My guest today is David Betz, Professor of War in the Modern World at King's College London, and specialist in the study of insurgency and counterinsurgency, information warfare, cyberwarfare, and propaganda.
Passed through Heathrow early this month. I usually find the Yookay multicultural and gender diverse posters risible and naff, but this time I felt I was looking at propaganda from a regime that has no legitimacy and that hates me. Worst of all was the picture of a clearly Arab Muslim man in full floor length robes and turban that bore the caption 'Faces of Britain'. I'm a professional middle class man, a Christian, married to someone from another country who wouldn't be characterised as 'White British'. I have two daughters in their tweens and I love my country and want it to have a great future - but the rage that regularly arises in me when I see all this shit makes me either want to burn it all down and start again or flee somewhere else. The water has finally got too hot for this frog not to notice.
Hello Paul, I also have a young daughter and a foreign wife. And also prone to episodes of rage.
I walked home from school aged 7 onwards. It taught me independence, and I wanted the same for my daughter.
But once she starts school I will need to be at the gates as she enters and leaves, in order to deter the very credible threat from predators cruising these places looking for girls, while the police look the other way.
In other words, she now needs a male chaperone while outside.
How we got here, I don’t know. Boiling frog indeed. Little by little, browbeaten by small humiliations, until we lose the courage to resist.
I would probably have left by now, but family commitments keep me here.
But there is another reason too. This is the only place on the planet we can truly call home. We can move somewhere else and call it home, but that doesn’t make it so.
This little patch is all we’ve got. If we lose it we are homeless, like the last kid in a game of musical chairs. We don't seem to get that.
I was in the UK recently and saw the "Faces of Britain" in passing... one was literally a woman in a niqab. Couldn't even see her actual face 🤣 I really thought, wow, you can't make this sh*t up. I laugh but I don't even find it funny, it feels like a large-scale, extremely cruel trolling of the population. I think this kind of stuff is going to radicalize more and more "normal" people.
You sound like my husband. We are also a couple, he's white English and I'm of dual heritage. White German mother and Black 1st generation father. My parents met whilst my father was serving in the Army and was stationed over there. We live in Birmingham which I would describe as one of those cities Matt discusses in this podcast, I can't remember the exact term. The instability is clear here. Our Council is effectively bankrupt, there are sections of the city that are self governed, which I would argue are now no go zones and there is no shared idea or culture. Needless to say, we are planning to move within the next 18 months.
My husband loves his Country and is clearly not a racist but when he sees the day to day bastardisation of Britain, he is enraged. He feels not listened to and refuses to have our 2 daughters grow up in a city where our Local MP Tahir Ali is asking for blasphemy laws. It's a appalling and based on the information in this podcast it won't be a surprise when the silent majority will feel it necessary to take things into their own hands.
Until recently I just cynically gave it the side eye y’know. But since Southport and the resurfacing of the grooming gang stories.. man it feels like I’m being goaded. I don’t want to leave this land - my ancestors fought and died for it. I’m Lancastrian (north of the sands) but I’ve got Manx, Welsh and Scots ancestry as well as Cumberland and Westmoreland. I don’t want to leave, why should I? I’m living in Surrey and there is a different sense of Englishness here, but it’s still a land that somehow calls to me as home.
That psychological insight that it’s much easier to make people attack things rather than people was amazing to hear. And disturbing, since attacking things like infrastructure can harm more people indirectly than attacking people directly.
Honestly, I think this is the best podcast Louise has ever recorded on this show, I don’t know think I’ve ever learnt so much new knowledge from a single episode, military intelligence and strategy is fascinating to learn and think about, I’m thankful David could introduce it to a lot of us, albeit in a darker context of conversation.
Thanks Louise. Fascinating & disturbing conversation. I have all sorts of follow-up questions for David. Any chance of us followers submitting questions & then you get him back to address them? E.g.
- Are large political changes impossible... or just too late now? With the re-election of Trump, it (so far) looks like a sea-change in the political environment in the U.S. And here in Europe the AfD is starting to seriously influence politics in Germany. Is it not possible that there could be a large political shift here in the UK within the next few years which could bring about very different policies & defuse much of the frustration? Or have we really gone too far already?
