- These Are The States With The Most Hate Groups
Funerals for those killed during the shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburg were held last week.
Eleven people were killed, and several others were injured during Saturday morning service when a gunman opened fire on congregants.
While horrific, it was by no means a one-off, as Statista’s Sarah Feldman explains, in 2017, the Anti-Defamation Leagues recorded a 57 percent increase year-over-year in anti-Semitic hate crimes.
Jews are the largest target of religiously motivated hate crimes in the United States.
Hate crimes in the United States are on the rise generally. The Southern Poverty Law Center has uncovered 953 registered hate groups across the United States.
You will find more infographics at Statista
The states with the most hate groups include California with 75 groups, Florida with 66, and Texas with 66 registered hate groups.
- Written In History: The Death Of America's Hyper-Power Fantasy
Authored by Martin Siff via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
In 1987, Paul Kennedy, a British professor of history at Yale University, unleashed a political and intellectual firestorm with the publication of his great (677-page) book, “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.” Kennedy produced a magisterial overview of the competition for global power over the past 500 years from 1500 AD to the present.
Kennedy proposed the thesis that any power that achieved, imagined it had achieved or sought to achieve and maintain a dominant hyper-power role of global dominance was doomed to lose it and then rapidly decline in overall power, wealth, prosperity and influence.
Kennedy argued – with a wealth of detail drawn from different nations over his vast period of half a millennium – that the very attempt to achieve and maintain such power forced every nation that attempted it into a ruinous pattern of strategic overstretch.
This demanded every major global empire in their turn to devote ruinously far too many economic resources to unproductive military power and ever more costly global commitments and conflicts.
The more ambitious the commitments, the quicker came military defeat, economic ruin and national collapse, Kennedy documented.
Kennedy published his book however at exactly the wrong moment for its abundantly documented conclusions and arguments to be taken seriously in the United States. The Cold War was just ending. The heroic actions of the Russian people in rejecting communism and leading in the dismantling of the Soviet Union were being misinterpreted as an eternal and lasting victory for the United States and for the forces of free market capitalism and minimum government regulation.
Kennedy was therefore subjected to a furious firestorm of abuse, especially from the emerging neoconservatives who under President George W Bush succeeded in imposing their reckless policies on nations across the Middle East and Eurasia. Kennedy, unlike his enraged critics was a gracious and tolerant gentleman as well as great scholar and took the firestorm in his stride.
Now more than 30 years after Kennedy published his great work, we can see how prescient, wise and visionary it truly was.
In 2016 President Donald Trump was elected on a platform of dealing with domestic crises raging from economic ruin and impoverishment to an out of control drug and opioid abuse epidemic and the collapse of law and order across the long US land border with Mexico.
That outcome provided telling testimony to the previous US policies of wasting at least $2 trillion on entirely unsuccessful nation-building and government-toppling projects ranging from Iraq to Afghanistan and since extended into such nations as Ukraine, Syria, and Libya
All the national pathologies of bankruptcy, exhaustion, decline and ever spreading human misery that Kennedy in his book traced in previous empires can now be clearly delineated in the policies of the post-Cold War United States.
The bottom line lesson to be drawn from Kennedy’s great book that so outraged neoconservatives at the time was a simple and stunning clear one: Unipolar Moments are just that and nothing more. They last for moments not ages.
Instead, the very attempt to maintain a unipolar moment of apparent global supremacy by any power automatically instead will raise up a host of challenges to that power that will rapidly exhaust and then doom it.
Kennedy traced this process of inexorable over – commitment and decline in 17th century Habsburg Spain. He followed it again in 18th century Bourbon France. He documented it once more in the rise, pride and inevitable fall of the British Empire and in the rash German attempts to create dominant global empires in both world wars of the 20th century.
A generation before Kennedy published his great work, British historian Correlli Barnett, focusing only on the British Empire, published in 1972 his own classic “The Collapse of British Power.” Barnett focused on a one, single unipolar moment – the 1920s and 1930s when the British ruling class, like their American successors today imagined that they were the divinely-appointed global policeman charged by Providence with maintaining their own conceptions of right and wrong over the whole world.
The British at least were reluctantly forced to cede independence to their vast global territories. It is doubtful whether the American people will be so lucky: The US Deep State establishment and their tame, unthinking media puppets remain blindly committed to inflexible expansion, conflict and strategic gambling with the peace and even survival of the world.
Thirty years after his magnum opus was published, Paul Kennedy’s message of warning remains unheeded. America’s Unipolar Moment is long since dead and gone. America’s pretensions to rule supreme as the world’s unchallenged hyper-power have become a dangerous and unsustainable fantasy.
