This article is extremely idiotic in many ways (the imperialist narrative on Rwanda is so dear to them, the bourgeoisie would sooner change their narrative on WW2 itself than give up this lie), but it goes to show the fear in the minds of the ruling class. They don’t fear Trump or Biden (lol!) organizing for civil war, what they fear is that not enough people will pay attention to them to prevent a civil war.
Make no mistake, “America” has zero political parties. The Democratic and Republican “Parties” are not ruled by ideology, political lines, dues paying members who believe in things, etc. They really are nothing but State-institutions that exist to facilitate the ability of capitalists to fill vacancies in political offices. The bourgeoisie call the shots on both sides, and no matter what happens, the people they control will be screeching “We need to compromise! Violence is wrong!” at the top of their lungs on the news 24/7.
That isn’t to say, there aren’t millions of stupid people who don’t understand this. The head of any State is largely a symbolic figure, and Trump is bad for “America” because it makes too many people unable to identify with the regime. Likewise, millions of stupid whites actually do think the Hollywood celebrity from Queens represents them in some way, and his removal could lead quite a few of them to acts of violence. No matter what the outcome, people should expect a sharp spike in unorganized, spontaneous violence from highly politicized masses.
The difference between this and a full-fledged civil war is the difference between powerful forces in society organizing it or not. What organization, say, on the “America” “Left” exists that has the resources and ability to coordinate mass violence, much less the desire to do so? Is the DSA going to turn into Gonzaloites overnight, and start using their control of the imperialist labor apparatus to turn their union organizers into recruiters for armed conflict? Of course not! As the author of this piece hints several times, the “Left” that is under the control of the Democratic “Party” will not only not do anything like this, they will actively try to suppress violence at every opportunity.
The situation is similar on the “Right” in “America.” There doesn’t exist anything like the Organization from the Turner Diaries to be able to mobilize masses of Euro-“Americans” for combat against a newly installed Biden regime. The Republican “Party” already bends over backwards to do everything they can to stop white settler rebellion on the “Right.” As Sakai said in his fascinating essay The Shock of Recognition:
Obviously, rightist political views that touch on fascism are held by many white Americans. They’re conditionally loyal to the government (and in the government) only because their level of prosperity and privilege is so high that why should they lift their faces from the trough? But if the u.s. capitalist class left it to a “democratic” vote of its white citizens, known fascists like David Duke would be in the u.s. senate, there would be no W.T.O. but also no Civil Rights Act, and much of America would proudly fly the Confederate flag of the slavemasters. The imperialist State’s largest domestic security priority is not terrorism, the ghetto or the border as they pretend, but restraining and defusing white settler rebellion to the right.
In my years and years of dealing with the “American” “Left,” it’s quite obvious to me rebellion will first break out on the “Right.” Trump is not a cause, not even a symptom, of what is happening. Trump is bourgeois medicine poured down the throats of the stupid whites to dope them up and keep them from turning against their Christian Zionist overlords. It is the bourgeoisie trying to serve up some existential-elixir, so the stupid whites can at least fantasize they got their own Fuhrer that cares about them.
Whether or not a civil war is going to erupt is going to come down to the existence of an organization, with a desire and the resources capable of bringing it about. Most of the masses of North America will sit it out, of course, but there are tens of thousands of “Left” people who could be motivated to violence against a second term Trump regime. A revolutionary organization that made the dividing line of us/them about violence itself, rather than historical narratives about the Cultural Revolution, could unite many people for semi-organized violence.
I say semi-organized, because such an organization would first have to take a page from the Siege playbook. Once the call for individual violence is put out, the organization would need to see how many people hear the call. So if some such group did that to all the (self-proclaimed) revolutionary English-language “Left” spaces they could, they could count up the amount of incidents around the country, and get a reliable estimate of the size of their anonymous army.
From there, it would be a matter of developing the strategy and tactics, and leadership to command the people willing to fight. The most important thing at that point would be maintaining lines of communications to the people who responded to the initial revolutionary call to violence, probably via a tor node hosted in a hostile country to the US (so the server simply can’t be taken offline), and this would be the beginning of the revolutionary army, hopefully it would be able to outgrow the anonymous stage of the conflict.
Generally agree with your assessment. The lack of any serious organization on the left or the right precludes an actual civil war from happening at this point. However, I do think that a mass civil unrest scenario is quite possible as it doesn’t require central organization.
I think it’s very plausible that if the democrats win, then the right wing groups will start localized riots and violence. This could easily escalate into a country wide unrest.
The deterioration of economic conditions will play a big role here. The system perpetuates itself because majority of the population finds life bearable. Life is not great, but it’s been generally predictable up to now. US is now entering uncharted territory where the economy is collapsing, and huge numbers of people are going to be left destitute with nothing to lose and little to look forward to.
the imperialist narrative on Rwanda is so dear to them, the bourgeoisie would sooner change their narrative on WW2 itself than give up this lie
What is the truth about Rwanda? I know basically nothing about that.