- What about inter-ethnic conflict? David talks about the majority white population's anger at the political elites/the state, and that that anger would initially be expressed through e.g. attacks on state infrastructure. He also sees it taking the form of country vs city. But what about *inter-ethnic* conflict, which seems equally plausible to me? Or if that's just a later stage of a series of escalating steps, how does he see the steps playing out?
- Aren't we too old for this? Early on you brought up the age profile of the UK, along with the common view that civil wars can't happen in a country where so many people are old. David said that was mere conventional wisdom & not true. But he didn't really elaborate. Is the age profile of a country completely irrelevant to civil war? And how would the age profile of the UK affect the way any conflict would play out?
- 'Downgrading' was a key idea i.e. the majority population feeling that it's losing its position & feeling defensive & angry about that. In other words, the main impetus for conflict comes from *the majority*. Since recent terrorism, attacks & large-scale protests (e.g. pro-Palestine) have been almost entirely Muslim, I've always thought that if things really started to break down it would be Muslims kicking things off & harassing non-Muslims on a much larger scale. Of course one doesn't preclude the other. But how does David see this playing out?
Anyhow, just thought I'd put these questions out there. Thanks for the very good conversation.
Take the Pakistanis that dominate my town, for example. How do we fight a very tight-knit group that can communicate and organise in a different language?
And when the fighting starts, what if they can access weaponry? In a country with few guns, a shipping container of AK47s goes a long way.
There may already be plans afoot, probably financed with a government small business grant.
Bear in mind inciting civil war in the West is an explicit aim of many Islamic terror groups, so I don't think this is far-fetched.
How will the state attempt to contain this? Our army is dwarfed by the size of the Muslim diaspora, probably outnumbering them a thousand to one. Our police have fat arses, the men too.
I have noticed the mood is definitely changing though. I often speak to working class men. We will exchange remarks, as if testing the water. It's like we're all getting ready.
Once the fighting starts and the impotence of the state becomes clear, it's possible that regional militia could spring up quickly to police our local areas and maintain order.
Remember all the coercion and conformity around masks and social distancing? Misplaced on that occasion, but evidence of the urge to unite for a cause. It will be a test of what social capital remains.
This is a massive if, but if we can organise quickly, dismiss the government and get the army onside, we could minimise the violence by sheer weight of numbers.
Probably pie in the sky. As a nation we're in uncharted territory now, so it's anyone's guess what happens next. But something will certainly happen, and it won't be nice. We'd better get ready, like he said.
My focus now is on building a sense of community with my neighbours. We live on the fringes of downtown Karachi, so in the firing line when things erupt. We need to feel we have something worth fighting for.
Yes, I kept waiting for the explicit discussion of this aspect, and it never really came. From what I saw on social media, the Southport riots involved groups of Muslims vs. groups of white people. This seems like it would be a big part of any future civil war in the UK.
It is the only reasonable pattern for any civil war. I expect the Sikhs and Hindhus would fight with the native Brits but how many of the native Brits (and moderate Moslems) would join in with the 'peace loving tolerant' Islamists
Hi Toby, I can’t answer as well as David obviously, but with respect to age, I’d point you to Donbas in Eastern Ukraine. Despite demographic decline for some decades it seems they still had enough young people to start shooting at each other.
It is only the only way out if we start when we are still numerous (and well armed and tough) enough to win. Anything else and we will end up as, at least, the subclass in Britain.
I’ve been listening on and off to this podcast for a few months. This was a fascinating interview. It convinced me to become a paid subscriber. America vice-president Vance recently expressed concerned about a future Islamic takeover of Britain, with Islamists gaining control of Britain’s nuclear weapons. At the time, I dismissed it as just another crazy comment from MAGA world. But this podcast makes me wonder if it isn’t as preposterous as it seems. If Britain did plunge into civil unrest that spiraled out of control, another very real possibility to consider is American military intervention in Britain. After all, the prospect of a major European ally with nuclear weapons such as Britain or France falling into civil war would be a direct threat to American national security.