A wakening to sanity is long overdue and the hour is late: National catastrophe can be the only other outcome.
- Travel Trends Index: "Perfect Storm" Threatens US Domestic And Inbound Travel
The US Travel Association warned in a new report that US domestic travel is about to “level off” after achieving 105 straight months of overall expansion. The report indicates a “perfect storm” of factors is brewing that is currently suppressing international demand for travel to the US.
The organization highlighted a strong dollar as one of the significant factors in deterring foreigners from visiting. Another issue presented is the global slowdown and political uncertainties in Asia, Europe, and Latin America spurred by the ongoing trade war.
“We’re seeing something of a perfect storm of factors that could suppress international demand for travel to the U.S.,” said David Huether, U.S. Travel senior vice president for research.
“The U.S. dollar has been on another very robust strengthening trend since April of this year, while the global economy has been cooling off considerably overall. That, coupled with political uncertainty in Europe and rising trade tensions, is a bad-news recipe for inbound travel.”
Furthermore, the international Leading Travel Index (LTI) forecasts that the market will not expand any further at all in the next six months, which coincides with our thoughts of a significant economic slowdown that is currently festering in Asia and Europe and could soon rear its ugly head in US macro data in the next several quarters.
The monthly Travel Trends Index (TTI) is prepared for US Travel by the research firm Oxford Economics. The TTI is based on public and private sector source data which are subject to revision by the source agency.
TTI draws from advanced search and bookings data from ADARA and nSight; airline bookings data from the Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC); IATA, OAG and other tabulations of international inbound travel to the U.S.; and hotel room demand data from STR.
TTI shows that overall travel to and within the US grew 1.6% y/y in September, but warns of declining domestic travel rates, with business travel appearing to have plateaued and leisure travel accounting for the small growth. International travel was up 4.4% in September y/y, but US Travel said that since inbound had dropped 2.2% in September 2017, the y/y improvement “is liable to appear over-inflated.”
US Travel Association Chartpack-
Overall Current Travel Index
International Current Travel Index
Domestic Current Travel Index
Domestic Business Current Travel Index
Domestic Leisure Current Travel Index
Finally, the Dow Jones Travel & Leisure Index, an index that provides coverage on 95% of market capitalization of travel and leisure stocks, confirms the industry has fallen under hard times in recent months.
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- China Infiltrates American Campuses
Authored by Gordon Chang via The Gatestone Institute,
Beijing, in seeking influence on American college and university campuses, has been infringing on academic freedoms, violating American sovereignty, and breaking U.S. law. U.S. officials, neglecting their responsibilities to the American people, have allowed this injurious behavior to continue, in some instances for decades.
As an initial matter, some of this impermissible Chinese conduct is harmless, even amusing. As detailed by Anastasya Lloyd-Damnjanovic in a landmark study for the Wilson Center, Chinese officials in 2004 and 2007 threatened then Columbia University professor Robert Barnett, the prominent Tibet expert, that if he did not adopt a more favorable view of China’s policies they would — heavens! — stop speaking to him.
Most of the time, however, impermissible conduct has taken on a more ominous tone. Barnett, for instance, was also the target of an effort, by a Chinese student at Columbia and a faculty member from China (at another institution), to “depose” him for trying to protect Tibetan exiles from harassment by Chinese students and Chinese consular officials.
In 2009, an official from the Chinese Consulate in New York got in touch with Ming Xia, a faculty member at City University of New York, and demanded he stop work on a documentary on the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. The official, saying China could offer more “financial rewards” than he was getting for the documentary, essentially offered Xia a bribe; when that did not work, the official directly threatened him.
Then there was the Yang Shuping incident in June 2017. Yang gave the commencement speech at the University of Maryland, criticizing Beijing’s environmental record and praising American democratic values. She was targeted by the infamous Chinese Students and Scholars Association (CSSA), which called her speech “intolerable”, a word inconsistent with the notions of an open campus. Her family back in China was threatened.
China’s Communist Party, especially its United Front Work Department, has targeted institutions of higher learning as part of an intensive, multi-decade effort to influence American society. Chinese President Xi Jinping, who has placed great emphasis on international propaganda efforts, in May 2015 identified students as “a new focus of United Front Work,” suggesting they should be promoters and implementers of Party efforts.
As a result of this direction from the top of the Chinese political system, United Front Work Department activity, according to one “senior US official” quoted in the Financial Times, has “reached an unacceptable level.”
