New vectors of the Civil War in the US

The unrest shaking the United States today is seen by many analysts as the beginning of a very serious process - a full-fledged civil war. Not everyone agrees, but as unrest increases and looting and violence spread to more and more American cities, starting in Washington and New York, as the US Army becomes involved in the conflict, the scenario looks increasingly plausible. In this article, we do not aim to weigh the chances of a full-fledged civil war in the United States or look at what factors are at odds with those outcomes. Let us assume that what is happening in the US right now is a civil war, and try to understand the nature and consequences of these dramatic events for both America and the rest of the world.

American bipartisanship as a frozen moment of civil war...

Are the prerequisites for a full civil war in the United States present? Yes, absolutely. 

Ever since the 1861-1865 Civil war, when the Confederation of 11 slave-holding States vs. the 20 abolitionist states of the North (including the 4 fringe states where slavery existed, but joined nonetheless), American society remains politically divided. While the North triumphed and slavery was abolished, many other principles have preserved exactly the positions that the South championed. The abolitionism of the North was combined with a republican desire to unify the United States into a single nation state, hence the Republic. The South insisted that the United States retain a significant degree of independence, up to legal sovereignty. On the issue of slavery, the North won, and on the question of the interpretation of federalism and the very nature of the American State, the South won, despite the military defeat. 

It was during the Civil War of 1861-1865 that the two major US parties were established - the Republican (Grand Old Party) and the Democratic Party. The bipartisan policy of the United States, which has survived to this day, is a direct consequence of the civil war, which, along with the military victory of the North, resulted in a political compromise with the South. To understand the nature of American bipartisanship, one can imagine what would have happened if, after the Reds' victory in the Russian Civil War, the defeated Whites had created a second party alongside the Bolsheviks and continued to defend their views, or after Mao's victory in China, a coalition government with the Kuomintang was established.

That's what happened in the United States. Thus, the US bipartisanship is a frozen civil war that has been transferred to the political sphere. The fact that this system has not been changed for almost two centuries and that no party has disappeared, even though no third party has appeared, shows how deeply the civil war and the bipolar system are deeply rooted in American politics.

The bipartisan system has its own history, and in some periods relations between the parties intensified or evened out. Obviously, from the era of the 1990s, from Bill Clinton to Barack Obama, including the period of George W. Bush's presidency, there was a consensus among the parties on foreign policy, and all disagreements were limited to a few domestic political topics - primarily health care reforms. At one point, the civil war seemed to have been completely overcome as globalization progressed, but President Trump's arrival changed everything. The fierce confrontation with Hillary Clinton four years ago and the re-emergence of the struggle between Republicans and Democrats in the presidential race of 2020 brought everything back to its place: the mutual hatred between supporters of the Republican Party and Trump and Democrats reached its climax. At the same time, it is important that these contradictions are focused on the main political forces, which originally emerged during the Civil War, and are thus dormant hotbeds of new possible conflicts.

Conclusion: Today's wave of protests dramatically aggravates the contradictions within the American political system itself and may well result in a new round of full-fledged civil war between the conservative wing represented by Trump and the progressives represented by the electoral base of the Democrats. At the same time, the figure of Trump and the sharpness of his policies further exacerbate the situation. Trump is the most suitable figure for the civil war in the US to become a reality.

Black America vs. White America: An uprising of negatives

The riots, pogroms, protests and clashes with police in many US cities have clear racial overtones. This shows that the racial problem in the US is far from being solved, and like the Civil War, it has simply been temporarily frozen. If the Civil War and its relevance are followed by two dominant parties in the US, then the legacy of undead slavery is the presence of two halves of the US population that differ in color. No matter how much the US claims that racism in the US is completely outdated, today's protests and their grand scale show that it is not. The US race problem exists and is the most important force in a possible and clearly approaching civil war. 

The murder of black African-American George Floyd by a white policeman was a trigger for today's protests, which immediately became distinctly racial in nature. It was essentially a black American uprising against white America, despite all the assurances that American society had achieved full equality of races. If that were the case, African Americans would not rebel with such rage in response to a fairly common US crime, and a movement such as Black lives matter would not be so widespread.