Yes, and that is frightening! However, Pakistan probably doesn’t have the same launch capabilities as Britain. Moreover, Pakistan is of no economic or cultural significance to the United States. Britain and France for that matter are quite important.
The one simple thought that keeps bumping around in my mind since listening: thank God for our 2nd Amendment and all the groups who lobby for our access to semi-automatics. Controversial to say but has to be said. Not sure how things will go for y’all without an armed citizenry
More American soldiers in the Iraq War died of cheap, easy to make roadside IEDs than died from small arms fire. If people no longer see their government as legitimate and civil unrest breaks out in Britain, the lack of guns among the populace won’t necessarily prevent violence.
The comment that stands out above all the alarmist speculation is that the British State has lost legitimacy. For all our lives and generations before we have taken for granted that a social contract whereby we obey laws and pay taxes and in return the State will protect us and our children and our property and provide a safety net against ill health and misfortune. What happens when the State doesn’t meet its side of the bargain?
I don't want a civil war, of course, but I do feel one is almost inevitable. And as it is then surely better to have it sooner when the native Brits are still the majority. If we wait till our Uniparty Governments have finished inviting in huge numbers of immigrants then we will likely be unable to mount any defence and will just acquiesce to wearing burkas, worshipping Allah etc.
Years ago I laughed at a friend who warned me about this (when Brits must have still been 90%+ of the population). I am definitely not laughing now!
For example, one big blind spot which I try to point out to leftists I speak to, is that if the re-emergence of “fascism” is your biggest concern, then surely the Dems in the US are the bigger risk, with their affinity for the Maidan Revolution and Ukraine War, tech censorship and the “intelligence community”?
Sure we are all aware of this but just in case..... We can be fairly sure that our Elites are reading these comments and marking out the 'troublemakers'.
Sounds grim and not something that is known in New Zealand with its small population. There is enough living space for everyone here. It’s true that wealthy individuals and entities have indeed acquired significant amounts of land in New Zealand. But plenty still left. And the Government has created two new ‘active’ investor visas. Five million minimum over three years and ten million over ten years. The money must be invested directly into NZ businesses. Residency is thrown in. Might be attractive for cashed up wealthy professionals.
This was very interesting. Even if I only got halfway through on my commute this morning. However, I would have liked Mr Betz’ opinion on what Americans call “the Deep State” but the fictional Sir Humphrey Appleby would prefer to call “her Majesty’s Civil Service”. In particular, the fact that both the British and American state apparatus have significant experience in fomenting “colour revolutions” in various parts of the world.
In this world of increasing politicisation of institutions, is there not some risk of these “chickens coming home to roost”?
After this podcast I'm left wishing he had elaborated more on what he said. He went so far, then stopped.
For example, let's say the city infrastructure is attacked, as he described. This sounds very plausible. He mentioned gas and electricity, but not water, which is also rather important. But anyway, so essential supplies are cut, then what typically happens next? Surely someone workmen (sorry, workpeople) show up in a truck and fix the damage, as they would after a storm etc.
Or they show up to fix it and are threatened or attacked, as per the asylum hotels in Ireland. So police/military show up to secure the area while repairs are done.
Then somewhere else is attacked while they are busy fixing that. We are now assuming a level of rational thought, emotional control, and organisation beyond the ULEZ example. How does this entity organise while avoiding the attention of the state? Bear in mind we get done for saying men aren't women.
But let's assume they exist and they have a plan. So they launch an attack that overwhelms the various emergency services and the city becomes unliveable. This must have happened countless times before. So what typically plays out next? Do the vulnerable (old, young, women) voluntarily leave first, and if so where to? English people are more likely to have connections outside of cities, whereas immigrants and their descendants will bolt to their relatives in nearest immigrant area.
What then becomes of all the young men who are up for a fight, and now have a town or city to themselves? Do they just drive back and forth up the M6 while all this is going on?
I realise he can't know all this because there are so many moving parts, but there must be patterns to observe from situations similar to ours.
I suppose for me the key question is state control. Fighting a chronic insurgency is one thing, but losing the monopoly on violence is another. If the state loses the ability to project power onto a situation, then very bad things can happen, very quickly. This is what worries me the most.