Unacceptable? What the official may have found “unacceptable” was that students from China have acted in ways that have intimidated faculty, staff, and other students at American universities. Chinese students have done this by, among other things, demanding schools remove research materials, by insisting that faculty change teaching content to suit Beijing, by trying to prevent others from criticizing China, and by trying to force the cancellation of academic activities.
Chinese students, not surprisingly, are becoming a part of what is known as “China’s long arm.” Far more worrying than the activities of students, however, are the actions of Chinese diplomats. Chinese diplomats, as Lloyd-Damnjanovic wrote in her September 2018 report, have been “employing intimidating modes of conversation.”
Diplomats have also infringed on academic freedom by complaining about on-campus speakers and events, by trying to coerce faculty, and by threatening retaliation against American university programs in China.
The main instruments of Chinese power on American campuses are the Confucius Institutes and CSSA chapters.
CIs, as the Confucius Institutes are known, were first established in 2004 to provide Chinese language instruction, but they now teach Chinese society, culture, and other topics. They have also, incredibly, organized demonstrations on American soil, often to welcome Chinese leaders or to hound the Dalai Lama.
The CIs operate at Beijing’s direction. The 107 or so Confucius Institutes in the U.S. formally report to the Hanban, the National Chinese Language Office, “affiliated” with the Chinese Ministry of Education.
In reality, the Hanban appears to be a front for the Communist Party’s United Front Work Department, which is charged with managing relations with other organizations and individuals. Liu Yunshan, once head of the Party’s Propaganda Department, in 2010 exhorted CIs to “actively carry out international propaganda battles.” CIs appear, in fact, to be funded by the Propaganda Department. A party-state, especially one as problematical as China’s, disseminating information as a formal unit of an institution of higher learning is nothing short of alarming, especially considering the Party’s renewed emphasis on undermining freedom and democracy worldwide.
Possibly even more alarming are the arrangements between China and American educational institutions. The contracts establishing Confucius Institutes are rarely public. One might well wonder why.
According to Rachelle Peterson, director of research projects at the National Association of Scholar:
The contractual language the Hanban pushes on universities poses a more substantive threat to academic autonomy. The Confucius Institute constitution requires all universities to avoid “tarnish[ing] the reputation of the Confucius Institutes” — an offense punishable by revocation of the contract, immediate loss of all Hanban funds, and potential unspecified “legal action.” I examined eight signed contracts between American universities and the Hanban, all eight of which duplicate this language almost verbatim.
The institutes, therefore, have been set up from the get-go to be exempt from criticism. This immunity, by itself, undermines the ability of administrators to supervise the CIs.
Even more dangerous are the 150 or so chapters of the CSSA and their closely affiliated groups. These organizations are sometimes covertly sponsored, funded, and, most disturbingly, directed by China’s embassy and five consulates in the U.S.
Sometimes these links are openly admitted, but often the chapters try to hide their connections to Beijing. The website of the University of California San Diego chapter once said it was “a subordinate organization” of the Los Angeles Chinese Consulate. The George Washington University chapter says it is “directed by” and “works with” the Chinese embassy. The chapter at the University of Tennessee requires members to swear adherence to certain positions advocated by the Chinese government. The constitution of Southwestern CSSA — a group of chapters in Arizona, California, Hawaii, and New Mexico — states that all local CSSA presidential candidates must be approved by China’s Los Angeles consulate.
The main points of contact for CSSA chapters are often intelligence officers in the embassy and consulates. China’s Ministry of State Security uses CSSA students to inform on other Chinese on campus. Sulaiman Gu, a student at the University of Georgia, told Radio Free Asia that MSS agents tried to get him to inform on fellow Chinese. Gu actually provided RFA with tapes of MSS agents giving him requests for information on certain targets.
Moreover, the Chinese state has, for several decades, been organizing — and paying for — Chinese students to engage in demonstrations on U.S. soil outside campuses, thereby impermissibly interfering in the American political process.
So, what should be done about all this?
Let us start with what should not be done. America should not, as President Trump’s senior advisor Stephen Miller proposed this year, ban all Chinese students. The U.S. is an open society, and Americans should keep it open. That is why their country is so strong. Americans do not need to create a climate of intimidation and fear against a racial group.
Americans also should not vilify Chinese students as a group or forget that Chinese students and faculty members of Chinese descent are often the targets of Beijing’s influence and interference operations. In short, let us not punish victims.
So what should America do?
First, universities can take over many of the functions of CSSA chapters. In addition to their malign activities, CSSA chapters provide important support services, such as helping Chinese students adjust when they first arrive on campus. The Communist Party should not be the only institution providing those services. U.S. colleges and universities benefit from the tuition of about 340,000 students from China, and these institutions can certainly offer services to support their stay.