The most important thing at that point would be maintaining lines of communications to the people who responded to the initial revolutionary call to violence, probably via a tor node hosted in a hostile country to the US
Tor is financed by the US government, and they have repeatedly discovered the identities of people that used it. I don’t think it is possible to creare any kind of leftist militant organisation over the internet, there need to be personal contacts.
What is the truth about Rwanda? I know basically nothing about that.
I recommend the books Rwanda and the New Scramble for Africa: From Tragedy to Useful Imperial Fiction by the Québécois nationalist Robin Philpot, and Rwanda 1994: The Myth of the Akazu Genocide Conspiracy and its Consequences by the British Trotskyist Barrie Collins, to begin to understand what actually happened there. The essay here is also okay, but very brief.
Tor is financed by the US government, and they have repeatedly discovered the identities of people that used it.
All those cases have been due to people misusing Tor, and being identified by Javascript. I don’t think you can even use Tor anymore outside of the Tor browser, which disables Java by default, though in the old days it was a separate application that you turned on and off.
Tor is open source software, and has been looked at by many, many people now, and any backdoor would have been found out a long time ago, and it would have been utilized by other governments around the world to catch people doing all sorts of illegal activity already.
I don’t think it is possible to creare any kind of leftist militant organisation over the internet, there need to be personal contacts.
The exact opposite is true. Trying to do this with “personal contacts” is how you’re going to be arrested before you ever do anything. Either that, or talked out of it completely, and told to do some ritualized meaningless protest activity.
All those cases have been due to people misusing Tor, and being identified by Javascript.
I mean there was that time researchers at Carnegie Mellon poisoned the network with malicious nodes and managed to decloak traffic for six months, did so with DOD money, didn’t responsibly disclose to TOR, then the FBI heard about their project and subpoenaed them and they forked over IP addresses to help throw a Silk Road 2.0 operator in prison, but sure. TOR has definitely never been successfully subverted.
Also, in terms of computer security, open source and auditability isn’t a magic wand and it’s actively dangerous to pretend that it is, especially when advocating what you’re advocating.
The NSA has teams of security researchers actively finding vulnerabilities they keep a secret so they can exploit them. The longer they can keep a vulnerability secret, the longer they can keep using it without anyone necessarily noticing. This applies to open source software, too. Vulnerabilities can sit unnoticed in products for years and sometimes even decades before anyone finds them. Auditability just improves the chances of finding them.
Everybody involved in hacking – nation states, cyber criminals, etc – with the resources to do research hoards zero days. An unpublished zero is like gold for hackers. It’s important to understand that any piece of software is more likely to be compromised by a nation state actor than is publicly known/knowable.
You are doling out bad and dangerous advice.
I mean there was that time researchers at Carnegie Mellon poisoned the network with malicious nodes
Yeah, this is exactly what I was talking about. The Carnegie Mellon people used a Javascript exploit to do what they did. To quote a random vpn website:
In 2014 the FBI – with assistance from researchers at Carnegie Mellon University – developed an exploit based on a Firefox JavaScript flaw that successfully de-anonymized some Tor users, including the operators of the popular Silk Road website. Although the vulnerability that allowed those attacks was fixed within days of its discovery, the incident nonetheless created fear among Tor users that it may not be 100% secure after all.
The reader should ponder to themselves why this user wants to make it appear we’re talking about two different incidences.
TOR has definitely never been successfully subverted.
If you have better suggestions for anonymously communicating with a violent mass audience, I’m all ears.
You are doling out really bad and dangerous advice.
And you’re doling out fear and paranoia to keep people from taking up arms, based on the idiotic idea the “American” government is omniscient (it isn’t). It goes without saying that anyone willing to organize violence against the “American” government is taking their life into their hands, and the more effective they are, the more resources said government will utilize to destroy them. The advice I have given, in fact, is probably the safest advice for any organization wanting to go about conducting warfare against “American” government by mobilizing those who can be mobilized to fight them.
Yeah, this is exactly what I was talking about. The Carnegie Mellon people used a Javascript exploit to do what they did. To quote a random vpn website:
Cite your source. Some random VPN website? Which? How reliable is this VPN website? Who owns it? What even is a VPN website? A website about VPN’s? A website run by a VPN provider? Who said this?
Even though you’re douchey as fuck and also sloppy as hell, I went ahead and checked the tag on the story, because it’s quite possible that I might have misremembered.
