R.S. McCain on the Coming Cataclysm

 Here's my old blogging pal, Robert Stacy McCain, at the Other McCain, "Poised on the Brink of the Abyss."

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What inspired this, mainly, was Tim Pool on YouTube. While I am not generally a fan of political video, much preferring the written word as a means of communication, Tim is an exception. His audience is larger than most daytime shows on CNN, and it’s easy to see why. The guy is extremely smart and has a knack for finding the important inflection points amid the daily headline noise. For months now, Tim has been talking to his audience about the potential of civil war, even while acknowledging that most people will think he’s crazy for bringing up the topic. Back during the late 1990s, I recall how some people saw America drifting toward a conflict like the one that devastated the former Yugoslavia. The 1992 Los Angeles riots, the Branch Davidian showdown at Waco, the Oklahoma City bombing — it was a scary time.

Back then, at various events, warnings about civil war were being issued by guys who knew what they were talking about — grizzled veterans of the various post-colonial struggles in Third World places like Algeria, Vietnam and what used to be called Rhodesia. The Cold War era had been an age of guerrilla warfare in lots of “hot spots” around the globe, and there was a certain authority behind the pronouncements of danger when they came from such sources as a scarred Afrikaner veteran who had fought Castro’s troops in Angola. We have had a bit too much peace lately, which is why talk of civil war now sounds like lunacy, but we can’t afford to take these things lightly. One of the strange things about such historical disasters is how, in retrospect, the allegedly intolerable state of affairs that preceded the outbreak of war was mild in comparison to what happened once the shooting started. Go back to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 and ask yourself what was so wrong in Europe as to necessitate four years of carnage and everything that followed in the aftermath of World War I.

Ever heard of the Pottawatomie massacre? Five people were murdered in that 1856 incident, part of the struggle over “Bleeding Kansas” that shocked Americans at the time. Over a period of about three months after that massacre, about 30 more people were killed in Kansas, and this outbreak of guerrilla warfare on the frontier was viewed at the time as a grievous tragedy. Yet in the war that followed, the death of a few dozen men was a minor detail of outpost skirmishes. Most Americans today know absolutely nothing about, for example, the Battle of South Mountain in September 1862, in which 750 men were killed and a little more than 3,000 wounded. Now think of some of the police shootings that have sparked Black Lives Matter protests, and compare those cases to the wholesale death that might result if civil war were to break out.

It’s simply unthinkable, yet there is a danger in not thinking about it.

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More at the link.