Second, Washington should rely on existing norms, rules, and laws. American institutions certainly can deal with whatever Beijing throws at them. So, for instance, any CSSA chapter that hides funding from Beijing — a violation of college and university rules — should be disbanded.
Most of all, let us get the FBI to round up Ministry of State Security agents who, up to now, have been given free rein to operate in America. Putting these agents behind bars or even just revoking their visas will end many of the activities that endanger American campuses. The Chinese kill CIA agents in China. The least Washington can do is declare China’s agents personae non gratae.
The Chinese feel emboldened to violate American sovereignty and break laws because American administrations have let them do these things — sometimes openly — since at least the early 1990s. This is as much a Washington problem as a Beijing one.
Third, Congress can also change laws to make life inhospitable for Confucius Institutes. The John McCain 2019 National Defense Authorization Act provides that an educational institution cannot receive Defense Department funds for any program that involves a Confucius Institute.
That is a good start, but the Trump administration should try to extend the prohibition. Legislation should bar an educational institution from receiving any federal funds if it hosts a CI.
Rachelle Peterson of the National Association of Scholars told Gatestone that there are now three bills before Congress — the Foreign Influence Transparency Act, the Stop Higher Education Espionage and Theft Act, and the Aim Higher Act — addressing the problems posed by Confucius Institutes.
Fourth, U.S. and campus officials must make sure that Communist Party members do not abuse their First Amendment rights. The First Amendment gives China’s Party committees the freedom to convene, but they do not have the freedom to intimidate others, especially Chinese and American students and scholars, a violation of civil liberties.
The existence of a Party cell on a U.S. campus — there are now several of them — signals to Chinese students and faculty that, although they are in the United States, they are still subject to Beijing’s supervision.
This issue of Chinese intimidation on campus for me is personal. My father, born in China, came to Cornell University in 1945 on a Chinese government scholarship. For Chinese students in the United States, I wish for them what my father had, the experience to study — and live — without fear.
- As Employment Soars, These Are The US Cities Losing The Most Skilled Workers
As the US labor market continues its record-setting streak of jobs growth, torpedoes (or hurricanes) be damned, skilled workers are enjoying more opportunities than ever before.
So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that people living in areas blighted by drought or drug abuse – or that are simply struggling with a shortage of well-paying jobs – are opting to leave for greener pastures. According to Bloomberg’s Brain Drain index, California’s Central Valley and opioid-ridden West Virginia are seeing some of the largest outflows of skilled workers.
Even as the rest of the state booms, California’s struggling Central Valley is home to the metropolitan area seeing the highest degree of brain drain in the US: Hanford-Corcoran. Situated about 175 miles southeast of the Silicon Valley, losses of white collar jobs and reductions in pay in the STEM fields are driving skilled workers away. The index measures the outflow of advanced degree holders, as well as any drops in business formation.
Hanford’s economy is also dependent on agriculture. And the state’s stubborn drought has taken its toll.
“The small group of educated workers in the region are drawn to economies that offer more opportunity,” said Matthew Horton, associate director of the Milken Institute’s California Center. Only 12% of Hanford’s population over age 25 holds a bachelor’s degree.
Still, the region holds some promise. Faraday Future, a manufacturer of electric vehicles, is preparing to move into a warehouse abandoned nearly two decades ago by Italian manufacturer Pirelli & C. SpA, according to the chief executive of the Kings County Economic Development Corporation Lance Lippincott.
“Historically, the Central Valley has had a usually higher unemployment, lower attainment rate for four-year degrees overall compared to California,” Lippincott said. “But it kind of seems like there’s a shift in what’s going on in Hanford.”
The runner-up for largest brain drain is post-industrial Kankakee, Illinois. The city started losing manufacturers back in the 1980s. As one long-time resident pointed out, the city is trying to rebuild. But when it comes to rectifying the collapse of America’s industrial base, there’s no easy solution. “We’re a nose-to-the-grindstone type community. We rebuilt over time. There is no silver bullet,” said Lisa Wogan, director of marketing and business attraction at the Economic Alliance of Kankakee County.
In recent years, Kankakee has lost 300 jobs at agribusiness Bunge SA and 50 positions at chemical maker BASF. Fortunately, some of those cuts have been offset by an expansion of CSL Behring’s local pharmaceutical operation, which acquired Bungee’s old 74-acre site in 2017.
