Podcast Warriors Predicting Civil War Are Really Fantasising About Pogroms
The right are in a froth over suggestions by an academic that society will fracture within five years. People who should know better are promoting the idea. Killing your neighbours is not fun
EVEN BEFORE Elon Musk’s “Civil war is inevitable” post, there has been a lust among right-wingers for internal conflict in the United Kingdom. The deranged idea seems to be gaining even more currency among a certain section of the population.
Some people are gagging for a breakdown of society.
It is reminiscent of the time a decade or so ago, when austerity began to bite after the banks were bailed out and the poor and middle earners picked up the tab. Then, it was a different refrain, usually trotted out by left-wingers from genteel backgrounds.
“I don’t understand why people aren’t taking to the streets/rioting.” It was said to me scores of times over the years in various forms and I used a similar reply in every circumstance. “What people? Why not you? What’s stopping you?
“Or would you rather stay at home watching black and working-class kids do the dirty work while you cream your kex in front of the telly?”
Harsh, I know, but I wasn’t having it. Only those who’ve never choked on tear gas or felt a robocop’s baton could be so glib about rioting. It’s not as much fun as it looks.
Back to the civil war ultras. In March, a podcast featuring David Betz, Professor of War in the Modern World at King's College London, sent shock waves of excitement across the right. Betz claims that Britain is particularly vulnerable to internal anarchy and it could arrive (gasp) in the next five years. The host of Maiden Mother Matriarch, Louise Perry, gushes at these fantastic claims with unseemly glee. She released the pod from behind her paywall so we all could hear it.
It makes for unhappy listening for anyone with a grasp on reality. Very quickly, it becomes clear that Betz, a Canadian who advises the British government on terrorism, is a less than trustworthy source. He makes good points about the delusional nature of the British self image: “I think that there is a fracture in British national self-conception and material British reality,” he says. Then, he undermines it with a ridiculous assertion. “…We've educated ourselves now for coming on two generations on the validity of our various national myths, all of which now are either considered invalid or indeed to be disreputable or shameful.”
All of which? All? The Battle of Britain? I’d expect he mean the reappraisal of the empire a less than entirely benevolent entity. You wait for the word ‘woke’ but it never comes. Yet there are uglier giveaways.
Betz refers to the “industrial rape gang revelations.” He is correct to use the term rape rather than ‘grooming gangs.’ But the word industrial is problematic in the extreme. The Holocaust is often described as the “industrialised mass murder” of Jews and other targets of the Nazis. There is good reason for this. The methods used in the death camps attempted to apply production-line techniques on dehumanised groups to limit human contact with the killers. It turned out that genocide wasn’t as easy as everyone expected and mass murderers had too many nervous breakdowns if there was too much interaction with the victims. This was particularly pronounced among members of the Einsatzgruppen units in the early days of the second world war and the German learnt their lesson from this.
Other giveaways come thick and fast. Betz talks about Britain’s “failure to secure its borders against what can only be described as a large-scale border raid.” The only way?
He is talking about small boats arriving on the south coast. In the seven days between March 19 and 25, the office for national statistics counted 1,654 people attempting to cross the channel without permission.
They are asylum seekers. Raid implies violence and destruction. The vast majority of those who cross the channel put themselves in the hands of the authorities when they hit the beaches. This is appalling and manipulative use of language by someone whose position should imply trust.
Things get surreal when he talks about “Feral Cities.” This is a concept created by the American military to describe urban areas that are ungovernable. Mogadishu in Somalia is the extreme end of the spectrum but Betz contends that a number of British cities are in danger when measured on the same metric because of “government corruption, no-go zones and negotiated police control.”
When anyone mentions “no-go zones” in the context of British life, it should set off alarm bells. It’s code for “I don’t feel comfortable in districts which are not overwhelmingly full of white people.” Despite what social media tells you, no-go zones do not exist in the UK.
The truth is simple: Mogadishu is on the same spectrum as London in the same way that I’m on the same wealth spectrum as Musk.
