Peasant Revolts, Unpleasant Results
Predictions of forthcoming dirty civil war in the West.
The recent VE-Day celebrations throughout early May marked 80 years since the Allies won the Second World War. Sadly, those very same Allies now seem to be losing the Third World War: the war against the Third World nations currently invading us all.
In Great Britain, whose beaches are presently subjected to amphibious landings of foreign males of military age on a daily basis, like D-Day in reverse, one local council candidate for Nigel Farage’s immigration-skeptical Reform UK Party came in for media flak after labelling the influx “a full-blown invasion”, before calling for the Royal Navy to be sent out to “intercept them and thunder them back using a volley of gunfire aimed at sinking them.” Another was criticized for posting online his view that Islam is “100 per cent incompatible with Western civilization” and that Muslim invaders planned to enforce “Islam or else” upon helpless white dhimmi voters once they “outnumber” everyone in Britain, alongside images of London covered in Pakistani flags. Amusingly, this candidate’s name was John Birch. Someone should name a Society after him or something.
Personally, I find it more imaginable the present UK Government would turn its naval heavy artillery on its own people, rather than on the immigrants. The overall impression one gets of life in 2020s Western Europe is of a pan-continental war of the rulers against the ruled. Within such a situation, it is increasingly being asked, will the next war to hit Europe be a kind of civil war, in which the peasants finally rise up and revolt against their elitist overlords? The answer may well be yes … but only if you somewhat redefine what the term ‘civil war’ means in the first place.
Place Your Betz
At the end of March, a much-discussed podcast interview with a man named Professor David Betz went viral. Betz is a Canadian-born Professor of War in the Modern World at King’s College London, and a Senior Fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute – and, every time he looks out of his office window into the street outside, he now sees a potential warzone.
Professor Betz predicts civil war will come to the West within the next five or so years, but he is only able to conjure this pessimistic vision by a very special means: expanding the meaning of civil war beyond its traditional definition, as most people would understand it.
In classic civil wars of the popular imagination, like the American, English and Spanish examples, twin sets of large standing armies confront one another on clearly defined battlefields, ready for armed combat with guns, horses, sabers, tanks and artillery. The prospects of such conflicts occurring in countries like the US or UK at present are exceedingly slim, however, as by definition they would require two sets of powerful, opposing elites to emerge to face one another down, like the Cavaliers and Roundheads, who actually possess the pre-existing financial and military wherewithal to arm themselves to the teeth with up-to-date mass-killing technology in the first place.
Ordinary disillusioned civilians can always fashion themselves petrol bombs, or make toy bayonets by taping knives to broom-handles, but Challenger Tanks and Black Hawk helicopters tend to be elusive things to acquire upon the open market. When elites fight elites, we have a civil war. When plebs fight elites, we have a civil suicide.
Therefore, when Professor Betz makes his claim that the West is headed towards a “civil war”, what he really means is a low-to-medium-level intermittent race-conflict, but perhaps it would be deemed too politically difficult for an academic these days to call it that. Nonetheless, if you read what he is actually saying, he is pretty clear on this matter – racial issues, and uncontrolled mass immigration, have the innate potential to tear our societies apart.
Betz Predicts Blitz
Betz’s ideas were first published in 2023 in Military Strategy Magazine, in his essay “Civil War Comes to the West“. Here, Betz writes of how, according to the great mass of literature on these topics, civil war generally does not befall either “securely-perceived-to-be-legitimate democracies” or “strong autocracies”, both of which tend to be stable due to popular consent for the rulers from the ruled in the former, and the crushing of all possible dissent before it even gets started in the latter.
Western nations used to be those steady “securely-perceived-to-be-legitimate democracies”, but are becoming less and less so, as more and more disillusioned voters are beginning to realize that modern ‘democracy’ is an increasing sham in which, whoever you vote for, you end up with more of the same. You mark your cross for one party promising to lower immigration, and another party promising to lower it even more, and what do you end up with? More immigration anyway. Under such circumstances, it begins to appear as if the ruling classes actively wish to replace their traditional electorate with an entire new imported one for whatever reason.
Within such a scenario, more and more mutually incompatible racial and ethnic minority groups begin to grow in Western nations, without ever fully displacing the initial overwhelming white majority as the largest individual group there (at least, not yet). Betz says lands like the US, UK and France are now in the process of hitting a sort of demographic reverse-sweet-spot, which makes them ripe for racial conflict to occur:
The most unstable [nations demographically] are moderately homogenous societies, particularly when there is a perceived [downwardly mobile] change in the status of a titular majority, or significant minority, which possesses the wherewithal to revolt on its own. By contrast, in societies comprised of many small minorities ‘divide and conquer’ can be an effective mechanism of controlling a population.