Coming in at No. 3 is Charleston, West Virginia – the capital of one of the states hardest-hit by the opioid epidemic. Adding to its problems, the state has been wracked by coal industry bankruptcies and poverty as well. In September, a poll by MetroNews Dominion Post revealed that 50% of West Virginians “say they have a friend or family member who has been addicted to prescription pain medications.” Four other cities in West Virginia made it on the brain drain list as well. They are Bluefield (No. 9), Huntington (No. 14), Weirton (No. 45) and Clarksburg (No. 46).
Thanks in no small part to the burgeoning US marijuana industry, the Colorado metropolitan areas of Boulder and Fort Collins have ranked as No. 1 and No. 2 on the index, while San Jose, located in the heart of Silicon Valley, ranks No. 3 in brain concentration.
- The Chinese Government Identifies Citizens By The Way They Walk
Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,
Communist Chinese authorities are using “gait recognition” technology to identify Chinese civilians by the way that they walk. The new technology uses body shapes and movement to identify people even when their face is not in the camera.
This dystopian big brother nightmare is quickly becoming a reality for the souls residing in the People’s Republic of China. Already used by police on the streets of Beijing and Shanghai, “gait recognition” is part of a push across China to develop artificial intelligence and data-driven surveillance that is raising concerns about how far the technology will go.
The software, built by a Chinese artificial intelligence company called Watrix, extracts a person’s silhouette from video and analyses the silhouette’s movement to create a model of the way the person walks. It can identify people from 50 meters away and requires no special camera to do so.
China is building a digital dictatorship to exert control over its 1.4 billion citizens. As if the “social credit” scoring system wasn’t terrifying enough, the country continues to cross the line with surveilling its own people.
“Gait analysis can’t be fooled by simply limping, walking with splayed feet or hunching over, because we’re analyzing all the features of an entire body,” said Watrix chief executive officer Huang Yongzhen.
“You don’t need people’s cooperation for us to be able to recognize their identity,” Huang added.
Huang is a former researcher and quite obviously an authoritarian control freak who said he left academia after seeing how promising the technology had become. He then co-founded Watrix in 2016, and his company was incubated by the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Though the software isn’t as good as facial recognition, Huang said its 94 percent accuracy rate is good enough for commercial use.
But not everyone is excited about being tracked and monitored while minding their own business. Shi Shusi, a Chinese columnist and commentator, said it was unsurprising the technology was catching on in China faster than the rest of the world because of Beijing’s obsession and emphasis on social control.
“Using biometric recognition to maintain social stability and manage society is an unstoppable trend,” he said.
“It’s great business.”
- The Social Cost Of De-Industrialization? 47,238 Gun Incidents In The U.S In 2018
There have been 47,238 gun incidents across the United States in 2018 — and thanks to Gun Violence Archive (GVA), a not for profit advocacy group offering information about gun-related incidents in the United States, they all presented in charts below.
As we reported last week, eleven people were killed, and at least six more were injured — including four law enforcement officers — when a gunman opened fire at a Pittsburgh synagogue Saturday morning.
“It’s a very horrific crime scene,” Alleghany Public Safety Director Wendell Hissrich told reporters during a press conference Saturday afternoon. “It’s one of the worst that I’ve seen.”
As the nation comes to grips with yet another mass shooting carried out by an angry man with a gun, the Anti-Defamation League, which tracks anti-Semitism in the U.S., said the attack was “likely the deadliest attack on the Jewish community in the history of the United States.”
“It is simply unconscionable for Jews to be targeted during worship on a Sabbath morning, and unthinkable that it would happen in the United States of America in this day and age,” the group wrote.
In 2018, including this weekend’s mass shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, there have been 47,238 gun-related incidents resulting in 11,991 deaths. GVA shows gun death concentrations are the highest in Northeast and Southeast regions.
Over 23,359 injuries from gun-related incidents were recorded so far this year.
Of the total gun deaths, 548 were children, while 2,321 were teenagers.
Mass shootings incidents in 2018 are heavily concentrated in the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic area.
Home invasions involving guns are mostly concentrated in Northeast and Southeast regions.
GVA shows gun-related defensive use incidents mainly occurred in the Southeast and Northeast area.
“There are, of course, arguments from staunch gun-rights supporters that an armed citizenry is a safer citizenry. Nothing stops a bad guy with a gun like a good guy with a gun, is a popular National Rifle Association talking point. And President Trump pondered aloud on Saturday whether guns inside the synagogue might have led to a less tragic outcome, said MarketWatch.
