Opinion: 'We Are Closer To Civil War Than Any Of Us Would Like To Believe,' New Study Says
- Washington Post, Dana Milbank, Dec. 17, 2021. - Edited. 'How Civil Wars Start,' by Barbara F. Walter.
If you know people still in denial about the crisis of American democracy, kindly remove their heads from the sand long enough to receive this message: A startling new finding by one of the nation’s top authorities on foreign civil wars says we are on the cusp of our own. Barbara F. Walter, a political science professor at the Univ. of CA at San Diego, serves on a CIA advisory panel called the Political Instability Task Force that monitors countries around the world and predicts which of them are most at risk of deteriorating into violence. By law, the task force can’t assess what’s happening within the U.S., but Walter, a longtime friend who has spent her career studying conflicts in Syria, Lebanon, Northern Ireland, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Rwanda, Angola, Nicaragua and elsewhere, applied the predictive techniques herself to this country. Her bottom line:
“We are closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe.” She lays out the argument in detail in her must-read book, “How Civil Wars Start,” out in January. “No one wants to believe that their beloved democracy is in decline, or headed toward war,” she writes.
But, “if you were an analyst in a foreign country looking at events in America- the same way you’d look at events in Ukraine or the Ivory Coast or Venezuela- you would go down a checklist, assessing each of the conditions that make civil war likely. And what you would find is that the U.S., a democracy founded more than two centuries ago, has entered very dangerous territory.” Indeed, the U.S. has already gone through what the CIA identifies as the first 2 phases of insurgency- the “pre-insurgency” and “incipient conflict” phases- and only time will tell whether the final phase, “open insurgency,” began with the sacking of the Capitol by Trump supporters on Jan. 6. Things deteriorated so dramatically under Trump, in fact, that the U.S. no longer technically qualifies as a democracy.
Citing the Center for Systemic Peace’s “Polity” data set- the one the CIA task force has found to be most helpful in predicting instability and violence- Walter writes that the U.S. is now an “anocracy,” somewhere between a democracy and an autocratic state. U.S. democracy had received the Polity index’s top score of 10, or close to it, for much of its history. But in the 5 years of the Trump era, it tumbled precipitously into the anocracy zone; by the end of his presidency, the U.S. score had fallen to a 5, making the country a partial democracy for the first time since 1800. “We are no longer the world’s oldest continuous democracy,” Walter writes. “That honor is now held by Switzerland, followed by New Zealand, and then Canada. We are no longer a peer to nations like Canada, Costa Rica, and Japan, which are all rated a +10 on the Polity index.”
Dropping 5 points in 5 years greatly increases the risk of civil war (6 points in 3 years would qualify as “high risk” of civil war). “A partial democracy is 3 times as likely to experience civil war as a full democracy,” Walter writes.
“A country standing on this threshold- as America is now, at +5- can easily be pushed toward conflict through a combination of bad governance & increasingly undemocratic measures that further weaken its institutions.”
The Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy put the U.S. on a list of “backsliding democracies” in a report last month. A new survey by the academic consortium Bright Line Watch found that 17% of those who identify strongly as Republicans support the use of violence to restore Trump to power, and 39% favor doing everything possible to prevent Democrats from governing effectively.
The question now is whether we can pull back from the abyss Trump’s Republicans have led us to. Democracy is the foundation of everything else in America. It is no exaggeration to say the survival of our country is at stake...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/12/17/how-civil-wars-start-barbara-walter-research/
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- Also: 'Republicans are plotting to destroy democracy from within.' Opinion, Capitol Attack, by Lawrence Douglas, The Guardian, Dec. 17, 2021. Opportunism and cowardice has more than sufficed to make Republicans espouse a noxious falsehood as an axiomatic truth.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/dec/17/republicans-plotting-destroy-democracy
= new reply since forum marked as read
The Christian Takeover of the U.S. Military
For years, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation has noted the growing efforts by evangelicals to turn the U.S. military into an instrument of their ideology and worldview. While not all evangelicals believe the same, the far more radicalized tend toward a belief called dominionism — a wish to turn America into a nation perhaps not run as a theocratic state but at least run by extreme Christian beliefs, the military included. Hence the reason Pence, with the help of the Family Research Council and the Heritage Foundation, produced a report full of bad anti-transgender science and myths in order to justify the ban. This is not the first time military policy and leadership have been guided not by military regulations and the law but by evangelical proselytizing and beliefs.