Here is what the actual TOR project said about the attack. Since they have a vested interest in downplaying any threats to their software, we should expect them to mention something something about users using it wrong but they didn’t. https://blog.torproject.org/tor-security-advisory-relay-early-traffic-confirmation-attack
Based on what the TOR project said, which you can verify at the link because unlike you I have at least one actual source it was a combined traffic confirmation attack and sybil attack based on poisoning the network with malicious nodes and was directly based on weaknesses in TOR. Both attacks happened below the browser level. I’m searching and searching and the best I can piece together is that your “random VPN website” is run by confused dipshits who are confusing several different attacks, but literally nobody can verify because you’re your own source as far as anyone can tell.
The reader should ponder to themselves why this user wants to make it appear we’re talking about two different incidences.
“The reader” should wonder why this arrogant, pompous asshole who is too good to provide verifiable sources about their claims is trying to insinuate I’m lying when, to all appearances after I followed up in good faith on their claims, it appears that some_random_commie is actually the one who is spreading confusion about the Carnegie Mellon attack.
My theory is that they are embarrassed to have been called out for being wrong and are now trying to save face.
If you have better suggestions for anonymously communicating with a violent mass audience, I’m all ears.
I haven’t examined it in detail so I can’t vouch for its security but I2P is architected for better anonymity (was designed partially in response to TOR) and I’ve never heard of any attacks on it. To be clear, I’m not specifically recommending I2P, but my point is that TOR’s not special. There are multiple anonymizing networks with different implementations.
What I would say is that instead of spitballing on a public forum based on shit you read on “random VPN sites” a revolutionary party should recruit some computer security experts to help them examine these problems in a rigorous and well informed fashion.
And you’re doling out fear and paranoia to keep people from taking up arms, based on the idiotic idea the “American” government is omniscient (it isn’t).
You’re constructing a straw person argument. I never said either of these. TOR not being perfect is not a claim that the US federal government is omniscient. Criticizing your bad security advice is actually not the same as what you’re hysterically claiming I’m saying.
And I’m not saying don’t trust TOR for anything at all, but if you’re actually gonna try to drill down into the specifics of revolutionary tactics… if a revolutionary party, like one actually participating in some popular unrest uses TOR to host a website “anonymously” they will be deanonymized. The security requirements for what you are suggesting are through the goddamn roof and TOR is not up to spec.
Sadly an anti-communist, but still pretty good.
Yeah, I got a kick out of the whole we don’t know who the good guys were in the Russian revolution bit. Overall, it does do a good job laying out the likely scenarios. I think US splitting up into separate states is one of the more likely scenarios, surprised the article didn’t really explore that one. People are already largely divided by state, so blue and red splitting along the party lines seems very probable.
I’m not so sure about splits in the party line but states splitting up I can see. I see something closer to what happened during the Yugoslav wars than the civil war North and South divide. What broke the Union last time was a powder keg that was already ready to explode from the forming of the American union, namely slavery. This time there are alot more complicated issues between the states and the federal government and even local municipalities. I can say this, the Union cannot hold unless the federal government is willing to push it’s authority more than it already has. And this is only the political an official political level. Honestly it would be safer if the states were allowed to become completely independent of the federal government and form coalitions with other states and maintain international trade relations. It would go a long way for democracy in this country because there’s large possiblity that the whole system could be made more democratic and easier to do “Democratic Socialism”. On the other hand it’s clear a peaceful succeeding would be impossible even if they did something as radical as leave it to a popular vote and it was successful.
I agree that a loose union akin to EU would be a lot more stable. The whole point of a federal government is to solve cross cutting problems, and it’s been increasingly unable to deliver on that. The pandemic is a good example of a complete failure on the part of the federal government to provide any kind of coordination between the states. Since the states aren’t seeing the benefit of this model it’s only natural for them to start asking why bother staying in the union at all. I do agree that peaceful dissolution is highly unlikely though.
I wonder if the civil war is actually going to happen or if liberals are panicking needlessly
Its def not going to happen, its about as likely as the UK having a civil war over brexit. The US is incredibly stable, none of its institutions are under any threat.
On the other hand, the Soviet Union was in a far better shape than US is right now when it dissolved. US already had serious economic problems before the pandemic, and things got significantly worse now. This is ultimately what’s driving the current wave of unrest.
Meanwhile, the electoral system relies on the public having faith in the integrity of the process. The democrats spent four years questioning the legitimacy of the process with Russiagate, and which helped normalized the idea that the process may be tampered with. This is a dangerous situation since there is very little reason to accept the party you didn’t vote for taking power if you don’t think they won fairly.
Another factor is that mainstream US public has become very tribal across the party lines. Democrats and republicans see each other as enemies, and the parties aren’t campaigning on policy, but rather on rallying their base. This further drives extremism, especially on the right where we now see organized armed militias.
While I don’t know if there would be an actual civil war, I certainly expect civil unrest and violence regardless of which party claims victory during the election.