President Trump, asked about gun laws, says the Pittsburgh synagogue should have had armed security at the bris and the gunman wouldn’t be able to do what he did pic.twitter.com/y9Cq59wPM5
— Justin Fenton (@justin_fenton) October 27, 2018
While the data above certainly supports America could have a gun problem, we do not find it odd that most of the shootings have occurred in the Northeast and Southeast regions. Many of these areas have been de-industrialized over the years, which has resulted in widespread social and economic woes for its residents. It seems that the social costs of de-industrialization are finally being realized in gun-related violence.
- What Are The Chances America's Disunion Devolves Into Civil War?
Authored by Ian Morris via MarketWatch.com,
Strong rhetoric and violence on both sides of the political spectrum are reaching a fever pitch…
Is the United States on the brink of a new civil war?
According to Newsweek magazine’s polling, a third of all Americans think such a conflict could break out within the next five years, with 10% thinking it “very likely to happen.”
Plenty of experts agree. Back in March, State Department official Keith Mines told Foreign Policy magazine: “It is like 1859, everyone is mad about something and everyone has a gun.” He rated the odds of a second American Civil War breaking out within the next 10-15 years at 60%.
October’s awful events — pipe bombs sent to leading Democratic politicians and supporters, the mass shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh — have only amplified these fears. “We are now nearing a point comparable to 1860,” my Stanford University colleague Victor Davis Hanson recently wrote in the National Review.
The historian Niall Ferguson, another Stanford colleague, suggested in The Sunday Times of London that if someone were to design a “Civil War Clock” comparable to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ “Doomsday Clock,” the designer would probably now be announcing that it is “two minutes to Fort Sumter.”
Ferguson himself is more upbeat, thinking that “the time on the civil war Doomsday Clock looks more like 11.08 than 11.58.” It seems to me, though, that all these speculations are deeply misleading — so much so, in fact, that the main thing they illustrate is how not to use the past to understand the present.
Similarities, differences and broad patterns
There are certainly some striking similarities between the American political scene in the late 2010s and that of the late 1850s. Both periods saw extreme polarization over issues of intense economic and emotional importance. At both times, the country divided geographically, with more urban and educated regions leaning one way and more rural and less educated regions the other. In both periods, highly partisan media inflamed passions, sometimes brazenly peddling “fake news”; and at both stages, the country was recovering from a severe financial crisis.
It is all very alarming — but that does not put us minutes away from Fort Sumter. In the nearly four years that I have been writing columns for Stratfor, I have repeatedly drawn attention to a distinction that logicians like to make between “formal” and “relational” analogies. A formal analogy involves finding similarities between a case about which we know a lot (such as what happened in the United States at the end of the 1850s) and one about which we know less (such as what is just beginning to happen in the United States at the end of the 2010s), and extrapolating from them to variables that cannot be observed in the less well-known case — concluding, here, that if polarization, sectionalism, financial problems and political violence produced civil war in the 1850s, they will have the same result in the 2010s.
The problem with formal analogies is, of course, that no two cases are identical. The modern rage over globalization and its discontents does not come close to the moral intensity of the 19th-century arguments over slavery, while the consequences of the 1857 financial meltdown were nowhere near those of the 2008 collapse.
Even more striking, the forms of political violence in the two periods are very different. The 1850s experienced nothing like last month’s pipe bombs, the 2017 shooting of Republican Rep. Steve Scalise and three others or the 2011 shooting of Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and 18 others; and the 2010s have seen nothing like U.S. Rep. Preston Brooks’ near-fatal 1856 attack on Sen. Charles Sumner on the floor of the U.S. Senate, let alone the “Bleeding Kansas” insurrection of 1855-56 or John Brown’s raid on the federal armory at Harper’s Ferry in 1859.
The devil is in the details, which means that differences are just as important as similarities when we try to learn from the past. But how do we weigh up the pros and cons of comparisons? This is where the second kind of analogy comes in. Rather than cherry-picking convenient similarities and either ignoring or arguing away inconvenient differences, relational analogies begin from broad patterns in multiple well-known cases and proceed by understanding how a less well-known case fits into the larger structure. So, rather than wringing our hands over how much 2018 resembles 1860, we should be looking at how civil wars began in a wide range of different contexts, and then asking how well the late 2010s fit into that pattern.
Sufficient and necessary causes
The most obvious point is that the polarization/regionalism/financial crisis/political violence package is not just shared by 1850s and 2010s America. It was also common in many other eras that ended in civil war.
The English Civil War of 1642-51, for instance, was preceded by decades of comparable disturbances. The population split into “court” and “country” factions (nowadays more familiar as “Cavaliers” and “Roundheads”). Each had its own geographical base and religious affiliation, with High Church Royalists and Puritan Roundheads literally ready to mutilate and burn each other over their differences.
