So, lets say we get to August or some summer month, and 4,000,000 people are protesting right out front the white house.
Do they send in the tanks? Do they kill 1,000,000 people? Would republican civilians see empathy for the dead americans who were democrats? Or would it unite the nation like 9/11 did, except this time against the government?
It really depends on when this happens. If it would happen today, there would be bloodshed, but probably not on a Tiananmen level. The longer we wait, the more likely that the number of deaths is higher in such a case. Which makes it that much more important to act now (which, to be fair, is easy for me to say, considering I don’t live in the US).
In 1970, the National Guard opened fire on a crowd of peaceful, unarmed students, killing four and wounding nine more. A Gallup poll conducted a week after the shooting found that 58% of Americans blamed the students for the massacre, with only 11% blaming the guardsmen. Many students who were present at the massacre were shunned by their own families, some were even disowned, and some were told that even more students should have been killed to teach them a lesson.
The students, for their part, couldn’t even comprehend what was happening at first. Many of them thought the soldiers’ weapons were loaded with blanks, that they were just trying to intimidate them. After the massacre, many of the students wanted to reassemble and continue peacefully demonstrating, in defiance of the guard. One of the professors convinced them to disperse, by shouting at them that all of them would be killed.
How was it possible for the public to see it that way? Because of how the media spun it. Even before the massacre, they were saying that the protests were full of “outside agitators” and claiming that they had been doing things like lacing the water supply with LSD. Of course, it eventually “came out” that these claims were complete bullshit based on nothing. So, once the moment had passed, they quietly printed retractions.
All that shit still happens today. It happens every single time a cop murders someone, whether it’s Renee Good or George Floyd. The right wingers immediately start digging for any possible way to spin it and if they can’t then they simply lie, and if the lie falls apart it doesn’t matter, by that point people will have forgotten and moved on.
Yes they will kill you. They’ll put people down like dogs and worry about how to justify it later. People want to believe the world is just, and that often means blaming the victim. They’ll do it and they’ll get away with it too.
Buy a gun.
No, what the hell, don’t buy a gun for that reason. That will only escalate the violence. And there’s only so far that you can escalate as a civilian until they roll out the tanks, and your guns can’t do shit against tanks.
You need power in numbers. That’s how you can build a proper resistance.
Everybody keeps expecting civil war when what we’re likely going to get is akin to “the troubles” of Northern Ireland. Prolonged, indefinite, bloody, insurgency. Bombings. Assassinations. More heavyhanded fascist paramilitary actions. Blood and chaos.
Yep, there is no organization capable of staging armed opposition to the government. A series of mass shootings and maybe some explosives is all we are going to get.
Given the number of incidents, I wouldn’t be shocked if historians decide later we are already living through it. Political assasinations in Minnesota, the attempted murder of pelosi’s husband, attempted trump shooter, charkie Kirk, the car bomb in Memphis that didn’t go off a few years ago. The United Healthcare CEO hit. Attempted kidnapping of Gretchen Whitmer.
There is plenty of violence to go around, but nothing that would rise to civil war.
I have imagined a scenario where a debt crisis degrades the capacity of the federal government and polarization leaves citizens and national guard more loyal to their state than the federal government, but we are a long way away from that.
I agree. To have civil war you need multiple opposing armed forces of somewhat similar military strength. I don’t really see that happening because of the purges of military leadership but an insurgency is very possible.
Agreed, civil war will only happen if states bands together and starts fighting each other or the federal armed forces.
What we’ve seen so far has been almost too small to be called skirmishes. The intensity and size of the confrontations will likely increase, but it won’t be civil war.
At the end of the day, the die hard MAGA folks are a quarter of the country. The stuff they’re doing is wildly unpopular. At some point you have to fight for democracy. It is worth dying for. It is worth killing for. If we have to go through a troubles, so be it. Frankly, this probably isn’t going to end until we start seeing a whole lot of dead Evangelical Christians. The Christian nationalists are so used to being able to violently oppress and persecute everyone else. They don’t realize that their own lives and freedoms can be just as easily destroyed.
We already are in a civil war. One portion of the population has declared war on everyone else, hell bent on forcing their evil beliefs on everyone else. They do so in the confidence that they themselves will never face persecution, the loss of their rights, or a threat of violence. White Evangelical Christians are way too fucking comfortable.
Honestly, a troubles might be the best thing to knock some sense into these fuckers. Once the retaliatory killings start and their churches start getting torched, maybe it will finally get through their thick skulls that if you want to live in a democracy, you have to be willing to respect other people’s choices and let them live their own fucking lives.
The troubles ended because both sides felt threatened. No one felt safe. This encouraged everyone to come to the table. Right now one side feels invincible. They believe they can act with complete impunity against the rest of the population. So far, we’re all just holding our punches and trying not to escalate things, but these fuckers just keep pushing. Something will have to give.
Mutual bloody violence is a superior option to one-sided bloody violence, which is the situation we have now.
Incredibly fucked up to think there’s any upside to the troubles. Typical clueless yank energy.
As someone who lived through the Troubles, there were clearly upsides vs the country we had before.
The civil rights movement grew at a pace, the police service was completely revamped, and cross community relations improved dramatically. Most importantly, we largely stopped killing each other.
There was nothing good in the Troubles, but what came out of it was undoubtedly better than what had been there before.
We then ask was this due to the troubles, or was it a progression held back by the troubles.
It was deeply rooted systemic shitting on that was going nowhere.
Would it have been better if there was violence, but only one side was violent?
Peace happens when both sides have a motive to achieve peace. You cannot have a peace treaty when only one side is willing to use force.
Three sides were using force. The republicans and unionists were mainly occupied with using violence against their own people suspected of “disloyalty”. As usual, regular people were the big losers.