The fact is that racism is the basis of the American liberal system. Ethnic differences in the US were erased among all segments of the population - both white and slaves imported by force from Africa. The Indians living in North America were almost completely exterminated, and only a few diasporas - Latin American, Chinese or Jewish - retained a certain ethnic identity. The Anglo-Saxons, on the other hand, built American society on the principle of individualism. And at all levels - both at the level of lords, the colonizers themselves, who came from Europe, and at the level of slaves, which was expressed in the division of enslaved Africans: they were distributed among different masters precisely in order to prevent the slightest ethnic consolidation. Thus, Europeans arriving in the United States lost their identity and language in favor of English and Anglo-Protestant culture, and African slaves lost their ethnic roots and learned the language and morals of their masters (and what they had to do!). This distinguishes slave-holding practices in the Americas from those in other countries. Anglo-Saxon countries forced and obligatory division of slaves, and in Latin America most often black slaves were settled by families or groups.

Thus, in South America, the black population has managed to preserve its cultural traditions, its identity, at least in residual forms, and in the United States it has lost it completely. This is a colossal problem for African Americans: they have become negatives, "black copies" of the white population, deprived of any identity other than that which they were allowed or even forced to borrow from their white masters. It was American liberalism that gave birth to racism, where instead of ethnic differences, color differences were reinforced, while all other signs were reduced to individuality in both cases - the white and black populations. Normally, white was considered a full and free individual, while black was considered an inferior and dependent individual.

The abolition of slavery included African-Americans among the nominal citizens (outside of which, however, there were still Indians who categorically refused to accept individual identity and to turn into obedient slaves). But this inclusion was based on an external - white, individualistic, liberal-Anglo-Saxon - identity. In other words, "black" was accepted by citizens as "evil", "would be white", that is, as those who had yet to become white, fully assimilating their cultural identity. First, African slaves had their own identities scorched with calico iron, and then they were graciously allowed to base copies of white people's identities on this "empty space". 

These processes took about a century, and today African Americans have formally all the same rights as whites. Everything... except the right to their own identity. The question of this identity became acute among the African population as early as the 19th century, when theorists such as Paul Cuffee, Martin Delany, etc. put forward the thesis that the complete liberation of the African American population is possible only through return to Africa (Back-to-Africa). The emergence of African States such as Liberia and Sierra Leone are linked to these projects. 

This idea was later developed by another African-American leader, Marсus Garvey, who developed a theory of pan-Africanism and declared himself "President of Africa". However, these movements were not widespread, and the vast majority of Africans remained in the United States with no identity other than that which dominated white society, becoming a kind of "photonegative" of the white population. Thus the racial problem in the United States became non-ethnic: white and black meant only social markers corresponding to social classes - white was "at the top", black was "at the bottom". 

Therefore, today's African American uprising is not about defending one's own identity (African Americans simply are not allowed one), nor is it an act of struggle for one's rights. This uprising shows only the tragedy of the emptiness of people who have no identity at all, except for the color of their skin, which has developed a private meaning by inertia.

And that is why the whites who apologize in mass today to African Americans who are wrecking shops and engaged in destructive looting only swear by the same "black emptiness" that in a sense opens their own "white emptiness". True repentance should have been done in liberalism, individualism, and utilitarian selfishness, but these principles are still the foundation of the entire New Age Western civilization, and above all its cultural and economic avant-garde - the United States. Racism and segregation are only consequences of the materialist imperialist universalism of the New Age. And this same universalism in its new - ultra-liberal or left-liberal form - pushes American progressives to align themselves with African-American protests: under conditions of an exclusively individual identity, the United States simply has nothing to offer blacks, and blacks have nothing to defend in the face of whites.

The racial problem in American society in such circumstances simply has no solution, but formally at the level of law and official liberal ideology, everything is already solved. Consequently, the current wave of African-American protests raises deeper questions where there are no answers. The only proportionate answer would be the destruction of the United States. But that is, in a sense, the logical outcome of the civil war that is now emerging. 

The White Pole: The Second Amendment and Black Helicopters... 

At the opposite pole from African Americans in the structure of the modern social and political explosion in the US stand alternative forces to African Americans and progressives, most often represented by white people with conservative views. They are largely oriented towards Trump, American isolationism and even nationalism. At the same time, they are aware of themselves as opponents of progressivism, globalization, and the strengthening of centralist tendencies, which were not historically associated with Democrats as they are today, but with Republicans. As a rule, it is this part of the population that holds on to the second amendment to the Constitution, which allows for the possession of firearms. Sociologically, they represent the main group of population of provincial America or small towns - the fly over zones. 

On the extreme flank of these deliberately "white" Americans are extreme American nationalists. Some of them are united in small communities - those that consider it their mission to protect private property - with weapons in their hands if necessary. Only a very small minority, even from that part of American society, are truly racist. That part of the American white population as a whole is not a single political force.

