The Coming Second Civil War

By Steven Jonas

“They simply can’t treat this as a normal inauguration’: counterterrorism professionals warn violence could plague the country for months.” So reads the headline in a recent issue of Vanity Fair. The header goes on to say that “Extremists have likely been emboldened by the storming of the Capitol, and experts are worried about what will happen on Inauguration Day-and after.”

As Ms. Noa Yachot, the Guardian (UK) US membership editor, has said: “After last week’s attack on the Capitol, and with one week of Donald Trump’s presidency remaining, the spectre of political violence has an entire country on edge. Today, the Guardian published a look at what happened on 6 January – not just in Washington, but at state capitols across the country: ‘A guillotine outside the state capitol in Arizona. A Democratic governor burned in effigy in Oregon. Lawmakers evacuated as pro-Trump crowds gathered at state capitols in Georgia and New Mexico. Cheers in Idaho as a crowd was told fellow citizens were “taking the capitol” and “taking out” Mike Pence.’ “

There are now an increasing number of accounts of what actually went on in the Capitol during the insurrection, takeover-for-a-time, and the search for national leaders of both parties who were on the kill list of certain insurrectionists (as they were not shy about telling any observer). One of the most chilling recordings is that of a brave, what chillingly can be called war-correspondent, Luke Mogelson, for The New Yorker magazine. As David Remnick, the Editor-in-Chief of The New Yorker put is in his column “The Inciter-in-Chief,” “How surprising can Donald Trump’s recent provocation be when for years he has served as an inspiration to bigots everywhere?”

I am a supporter of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives in New York City, which is a vast collection of documents arising from the actions of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the US unit of volunteers that fought on the side of the Spanish Republic against the Spanish fascists, supported by the German Nazis and the Italian Fascists, in their eventual overthrow of the elected Republican government of Spain, 1936-39. Just the other day ALBA members were asked what we thought “The Lincolns” would say about the horrific events here. I responded so:

“I think that the Lincolns would have been very interested in the events of Jan. 6, and those leading up to it, since the (totally amateur) fascist’s loss on Nov. 3. That is because in my view, there is a civil war (no arms, yet) going on between that element of the US ruling class which believes that the way to hold on to and control state power is through the bourgeois democratic process and bourgeois Constitutional government and forces that believe that the only way to do so is to move to a fascist form of State Control. The fascist forces, of which serious leaders are people like Cruz, Hawley, and Bannon, are certainly ready to start taking over the State by force and violence, if they cannot get control of it by voting through the elections of 2022 and -24. Last Wednesday [1-6-21] was, in my view, a dress rehearsal. A recent column of mine on Trump and fascism (a topic on which I have written frequently since my first, in 2015, that was entitled “Hair Trump or Herr Trump?”) is found at click here.

As an article in Yahoo News said: “After ransacking the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, they walked down the building’s broad steps unmolested and into the mythology of right-wing extremism. Many wore shirts identifying them as acolytes of QAnon, riders in ‘the Storm’ who believe the fever-dream conspiracy that they are foot soldiers in a war against Satan-worshiping pedophiles in the government’s ‘deep state’ bureaucracy. There were also neo-Nazis and anti-Semites in the overwhelmingly white crowd, including a man wearing a ‘Camp Auschwitz’ sweatshirt. Racists rallied to the Confederate flag of rebellion that some of the insurrectionists waved in the halls of Congress.”

The central issue for virtually all of the folk who have been rallied by Trump, and his predecessors going back to the Deconstruction of Reconstruction that followed the election of 1876, is race. As is very well-known to virtually all readers of these columns, as well as those of many other historians, journalists, and liberal-to-progressive-to-radical politicians, that is, hardly an original thought (and well-summarized in Project1619, which makes the racists so very angry) the issue that has riven this country since the 17th century is that of race. It was then that the Doctrine of White Supremacy was developed in order to justify the institution of chattel slavery of, at first, Africans, and then of African-Americans. The central issue of First Civil War was, at its beginning at least, whether the institution of slavery would be allowed to expand unhindered into the rapidly developing Western Territories on the United States.

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Source: OpEdNews