People forget that labor unions were a major factor in Tiananmen Square, US labor unions are not a credible threat to take over so don’t need to be put down as brutally.
They used to be.
America bombed its own city 40’ish years ago, and the entire country just moved on without a care. And about 60 years before that, almost forty city blocks were razed to the ground because the inhabitants were black.
Yes, they 100% could risk it. America is an extremely propagandized country, with patriotism on the right reaching jingoistic levels.
What was the name of the event where the US bombed itself 40’ish years ago?
The MOVE bombing in Philadelphia. Also against black people, by the way.
Thank you! Im gonna research it now!
This thread is actually really depressing.
“Would republican civilians see empathy for the dead americans who were democrats?”
You mean a couple hundred paid agitators that were bussed up from asylums in south America?
Because that’s the story your average republican voters would believe. I know it’s a bit hyperbolic but some of the shit I’ve heard them say about Mrs Good, and in general about the current protests leads me to feel that there is no limit to the lies an average republican voter is willing to suck down.
All that said I do not believe the military would follow those orders, but I’m not sure they would interfere if the DOJ started killing protesters in front of them.
Do they send in the tanks?
You don’t use tanks in a city. You use machine guns.
Do they kill 1,000,000 people?
If they can, probably
Would republican civilians see empathy for the dead americans who were democrats?
Ask yourself how many people in the US showed empathy for the Gazans.
Or would it unite the nation like 9/11 did, except this time against the government?
Lol no, the US is a terminally propagandised country. Iraq has WMDs, Venezuela has drugs, free healthcare is bad somehow, Israel is not genociding the Palestinians, etc. etc.
I’m still surprised that all of the January 6 insurrectionists could just storm the capitol building without being shot. They were breaking into the main building that had all of our lawmakers in it at the time, and only one of those morons was shot. Only the stupidest one. The queen of morons.
And did you notice what happened after that idiot was shot and killed? Nobody else tried to go through that window.
Wasn’t there an incident where Pelocy was begging for the national guard to be called in? Or maybe one of the cabinet members. And Trump kept declining.
So the only people to do the shooting were the limited number of capital police. I don’t think they’re set up for riot defense and it’s a lot to ask them to individually put their lives on the line by just shooting into the crowd.
The other night, I was eating lunch at my desk, in our small open office. The IT guy and one of the robot techs were debating whether the summary execution of Alex Pretti was justified. IT guy believes the government’s version of events, suggesting that Alex brandished his firearm (which is patently false). They openly support the state’s murder, and further, encourage it. It might be a bit difficult to get them to go along with a massacre, but they’ve already been walked through 2 murders, and are primed for more.
Would something like this ever happen? Hope not. But if it does, god help us all.
I’ve checked out from trying to advocate for the truth. You cannot reason with someone who is arguing in bad faith. The blatant disregard for the live’s lost, instead focusing on proving a point to justify the theft of those live’s. It’s gross. How anyone can look at the system that has been fully exposed in front of them and say More of that! blows my mind. But those are the people that will backup Trump if such a thing happened.
I don’t think IT guy, or at least the equivalent people in my life, would be supportive to the point that they would actively involve themselves in a shooting war in support of Trump, which is what this hypothetical scenario would turn into.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned about conservatives it’s that they will start to pay attention once something impacts them personally. They are fine with the lies when it’s about some abstract person some other place but when it involves someone they know or happens in their town they will change their tune quickly. Of course not all of them but enough to matter. These kinds of people prioritize familiarity and perceived stability over just about anything else. As long as things are stable enough that they can maintain most of their routines they won’t think too deeply about anything. This kind of event, and the ensuing chaos, would force them to take a deeper look at things in a way that they’re currently too comfortable to be forced to confront.
I don’t think IT guy, or at least the equivalent people in my life, would be supportive to the point that they would actively involve themselves in a shooting war in support of Trump, which is what this hypothetical scenario would turn into.
He wouldn’t have to, the army and the police would do the shooting.
Kent State says yes
They can’t risk it. Too many people could record it so they couldn’t control the narrative.
They’ve done it before. They’ll do it again.
Hard disagree. Their base will believe anything.
If we set up gas chambers in Florida some people would be insisting they were harmless showers while they were being forced into them.
Too many people recorded the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti for them to control the narrative, but all that happened was that one guy got demoted.
It is building political pressure against them, they’re very clearly uncomfy within the administration. It may not directly fix all our fucked up shit but the admin blinked for the first time this cycle when it was looking increasingly likely that they had no limit and we were headed straight for a police state.
We survived last time by keeping them consistently on the defensive and for the first time we’ve managed to control the narrative again
It’s not over yet. I choose to believe this is the turning point.
Do you think they care? Dude they’re shooting unarmed women in the face in broad daylight in front of thousands of witnesses and on video.
And just imagine, the heartless coward that did it isn’t facing charges and gets to lie down in his own bed every night and walk up the next day.
Yep
No consequences so far
Civil wars have started over less than this
Civil wars require 2 sides capable of taking power.
IIRC they moved Ross out of state. So yes, he’s not in jail but he’s not exactly lounging at home either.
Based on the reaction to all of this, it’s kinda clear they do not give a shit. So we’ll see how the all plays out.
It wouldn’t be the first time we’ve bombed Americans in the US.
False flag incoming
Don’t confuse United States with Trump. Trump would risk it
Like it or not, the distinction is meaningless to people outside of the US
People have been calling U.S Americans dumb cunts for decades, Trump is the embodiment of the U.S.A as viewed by outsiders.
Trump wanted to literally bomb protestors last term. There is some report on a call where he wanted to do it. Just drop a missile on them.