Distrust of institutions was even worse than in 2010s America: Royalists accused Parliamentarians of blasphemy and corruption, while Parliamentarians replied that Royalist corruption was even worse, and was magnified by the royal court’s sexual deviance and willingness to sell the country to foreigners. Throughout the 1630s, financial crises paralyzed government and political violence mounted. Pro-Parliament mobs murdered bishops and besieged royal favorites in their mansions, and, in the 17th-century equivalent of sending anthrax spores through the mail, a leading Parliamentarian received a package containing a rag soaked in pus from the sores of a plague victim. He suffered no ill effects — then as now, biological terrorism was difficult to do well — but within a year, the two sides would fight their first pitched battle.
The Roman Republic provides another classic case. In the 50s B.C., the political elite was deeply divided between what Romans called populares — men such as Julius Caesar, who presented themselves as champions of the masses — and optimates such as Pompey the Great, who claimed to stand for virtue, tradition and the nation as a whole. Webs of patronage and debt bound much of the population to one faction or the other. Escalating financial crises ruined cities and regions, and entire provinces lined up behind strongmen who claimed to be able to save them — Gaul with Caesar, Italy with Pompey. Politicians fortified their homes against mob violence, street gangs regularly stopped elections from being held and assassination became almost commonplace. The civil wars that began in 49 B.C. would leave millions dead.
However, although England and Rome provide alarming formal analogies, things get more complicated as soon as we start looking for relational analogies. While the polarization/regionalism/financial crisis/political violence package regularly leads to civil war, it does not always do so. In Rome, for instance, the package was in some ways even more prominent in the 130s B.C. than in Julius Caesar’s day. Tiberius Gracchus, usually seen as the first popularis politician, tried to cancel the debts of poor farmers and redistribute elite properties to them. A constitutional crisis ensued, splitting the ruling class. To conservatives, Gracchus seemed to be rallying the impoverished peasants of Etruria against Roman urban interests to make himself king. In political violence going far beyond Brooks’ assault on Sumner, a meeting of the Roman Senate in 133 B.C. ended with conservatives breaking up the wooden benches on which they sat and using the pieces to beat Gracchus and 300 of his followers to death. Twelve years later, his brother Gaius also died in political violence over much the same issues. Yet civil war did not erupt in either case.
Similarly, following Henry VIII’s break with the Roman church and dissolution of the Catholic monasteries in the 1530s, England experienced just as much polarization, regionalism, financial crisis and political violence as it would in the 1630s. However, it did not tip into civil war, although it came close. The United States was arguably almost as divided and haunted by political violence in the 1960s as in the 1850s, yet it too escaped civil war. We can only conclude that the polarization/regionalism/financial crisis/political violence package was not a sufficient cause for civil war in Rome, England or the United States.
Nor was it a necessary cause. In Rome and England at least, civil wars broke out in the absence of polarization, regionalism or financial crisis (although political violence is, by definition, always part of civil war). In A.D. 69, which became known as “The Year of the Four Emperors,” multiple civil wars convulsed Rome, but they were driven almost entirely by generals’ ambitions to seize the throne. Similarly, between 1135 and 1153, England was torn apart by such severe civil wars that the period came to be called “The Anarchy.” The violence was so extreme, one chronicler recorded, that “Men said openly that Christ and his saints slept”; yet the polarization/regionalism/financial crisis/political violence package was largely absent in the 1130s. A royal succession crisis and fragile state institutions were all it took.
The polarization/regionalism/financial crisis/political violence package that 2010s America shares with 1850s America can be present without leading to civil war, and civil wars can break out without the package being present. We can only conclude that these forces are neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for civil war. The dark prophecies of a second Civil War within the coming decade might well be nothing more than bad scholarship.
It’s the Army, stupid
So, the obvious questions: Why do the polarization/regionalism/financial crisis/political violence package and civil war sometimes go together and sometimes not, and will they go together in America’s short-term future?
Fortunately, the answer to the first question was worked out long ago, by the Roman historian Tacitus. Looking back on the Year of the Four Emperors some 50 years after the event, he recognized that “Now was divulged the secret of the empire — that emperors could be made elsewhere than Rome.” What he meant by this was that although the empire’s political institutions were all concentrated in the city of Rome, if the armies out in the provinces decided to intervene in the political process, they always had the final say. Rome lurched into civil war in 49 B.C. because Caesar and Pompey each had armies to back their political ambitions. It did so again in A.D. 69 because no fewer than four rivals found themselves in this position. It did not lurch into civil war in 133 B.C., though, because its mighty armies remained aloof from politics.
