Elites And Consequences Of Their Actions

And: Eurozoomers & Democracy; Going Broke; 'Camp Of The Saints'; Bryce Crawford

Happy Independence Day, the day we Americans celebrate as the beginning of what one might have seen (from a British perspective) as a civil war within the United Kingdom, but that we Americans see as a war of independence.

Once again, I urge you to pay close attention to what Prof. David Betz, a professor in the war studies department at Kings College, London, is saying about the likelihood of civil war coming to the West. If you are a reader who dismisses what he has to say without listening to it (but because you just don’t want to hear it), then kindly keep your opinions to yourself. Here is a link to a new interview with Betz by Andrew Gold. I learned of it from Max Remington’s latest Substack newsletter. Remington says this interview is the most complete, detailed statement Betz has made yet about his thesis.

Remington writes:

Betz makes the point early on that there are two levels to this conflict: ‘Ulsterization’ and ‘Balkanization.’ The latter is a term most of you are familiar with, the former perhaps less so. The root of the term is ‘Ulster,’ which is effectively Northern Ireland. The term thus refers to how a society becomes ethnically divided, battle lines being drawn along ethnic lines.

Balkanization, on the other hand, is being driven by elites and national leaders who actually possess no nationalistic sentiments, considering it backwards and corrosive to the social fabric, even as the evidence clearly shows that a lack of nationalism has led to a lack of unity. Betz and his interviewer both note that political leadership sseems to understand the importance of nationalism when it comes to Ukraine’s survival and the necessity of Britons to be willing to march off and fight Russia, but apparently not when it comes to their own country’s survival. Betz considers Balkanization to be the more dangerous conflict.

It’s this combination of fracturing along ethnic lines and elites who are incentivizing groups to live not only apart from one another, but to compete against one another, that’s driving Britain and the West towards civil war.

Betz adds in the interview that there’s nowhere to escape to. The conditions favoring civil war are general throughout the West. He says that there is a significant chance that this will happen within five years, and if it breaks out in one place, it is likely to spread elsewhere. You’ll need to listen to the entire podcast to get details.

Interestingly, Betz says Islamism is only half the story (with Islam being tied to the lines of ethnic conflict within western Europe and Britain). There are two vectors here, interacting with each other. “The second vector is more in the nature of ‘peasant revolt’ … a form of internal conflict that arises out of a feeling among the majority populace that the elite are changing the rules of the game in some way that is seriously invidious to their well being… .”

The governing classes throughout the West are “postnational” in their outlook, he says. “They don’t think in terms of national interest, and their unable to think in terms of national interest,” he says. The people who govern nation-states don’t have a lot of feeling for those nation-states. Notice, he says, how national elites recognize the value of nationalism in Ukraine, but reject it when it comes to their own countries.

Gold and Betz agree that the elites will provoke acts of civil war by their behavior, and then when the “peasants” revolt, the elites will say, “Ah ha! This is why we have to suppress nationalism!”

Betz says that we have probably already seen “the first important aspects” of civil war, with the national reaction to the Southport murders last summer, which led the UK government to viciously repress anyone who drew attention to the fact that the killer of three little girls was the son of migrants, or who expressed anger at that fact. The reaction of the state to the peasant revolt shows how terrified the government is, says Betz.

Writing in Unherd today, Aris Roussinos takes the measure of Keir Starmer’s failure as prime minister. More:

Yet for all that Starmer is simply a dud, the Government’s root problem is structural rather than personal: any Labour replacement would suffer the same fate. All the recent character portraits released to mark his dismal anniversary, peering behind the hollow mask, are thus an exercise in futility. The reason Britain is cycling through prime ministers at an ever-increasing rate is due to a crisis of state legitimacy. Like later 19th-century Ireland, the effective governance of the country has now become impossible. The state’s legitimacy and reach are contested, neither oppression nor mollification are practicable, an amorphous nationalist revolt is brewing, and strategic shocks are appreciable on the horizon.

In an attempt to borrow the legitimacy of existential threat, the state warns darkly of an approaching war it is not equipped to fight, in defence of a political order no one would willingly fight for. The country is simply in no state to fight a war. According to Westminster’s own newly announced commission on social cohesion, the UK is now a “tinderbox” of “creeping balkanisation and extremism” in which “the basis of our democracy is at risk”. Yet as the commission itself laments, “We do not have a national era-shaping presidential figure such as Lee Kuan Yew or Charles de Gaulle” to remake the faltering state. What we have, for now, is Keir Starmer.

Roussinos believes that civil war is less likely for Britain than a “more common and plausible political outcome of political pressures leading towards a reinvigorated, more tightly-defined nation state, as historically distinct in its own way as Eastern Europe’s transition from communism.” Roussinos talks about the shift in the late Soviet period of ethnic Russians to thinking of their country in ethnic terms. This led to their effective withdrawal of support for the Soviet order, and its collapse.

Even if Roussinos is correct, we should not forget that post-Soviet Russia came close to ethnic-driven civil war, and indeed — as I pointed out in this post from April based on reading Secondhand Time, the oral history of Russia’s immediate post-Soviet period — there were some horrific, fast-metastasizing incidents of inter-ethnic violence.

In the Gold podcast, Betz says if you want to understand what we might well be facing, read histories of Yugoslavia during its breakup. Many people thought it can’t happen here. They were wrong. When things kicked off, people ran towards the communities that offered them safety. This is why things quickly become tribal under conditions of great stress and chaos.

Betz emphasizes that he’s not saying anything that we don’t know — and know very well — from a wide body of scholarship about the way societies work, and how civil wars start. He’s simply drawing logical conclusions. He talks about an important scholarly book that came out back in 2013 warning against mass migration as a destroyer of a nation’s social capital. It demolishes trust and cohesion. After the book came out, Britain went on to admit 11 million migrants.

“Dear elites, the consequences of your actions have arrived,” says the professor.

Gold asks Betz how we could stop this. We can’t, Betz says. It’s too late. It’s going to get much worse before it gets better. We have no choice but to ride this thing out.

By the way, since I began writing this item, I saw a new, shorter video interview with Betz alongside the great Mary Harrington, just appeared on the UnHerd site.

I’m going to be sticking closely with this story, especially because the media won’t.