But I also worry that our political system is not designed to deal with the situation we are now in. Take our bodies, for example. It has systems to maintain our core temperature. We get cold, we shiver; we get hot; we sweat. But it only works within a certain range, and beyond that we are past the point of no return.
I think this is where we are now politically. Our system has evolved over centuries to the point it only needed to make small tweaks to keep things stable, but that won't work anymore. So if that's true, what happens next? Increasing state control to head off revolution, thus exposing themselves as tyrannical and impotent, thus feeding the fires for revolution. Where does this spiral lead? Historical examples must exist.
I wonder if we just end up like Terry Gilliam's Brazil; random explosions and infrastructure collapses that no-one knows are terrorism or incompetence; anarchotyranny writ large with rape and sexual assault, low level theft, fly tipping going unpunished in non-white areas and left to 'community' justice contrasted with efficient and merciless application of force on minor infractions carried out by anyone not under the umbrella of 'community' justice. Doubling down on the twee bollocks like Paddington and Richard Curtis movie worlds, more propaganda on every soap and media outlet - but a huge crackdown on anything considered subversive (see Prevent's 'far right' starter kit of Tolkien, Lewis, Dickens, Shakespeare and Beowulf), every historical drama has to have an incongruously cast anachronistic black or queer character. They'll do for the farming industry - as identified the rural areas offer resistance to the 'Yookay' state, they'll fuck the economy so thoroughly we will have to accept that we will euthanise our grannies or go bankrupt. If you want a vision of the future its being patronised by the 'lesbian nana' police woman as she arrests you for owning a copy of 'The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe' while your daughters are abused by either a man dressed as a woman in the local leisure centre changing rooms or a failed asylum seeker who couldn't be deported because he bought a hamster....
Well, where I live the unpunished fly-tipping and sexual assault is already happening and has been for years. The efficient and merciless application of force on minor infractions is also happening. And the media are still doing their thing, as you describe. All this reminds me of the Gramsci quote "..the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear."
Is this an interregnum, or just a slow decline into Third-world dysfunction? That's what we don't know.
I may be wrong, but I don't see how this can continue without causing a violent reaction of some kind. There are too many wealthy people with too much to lose.
We have been running two radical social experiments in tandem: mass immigration, and the welfare state. The way things are heading now, at some point the money must run out and the payments will stop, pitching millions into poverty.
But unlike other terminally poor countries, we have long since lost the ability to get by on our own. The state has been our daddy for so long now, I wonder how we cope once that ends.
Frequently I wonder if the whole point of the uncontrolled, let alone dangerous, immigration is purely to lead to the collapse that both enables them to 'go tough' and to create the NWO.
It wasn’t that long ago that the tanker drivers went on strike and the country was a day or two away from grinding to a complete halt. It doesn’t take much.
On the timescale of the civil war Prof. Betz is expecting, I note this:
"I would ask Barbara Walter rather than me for reasons that I just mentioned. But in her book on the matter, she concludes, if I recall correctly, that in the countries where the conditions necessary for the outbreak of civil war are present, the actual likelihood of it breaking out in any given year is about 4%." (from the transcript)
This puts the chance that there won't be an outbreak of civil war over the next 5 years at about 81.5% (raising 0.96 to the power of 5 and converting it to a percentage). A near 1 in 5 chance of it happening within the next 5 years is a bit unnerving.
I really hope Betz is wrong. It'd be interesting to find out if there are other experts in warfare who've looked at this question regarding the UK and the West and would challenge Betz's conclusions here.
Passed through Heathrow early this month. I usually find the Yookay multicultural and gender diverse posters risible and naff, but this time I felt I was looking at propaganda from a regime that has no legitimacy and that hates me. Worst of all was the picture of a clearly Arab Muslim man in full floor length robes and turban that bore the caption 'Faces of Britain'. I'm a professional middle class man, a Christian, married to someone from another country who wouldn't be characterised as 'White British'. I have two daughters in their tweens and I love my country and want it to have a great future - but the rage that regularly arises in me when I see all this shit makes me either want to burn it all down and start again or flee somewhere else. The water has finally got too hot for this frog not to notice.