Under the pretext of confronting "nationalists", left-wing liberals in the United States are forming "anti-fascist movements", sometimes using terrorist methods. Thus Trump recently called for recognizing "antifa" as an extremist ideology. Under the pretext of fighting against real or fictional American nationalists, antifa sometimes use violence against their political opponents, whoever they may be, adding even more fuel to the fire of civil war.

So far, these "conscious white people" on the right are not actively involved in the civil conflict, but when the object of the looters become those whose owners are among this category, they may meet a tough fight, which marks the next phase of a possible scenario of escalation. If this part of the conservative America sees a real threat to what they consider their inalienable rights (first of all, the threat of the Second Amendment to the Constitution), they may play an important role in civil war.

It is indicative that today not only Republican nationalists, but also those who still share the Southerners' positions in the 1861-1865 war - at least in the issue of decentralization - belong to this pole. Thus, a more European-like pair of positions is formed from the special and quite original American bipartisanism, where Republicans initially defended abolitionism and centralism and Democrats - slavery and decentralization.

- On the one hand, there are progressives who support further phases of "nihilistic emancipation", all types of minorities, legalization of perversions, etc., and at the same time, strengthening of central power and raising taxes, introduction of a number of social strategies,

- and conservatives, on the other hand, combining nationalism with maximum regionalism, subsidiarity and the right to bear arms.

These two poles - unlike the two main US parties - have no clear institutionalization, but it is these two positions that are as irreconcilable, conflictual and radical as they are beginning to appear today. 

This is how the new coordinates of the civil war are gradually becoming clearer, reflecting exactly the political, social and ideological conditions where the US finds itself today.

Coronavirus and eschatology: American Armageddon.

Now it is important to take into account another factor: protests and unrest in the United States are unfolding in the context of an epidemic. The Coronavirus has hit the US economy and especially the middle class, which was knocked out of its economic rhythm due to quarantine. But in a credit-based economy, this disruption of rhythm can easily become fatal. If the balance of earnings and payments is interrupted for at least a short period of time, which is exactly what happened, the modern capitalist economy will collapse. And this collapse is most painfully felt by representatives of small and medium-sized businesses. In contrast to the economic crisis in 2008 or the dot com crisis in 2000, the problem cannot be solved by allocating additional funds from the FRS to large banks and other financial institutions. Today, American households have been directly affected by quarantine, and giving them direct assistance is so contrary to the logic of financial capitalism and the FRS principles that it is not even theoretically considered.  Besides, it will only lead to a round of inflation and will not structurally improve the situation. This factor of the deep crisis of the American economy, associated with the coronavirus, further aggravates the probability of a truly radical conflict, which has every possibility of turning into a full-fledged civil war. The last degree of despair can easily push people to such an outcome.

Attention should also be paid to the polarity of opinion that has developed today in the US when assessing the very nature of the coronavirus pandemic. 

Progressives, Democrats and social reformers insist on the seriousness and reality of the Coronavirus and indirectly support universal vaccination. Moreover, reformist and Democrat-owned media and social platforms (such as FB) strictly censor articles and posts of those who deny the seriousness of the epidemic and - under whatever (sometimes extremely extravagant) pretexts - propagate against vaccination, Bill Gates, George Soros, WHO, etc. 

Conversely, the conservatives and supporters of Trump, from the very beginning, challenged the scope of the epidemic, refused to observe quarantine and perceived the pandemic as a false strategy of globalists aimed at reducing the population, destroying the economy, introducing a regime of total supervision and control - for the subsequent chipping and reduction of humanity into slaves of a global elite. These sentiments are extremely common today in the United States, and Trump himself, who formally introduced a quarantine regime, seeks to please this part of the electorate, which is very substantial.

It is telling that African-American protesters most often - even nominally - wear masks, and in images of armed whites gently repelling the rebels, we see their faces without masks.

Thus, the coronavirus not only creates economic prerequisites for the exacerbation of civil war, but also lays the foundation for demonizing the enemy. In the eyes of conservatives, progressives are the accomplices of the forthcoming crime of planetary expansion, which is supported by the widely developed in this environment Protestant ideas about the near end of the world. For them, Bill Gates, George Soros, Hillary Clinton and other globalists appear to be the Antichrist retinue, which is ready to bring the US and all mankind (especially the free world) on the altar of Satan, establishing a planetary electronic dictatorship and high-tech concentration camp.

For the progressives themselves, such views seem to be the ultimate "cave obscurantism" and "fascist delirium", the more dangerous it is, the wider it spreads among the population. And in the US, more than half of the population sincerely believes in conspiracy theory, in one form or another.