Working in London, Betz is naturally most concerned with how this “perceived change in the status of a titular majority” – namely, white people – is likely to play itself out in Great Britain. Looking around him, he sees a severe decline in previously high levels of social capital, or feelings of unity and cohesion between citizens, one only likely to be further exacerbated by economic downturns and the ever greater realization that the UK is becoming a two-tier society, based on an individual’s innate characteristics like race. This problem even has a technical name in the field of civil war studies. It is called degradation, and can be defined as follows:
A situation of status reversal, not just political defeat. Dominant groups go from a situation where, one moment, they get to decide whose language is spoken, whose laws are enforced, and whose culture is revered, to a situation where they do not.”
What we have right now is a form of what Betz calls “asymmetric multiculturalism”, which allows for “in-group preference, ethnic pride and group solidarity – notably in voting” amongst non-white citizens, but condemns these precise same things as basically being forms of borderline neo-Nazism amongst white people. Thus, what emerges amongst whites is “a perception that the status quo is invidiously unbalanced”, which, in the land of Two-Tier Keir, it most certainly is.
This provides that most valuable of things from a civil war perspective, an actual coherent casus belli, in terms of “a morally inflected narrative which has a clearly articulated grievance, a plausible and urgent remedy, and a receptive conscience community”. The grievance here might be something like “We’re becoming second-class citizens in our own homeland!”, the remedy being “Kick out all the unassimilable immigrants!”, and the receptive community being that of dispossessed white native people. It is much easier to motivate persons to fight from an impetus of self-defense than attack: saying whites are under threat from the Great Replacement would be much more likely to call people to arms than one of pure race-hatred against non-whites per se. “Save yourselves from Islam!” has far greater appeal to most than “Kill all the Muslims!”
Betz Case Scenario
Betz sums up the whole current failing civilizational scenario like this:
It can be said that a generation ago all Western countries could still be described as to a large degree cohesive nations, each with a greater or lesser sense of common identity and heritage. By contrast, all now are incohesive political entities, jigsaw puzzles of competing identity-based tribes, living in large part in virtually segregated ‘communities’ competing over diminishing societal resources increasingly obviously and violently.
As Betz also points out, “75 percent of post-Cold War civil conflicts have been fought by ethnic factions”, not political ones as such. But what would such conflicts of ethnic groups “competing over diminishing societal resources” actually look like in a developed country like the UK, where the Roundheads and Cavaliers are now long gone, and where the elites, far from being at one another’s throats in two competing armed military power-blocs, are singing mainly from the same hymn-sheet (probably one with lots of nasheeds on)?
Betz says they will resemble most of all the so-called “dirty wars” of Latin American countries from the 1970s and 1980s, where “political assassinations, death-squads and intercommunal reprisals, plus thriving criminal predation … typify a society in the process of tearing itself apart.” So, more intermittent social chaos than outright civil war as such, then, a process which sounds nowhere near as improbable as bazookas at dawn between the Atomenwaffen Division, ISIS UK and the Royal Marines on central Dartmoor one day. If Betz’s dark prophecy comes to pass, then this will be a sort of quasi-war which it is perfectly possible to deny even is a war at all: the real battle here may well prove to be one over semantics.
As most cities in the UK tend to have many more immigrants and non-whites than countryside areas, Betz foresees the dirty war will have a rural v urban aspect to it, with the likely key strategy of nativist groups in the shires being to trigger anarchy in the cities, largely via sabotaging their vulnerable infrastructure. Then, those who have precipitated all this can sit fast and await the outcome in their rural redoubts. Once the interracial violence in the cities is over, the evidence that multi-ethnic, multicultural societies are a total failure will be plain for everyone to see, such happy-clappy dreams being the true greatest casualty of war. This truth finally having to be acknowledged by the governing class, maybe the white rebels will then finally be able to get their country back?
Betz points out that the necessary infrastructure of modern urban life has all been built under the unshakable automatic presumption that nobody would ever really want to attack it. Thus, it is all left largely unguarded. And yet, as we saw with airliners after 9/11, such unquestioned assumptions can easily be upended by those determined to do so, as anyone who has ever read Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent will know.
The main barrier towards attacking unprotected things like electricity pylons and substations is essentially a mental one; it is assumed to be ‘unthinkable’, simply because very few people thus far appear to have thought of doing so, at least not openly. But there could easily be a copycat effect at work here. Once one person finally topples a pylon, then others would no doubt try to do so too. Of course, most persons would have not the slightest desire ever to do such a thing, preferring to live out their slowly declining, but still often largely comfortable, lives in as much comfort and peace as is still possible. But a small, alienated minority might one day do so: in a nation of over 60 million people, it could only take a few hundred rebels to spark off such dirty war chaos.
