himself has recently praised in an essay for First Things–served to stain anyone who disagreed with the Left. It allowed young socialists to commit violence in Spain. The Centrist authorities could not or refused to prevent attacks on private property and businesses as well as churches, convents, clergy, and other religious properties. They blamed victims and arrested the perpetrators, but made scapegoats of monarchists, conservatives, and others. Rene Girard, a cultural theorist, understood that this kind of scapegoating doesn’t stop violence but only intensifies it. When revolutionaries attempt to purify a corrupt state and society through scapegoating, those whom they kill become martyrs, whose sacrifice becomes redemptive for nascent counterrevolutionaries. Spain’s conservatives and monarchists were able to convert large sections of society from anger to apathy by making them scapegoats. The Left made martyrs in Spain by allowing murders to go unpunished, and not just punishing innocents. This galvanized the counterrevolutionary forces and turned the conflict into an Islamic war.

Think about the differing response that the Regime gave to the “mostly tranquil” riots of Summer of Floyd versus the attack on January 6. It is not to excuse January 6 or minimize its evilness. Both violent incidents were handled very differently by both the Regime’s media arm and its media counterpart. Today, Boston’s Department of Justice attorney issued a statement pledging to defend doctors and hospitals from the violence of sexual mutilation of children. Fine. Think about all the violence committed by the Left to pro-life centers since the repeal of Roe .. Both center-rightists and progressives are making a martyr out of the Regime.

One more Pinkoski quote:

The third factor in the collapse of the republic was the centrist endorsement of unconstitutional action in the name of saving the so-called liberal consensus–what French political theorist Pierre Manent has called “the fanaticism of the center.”

This brings to mind Gen. Michael Hayden’s shocking tweet from last week:

From Gen. Hayden’s Wikipedia Page:

He was Director of the National Security Agency (NSA) from 1999 to 2005. During his tenure as director, he oversaw the controversial NSA surveillance of technological communications between persons in the United States and alleged foreign terrorist groups, which resulted in the NSA warrantless surveillance controversy.

Now you are familiar with Gen. Hayden and the actions he will take to defend the Regime. Here is a passage from my book Live Not By Lies that tells you what we are dealing with:

In 2013, Edward Snowden, the renegade National Security Agency analyst, revealed that the US federal government’s spying was vastly greater than previously known. In his 2019 memoir, Permanent Record, Snowden writes of learning that

the US government was developing the capacity of an eternal law-enforcement agency. The government can search through all communications to find evidence of any crime at any moment. Any new government–or future rogue heads of the NSA—-can simply show up at work to instantly track everyone with a smartphone or computer and know where they are, who they’re with, what their past activities were and how they got there.

Snowden writes about a public speech that the Central Intelligence Agency’s chief technology officer, Gus Hunt, gave to a tech group in 2013 that caused barely a ripple. It was only the Huffington Post that covered it. Hunt stated that it was “very nearly possible” to calculate on human-generated data. He also said that once the CIA has captured that data it will be able save it and analyze it.

Understand what this means: your private digital life belongs to the State, and always will. We have legislation and practice that for the moment prevents the government using this information against people, except if it suspects that they are involved with terrorism, criminal activities, or espionage. Dissidents have repeatedly told me the truth: If the government wants to get you out it can create a crime using the information it has gathered, or use it to ruin your reputation.

Subscribe Today

Get weekly emails in your inbox

This, I believe, is the reason why talk about an American civil war seems to be largely empty talk. Both the Regime, which includes both State and private institutions actors, has the technology to make those it doesn’t want to marginalize go to the Regime. The Regime saw Covid as an opportunity for us to become cashless societies (remember that “coin scarcity” bullshit? It will not be possible to sell or buy if your electronic card is disabled. It’s true.

I was speaking with a few academics about this matter this morning. We agreed that when Generation Z and the Millennials have achieved political power, it will not take long before there is widespread acceptance that such measures must be taken to punish the dissidents. We Americans today have created a system that can be used against us to crush our liberties — and a progressive totalitarian-therapeutic culture that will insist on it for our own good.

What can we do? What can we do about it, and what must we do about it? It is time to start having a conversation about this amongst ourselves and also innovating and networking while there’s still time. Lurid speculations about “civil War” keep us from discussing more serious concerns about the threat to our freedoms from this revolutionary bourgeois Regime and what we can do realistically to resist them.