Under such conditions, those who believe in the danger of coronavirus and those who deny it in the eyes of each other acquire the status of "ontological enemy", because for religious consciousness in "recent times" (in the era of disasters, ulcers, upheavals) there is no more serious opposition than the division between the camp of believers and supporters of the Antichrist. But this time the role of "Antichrist" is not played by the USSR, not some external force or threat, but by half of the American population itself. 

This is how the civil war in the US acquires a religious and eschatological character. 

Black Revolution: Trump and the Globalists

When we carefully observe the details of the protests in the US, we see that behind the actions of the protesters with their spontaneous waves of indignation and the desire to break the window of a supermarket and loot everything, the combination of which seems rather strange to a Russian, there is some more or less organized force. In one place, then in another, figures appear who know very well what they are doing. For example, they break several shop windows, but do not participate in the robbery themselves, they simply move on to other windows, leaving no traces, carefully hiding their faces, hair, and eyes under a gas mask, a protective suit and... an umbrella (the fact that the opened umbrellas can protect against rubber bullets and filming from helicopters, few ordinary protesters know). In addition, it is clear that certain American and world media outlets - primarily progressive media (such as CNN or the BBC) - seek to steer things in a certain direction by mitigating the abominable scenes of the beatings and robbery innocent shopkeepers, women, the disabled and the elderly, and, conversely, by glorifying members of minorities who provoke the crowd to open violence by some (most often ugly) gesture or action. 

In other words, it seems that the US has launched a sort of "color revolution", using the strategies the Americans have previously used to overthrow regimes they didn't like around the world (from anti-Soviet uprisings in Eastern Europe in the 80s to Maidan in Ukraine or an attempt to pull Hong Kong out of continental China). But if in other cases of "color revolutions", the Americans overthrew their external opponents, bringing to power in other countries obedient to them political puppets, then who is striking the United States itself today?

Here we should remember the fundamental split within the American elites that was discovered during Trump's election campaign. Trump then accused the US political elite of ceasing to serve American interests, siding with globalization, and seeking to establish a World Government the US was willing to sacrifice itself to. Trump called the network of liberal-globalists the "Swamp". The revelation of Swamp was the most important line of his campaign and probably what brought him success and victory in the elections. Trump thus put an inner enemy at the center, making the elites split into globalists and nationalists, and making this contradiction the main political problem in the US. 

During his presidency Trump continued to fight against the "Swamp", which was clearly not ready to be "drained" and opposed Trump at every step. But it was the structures of these globalist centers that were most actively involved in the implementation of "color revolutions" in various countries. The crux of the push here belongs, of course, to the organizations of George Soros, a supporter of the global "open society", who together with his structures (banned in many countries because of direct links with terrorist tactics and coups d'état) resurfaced almost everywhere where protests, unrest and riots begin, actively adding fuel to the fire. It is clear that the "swamp" is not only Soros and its networks, but also a significant part of the world's political and financial elite, united by the project of the World Government. Liberals openly and consciously seek to abolish nation-states and create a supranational governing body. Their project was the creation of the European Union, as well as a number of supranational bodies such as the Hague Tribunal, the European Court of Human Rights, the World Health Organization (WHO), etc. But when the tools of classical political lobbying do not work (so Soros was unable to prevent Brexit and implement a number of other liberal projects), and so the methods of "color revolutions" are being used.

If this observation is true in the case of the US, we can conclude that the “Swamp” is behind the civil war in the US, that is, globalists and their structures that seek to discredit Trump and ensure the victory of his candidate - Joe Biden. 

At the same time, using the marginal layers of American society, mobilizing the most unstable and oppressed minorities and especially the racial factor, the networks of globalists risk bending the stick and blowing up American society from within. And if that happens, even if Trump manages to win, the raised wave will threaten the American state itself. After all, the aggravation of all the existing contradictions that we see can hardly be removed by the coming to power of the indecisive, inaudible, and unwilling Biden, devoid of any charisma or charm. 

In other words, if we are dealing with a "color revolution", enacted by the Swamp, it may not only lead to excessively destructive consequences in its first stage, when a state of emergency has to be declared throughout the country, but also further undermine any sustainable strategy - even if Trump succeeds in defeating it.

The Deep State and its ambiguity

It remains to consider how the American Deep State will behave. The term never made its real meaning clear during Trump's presidency. It is not clear whether Deep State stood behind Trump himself, supporting him in the face of globalists who have gone too far from US national interests, or whether, on the contrary, the Deep State is so tied into globalism that it cannot sunder its deepest layers, and therefor Trump's entire presidency counteracts it by preventing it from implementing its program. Since this most important circumstance remains unknown, it is difficult to envisage the behavior of Deep State. Without knowing what we are really talking about, we can equally likely assume that some forces in the American establishment (primarily law enforcement agencies) may take advantage of the emergency situation to introduce direct centralized control and even establish a military dictatorship, or vice versa, to oust Trump if the protests are partially played up. In any case, the Deep State, whatever it may be, may have its own agenda in an emerging civil war, different from the policies and ideologies of the main operating forces.