All Betz Are Off
When Betz wrote his essay in 2023, it was largely ignored. Then, in the summer of 2024 the Southport riots broke out across England, following the murder of three little girls by a non-white Rwandan ‘Welshman’, leading to public figures like Elon Musk claiming civil war was inevitable in the country. Betz’s essay being rediscovered, this March he was invited onto the Maiden, Mother, Matriarch podcast (transcript here) hosted by journalist Louise Perry, to discuss his idea, in relation to the notion the Southport riots were the just an opening salvo in the forthcoming Second English Civil War.
Now his theories seemed to be coming true, Betz was asked what had prevented them from being paid any attention to earlier. His answer was something called “normalcy bias” – the strong idea many of us possess that, just because the world around us has always been arranged in a certain, seemingly constant, way, it will remain that way forever. You know, just like most Europeans once thought in the summer of 1914.
Betz initially possessed this same normalcy bias himself, thinking the UK a nation so steady that the foreign civil wars and insurgencies he studied in his day-job could never take place in such a developed, democratic, Western nation, where voters ironed out all their differences with the ballot, not the bullet. Then, however, he observed the “parliamentary shenanigans” following the 2016 vote for Brexit, when the people’s elected ‘representatives’ [sic] took it upon themselves to try and reverse the decision, whilst simultaneously lying that they were doing no such thing. [1] Due to many long years of peace and political stability, the politicians’ own brand of normalcy bias here was that the tame British people would just sit back and quietly take it, forever, without ever turning to acts of violence. Betz himself was not so sure:
There is a very strong normalcy bias within the British psyche; I would say probably, possibly, more substantially than others, that the British have a self-conception of themselves as essentially peaceful. It is a society, it is a country which essentially invented … the idea of good government. We haven’t had the kind of revolutionary turmoil which has plagued our European neighbors from time to time … Why do I think [this idea is] wrong? I think that there is a fracture in British national self-conception and material British reality … the society’s self-conception is out of kilter with reality. It’s a much more fractured society [than in the past]. It’s one that has a much less secure connection to those aspects of its history that have made it the stable, well-governed, essentially more or less content society that it has been.
Into this “fractured” society, within which “the belief of people in pre-political loyalty [towards the nation] has been shattered by the triumph of identity politics”, then dropped “the industrial rape-gang revelations” about Muslims sexually abusing white girls, which helped spark the 2024 riots. Betz compares this back to something called the Boudican Revolt, when the native British Queen Boudica’s daughters were raped by immigrant (but at this stage still non-Pakistani) Roman soldiers, causing her to lead a rebellion against the imperial occupiers during which London was burnt to the ground.
Post-Southport, London itself didn’t burn, but a few isolated mosques and asylum hotels certainly did. As such, Betz’s podcast-host questioner, Louise Perry, here interjects to describe how:
The burning down of asylum hotels has been happening in Ireland quite a lot … My husband showed me an example of someone graffitiing a building site where an asylum hotel was being built, saying ‘Anyone seen working on this site will be shot.’ And this is in a country where that threat is taken seriously, given recent history.
During the still-recent 1968-98 era of The Troubles, Ireland knew full well what a dirty civil war looked like, so the Irish people’s own “normalcy bias” still retains plenty of living memory of what things can look like in a society gone horribly wrong. But mainland Britain, despite numerous IRA bombings, didn’t experience this kind of horror on anything like the same scale, leaving most of its ruling class thinking perpetual peace was just the normal way of things.
It is this prevailing normalcy bias which has caused all Britain’s infrastructure to be left so wide open and unprotected. For decades, nobody in power ever seriously thought England’s southern coastline would be subject to invasion. Hence, no meaningful invasion protections like the Martello Towers or radar listening-posts of old were ever erected there by politicians, thereby allowing what Betz says “can only be described as a large-scale border raid” to take place on British beaches today, in terms of dinghy after dinghy full of illegal immigrants. As with UK beaches, so with UK infrastructure:
Now bear in mind, a good deal of Britain’s infrastructure is essentially unguarded, and it’s almost impossible to guard, because it’s spread all over the place. That doesn’t matter in a normally-functioning society. You don’t need to guard that stuff, because who would attack it? But that’s putting a lot of importance on this concept of normally functioning. If we move to abnormally-functioning, that stuff can be attacked … a really obvious one is the gas network. Gas is explosive. It is its own bomb … The Major Accident Hazard Pipelines … are very easy to access. They’re very big, their locations are publicly known. They have to be because of the danger of accidental explosion if you dig around them.