Why would an academic look to the Somalian capital for comparisons? Probably because the UK had been so stable and has had nothing close to a civil war since Cromwell chopped off Charles’s head. Oh, hang on…
To be fair, Betz has heard of Northern Ireland. The Troubles get 300 or so words and a minute and a half in a discussion that extends to more than 12,000 words and almost 90 minutes. Wouldn’t that be a better jumping off point from a discussion about a potential civil war?
Well, white people killing other white people from similar religious backgrounds doesn’t quite have the resonance that ethnic cleansing and anti-Islamic rhetoric carries for the target audience. Betz frames the coming conflict in terms of urban v rural (non-whites in the cities, whites in the countryside) and predicts attacks on infrastructure will be a component of the mainland’s future troubles. “Psychologically, he says, “it’s a lot easier to get people to attack stuff than it is to attack other people.”
The lesson of Northern Ireland is how easy it is to kill your neighbours. There are so many parallels to learn from: a disadvantaged minority finding its voice, a majority losing its traditional power and sensing a demographic shift and authorities that seemed unable to adapt to the changing environment.
A conversation that references the Boudicca (“I’m surprised that we don't hear a lot more about the Boudiccan revolt”), the Peasants’ Revolt, Latin American dirty wars and uses the disabling of ULEZ cameras as an example of destroying infrastructure, verges on risible. But it’s dangerous. Silly, but dangerous.
The host joins in to reinforce the ULEZ point. “The people who are particularly likely to have to pay it [the ULEZ charge] are displaced working-class Londoners who have been displaced by demographic change and now live outside of the borders,” she says. “That group are particularly displeased by the wider demographic change in that basically the white working classes have been displaced from London.”
Mmmm. Nothing to do with them buying their council houses on the cheap during the great Thatcher sell-off of British assets, cashing in on the subsequent profits and moving out to the leafy suburbs, then? To be fair to Perry, she’s probably grown up hearing this history being rewritten as ‘white flight’ by those who benefited from Thatcherism in the short term but are feeling a greater sense of alienation by the year as they realise that the nation’s core industries were hawked around to foreigners as part of the same process that allowed them to buy council property.
There is little sense of perspective beyond the past decade. “I think our context is different from the past now in some important ways,” Betz says. “I’m not really drawing so much on history.” No shit.
The professor makes some good points but there is a clear political agenda in his words. He cites the aftermath of the Brexit referendum as a significant point in people losing trust in government, suggesting that the “elites” tried to block the exit from Europe against the will of the people. This rather forgets that there was no landslide vote in favour of leaving the EU: 52-48 is a split decision, not a mandate. The “will of the people” myth has been one of the most corrosive features of British politics.
Of all the examples of police overreaction and the erosion of trust in the authorities, he chooses Tommy Robinson’s arrest. Betz must know the impact of his words.
The Reform voters lapping up podcasts like this don’t really want a civil war. They want pogroms. They want ethnic cleansing. They want their country back and imagine it will take a blood sacrifice. As long as it’s not their blood.
What do they want it back from? At the last census more than 81 per cent of the population defined themselves as white. You might not know it listening to the avalanche of propaganda, but that’s a huge majority. Whiteness is not in danger.
The people under threat are minorities. How many of this 81 per cent have a huge hard-on for civil war anyone’s guess. Too many, one suspects. But not enough to fulfil Betz’s perverse fantasies.
Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is having an appalling impact on the United States. But listening to Betz talk about working for the British government makes you yearn for a domestic DOGE. Paying the good professor from the public purse for these sort of insights while benefits are being cut suggests a society seriously out of kilter.
So let’s get this clear. If this “civil war” comes, it will be ugly, the groups with the least economic power will suffer the most and bullying by the majority – which happened in Northern Ireland for most of the 20th century – will expose the ugliest side of the national character. The Brexit vote cemented the idea on the mainland that a simple, tiny majority legitimises policies that a very substantial minority find appalling.
If the civil war/pogram comes, where will Betz and Perry be? My guess is nowhere near the front lines. They’ll be sitting in front of televisions shivering with vicarious thrills. Lord save us from dinner party – or podcast – warriors.
My novel Collusion deals with similar themes to this piece. Read chapter one on substack