England stumbled into civil war in 1642 because it had no standing army at all. When relations between the Royalists and Parliamentarians broke down, each could safely set about raising its own armed forces with no fear that Leviathan would intervene and stop them. This was Thomas Hobbes’ central point in his 1651 masterpiece Leviathan; only a powerful government with terrifying armed force can scare people straight and deter them from using violence to pursue their own ends. Things had been even worse in 1135, because in addition to there being no strong central army, dozens of barons had their own private armies, which they gleefully unleashed on rivals. In the 1530s, by contrast, despite the mass uprising in defense of Catholicism known as the Pilgrimage of Grace, the barons largely remained loyal to Henry VIII and civil war was avoided.
When relations between Northern and Southern states broke down in 1861, the United States had more in common militarily with England in 1642 than with any of the other cases discussed here. It did have a professional army, but it contained just 16,367 men, and 179 of its 197 companies were stationed west of the Mississippi, so far from the initial areas of fighting as to render them irrelevant. In any case, one in five of the U.S. Army’s officers promptly resigned their commissions to join the Confederate states and thousands of noncommissioned men simply deserted and followed them. The government in Washington effectively had no army to enforce its will, and both sides — like King Charles I and the English Parliament in 1642 — had to set about raising forces almost from scratch.
Nothing could be less like the United States’ position in 2018. It has the most powerful and professional armed forces the world has ever seen, and there is absolutely no doubt about their loyalty to the legitimate government or commitment to the principle of civilian command. American soldiers, sailors and airmen do have political opinions, but they currently can be relied on to put their duty first. The United States therefore has far more in common with Rome in 133 B.C. than with any of the other cases. Even if U.S. senators start killing each other with chair legs, the armed forces will not take sides, other than to implement orders — so long as the orders are legitimate and legal — from their elected commander-in-chief.
When we look at the recent civil wars in Syria, Yemen and Libya, or at places such as Egypt where civil war has been averted, nothing matters so much as the stance and strength of the armed forces. We have to conclude that the American Civil War Doomsday Clock does not stand at two, or even 52, minutes to midnight. The very idea is ridiculous. So long as the armed forces remain true to their highest traditions, it will not matter how angry the American people get or how badly their politicians behave. There will be no second Civil War.
- China's First Drone Missile Boat On Display At Airshow China
Earlier this week, we reported how the 12th China International Aviation and Aerospace Exhibition (Airshow China) in Zhuhai, South China’s Guangdong province, is a traditional event for Beijing to demonstrate its expanding defense sector in front of world leaders and arms dealers from over 40 countries.
Throughout the week, state-run media has been releasing reports of defense exhibits and demonstrations of China’s next-generation of weapons.
In particular, what caught our attention on Thursday morning, is that China has developed an autonomous boat that can conduct reconnaissance missions and fire up to four image-guided missiles, said China Daily.
The drone boat, called the Liaowangzhe-2, is the country’s first and second globally to fire missiles successfully. Israel’s “Protector,” a drone ship, fired rockets during an exercise last year.
This is the first time that Liaowangzhe-2 has been released for public viewing and or allowed coverage by state-run media outlets.
Zhuhai-based shipping developer Oceanalpha, Xi’an Institute of Modern Control Technology and Huazhong Institute of Electro-Optics are Liaowangzhe-2’s shipbuilders, according to China Daily.
The vessel is 7.5 meters long and 2.7 meters wide, has a maximum speed of 45 knots. It can sail about 310 nautical miles at a rate of 22 knots. It is rated for all type of sea conditions leveled below rough, or waves below 2.5 meters high.
Liaowangzhe-2 is considered a reconnaissance and strike vessel, and it is equipped with a missile launcher on the bow with a maximum range of 5 kilometers under an image-aided terminal guidance system.
It seems that China has found a new autonomous vessel for reconnaissance and strike missions around its militarized islands in the South China Sea.
With trade war tensions spiraling out of control between Washington and Beijing, and the US continuing to sail its Arleigh Burke-class destroyers around the militarized islands — further angering China. Global trade momentum is rapidly slowing, with the risk of a full-blown trade war in 2019, which seems both world superpowers are preparing for the inevitable: a hot clash.
Maybe Beijing is indirectly warning Washington that the South China Sea is about to be flooded with rocket launcher drone boats as a deterrent.
Tensions are high, when trade stops, that is when a military conflict starts…
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