Hello Paul, I also have a young daughter and a foreign wife. And also prone to episodes of rage.
I walked home from school aged 7 onwards. It taught me independence, and I wanted the same for my daughter.
But once she starts school I will need to be at the gates as she enters and leaves, in order to deter the very credible threat from predators cruising these places looking for girls, while the police look the other way.
In other words, she now needs a male chaperone while outside.
How we got here, I don’t know. Boiling frog indeed. Little by little, browbeaten by small humiliations, until we lose the courage to resist.
I would probably have left by now, but family commitments keep me here.
But there is another reason too. This is the only place on the planet we can truly call home. We can move somewhere else and call it home, but that doesn’t make it so.
This little patch is all we’ve got. If we lose it we are homeless, like the last kid in a game of musical chairs. We don't seem to get that.
I was in the UK recently and saw the "Faces of Britain" in passing... one was literally a woman in a niqab. Couldn't even see her actual face 🤣 I really thought, wow, you can't make this sh*t up. I laugh but I don't even find it funny, it feels like a large-scale, extremely cruel trolling of the population. I think this kind of stuff is going to radicalize more and more "normal" people.
You sound like my husband. We are also a couple, he's white English and I'm of dual heritage. White German mother and Black 1st generation father. My parents met whilst my father was serving in the Army and was stationed over there. We live in Birmingham which I would describe as one of those cities Matt discusses in this podcast, I can't remember the exact term. The instability is clear here. Our Council is effectively bankrupt, there are sections of the city that are self governed, which I would argue are now no go zones and there is no shared idea or culture. Needless to say, we are planning to move within the next 18 months.
My husband loves his Country and is clearly not a racist but when he sees the day to day bastardisation of Britain, he is enraged. He feels not listened to and refuses to have our 2 daughters grow up in a city where our Local MP Tahir Ali is asking for blasphemy laws. It's a appalling and based on the information in this podcast it won't be a surprise when the silent majority will feel it necessary to take things into their own hands.
Until recently I just cynically gave it the side eye y’know. But since Southport and the resurfacing of the grooming gang stories.. man it feels like I’m being goaded. I don’t want to leave this land - my ancestors fought and died for it. I’m Lancastrian (north of the sands) but I’ve got Manx, Welsh and Scots ancestry as well as Cumberland and Westmoreland. I don’t want to leave, why should I? I’m living in Surrey and there is a different sense of Englishness here, but it’s still a land that somehow calls to me as home.
That psychological insight that it’s much easier to make people attack things rather than people was amazing to hear. And disturbing, since attacking things like infrastructure can harm more people indirectly than attacking people directly.
Honestly, I think this is the best podcast Louise has ever recorded on this show, I don’t know think I’ve ever learnt so much new knowledge from a single episode, military intelligence and strategy is fascinating to learn and think about, I’m thankful David could introduce it to a lot of us, albeit in a darker context of conversation.
Thanks Louise. Fascinating & disturbing conversation. I have all sorts of follow-up questions for David. Any chance of us followers submitting questions & then you get him back to address them? E.g.
- Are large political changes impossible... or just too late now? With the re-election of Trump, it (so far) looks like a sea-change in the political environment in the U.S. And here in Europe the AfD is starting to seriously influence politics in Germany. Is it not possible that there could be a large political shift here in the UK within the next few years which could bring about very different policies & defuse much of the frustration? Or have we really gone too far already?
- What about inter-ethnic conflict? David talks about the majority white population's anger at the political elites/the state, and that that anger would initially be expressed through e.g. attacks on state infrastructure. He also sees it taking the form of country vs city. But what about *inter-ethnic* conflict, which seems equally plausible to me? Or if that's just a later stage of a series of escalating steps, how does he see the steps playing out?
- Aren't we too old for this? Early on you brought up the age profile of the UK, along with the common view that civil wars can't happen in a country where so many people are old. David said that was mere conventional wisdom & not true. But he didn't really elaborate. Is the age profile of a country completely irrelevant to civil war? And how would the age profile of the UK affect the way any conflict would play out?
