How to accidentally start a civil war

Thursday-Friday blog

I have written before discussing whether an English civil war was inevitable. In this blog, I thought it might be worth considering what conditions might lead to a civil war. I ain’t no historian or philosopher or climatologist other supposed ‘expert’ generously paid to push a certain politically-correct agenda. But, perhaps with just a little non-expert common sense, one can begin to identify some situations which might make a civil war more likely.

Situation 1: Second-class citizens – a significant part of the population, usually a minority but in some cases it could even be a majority, feels they don’t have the same rights and opportunities as some other section of the population. That was clearly the case during 1968-1998 Troubles in Northern Ireland where the minority Catholic community felt it was oppressed by the Protestant majority. This was also partly responsible for the Ukraine mess where the Russian-speaking areas were engaged in a low-level civil war with the Ukrainian areas and this gave Russia an excuse to invade.

Situation 2: Radicalisation – here most people in a group might want to integrate with other sections of society and live in peace. But radical elements within one group increasingly agitate to gain power and influence with the aim of imposing their beliefs and way of life on all other groups. And the more success the radicalised agitators have, the more they are able to create hostility and division between their group and the rest of society thus deliberately increasing radicalisation. This was probably the cause of the collapse into violence of Lebanon, the ongoing low-level civil war in Southern Thailand and may be responsible for some of today’s bloodletting in several African countries

Situation 3: Economic decline and corruption – when an economy declines, some groups might start competing for the decreasing resources available. This situation is exacerbated when a corrupt ruling class is seen to be extracting much of the available wealth for itself. This competition for resources can quickly lead to fragmentation of society and violence. This has probably been the cause of several South American civil wars. Maybe our friends in Zimbabwe can be a leading example of this and we can soon expect the Zimbabwification of utterly corrupt failing South Africa

Situation 4: Distrust/contempt for the ruling elites – when people feel that the ruling elites are no longer acting in the interests of the general population, this can lead to mistrust of and contempt for political and societal leaders. Social cohesion will soon break down and there will be a sense of it being ‘every community having to look after itself and to h*ll with all others‘.

Situation 5: Invasion – if a population feel that their country is being over-run by people from outside and their heritage, history, customs and culture are being desecrated and destroyed, they may eventually turn to violence to try to protect the things they consider of value.

All the above are, of course, just part of some theoretical musings early on a Thursday morning. I’ll leave it up to readers to decide whether any, some of or all of the above might apply to today’s Britain.