Whilst people may find it psychologically difficult to violently attack other humans, even ones systematically invading their country, the psychological barrier towards attacking an inanimate object like a pipeline is obviously far less severe. But, if Betz is correct, such easy-to-hit targets will soon have to be requiring rather greater levels of protection, at greater cost to us all:
If you have high legitimacy then your cost of government is very low. People tend to do the correct thing voluntarily and your symbols of power are in fact powerful: so, coats of arms, flags, policemen’s badges. These things have a kind of material power in a high legitimacy system because that magic is working. When legitimacy collapses, then your government costs are very high. You have to police everything. You have to watch people because they won’t do the right thing; and indeed, if people are really pissed off, as soon as they’re unobserved they’ll do the wrong thing. They’ll do things to further cludge up the system because they’re angry … We will be become a very much more heavily-policed society, which is very much poorer than it is, and there you go. Those are the conditions that give rise to rapid, potentially highly violent, social rupture.
Diversity is our strength, as they say? It doesn’t much sound like it, does it?
Long-Odds Betz?
What are the prospects of Betz’s nightmare visions coming true? Some critics, perhaps suffering a bad case of normalcy bias themselves, would scoff “not likely”. One such man is Tony Evans, former Football Editor for UK broadsheet The Times, who now runs his own Substack begging patrons to “Support writing that does not conform with right-wing narratives.” Evans uses his great knowledge of this year’s Premier League fixture-list to disagree with Betz’s analysis, his basic argument being that the Mad Professor is some kind of rabid race-baiter.
For example, in Evans’ eyes, Betz’s use of the phrase “industrial rape-gang revelations” somehow becomes anti-Semitic, as
the word ‘industrial’ is problematic in the extreme. The Holocaust is often described as the ‘industrialized mass murder’ of Jews and other targets of the Nazis.
It’s also used to describe things like ‘industrial scale hyperbole’ like Evans is talking here, though. What does objecting to Muslim rape-gangs have to do with gassing the Jews?
Betz’s talk of “no-go zones” in UK cities is also a racist dog-whistle, apparently – albeit, as usual, a dog-whistle of such a particular frequency that only left-wingers can actually hear it:
When anyone mentions ‘no-go zones’ in the context of British life, it should set off alarm bells. It’s code for ‘I don’t feel comfortable in districts which are not overwhelmingly full of white people.’ Despite what social media tells you, no-go zones do not exist in the UK.
How do you know that, Tony? Maybe you’ve just never been to any. After all, they are no-go zones.
It appears that the only people who could possibly ever take Betz’s ideas seriously are those deeply racist souls who voted for Brexit and support Nigel Farage’s Reform UK Party, who it now suddenly transpires want to kill millions and millions of unwanted foreigners:
The Reform voters lapping up podcasts like this don’t really want a civil war. They want pogroms. They want ethnic cleansing. They want their country back and imagine it will take a blood sacrifice. As long as it’s not their blood. What do they want it back from? At the last census more than 81 per cent of the population defined themselves as white. You might not know it listening to the avalanche of propaganda, but that’s a huge majority. Whiteness is not in danger. The people under threat are minorities. How many of this 81 per cent have a huge hard-on for civil war anyone’s guess. Too many, one suspects. But not enough to fulfil Betz’s perverse fantasies.
But Betz doesn’t “have a hard-on” for civil war. If anything, he possesses severe erectile dysfunction. He specifically says:
I’m a classic member of the Establishment. I’m a homeowner, I’m a father, all of these things. I really do not want this to occur. But I also can’t look away; or I can’t not see what I see, for what it’s worth.
I think it would be legitimate to argue Betz’s fears are somewhat exaggerated. Maybe I too just have some lingering level of normalcy bias, but the ideas of London burning and cities collapsing wholesale into chaos and mass slaughter do seem somewhat of a worst-case scenario. But estimates of increasing but limited ethnic and sectarian strife, the rise of crime, vandalism, riots, violence and terror, interspersed with occasional attacks upon vital infrastructure, don’t seem all that unbelievable at all. Maybe some would think it a stretch to call this ‘civil war’, but it’s certainly a picture of long-term civil unrest and endemic national decline which I can see coming to pass. Betz’s notion definitely seems more plausible to me than Tony Evans’ counter-prediction that nothing much will go wrong and we’ll all go sailing along happily into a future multicultural utopia.
I don’t see how it is racist not to wish your society to collapse into increasing levels of violent incoherence, social decay, and urban unrest. Isn’t it just rational? To repeat the old joke, if the peasants are revolting, then their leaders are fucking disgusting.