- 'Downgrading' was a key idea i.e. the majority population feeling that it's losing its position & feeling defensive & angry about that. In other words, the main impetus for conflict comes from *the majority*. Since recent terrorism, attacks & large-scale protests (e.g. pro-Palestine) have been almost entirely Muslim, I've always thought that if things really started to break down it would be Muslims kicking things off & harassing non-Muslims on a much larger scale. Of course one doesn't preclude the other. But how does David see this playing out?
Anyhow, just thought I'd put these questions out there. Thanks for the very good conversation.
Thanks Toby, yes I had been thinking of doing a follow-up with David responding to listeners’ questions, I’ll ask him
I wonder how it will play out too.
Take the Pakistanis that dominate my town, for example. How do we fight a very tight-knit group that can communicate and organise in a different language?
And when the fighting starts, what if they can access weaponry? In a country with few guns, a shipping container of AK47s goes a long way.
There may already be plans afoot, probably financed with a government small business grant.
Bear in mind inciting civil war in the West is an explicit aim of many Islamic terror groups, so I don't think this is far-fetched.
How will the state attempt to contain this? Our army is dwarfed by the size of the Muslim diaspora, probably outnumbering them a thousand to one. Our police have fat arses, the men too.
I have noticed the mood is definitely changing though. I often speak to working class men. We will exchange remarks, as if testing the water. It's like we're all getting ready.
Once the fighting starts and the impotence of the state becomes clear, it's possible that regional militia could spring up quickly to police our local areas and maintain order.
Remember all the coercion and conformity around masks and social distancing? Misplaced on that occasion, but evidence of the urge to unite for a cause. It will be a test of what social capital remains.
This is a massive if, but if we can organise quickly, dismiss the government and get the army onside, we could minimise the violence by sheer weight of numbers.
Probably pie in the sky. As a nation we're in uncharted territory now, so it's anyone's guess what happens next. But something will certainly happen, and it won't be nice. We'd better get ready, like he said.
My focus now is on building a sense of community with my neighbours. We live on the fringes of downtown Karachi, so in the firing line when things erupt. We need to feel we have something worth fighting for.
> inter-ethnic conflict
Yes, I kept waiting for the explicit discussion of this aspect, and it never really came. From what I saw on social media, the Southport riots involved groups of Muslims vs. groups of white people. This seems like it would be a big part of any future civil war in the UK.
It is the only reasonable pattern for any civil war. I expect the Sikhs and Hindhus would fight with the native Brits but how many of the native Brits (and moderate Moslems) would join in with the 'peace loving tolerant' Islamists
Hi Toby, I can’t answer as well as David obviously, but with respect to age, I’d point you to Donbas in Eastern Ukraine. Despite demographic decline for some decades it seems they still had enough young people to start shooting at each other.
Thanks Louise, that was a great choice of guest.
So civil war it is. I feel relieved now, oddly enough. I think deep down we all know it's the only way out.
It is only the only way out if we start when we are still numerous (and well armed and tough) enough to win. Anything else and we will end up as, at least, the subclass in Britain.
I’ve been listening on and off to this podcast for a few months. This was a fascinating interview. It convinced me to become a paid subscriber. America vice-president Vance recently expressed concerned about a future Islamic takeover of Britain, with Islamists gaining control of Britain’s nuclear weapons. At the time, I dismissed it as just another crazy comment from MAGA world. But this podcast makes me wonder if it isn’t as preposterous as it seems. If Britain did plunge into civil unrest that spiraled out of control, another very real possibility to consider is American military intervention in Britain. After all, the prospect of a major European ally with nuclear weapons such as Britain or France falling into civil war would be a direct threat to American national security.
Can but hope.
There already is an Islamic country that has them,Pakistan
Yes, and that is frightening! However, Pakistan probably doesn’t have the same launch capabilities as Britain. Moreover, Pakistan is of no economic or cultural significance to the United States. Britain and France for that matter are quite important.
The one simple thought that keeps bumping around in my mind since listening: thank God for our 2nd Amendment and all the groups who lobby for our access to semi-automatics. Controversial to say but has to be said. Not sure how things will go for y’all without an armed citizenry
More American soldiers in the Iraq War died of cheap, easy to make roadside IEDs than died from small arms fire. If people no longer see their government as legitimate and civil unrest breaks out in Britain, the lack of guns among the populace won’t necessarily prevent violence.