This, of course, does not clarify the picture, but makes it even more confusing.

If America collapses...

What is the risk of a full-fledged civil war in the US for the rest of the world? It will mean no more or less the collapse of the global capitalist system. Since the middle of the twentieth century, the US has been the vanguard of world capitalism, and after the fall of the Soviet Union and the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe, acts as the only pole of the unipolar world. When the USSR collapsed, only one of the two poles remained. This pole became the main authority in world politics. Now, the US can much more easily comprehend the destiny of the USSR, as it is facing such a destiny itself. This means that there will be no pole in the world, and most importantly - the pole of the last decades and even of the era of great geographical discoveries will disappear, the pole that represented Western European capitalism, imperialism and colonialism. Rebellious African Americans today seek to derail the history of slavery and white racism. To do so, they must put an end to the history of New Times, capitalism and Western European civilization. This is logical: to finish the European Modern, it is necessary to "shut America down". Thus, this time the civil war in the United States is meant to be the end of the United States and at the same time the end of the global Western-centric capitalist world order.

For all peoples and societies on Earth, this can be both joyous and worrying news. Joyful - because the US implosion will open up the possibility for all countries and peoples to develop on their own trajectory, to look for their unique place in the world, which will become multipolar by necessity. This will be the end of Eurocentrism and colonization, and no one will be able to make claims to universalism - neither in economics, nor in politics, nor in technology. In this way, each civilization will be able to live according to its own values and perceptions, according to its own time frames, seeing the West as just one of many possibilities, as an exhibit that can be admired or simply overlooked, but which does not have to be followed.

What is important is that pro-Western liberal elites in all societies, which are now in almost all key positions, determining influence in them, will collapse after the US. This means that capitalism, parliamentary democracy, individualism and liberalism will no longer be mandatory fundamental paradigms, and each society will be able to build its own social, economic and political systems without paying attention to the prescriptions of the world metropolis - the West and the USA.

This will deeply affect everyone, including China and Russia. And if the US collapses first, all the other political regimes associated with capitalism - either ideological, economic, political, cultural, technological, or all at once - will collapse or be completely reborn.

But now, the disturbing news has come. The US implosion will also cause a global catastrophe, as the country has the largest concentration of weapons, including nuclear weapons. Consequently, the fate of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction may find itself in the hands of those whose actions will be unpredictable. Civil war nullifies all rules and all principles. And this is extremely worrying.

Finally, it cannot be excluded that, if the situation becomes worse, some of the forces desperate to resolve the situation in another way, may resort to a large-scale military conflict, which would make it possible to end the US civil war in the face of an external threat. Anyone can be chosen as an enemy - including Russia, China, Iran, etc. But there may be other candidates to "save America" by taking on the role of its mortally dangerous enemy. At some level, this may well be the only way to end the developing civil war, since it is even theoretically impossible for any of today's opposing forces to actually win it.

The end of America.

Let me remind you that from the very beginning we considered the fact that a civil war in the United States is very likely and that events are likely to lead into such a scenario. This was necessary for the integrity of the analysis. But of course, we cannot rule out that at present, we are witnessing the false start of a "civil war", its simulation or its rehearsal, a kind of laboratory experiment that allows us to assess in practice the real situation and the degree of escalation of internal conflicts in American society. Watching the footage of protests and riots in American cities and the American capital, it is difficult to escape the feeling that we have seen this footage many times in Hollywood soap operas and movies about epidemics, disasters, zombie apocalypse or political collapse (such as in "House of cards").

The upcoming civil war in the US has long occupied the fantasies of American filmmakers and embodied in a variety of texts and films. In a world ruled by virtual technology, reality and virtuality, reality and fantasy are so intertwined that it becomes increasingly difficult to separate one from another. That's why we sometimes get the impression of being present at the making of a movie about the end of the United States. And if that is the case, even if this time a full-fledged civil war is somehow avoided, it would only mean that it has been postponed. Seeing how events in the US are unfolding, something suggests that the next time will be soon, despite the postponement. In a sense, the "end of the United States" has already taken place - even if it is still in its first approximation, a rehearsal or a scenario, which with inevitable fatality becomes more and more realistic and assured.