For instance, in 2005 it emerged that evangelical cadets at the U.S. Air Force Academy were being urged to proselytize their fellows, warning them they would burn in hell without Jesus. Other allegations included prayers during mandatory meetings, public shaming, and leaders teaching witness classes to cadets. At one point, 41 percent of non-Christian Air Force cadets reported unwanted proselytizing. The Military Religious Freedom Foundation discovered a video in 2006 used to promote Christian groups that was filmed inside the Pentagon and featured uniformed generals. An investigation found the film’s purpose was misrepresented by an Army chaplain and listed numerous violations of DOD policy. The Army has come under extensive criticism for the inclusion of a spiritual aspect in its Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program, which evaluates soldier readiness, and has been accused of veiling the religious element with ambiguous language. Reports continually surface of soldiers being denied or threatened with a ban on reenlistment if they do not include references to God (which by regulation are optional).
Full Interview – Powerful Christian Nationalists in Military See Trump as Vehicle for Authoritarian Religious State – Mikey Weinstein
Christian fundamentalist nationalists in the senior ranks of the military, see Trump as an instrument of God’s plan to create an authoritarian Christian state. The military allows active proselytizing and recruitment of soldiers, contrary to the constitutional separation of church and state. Many of these officers and soldiers were involved in the events leading up to and on Jan 6th, which has been described as an attempted coup. Mikey Weinstein of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation joins Paul Jay on theAnalysis.news
I’ve reported on many other sources that shared the same concern, so I won’t go over all that again here. But in the media coverage of the events leading up to, and including, the storming of Capitol Hill, while there’s been quite a bit of talk about the far-right, white supremacists, and Nazis, even by active and retired military leaders at the highest levels, there’s not been much focus on the extent this growing movement is made up of followers of Christian religious extremists, many of whom are openly for dropping the separation of church and state and making the military an army for their version of Christ.
In an interview I did with Joe Wilson in 2019, in fact it would be the last interview he did before he died, I spoke to Ambassador Wilson, who was the man who exposed the Niger uranium fraud that Bush and Cheney tried to use to justify the Iraq war. In the interview, I asked about the rise of religious extremism in the U.S. Military. Here’s the quote from Wilson: “For the evangelicals, not only is it a way for them to get back to the plains of Armageddon for the last great battle of the Apocalypse, but they’ve managed to use this as a way to infiltrate the highest ranks of the military and to try and convert the military from an organization focused on the defense, national security, and the constitution of the country, to a military force fighting for their vision of Jesus Christ. They have penetrated the Chaplain Corps in ways that are absolutely disgusting. The responsibility of the Chaplains was always to minister to the needs of soldiers and their families in times of need, either in hospitals, grieving, or whatever, not to impose their view of what the right religion should be. But now, these guys do not minister. They proselytize.” Then I ask, “How successful have they been in infiltrating the military?” Wilson answers, “Way too successful. We fight that every day.” I ask, “And you’re saying at the highest levels?” And Wilson says, “Oh, yeah. We were in the middle of a fight with a brigadier general who now runs a command and it’s all about Jesus. It’s all about his vision of Jesus. And I think we’re in the middle of a legal fight with him right now.” And I say, “Who’s we?” And Wilson says, “The Military Religious Freedom Foundation. I sit on the board with, among others, Larry Wilkerson. It’s run by a guy by the name of Mikey Weinstein, who’s Jewish, and who has suffered every possible indignity you could imagine from these evangelical nuts, including having dead rabbits thrown on his property and swastika signs painted on his wall. Yes, they’re very nasty. They’re a nasty crowd.” So that was all Joe Wilson, now back to me.
Q&A: "We're Dealing with a Christian Taliban"
Interview with Mikey Weinstein
Mikey Weinstein
Credit:Margery Epstein
WASHINGTON, Sep 7 (IPS) - Last month, the Pentagon pulled the plugon a plan to dispatch so-called "freedom packages" to U.S. troops in Iraq that included Bibles, proselytising materials in English and Arabic, and an apocalyptic computer game in which "soldiers for Christ" battle satanic "Global Community Peacekeepers".
The scheme was derailed in part because of the efforts of Mikey Weinstein, founder and president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, which seeks to protect the wall separating church and state in the United States armed forces.
Weinstein, in his own words, is no "bleeding-heart liberal". He is a 1977 honor graduate of the United States Air Force Academy, and spent 10 years in the Air Force as a "JAG" or military attorney serving as both a federal prosecutor and criminal defence attorney.
A registered Republican, he also spent over three years in the Ronald Reagan administration as legal counsel in the White House, where he helped investigate the Iran-Contra scandal.
“There are stark regional differences in the makeup of our military, with the South contributing more than its fair share of personnel and the Northeast largely lagging behind, with a few exceptions”
The civil war types need to huddle in close together and breathe deep. 
