(no subject)

[pecunium]

In other places there has been discussion of civil war, of what happens if the center cannot hold.

I have some ideas on this (I'm against it. I've made several speeches against it at Making Light One (buried in a long thread, and lots of the pieces worth reading; in this context for more of my thinking on the subject. It's in the interplay between myself and Lance) and Two which is a specific comment on lots of things, some of which are going on; still).

So, in the event that peaceful means can't correct the course of state, and some more drastic means is employed... how do you see the situation resolving itself?

What happens should the body politic reache the breaking point and chooses to excercise its right to "alter or abolish," the Nation as it is presently configured?

I'll give my ideas later, when the rest of you have chimed in.

Comments

[elf]

"There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part, you can't even tacitly take part; and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all." --Mario Savio

I expect two common reactions:

1) A noticeable amount of "white mutiny" from people who are too caught within the political system to revolt outright, including in the military, which will disturb those who pay attention to such trends, but will go unremarked by the news media, because "soldiers who follow orders exactly" is not news. (Or because they're not sure how to report it.)

2) A lot of "slave tactics" from people outside of it--a lot of pretending to be stupid or careless (or just not being as careful as they are when they approve of a process), and a great many tiny "mistakes," with the thin hope of kicking off a "for the want of a nail" scenario.

A lot of tiny glitches in gov't offices from low-pay secretaries and interns who are dismayed at how things are going, and can't think of any way to *stop* it, but can hinder the process by misfiling forms, by "not noticing" that there's no signature on that one, by not checking the spelling on the address before hitting "send" on the email, and so on.

I predict an absolutely *stupendous* amount of tiny office fuckups in government settings... which will go entirely unreported, and indeed, unnoticed by the people responsible the current legal atrocities, except that they'll vaguely remember that office work went smoother before TWAT (The War Against Terrorism).

I don't think we'll get civil war in any meaningful, identifiable sense. We're too scattered; communication runs too quickly and travel too slow for traditional internal war patterns to get used. But I expect a few bits of absolutely genius hacking of gov't info sites, followed by bizarre crackdowns on anarchist geeks as "terrorists."

I don't think there's time before the next election to start concentration camps for noncriminal citizens, nor time to define large swaths of protestors as "criminals." But if 2008 goes R again, there might be time before 2012.