And if Brits don't have guns then those (mostly young immigrant men) with machetes will have a huge advantage.
Oh good (scary/sad) point! Yikes!
God forbid that gun shite.
The comment that stands out above all the alarmist speculation is that the British State has lost legitimacy. For all our lives and generations before we have taken for granted that a social contract whereby we obey laws and pay taxes and in return the State will protect us and our children and our property and provide a safety net against ill health and misfortune. What happens when the State doesn’t meet its side of the bargain?
I don't want a civil war, of course, but I do feel one is almost inevitable. And as it is then surely better to have it sooner when the native Brits are still the majority. If we wait till our Uniparty Governments have finished inviting in huge numbers of immigrants then we will likely be unable to mount any defence and will just acquiesce to wearing burkas, worshipping Allah etc.
Years ago I laughed at a friend who warned me about this (when Brits must have still been 90%+ of the population). I am definitely not laughing now!
For example, one big blind spot which I try to point out to leftists I speak to, is that if the re-emergence of “fascism” is your biggest concern, then surely the Dems in the US are the bigger risk, with their affinity for the Maidan Revolution and Ukraine War, tech censorship and the “intelligence community”?
Interesting but didn’t convince me in the slightest.
It reminded me of listening to Al Gore speaking about “An Inconvenient Truth” all those years ago.
Experts can always extrapolate to predict an alarmist future.
Sure we are all aware of this but just in case..... We can be fairly sure that our Elites are reading these comments and marking out the 'troublemakers'.
Sounds grim and not something that is known in New Zealand with its small population. There is enough living space for everyone here. It’s true that wealthy individuals and entities have indeed acquired significant amounts of land in New Zealand. But plenty still left. And the Government has created two new ‘active’ investor visas. Five million minimum over three years and ten million over ten years. The money must be invested directly into NZ businesses. Residency is thrown in. Might be attractive for cashed up wealthy professionals.
Fellow Kiwi here. We’ve got our issues to be sure, but we’re also a long way from civil war like conditions
Just remember it always goes "slowly at first and then all at once".
Five million new immigrants over 3 years looks very imminent to me. So don't leave it as late as the UK has.
This was very interesting. Even if I only got halfway through on my commute this morning. However, I would have liked Mr Betz’ opinion on what Americans call “the Deep State” but the fictional Sir Humphrey Appleby would prefer to call “her Majesty’s Civil Service”. In particular, the fact that both the British and American state apparatus have significant experience in fomenting “colour revolutions” in various parts of the world.
In this world of increasing politicisation of institutions, is there not some risk of these “chickens coming home to roost”?
After this podcast I'm left wishing he had elaborated more on what he said. He went so far, then stopped.
For example, let's say the city infrastructure is attacked, as he described. This sounds very plausible. He mentioned gas and electricity, but not water, which is also rather important. But anyway, so essential supplies are cut, then what typically happens next? Surely someone workmen (sorry, workpeople) show up in a truck and fix the damage, as they would after a storm etc.
Or they show up to fix it and are threatened or attacked, as per the asylum hotels in Ireland. So police/military show up to secure the area while repairs are done.
Then somewhere else is attacked while they are busy fixing that. We are now assuming a level of rational thought, emotional control, and organisation beyond the ULEZ example. How does this entity organise while avoiding the attention of the state? Bear in mind we get done for saying men aren't women.
But let's assume they exist and they have a plan. So they launch an attack that overwhelms the various emergency services and the city becomes unliveable. This must have happened countless times before. So what typically plays out next? Do the vulnerable (old, young, women) voluntarily leave first, and if so where to? English people are more likely to have connections outside of cities, whereas immigrants and their descendants will bolt to their relatives in nearest immigrant area.
What then becomes of all the young men who are up for a fight, and now have a town or city to themselves? Do they just drive back and forth up the M6 while all this is going on?
I realise he can't know all this because there are so many moving parts, but there must be patterns to observe from situations similar to ours.
I suppose for me the key question is state control. Fighting a chronic insurgency is one thing, but losing the monopoly on violence is another. If the state loses the ability to project power onto a situation, then very bad things can happen, very quickly. This is what worries me the most.
But I also worry that our political system is not designed to deal with the situation we are now in. Take our bodies, for example. It has systems to maintain our core temperature. We get cold, we shiver; we get hot; we sweat. But it only works within a certain range, and beyond that we are past the point of no return.
I think this is where we are now politically. Our system has evolved over centuries to the point it only needed to make small tweaks to keep things stable, but that won't work anymore. So if that's true, what happens next? Increasing state control to head off revolution, thus exposing themselves as tyrannical and impotent, thus feeding the fires for revolution. Where does this spiral lead? Historical examples must exist.
I could go on and on. So many questions.
I wonder if we just end up like Terry Gilliam's Brazil; random explosions and infrastructure collapses that no-one knows are terrorism or incompetence; anarchotyranny writ large with rape and sexual assault, low level theft, fly tipping going unpunished in non-white areas and left to 'community' justice contrasted with efficient and merciless application of force on minor infractions carried out by anyone not under the umbrella of 'community' justice. Doubling down on the twee bollocks like Paddington and Richard Curtis movie worlds, more propaganda on every soap and media outlet - but a huge crackdown on anything considered subversive (see Prevent's 'far right' starter kit of Tolkien, Lewis, Dickens, Shakespeare and Beowulf), every historical drama has to have an incongruously cast anachronistic black or queer character. They'll do for the farming industry - as identified the rural areas offer resistance to the 'Yookay' state, they'll fuck the economy so thoroughly we will have to accept that we will euthanise our grannies or go bankrupt. If you want a vision of the future its being patronised by the 'lesbian nana' police woman as she arrests you for owning a copy of 'The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe' while your daughters are abused by either a man dressed as a woman in the local leisure centre changing rooms or a failed asylum seeker who couldn't be deported because he bought a hamster....
Well, where I live the unpunished fly-tipping and sexual assault is already happening and has been for years. The efficient and merciless application of force on minor infractions is also happening. And the media are still doing their thing, as you describe. All this reminds me of the Gramsci quote "..the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear."
Is this an interregnum, or just a slow decline into Third-world dysfunction? That's what we don't know.
I may be wrong, but I don't see how this can continue without causing a violent reaction of some kind. There are too many wealthy people with too much to lose.
We have been running two radical social experiments in tandem: mass immigration, and the welfare state. The way things are heading now, at some point the money must run out and the payments will stop, pitching millions into poverty.
But unlike other terminally poor countries, we have long since lost the ability to get by on our own. The state has been our daddy for so long now, I wonder how we cope once that ends.
Musing on the Heathrow shut down; most likely an accident, but increasingly like the tanker accident last week how would one know?
Frequently I wonder if the whole point of the uncontrolled, let alone dangerous, immigration is purely to lead to the collapse that both enables them to 'go tough' and to create the NWO.
It wasn’t that long ago that the tanker drivers went on strike and the country was a day or two away from grinding to a complete halt. It doesn’t take much.
Beginning to think that the touch paper for things kicking off in the UK is going to be a military humiliation…
How long before we pay Argentina to take the Falklands back?
Or mutiny.
You seem to assume that the UK, or other, Govt is interested in protecting their 'original' citizens. Seems unlikely to me.
Stay safe
On the timescale of the civil war Prof. Betz is expecting, I note this:
"I would ask Barbara Walter rather than me for reasons that I just mentioned. But in her book on the matter, she concludes, if I recall correctly, that in the countries where the conditions necessary for the outbreak of civil war are present, the actual likelihood of it breaking out in any given year is about 4%." (from the transcript)
This puts the chance that there won't be an outbreak of civil war over the next 5 years at about 81.5% (raising 0.96 to the power of 5 and converting it to a percentage). A near 1 in 5 chance of it happening within the next 5 years is a bit unnerving.
I really hope Betz is wrong. It'd be interesting to find out if there are other experts in warfare who've looked at this question regarding the UK and the West and would challenge Betz's conclusions here.